This is my seventh article from the outback.
After spending a glorious summer working out of Alice Springs and enjoying the rich social life of the red centre, I returned to Lajamanu in March 2022. I knew I was probably returning to mayhem and chaos and was not looking forward to the trip back. I was able to make the journey in one day as the Tanami Road was dry enough to drive on after the wet season flooding had receded. The journey was uneventful and I returned to my residence which was luckily intact, unlike the other houses surrounding mine which had been broken into during the summer. Crime here seemed to be unstoppable and escalating.
In early April a few rangers, elders and I undertook a field trip to Tanami Downs (which is a 4 hour drive from Lajamanu) to enhance our animal tracking skills in conjunction with the Southern Tanami IPA staff. It was enjoyable learning to track from rangers, Christine, Alice and Ambrose teaching us to distinguish the tracks of different snakes, small mammals and lizards. I also taught a few of the rangers how to cook Spaghetti Bolognese which was a very fun activity. The rice I cooked for two days (yes, they did make the Sri Lankan guy cook the rice) was a big hit. This was to be my last field trip as the Northern Tanami IPA Coordinator.
In mid-April as an Easter gift I was offered the position of Rangelands Monitoring Officer, working for the Northern Territory Government’s Department of Environment, Parks and Water Security. I was so excited and glad that I was finally able to make the move to Alice Springs and enjoy living there whilst also continue working in public service. In the last week of April I bade farewell to Lajamanu and CLC. I took a month’s leave prior to commencing my new job in June. I settled into my granny flat with the pool, good friends Karin and Jim as landlords and their loving dog, ‘Matapa’ (named after a seafood dish from Mozambique) who loves food, and bought my first car, a 4WD Toyota Prado named ‘Armadillo’.
My parents came over for a visit from Sri Lanka in May after a 2.5 year hiatus thanks to COVID travel restrictions. I flew down to Adelaide and we stayed at my brother’s house for two weeks enjoying catching up with friends, exploring and enjoying Adelaide and glad to be together as a family after a long break. We attended my brother’s graduation at the University of Adelaide in May, which brought to a close another chapter in our family’s life as both brothers had finished their university education. A proud moment for the 4Gs, as my family is known. My family came over to Alice Springs for two weeks and I took them to all the social events I regularly attend including the weekly trivia competition where we were runners up. I also took them to see all the tourist locations including Stanley Chasm. My family finally got the opportunity to see and hear me play the organ at church as the parish organist. I was at last able to help tick Alice Springs off my mum’s bucket list.
After my family left for home and a week prior to starting my new job, I made my maiden trip to Darwin. Darwin airport though being international was only slightly bigger than the Alice Springs airport. I stayed with a close friend of mine and slept in the back of her car (as she was staying in a caravan park). It was very amusing that I fit so well in such a small space. It was wonderful to be back in the tropics, to see lush green tall vegetation, the beautiful ocean (which you couldn’t swim in due to sharks, crocodiles, jelly fish etc.) and enjoy eating all the amazing seafood. Though Darwin is a small city with a population of around 100,000, it is well spaced out so that it is not crowded or congested with traffic. I was able to visit the Darwin Cathedral which was very simple and small compared to all the other cathedrals I’ve been in. The Darwin cathedral has been destroyed twice, first during World War 2 and later by cyclone Tracy.
I started my new job in June as planned. My boss, David, reminds me of a clean shaven Santa Claus, a jolly, happy person with vast experience and a great sense of humour. My new job involves undertaking ground based habitat and land condition assessments, biodiversity monitoring and lease inspections on pastoral properties to ensure co-existence of biodiversity and pastoral activities. Whilst the red- tape, administration and complex procedures of government still exist, it is a pleasant and positive work environment where I am able to learn new things such as advanced mapping methods using GIS and new techniques in assessing habitats.
At each habitat, I check for weeds, erosion, feral animals, threatened species, evidence of fire management and species of dominant plants present. In the Northern Territory, the land where pastoral activities are undertaken is owned by the Northern Territory Government, but leased out to cattle station managers, but with strict conditions attached to protect biodiversity. Beef exports bring in significant revenue for Australia and it is very tricky trying to find the right balance between economic growth and biodiversity conservation. This is where I come in. I try to find ways to ensure biodiversity is protected by reporting issues and recommending solutions to degraded habitats to bring in speedy intervention methods to remediate those habitats. Where possible we try to avoid habitats being degraded by intervening early. But, as you can imagine, my role is not always popular with the cattle station managers. I undertook regular field trips every fortnight to a different cattle station which surrounded Alice Springs. It was saddening to see habitats which had been destroyed by pastoral activities as some cattle station managers placed a higher emphasis on income rather than learning to co-exist with biodiversity. It was, however, refreshing to meet a few cattle station owners who did seek this balance and actively worked towards achieving this goal. As part of my job I was able to travel to places which I previously didn’t have the opportunity to go to, including once travelling up to a cattle station near the Queensland border. I visited ten cattle stations during the field season, but due to privacy clauses won’t name them in this article. Sometimes the tracks on these properties were in such poor condition that it was good practice for driving in off-road conditions, though scary sometimes, especially when you have to cross very steep creek crossings. Our vehicle got stuck in the river bed on one of the station’s we visited and it took over 3.5 hours to dig ourselves out. Fortunately it was soft sand and not mud and we had two strong trees to which we could attach a winch to and four ‘max tracks’ to place under the tyres to aid us. The field season ended in September. It was now time to analyse and write reports for each station we visited. I wrote two station reports for the year. I felt like a cop trying to solve a mystery. Trying to give a story of each habitat assessed to give the full picture of how well the health of the ecosystem as a whole is faring on the station amidst fluctuations in rainfall, after effects of fire, grazing pressure, weeds, feral animals, erosion and sightings of threatened species. It finally comes down to cattle station managers who integrate sustainability and environmentally friendly practices in their cattle management to ensure co-existence over those who place emphasis on profits in the short term.
I have settled well into my new job and my new home in Alice Springs. It is such a lovely feeling to feel secure, to have access to all the resources needed for my work, to have a supportive supervisor and also have a fun social life. I’m now a true local of Alice Springs. I continue to play the organ at church weekly and have started to expand the music repertoire. In June I had the honour of accompanying the Trinity College Choir from the University of Melbourne on the organ and had the opportunity to work with the Grammy award winning Oxford educated music conductor Christopher Watson. As an added bonus thanks to the special occasion I finally was able to don my University of Queensland hood at the service which made this young organist look classy.
I attend weekly line dancing, swing dancing and Zumba classes which are fun and are a good form of exercise. My trivia team continues attending weekly competitions and so far we have managed to be champions once and runner up on three occasions this year. I continue to serve as a volunteer in the Northern Territory Emergency Services (transferred to Alice Springs Unit) and enjoy learning new skills and handling fancier equipment. I also took out a membership at the public library and am so lucky that I get to borrow books and music CDs for free.
My circle of friends has increased and I enjoy the many social events I get to attend with them, most of them involving food. I had the opportunity to attend a Latin dancing night in August which was lots of fun and learn the salsa, and other Spanish dances, not to mention the chance to dance with a lot of beautiful women. I was able to attend the infamous Henley on Todd boat race which is held in Alice Springs annually on a dry river bed. The main events involve teams racing each other carrying boat frames on the dry river bed and ships on wheels squirting everyone with flour bombs and water. I also got the chance to watch Ian Moss (former member of Cold Chisel) and country singer Troy Cassar-Daley perform live in Alice Springs. I didn’t realise till the concert that one of the songs that I love dancing to at line dancing ‘Tucker’s Daughter’ was a song by Ian Moss. I also had the opportunity to listen to an exceptional performance by the Alice Springs chamber orchestra who played a favourite, Bohemian Rhapsody as part of their repertoire for the concert.
I returned to Adelaide in September for a few days for my brother’s 25th birthday and to catch up with my parents too who returned to help celebrate his birthday. It was great to be together once again as a family and enjoy family time, and eat awesome spicy Sri Lankan food.
In October after over 4 years I flew to Brisbane for a week to attend a few reunions with many UQ friends. I flew on a Fokker Jet (former air force jet modified for commercial airlines) which only accommodates 80 people. It felt wonderful being back in Brisbane where I felt completely at home and was overjoyed to be back in my favourite Australian city. Everyone I wanted to see was in town that week. I stayed with my former Lajamanu neighbours Mick, Louisa and their cat, Puss-puss, who had returned home to enjoy their retirement in Brisbane. My counterpart at the local council in Lajamanu, Heather was also in town and staying with Mick and Louisa so it was good to laugh about all the chaos we had gone through together in the last year. My close friend Laurel with whom I worked at CLC was also in town and it was lovely to see her again after staying with her in Darwin in May. I also caught up with 5 of my former batch mates from my Masters degree and their dogs. We had a ball together in our own usual fun filled way with lots of laughter and mischief. It felt as if we had never been apart even though we were in different stages of our lives and hadn’t been together in person since we left UQ (University of Queensland) in 2018. The only thing that had changed in Brisbane was the decrease in stops made by the ferry thanks to the flood which washed away most of the ferry terminals last year. I found this out the hard way when the ferry stopped short of UQ when I was travelling to see my former Masters supervisor. This resulted in not only me being late for my catch-up, but also having to walk the last 20 minutes to the university uphill which I hadn’t done since I left UQ. I also had the chance to meet up with my dad’s best friend from his schooling days, uncle Ketheesan, who was in town with his family. He is a Professor of Immunology currently teaching at the University of New England. We hadn’t been able to see each other since the pandemic due to all the travel restrictions. I attended the service at Christ Church, St. Lucia and enjoyed listening to the choir sing, meeting all of them again and enjoying the organ playing by my former choir director Christopher Wrench. I also made a visit to south bank and found it amusing that I knew where everything was, but poor Louisa who accompanied me on that trip was so lost in her directions despite having lived in Brisbane for much longer than I. Louisa and Mick took me window shopping for houses around the area and were giving me tips on what to look out for and the best suburbs to buy in. It brought me so much joy to enjoy tropical Brisbane and be back in a city which hadn’t changed much and still seemed to thrive after 3 years of the pandemic. I felt very sad flying back to Alice Springs, but it reaffirmed my goal to settle in Brisbane for good in a few years’ time.
I joined the Alice Springs community choir as a Tenor and we performed in November at the Araluen Theatre. This was the first time I was performing on stage since living in the Northern Territory. The first of our two shows went without a hitch and I enjoyed singing in a choir. However, in between shows, while we were getting lined up for a group photograph we got caught in a mini cyclone called a ‘wet microburst’. In the 10 minutes this phenomenon lasted we were soaked, running for cover from falling branches, heavy wind and hail stones. In the aftermath the theatre had its power supply cut off and one of the orchestra members’ car was flattened by a falling tree. With a sold out second show we performed the concert outdoors with no mics. The audience got involved helping to move chairs outside, hold torches over the music for the orchestra members and one member of the audience brought a traffic cone for the soloists to use as a mic. It became a fun community event amidst all the chaos beforehand, and the concert ended with the audience also getting wet in the rain. I thought the acoustics were better outdoors and it was a good effort considering we all looked like drowned cats after the day’s events.
I celebrated my 28th birthday in December, my first birthday celebration in Alice Springs. I took the day off work as I have done every year. My birthday celebrations started with breakfast with a few friends who I ran into by accident in town. Afterwards I helped my landlady Karin to make chocolate rumballs and we got through the process without eating a single one which was a miracle. I had a swim and had a nap after a very tasty Chinese lunch. We had a poolside party with loads of food and drinks with a few friends and their dogs which was loads of fun. However, the weather suddenly turned quite cold which resulted in us giving the swim a miss.
After almost 2.5 years of living remotely and facing so many challenges, I feel much more relaxed, settled and matured to enjoy life and face the challenges ahead. Alice Springs, despite being small, is an oasis in the desert. You just need to seek the great treasures in this quirky town which are its simplicity, friendly people, social events and natural wonders. It makes so much sense to me that Neville Shute based his famous book on a town like Alice.
I flew back to Sri Lanka for two weeks to spend Christmas with my parents. My brother also joined me on the trip. My journey to Colombo from Alice Springs was via Adelaide and Melbourne. The journey was uneventful except for the Melbourne - Colombo flight being delayed by an hour after Melbourne experienced a thunderstorm which also flooded certain parts of the airport. It was joyous to be back together as a family for Christmas after COVID-19 travel restrictions halted our family tradition for the past 3 years. We decorated the house for Christmas, ate a lot as one would during Christmas and caught up with extended family members and friends. I enjoyed the company of the two recent puppies who have taken over the house, Bonnie and Clyde (my brother chose their names). They are certainly outlaws as they run riot and cause havoc as one would expect from puppies, but they are so loving and adorable. Bonnie is the brains of the outfit and makes all the plans while Clyde just follows Bonnie’s lead. Plus it was nice to see the clowder of cats my dad had adopted over the 3 years including our own two cats ‘Oliver’ and ‘Molly’.
We spent 3 days at Yala National Park in the south of the country. Yala is a hotspot for sighting leopards in the wild. We stayed at a motel called ‘Kele Yala’ which was a 20 minute drive from the national park. It was such a beautiful place while simplistic, providing a homely experience with delicious food and friendly staff. We also had the company of the 3 motel dogs, Scooby, Shelly and Kelly who joined us on walks. We organised two safaris while we were there and saw all the animals we wanted to see. We saw wild boar, elephants, a snake, a variety of birds including peacocks, spotted deer, sambar deer, crocodiles, mongoose, monkeys and of course the highlight, 4 leopards including two cubs. Whilst having the opportunity to enjoy seeing these beautiful creatures in the wild it saddened me to see how much deforestation was occurring around the park and the lack of appreciation and respect most people had for these amazing creatures in their own habitats. Humans have forgotten that we are part of the ecosystem and have to co-exist with nature, not destroy and think we are separate entities.
My trip to Sri Lanka gave me both immense joy and sadness. Being in my country, getting together with family, friends and travelling around was amazing. However, Sri Lanka is still in its worst economic crisis, with prices of even basic products being exorbitant, weekly limited quotas on fuel, shortages in food and medicines, and people who can afford to leave the country permanently including medical staff and engineers escaping the crisis. Leaving one's family after such visits is always difficult, but leaving them to continue to push through the current circumstances is even harder. Especially since Sri Lanka only faces this situation because corrupt and bungling politicians and officials are more interested in filling their pockets and enjoying a luxurious lifestyle, while the public suffer to access and afford basic needs, and to cap it all are compelled to pay higher taxes to boost government revenue.
My brother and I made the trip back to Australia in early January through the same route. My flight from Adelaide to Alice Springs had a technical issue prior to departure where the on-board navigation system stopped working. After 15 minutes of trying to fix it, as with any electronic machine glitch, the fix was to turn off the aircraft and reboot the system which solved the issue. I missed having my brother (he’s an aerospace engineer) on-board as I could have sent him to the cock-pit to have a look. Anyway all’s well that ends well and I was back in Alice Springs with no further dramas.
My first day at work for 2023 was very exciting. I arrived to find the large metal front gate of the office broken and cops around the place. The office building had been broken into in the early hours of the morning with one vehicle stolen which was then used to ram the front gate open and offices were ransacked. Luckily my office was untouched, but it was crazy having cops as my workmates for the day, taking fingerprints and photos and us having to formulate and implement further security measures to prevent another incident. At least I had a quiet day at work which was positive for one’s first day back for the New Year. Here’s hoping for a more welcome and peaceful return to work from now on.
The year 2022 brought so many good changes to my life. I have grown as a person, become more resilient and better able to roll with the punches that inevitably came from living in a remote community. And I have been blessed with being able to live and work in Alice Springs. I can’t wait to see what surprises and adventures are in store for 2023. Stay tuned for the next update.
Comentários