Divorce the Dividing Wall

We met Auntie Jude in Canberra, Australia. She is an Aboriginal woman who is fighting for the rights of other Aborigines in the areas of national land, law, and representation. 
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We listened as she told her story through very tired eyes. It was difficult to watch, but so important to hear. 
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A few quotes from what she shared with us:
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“We’ve had 6 generations of genocide.”
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“Our place (Australia) was a perfect place, a beautiful place – a haven.”
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“I don’t want to get sucked into the system.”
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“This is democracy, I suppose. I’m living it – breathing it.”
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“All governments, per se, are just businesses …. Where does the humanity come into it?”
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“Closed doors where the inside dies more …”
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“Divorce the dividing wall.” 

Barnaby Joyce and Bundy on Tap

This post is looooong overdue. These are images from Canberra - our very first group trip with the Australia Studies Centre back in March. I shall make a list of all the important things seen and learned in the capital city of Oz! 
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> The name "Canberra" either means "Meeting Place" ..... or "The Valley Between a Woman's Breasts." There is no way to be sure. I wouldn't worry about it. 
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> The most important thing at the National Portrait Gallery, I gathered, were not the paintings of diplomats or the depictions of Australia's past royalty ... Nope. Two words to make your heart stop: Heath Ledger. I walked by his photograph several times, and there were always at least 10 girls just sort of gazing at the grandeur of his presence. Glued to his demised magnificence. 
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> Senator Barnaby Joyce (Best. Name. Ever.) is excellent at character assessment. He called his opponent, who was playing a game on his iPhone in the middle of their debate, a "Garden Gnome," among other things. 
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> We routinely fit all 28 of us into normal-sized elevators. There was much love. There was also just enough oxygen. 
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> We were told to NOT roll down the grassy green hill that Parliament House is built into, please. No matter how perfect it would be. It is built that way so that people can politely stand on the hill, and be symbols of how the government is never above the people is represents. 
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> Bundanoon, an Aussie city devoid of bottled water, brought to light the possible conspiracy of "Evian," the first company to present the idea of having people pay money for something that is free: Water. "Evian" = "Naive" spelled backwards? Hmmmmmmm-furrowed-brow-of-suspicion.
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> Also, the word "Bundanoon" now officially means "To not drink bottled water" in Flemish. This is key. 
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> Not enough time spent at the Art Gallery of Australia! For those of you who join me in knowing some things about artsy-fartsy stuff, there were pieces by Moholy Nagy, Toulouse Lautrec, Josef Albers, Pollack, de Kooning, and some Rothko, among others. (Some gorgeous Picasso line drawings, too!) 
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> We visited the War Memorial, which is said to rival London's War Memorial. Also, our trip took us to the Aboriginal Tent Embassy (a bit more about that in my next post). 
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To see more pictures of our group, and our time in Canberra, click here. Or visit alessandra-elizabeth.posterous.com.


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Click here to view more pictures.

Those black flats

Tip-toeing morning sunshine is intoxicating as it graciously sweeps over shadowed stillness. With Phil Collins, Three Dog Night, and some Bossa Nova fueling my spirit as I sit on the sleeping bus, I realize, par its failing reputation, that my body has gravitated to sit me in the only seat that neither reclines, nor has a functional arm rest. At 5 in the morning, my spine doesn’t really care that I’ve taken eight dance classes that week which teach me about proper posture and alignment. Larry the Cucumber streams into my headphones – reminding me that he’s a pirate who doesn’t do anything; and I find I’ve made it all of an hour after dawn brekky before stuffing more food into my barely-waking system.

It’s quite a frightening sensation when you smell something waft over a bus and consider that it might be coming from the shoes you just took off. You envision, in a staggering instant, societies shunning your face and friendships being severed like the limbs of a Barbie in the hands of your twisted cousin. You feel that there will soon be generous frowns from all walks of life acutely stabbing your wardrobe selections;  at the fact that such a putrid smell could come from a pair of size 7 flats. All because you chose to bring those black shoes. Those silly black shoes. The ones that may potentially be molding. The ones you wore extensively in last weekend’s persistent deluge, possessed by the evil puddles to rot in humid decay. Rain everywhere. Cats. And dogs. From … the  … sky. You knew they would betray you, but it’s the only black pair of shoes you brought to Australia.  You wanted to be different than the girl behind you who brought all the shoes she owns for the four months abroad. But now you only have this one pair that match the dress you’re wearing. And you have to wear a dress on the 7-hour bus ride because you’re going to visit Parliament. You’re happy because most everyone is asleep, and maybe they won’t notice that the bus now smells like a well-loved locker room. Maybe they will be acutely unaware of the assault to the comfort of their senses. If you were to be able to just reach the frilly, girly lotion tucked in your backpack, maybe you could confound the nostrils of those nearby. It is, of course, wedged into the deepest, darkest, most hardest-to-reach corner of the most awkwardly placed pocket furthest from your desperate fingers ….  maybe you should just chuck both the insubordinate backpack and the disloyal shoes out the window … and you can feel those frowning noses from the fastidiously analytical culture of the masses coming to shame you ….. and you just can’t find that lotion … and people are starting to wake up …. And the shoes are staring at you, mocking the distress of your soul …

And then, in a moment of insurmountable beauty, the skies open up as you realize that the awful scent is coming from outside the bus.

Crisis crushed. Boo-yah.

So you begin a carefree conversation with those who are awake (and some who really aren’t, or shouldn’t be) about Neil Patrick Harris, excrement of jellyfish, mnemonic anemones, strategic tactics for the acquisition of quarters, school buses, and fathers being pastors.

It’s going to be a good day.  

A mighty graveyard

We have all these ideas, these possibilities for accomplishment and venturing thoughts of dynamic deeds,  that get drawn out of us like ship captains who never come home. It’s as though, for every one action we take, a thousand more potential actions drown, sinking to the depths along with their homeward-bound ships; ideas that often cry out from the sea-floor in ghostly recall, but that will never come to be.

I find myself plagued with ideas. Wonderful ideas – big ones, small ones – that could make of me the most interesting and useful human specimen if I were to follow them all (or the most laughed at, but we will ignore that possibility). I could be noteworthy for my accomplishments in newspaper-clipping collages, my skills of button organization, my strides in language and literature and the making of lasagna. I could be the first to break new ground in operatic singing, and then go on to conquer the realms of bringing belly dance into the forefront of the church. I could write poems of liberation and print them on napkins, then drop the napkins from hot air balloons into the cages of imprisoned zoo animals. I could knit kites, kill roaches, and have better reflexes than a cat’s ninth life. For each one idea I pursue (often to its failing demise), infinite more are lost; however silly, or successful, they might turn out to be.

So many ideas lost. It makes me think of armies strewn about shores; dead to their lives, but deader-still to their possibilities.

We recently spoke in one of our classes about the battle of Gallipoli in WWI, fought in Europe between Australian and Turkish troops. Some of you may not realize that Australia, at the time of WWI, was only just over 100 years old, compared to America’s 500-year-plus history. The first British ships landed in Australia in 1788, compared to America’s wonderful, “In 1492 Columbus sailed the ocean blue,” and the accomplishment found in the signing of the United States’ Declaration of Independence in 1776.

It was said of the Battle of Gallipoli, a battle in which Australia failed miserably, that “A young nation could not afford to lose such men.” This brought out the reality that, in all the lives lost, there were thousands of potential doctors, engineers, agriculturalists, mayors, fathers and brothers and scientists and artists …. Thousands of men who would have been forces of national forward-propulsion for the young country of Australia, and for the lives of those left behind. Thousands of men with ideas, and thoughts, and potential actions that could have changed the history of a place. In response to a European request for more Australian troops to be sent to fight in the war, Billy Hughes, the Aussie Prime Minister at the time, declined, saying, “I speak for 60,000 Australian dead.”

It is a mighty graveyard, the resting place of ideas. 

The image above is from the War Memorial in Canberra. I will write more about the memorial later, but this is a portion of a boat retrieved from the site of the Battle of Gallipoli, riddled with bullet holes. It is eerie to think of what was hit by those bullets after they pierced straight through the shell.