Still in
Canberra
Today I finished my research at AIATSIS. I did 5 full days of listening to Dalabon, Jawoyn and Mayali music, language and cultural samples recorded over the past 50 years by linguists, anthropologists and a missionary or two. I also met with two of the people who created a portion of those recordings to get a primer on what I should expect upon arrival in Arnhem Land. The listening (and watching of videos) is as you might expect – it’s long, somewhat repetitive and only very occasionally really enthralling. I can tell you that I now have a good idea of the proper way to cook a turtle in the shell over an open fire and a deep respect for anyone who can keep straight the endless terminology for defining family relationships in the Dalabon language (one linguist spent more than 4 hours on the topic – no I’m not going to attempt an explanation here).
After finishing the day with a review of the permissions rules and pricing schemes for use of AIATSIS recordings I walked out to what had turned into a really lovely day. I’d woken up this Monday morning to pea soup fog, a deep chill and a very wet bike seat. So the sight of the sun making friends with the clouds was extremely heartening. So heartening in fact that “Red” and I decided to head out on a little explore. You know the kind I mean - a Winnie-the-Pooh style explore. The kind of explore WtP usually took with Roo. The kind that inspired all of his best poems. The kind you take when you’re not really certain where you’re going, but you’re absolutely certain that you’re going somewhere. For Pooh this generally means ending up at the home of a friend eating “hunny”. For me it meant taking off around the shores of Lake Burley Griffin.
Now you would think it might actually be impossible to get lost while following the shore of a lake on a well-maintained bike path, and “lost” is probably too strong a word, but I did in fact end up going off trail for a bit. Which turned out to be a happy accident. Because as I muscled my way through the ruts and mud, right there in the soggy little field between the drainage ditch and the highway, was big old, tremendously endearing kangaroo. My first. I can now confirm that they are not, in fact, a mythical creature. This one looked at me with such lovely curious eyes I just wanted to run over and give him a hug and a gentle little noogie (no, I’m not that stupid – but I wanted to).
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