Travelling Whale

Hi there! How are you?

I am here writing this in the lobby of the hotel that I am staying in. I am about to leave on my (very lengthy) trip back to Sydney via Melbourne (that does NOT make sense) and I am not very excited for the air sickness to come…

UPDATE: It is a week later + I have an extremely sore back from hunching over this screen. Also I feel very guilty for not posting for 24 days (Pretty much the whole month of July). Whoops…

So anyways, Central Australia. Wow. When writing my ‘Update + Uluru’ post, I had NO idea how breathtakingly beautiful and phenomenal the Aussie heart would be. (Ok this is gonna be a LOOOONNNNGG post).

Every night we would sleep under the stars, rolled up in swags and wrapped in layer upon layer of the warmest clothes we had. “Big boppa to base, big boppa to base, big boppa, big boppa, big boppa to base”. The convoy (actually only 2 cars), required a walkie talkie (or 2… duh), and of course this was the only wakeup call that would ring throughout both cars every hour or so. And boy, you could only imagine the colour of the ground and the expanse of the sky that the filled my eyes with awe. But what interested me the most was the tiny indigenous towns – Armata, Ernabella, Hermannsburg… Playing a modified version of softball with little Aboriginal kids using a roll of tinfoil and a punctured soccerball outside the Ernabella arts centre. The way that they touched our hair, and spoke only a few words of English, most of which consisted of ‘gimme, gimme!!’ or ‘Pia u bowl, Sopia, SOPIA’.

What made me angry was the vast amounts of tourists that would flock to the site of the ancient Uluru, not to learn the rich history and culture of it, but to be able to say to their friends back home that “they climbed Uluru” and to cross ‘climb uluru’ off their bucketlist. What is not fair is that the surprising amounts of deaths that occur when climbing the sacred site are pushed back onto the custodians of that land, and they feel responsible for all of them. What if we drove back into Alice Springs and climbed the nearest Christian church? We would probably be arrested, and it’s no different to people climbing Uluru! Don’t ‘just do it’, Just don’t do it!

I was lucky enough to meet Mary Pan, an elder of the Armata community, artist and Tjanpi dester weaver. She went to great lengths to take my family and my friends to one of the most sacred sites she knew of – a place that in English was called ‘Cave Rock”.

Dreamtime stories were such precious reminders of the culture of the indigenous people, and I listened to many, most of them surprisingly based on feminism. Would you guys like me to write them on here?

Here are some of my most treasured shots, as I had over 200 and couldn’t put them all on here sadly 😦  .  Also my photography isn’t very good – it’s something that I aspire to get better at though !

 

Can we also just take a minute to talk about Emma Mulholland. I have been LOVING her and I mean LLOOOOVVVINNGGG! Her designs are so wacky and out of this world, yet so aesthetically pleasing! I’ll insert some of my favorite pieces (all images belong to the rightful owners, I do not intend to claim these as my own):

1 more thing, we are almost at 50 followers!! YAYAYAYY!!!! It may not seem like much, but to know that people still read and enjoy blogs (kinda old school) brings so much happiness into my heart! So thankyou for taking the time to read this post.

Talk soon,

xo,

Phiiaaaaa