A Decade in Adelaide

By Peter G Emery

A Decade in Adelaide is a ring-in’s account of cultural, social and political life in the ‘City of Churches’, in the years spent there since my wife Jo and I retired from university work in the Middle East in 2007. The book is also a record of our journeys throughout South Australia, as well as the neighbouring states of Victoria and Tasmania.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Aug 17, 2020
• ISBN: 9781716892974

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EMERY

Copyright © 2020 Peter G Emery.

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ISBN: 978-1-7168-9298-1 (sc)

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Lulu Publishing Services rev. date: 06/17/2020

A Josephine mia amore

chi mi ha aiuto a scoprire

il mio paese natale

‘We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do

language. That may be the measure of our lives.’

Toni Morrison

BROKEN HEEL

Driving north from Adelaide, it often seems that the empty expanses of the Outback are peopled by ghosts, both indigenous and non-indigenous. Saddleworth was christened in 1843 by a Yorkshire émigré who saw his native homeland in its swelling hills and gentle valleys and Burra-Burra, we are told, is not an aboriginal word but derives from the epithet ‘great..great’ used by Hindustani coolie shepherds - although what they were praising so lavishly is not clear today. The rise and fall of economic progress have always proceeded with, what in retrospect seems, bewildering speed. A detour down Port Germein Gorge road reveals the site of the one-time hamlet of Bangor; today, only kookaburras inhabit the red gums around the ruins of the hotel, built for the needs of the scores of men driving the bullock teams, carrying copper and silver to the coast. On completion of the railway in the 1890s, this settlement vanished overnight, along with the bullock-carts and their drovers. The sleepers and rails of the Adelaide-Burra line are still in place although the last passenger train ran in 1984. It would not take much to revive the railway; the track is leased to Wyoming International, a US company that pays a peppercorn rent in exchange for upkeep. We visit the recently restored station, the waiting-rooms and ticket office now spruce in khaki and green. North of Burra we come to the buildings of the station at Terowie, from where in 1942 hundreds of American and Australian soldiers went north to Darwin and beyond and where General Macarthur gave his I shall return speech at his first press-conference on Australian soil. Today, the tracks are gone but the extra-long platform, to cater for the transport of multitudes of troops, is still intact.

Our first night is spent at Yunta, where one begins to get a feel for outback ways. Water and electricity are precious commodities; the generator is the only power source and the groundwater is brackish and undrinkable. The welcome is warm, the meals generous and we have to keep the backdoor closed against the wildlife. No grass in the garden and a herbaceous border of wattle and cactus. Ubiquitous sand-martins swoop and dart, polishing off the flies. The main road goes through the middle of the hamlet, whose street lighting is provided only by the road-trains that roar past. There is no signal for the mobile phone; if you break down on this road, you can’t call the RAA. Like all bush hotels, the front bar is the fulcrum of activity and there we meet a travelling shearer, who is en route from NSW to Burra. One of the locals informs Jo that to celebrate his wife’s 50th, he rounded up a few feral goats and cooked up a stew. Some kids are with their Dads to watch the footy final on the communal TV; they reply to our questions with wonderment, as if we are speaking to them in a foreign language. Shared showers and washrooms for guys and gals but no one bothers too much which they use. The landlady embroiders all the bedspreads but has stopped making puddings since she ended up eating most of them herself. Jo goes out to the bar to order dessert and the shearer asks her where she comes from, not recognizing her Adelaide accent. Strewth! Do us a paver! Provenance is important in the outback. It’s 8 p.m. and we are overstaying our welcome in the restaurant; early to bed and early to rise is the watchword here.

Onwards from Yunta, the country becomes more open; black lizards sun themselves on the tarmac, apparently oblivious to the occasional vehicle passing over them. Black kites wheel and dive in the breeze; piebald magpies and pee-wee larks dot the verges. The road is lined with purple Salvation Janes and salt bush and scrubby pine spreads out to the far horizon. The towns are few and far between and often deserted on a Sunday morning. We are grateful we had a coffee before leaving our hotel as there will be nothing available until we get to the NSW border. Beyond Mannahil we see the line of the Thackaringa Hills and the road climbs and winds through a more barren landscape. We stop at Cockburn on the border and meet some more of the locals – several very large bikies sit silent and black-leathered on the balcony of the pub, like unofficial sentinels, and we meet a latter-day hippy and purveyor of music. He is slightly built and lightly bearded, longish grey hair curling around his ears and wearing a slouch hat. He tells us that the outback is the best place to live since you have the freedom to do whatever you want. He talks of the coin maker, who would take four hours to make a dollar in summer but quicker in winter (because the light was less). His dream house would be on a hill where he could look down on the traffic going past. We ask him why he didn’t make a career for himself in music in the big city (Adelaide), but he modestly says that he’s running away from Talentsville. It seems that in these roadhouses every evening is party time – as in Priscilla Queen of the Desert. Guitars and drum sets lie around, waiting for the evening ritual. In these parts, there is little of the fussy officialdom of Adelaide and a relaxed pace of life. In one bar we find a large fluffy cat, lying immobile on the counter, along with the bottles and a chihuahua ankle-biter. It is pleasant to drive steadily, without having to look out for some hooligan trying to get past. Shortly before Broken Hill, we find some Sturt Desert Peas resplendent in red and black by the roadside and, after passing a solar farm the size of a lake and a car-wrecker’s yard, coyly termed ‘automobile dismantlers’, we are rolling into the Silver City.

This weekend has been the Broken Heel parade – cross dressers and drag artistes have been strutting their stuff. Indeed, one absentee for the past twenty years has returned to his hometown from the urban east, feeling that the time for homophobia is finally over. He belts out some number in a divided scarlet skirt and (unbroken) high heels to delirious applause; his mother in the audience glows with delight that he’s finally back and accepted. We make a detour to Silverton, which used to have nine pubs and now, with the departure of the miners, only has one. A pretty famous one, however, since it features in numerous films made locally, such as Mad Max and Priscilla QOD. Drinkers who have too much grog are advised either to get a lift with the pizza man or marry a cabbie. We attend a low-key performance in the back yard; a nurse built like a front-row forward, dressed in a red skirt and pink wig, is selling raffle tickets, various artistes perform songs of ineffable boredom and we are all invited up to the stage to shake our booty. A booklet about Broken Hill claims that it is the cornerstone of Australian industry and culture. This seems a big ask. Dominated by the broke-back silver mine, it doesn’t seem to know whether it’s a town or a city. Grand municipal buildings stand cheek by jowl with nondescript eateries and tat shops. The streets are quaintly named after minerals and chemicals – Uranium, Choride, Sulphide, Bromide – but the suburbs are pleasantly rural and spacious as in most country towns. We call in at the Regional Art Gallery and find a masterclass in progress, run by the provocatively named Short Black Opera Company. The aim is to get indigenous kids interested in music, especially singing, and give a concert at the end of the week’s lessons. They all sit in a circle while the dynamic presenter stretches their tonsils and the pianist introduces them to Bach. In a side room, a series of local oil paintings depicts the violence of the past, when dozens of police were called in to break up lockouts and strikes. A reminder of the brutal and restless conditions in the early days of mining. Up in the gallery, I am quite taken with the works of the son of Badger Bates, who re-discovered his ancestral home of Mutawintji (north-east of Broken Hill) after a Sydney childhood. He depicts the snake and eagle, symbols of his people’s dreaming, in an intricate formalism of vivid red and black. His art is not only a means of self-discovery but also has a didactic aim; he wishes to engage and instruct all people in the traditions of his culture to foster understanding and reconciliation.

Later in the day, we retrace our route down Highway 32, striking off for Peterborough, the Clapham Junction of the outback, where the Adelaide/Sydney railway lines intersect. On to Orrooroo, where we admire the nodding metal horses and the owner of the pub directs us along the scenic route to Melrose. We travel, as in a dream, along a wattle-lined road amidst a patchwork of rape-seed fields, dandelion and marigold in the westering sun. Melrose abuts the aptly named Mount Remarkable, which rises sheer like a forest-covered slag heap. Here it was that Jo called me in Scotland on a chilly June evening 16 years ago and we whispered sweet nothings across the ether. Love’s young(er) dream! We photograph and marvel that the original phone box is still there – a rarity in these days of mobile phones. We don’t have time to explore the inviting walks and trails that lead into the forest; we are heading back to Clare and the south. Spring blossom is coming into its zenith and the pastures lush and green as far as the eye can see. The home-made pies at Laura are the stuff of legend. Our tryst with the outback’s living (and dead) is over but, echoing the great General, in another incarnation, We shall return.

September 2015

SALA IN CLARE AND BEYOND…

The South Australia Live Art Festival (SALA) was founded to showcase the talents of artists currently working in South Australia and, in August each year, every available venue is pressed into service for this worthy cause. Ken Done, the polychromatic Sydneysider, reckons that we all have artistic talent which, more often than not, fossilizes after we leave our childhood years, in similar fashion to our Language Acquisition Device. The trick is to preserve that ‘first fine careless rapture’, that freshness of vision to see the world through the eyes of a child. Of course, this is only half the story since we have to allow a large margin of credit for the natural genius and innate draughtsmanship skills of a Picasso or a Dali. Art represents the unique visual or material record of each of us and our mutual artistic interaction entails an awareness of others’ cultures and an enrichment of all our lives. On a more mundane level, some bright spark had the idea of combining the visual with the bibulous, which resulted in the concept of the Clare Valley Art Trail and thither we bent our steps on a bracing and breezy mid-August morning. Adelaide’s winters are deceptive; labelled dismissively by some as a ‘Pom’s summer’, it