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Local Lunar Landings

Michael Winkler November 14

The remote deserts of central Australia and the bright lights of Queensland’s Surfers Paradise are two iconic cultural landmarks, yet, on the surface at least, the two could not be further apart. Surfers, with its heavy focus on tourism and schoolies week, is all glitz and hedonism, whereas the outback, and the Aboriginal communities that live there, represent something else altogether. Moreover, and somewhat ironically, while much has been said of the central deserts in film and literature, Surfers remains strangely absent from our cultural dialogue. In the September issue of Meanjin, Michael Wrinkler travels from one extreme to the other, and makes some unexpected discoveries along the way. As always, the full essay is on our editions page. You can read a brief extract below.



When I am away from home I find it comforting to look up at the night sky and know that my family and I are all under the same celestial blanket. This was why I stood on a road in Ernabella looking at the blazon of night stars as the desert temperature neared zero. I was with a local teacher and we talked about indigenous and European astronomy. I had read about the astronomy of the Boorong people, but this was quite different. It seemed that perhaps we are not all beneath the same sky after all.

In the space of one week, by serendipity rather than design, I visited both ends of the Australian continuum. My week began under stars in a remote Aboriginal community in the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara Lands. It concluded in a high-rise apartment on Gold Coast Highway, Surfers Paradise, where the flamboyant wattage renders stars invisible.

While the two destinations fit into easy dichotomies—desert/coastal; spiritual/hedonistic; poverty/rampant commerce—my experiences of them had unexpected similarities. Continuums are curved. The extreme at one end bends to touch the extreme at the other.

The desert terrain was mesmeric, transfixing. It was an ecology based on the almost total absence of water, with landforms that might be found on the moon. I have visited Aboriginal communities on a few occasions. This Anangu community on the Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara Lands was superficially familiar to my middle-class eyes—the omnipresent dogs, the cars and trucks left lying where they conked out. But it was also different to the other communities, in the way that Aboriginal peoples across the nation are different.

Anangu culture is strong. Being with the residents while they spoke together was a profound reminder of my European status. I talked to whitefellas who have lived and worked in the community for years, who speak the language but accept that they can never truly understand the culture. Being an outsider hoping to know Aboriginal culture is like looking at the night sky: you might learn every star on display, but can never know how they are linked together, never grasp those connections every bit as mysterious as the constellations that lie beyond, present but out of sight.

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I still had red dust on my boots when I arrived in Surfers Paradise. That was a second lunar landing of sorts, and the culture shock was no less profound than it had been in the desert. In the Anangu community, I could not get over the suspicion that I was on a different globe. In Surfers, among my fellow tourists, I could not shake the feeling that I was overseas.

A friend once suggested to me that if the Big Brother household provided the entire gene pool and made everything crude and loud all the time then you would have something like Surfers Paradise. Commerce is triumphant. Flesh, ‘fun’ and the free market are rampant. Tomorrow’s temperature matters; global warming does not. You eat ice cream, look through shops full of foreign-made Australiana souvenirs, marvel at the tans and enhancements of the golden-haired locals.

In the Central Australian community you can buy art and have it shipped to any address, anywhere. You just won’t understand it. In Surfers, I tried and failed to find a post office. Perhaps Australia Post seems too akin to a public sector entity—an affront to the one true path of capitalism. Dozens of shops will sell you a post card, but only a sleuth can find a stamp or a post box. After the initial sale, the transaction is over. Maybe no-one ever writes on the things. Maybe visitors are rendered pre-literate by the primitive attractions of the sun temple.


 

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