It was my last week in Australia. I’d been persuaded to see Uluru – not the magic glowing rock it’s sometimes made out to be, but a majestic and powerful creature of the earth – and began my journey north. From the bus I watched the landscape grow green and lush. Along the roadside were termite mounds ranging from tennis ball bumps to full-size snowmen creatures dressed in old t-shirts. Dark grey clouds appeared and glowered until late afternoon when it poured torrentially for five minutes, and I realised I hadn’t seen rain in over a month.

Stepping off in Darwin I was hit by the humidity: it was a physical resistance, like swimming through the air. In the hostel my air conditioning was mistakenly set to 26 degrees (which felt freezing) and I woke to find the floor and walls covered in a sticky layer of condensation. But now it’s only the end of the wet season – I can’t imagine what it’s like at Christmas.

Since it’s the wet season it was harder to visit Kakadu, the massive national park in the top end of Australia. In fact, it was mostly underwater. I took a river cruise through parts that are dry land for the rest of the year. ‘Try to imagine my aunty standing underneath that tree fishing’, our guide said, pointing to a small bush – the few branches of the tree that still remained above water.

The water is beautifully tranquil, but murky and lethal. Before we set off in the boat we were given the compulsory lifebelt safety talk, but it ended with the instruction to never even think about using one since there are about 10,000 salties just waiting to eat you. It was very reassuring. The words of our guide kept on going through my head: ‘Remember, you’re no longer top of the food chain’. In the end, though, the closest I ever came to seeing a crocodile was the one caged in a roadside inn we passed, and the skull of the second largest croc in the world (the largest skull is in – where else – Russia). Instead we saw lilies, electric blue kingfishers, plump magpie geese, and lots and lots of still water.

Kakadu is also home to some of the oldest rock art in the world. We saw a monster, painted in x-ray decorative style, who bashed women to death with a yam, a painting intended as a warning for women to stay near the camp. I thought the most interesting drawings were a series of very basic stick figures with balls for joints. They are a warning that this is sickness country and that if you stay your joints will swell up. Thousands of years later it was discovered that Kakadu sits on one of the world’s largest mines of uranium and what people were experiencing was radiation poisoning from the water.

The small city of Darwin wasn’t quite as exciting as I hoped. I don’t know what I was expecting, maybe the old frontier town older generations talk about. It’s a quiet city, not unattractive, with a prominent WW2 history. The military presence is strong and Asia does feel very close – closer than Sydney or Melbourne. It did feel quite different from other places, with its massive bats, fragrant air, beautiful but untouchable water and spectacular sunsets.

It was a good place to say my goodbyes. On my last night a howling wind woke me up, and then the rain hit. It pummelled the sundeck and sunshade, making the swimming pool churn and knocking the potted palms over. Lightening bolts flashed like strobe lightning (frequent enough for me to get the photo below) and the thunderclaps rolled on for ages, sounding like atomic bombs. I woke again at 2am to catch my airport bus, but ten minutes before I had to go I realised I’d left my passport in the library photocopier (in a stupid fit of attempted organisation). I ran to the police station, but no help there, so ran to the library and hammered on the door until a security guard opened up. They looked at me very suspiciously, but went to have a look and returned, passport in hand! I sprinted back through the debris of the storm, only now feeling the humidity of the night – and even caught my airport bus on time. And it was in that hot, sweaty panic and the calm silence after the storm that I bid farewell to Australia.

The aboriginal town of Yuendumu is well known, between its brawls and occasional riot, for its art centre. As with almost every service or organisation in the community, which appear to be run exclusively by white people and makes the town seem (to an outsider’s eye) divided into white providers and aboriginal users, this art centre employs young white Australians and welcomes volunteers from around the world. They need as many workers as possible because the scale of production is practically industrial. Anyone in the community can come and paint, and on the whole it seems to be a way to earn money rather than the practice of a traditional culture. The works are usually traditional, depicting a story or dreaming from the land around, yet sometimes it is the non-indigenous staff who teach the aboriginal artists how to paint a particular image. It is an intriguing collaboration and meeting of cultures, and often seems driven entirely towards economic success. And they are very successful: every day we sent paintings off across the world.

In the week I spent there, we primed and prepared canvases, made up pots of paint, tagged and unpicked paintings, processed artworks, and tidied the gallery, all day long. But much of the work was fetching cups of tea for the artists, handing out sandwiches, moving pots of water and cushions for them, or microwaving their lunch. I felt uncomfortable doing a lot of this: was this demanding behaviour an expression of long overdue entitlement, or laziness, dependence, or even resentment? There were big cultural differences on every level, even between our western expectations of politeness and friendliness, and aboriginal ways of communicating and socializing. But my time here was too fleeting to get to know people, to go beyond superficial encounters and cautious eyes. It was, nevertheless, an extraordinary and rewarding week, and among the most magical, dramatic and strangest I’ve ever experienced.

Next door to the art centre lived an ancient lady called Rosie. She was frail and thin with wild white hair, and would stand at the fence watching us. One afternoon she beckoned me over, gripping the fence tightly, peering through the wires, and pointed upwards towards the branches. She told me to listen, and we stood there looking at each other and listening to the birds over the barking of dogs and music from a distant radio: ‘baby bird… there… not that one – that one… baby bird – there… there…’

The first night I arrived, I was taken to visit her by Juliana, a Columbian woman who had an amazing skill for getting on with everyone. It was dark and Rosie was sitting outside her house on a metal box. Inside I saw bare painted concrete walls and no furniture besides the metal sink. Around her neck was a necklace of seeds and a big wooden cross. She started talking, moving between English and Walpiri, telling us about her old land, the missionaries, and the family that had left her. She wanted us to know the Walpiri words for everything and kept translating for us. ‘I’ll give you a skin name’ she said to me. ‘Naparrula’. There are 16 skin names, and they form a very complex system for determining who you can marry.

Rosie talked and talked and talked, with her sandwich uneaten in her hand. We tried to get her to eat, but no matter how much she insisted ‘I’m hungry’, the sandwich lay uneaten in her hand. She wouldn’t let us go. She grabbed hold of Juliana’s wrist with one hand and her breast with the other. ‘Lampurna, lampurna’, she repeated, taking hold of her own breast. ‘Milk, same word. We all women, black and white’. As we tugged away, Rosie pulled Juliana’s wrist harder and looked up. Her hollow face was lit on one side as though in a film. ‘Pray for me’, she croaked. She looked up at us, and let us go.

It was the older women who were the most open and generous. Dorothy was a healer, and she took us hunting for bush tucker. Inthe evenings we drove around in the art centre’s ex-army land rovers, whose wooden benches in the back were cushioned only by the dogs that piled in with us. Off the roads, we started wandering through the bush. We looked for shells of insects underneath bushes, and started digging among the roots of the wittchety bush for grubs. We searched the vines in trees for the elusive green fruit of the bush banana. Suddenly, walking past one big tree we bumped right into gnarled pale grey balls hanging from the branches: bush coconuts. If you crack open the coconut there is a large sweet juicy worm you can suck out, some pink fly eggs (a bit of extra fibre), and the hard white flesh of the coconut which is slightly bitter.

Another day, while we were working in the gallery, a wailing started next door. Someone was crying. Within seconds others started joining in, shrieking and moaning, hugging each other, shaking hands, tears flowing freely. Painting immediately stopped and everyone got up to join the crying for the rest of the day. That afternoon the sounds of wailing and moaning gave the town a haunted atmosphere. A few days later, as we drove out of town, we passed a sorry camp: a collection of mattresses lying outside on the sand where people were sleeping.

Among the volunteers at the art centre was an Irish ceramicist. It was suggested we go out and find some clay to have a pottery class, so, taking Dorothy with us, we drove to a dried out creek and started digging in the hard earth. We suddenly stopped. Dorothy was looking very uncomfortable. You cannot remove stones from the ground because they are sacred, but you can take away earth. We weren’t sure about clay. Nor was she, it seemed. Although she said it was alright, there was something uncomfortable about the whole thing. But we took the lumps of clay, soaked, strained and dried it out, and ended up with a beautiful reddish brown clay. The plan was to fire it outside in a bonfire the following week, so I’ll have to wait and see how it went.

The town itself was dusty and dirty but had a great sense of community. Passers by would engage you in conversation, even if their dogs weren’t quite as friendly. Every time we walked out our gates and barbed wire fences we would be accompanied by at least three dogs, who essentially protected us from unwanted attention. The dogs went everywhere, even into the old Baptist church with its beautiful paintings and strange faith which combined Christianity and dreamtime. They sat on the paintings which had just been sold for thousands of dollars. They took me through the bush at sunrise, seemingly aware of the traditional belief that if you don’t ask for permission, you get lost. They fought in the dust as we lay on the dirt by a bonfire, stargazing. They had their parties while we had ours, revelling in the illicit pleasure of alcohol in one of the few houses with an alcohol permit. There was Ben the dingo, the most graceful and fastest dog of them all, Rosie, who was unaware of how fat she was and would knock you over in eagerness, and Daisie, who couldn’t go five minutes without a cuddle.  And there was Blackie, Kira, Ziggy, Raya, Plummie…

I wish I’d had more time to get to know people, to get to know the culture, to learn Walpiri, to understand the stories of dreamtime in the paintings and the landscape. But it would take more than a lifetime.

The Red Centre. The Outback. The Central Desert Region. Vast horizons, cloudless skies and never-ending straight roads draw me here. I want to know what life there can be in such an inhospitable environment. Heading north west out of Alice Springs, towards the Tanami Desert and the vastness of Western Australia, is the small aboriginal town of Yuendumu. Most of the remote communities in the Northern Territory are serviced by an amazing bus service called the Bush Bus, which acts as a kind of motorized walkabout for locals who don’t have the 4x4s of cattle stations or the government. On the bus I stuck out as the only white passenger, repeatedly questioned about where I was going and who I was seeing, though I could barely understand the broken English which intermingled with indigenous languages. Along the way we stopped off in Yuelamu, a closed community off the main road, and it was the first time I’d been in a fully aboriginal town. There are only about 100 residents, and you need a permit to access the land, but there was a lot of activity: people wandering along barefoot, driving their suburban cars along dusty red roads (I wondered how they’d managed to bring those cars here), children playing in an old playground strewn with cans, plastic bags and blankets. Women came out to greet the bus with their babies. It felt a quiet place, remote and yet somehow crowded.

35km from Yuendumu is Mt Dennison, a cattle station 300km north west of Alice Springs. The station is 3000 square kilometres – 60km between the furthest points, or a one hour drive across – and says it has 5000 cattle. It was hot. I was shown to my own little house, which had no air conditioning and was even hotter. The bathroom was infested with frogs and the peeling walls, broken cupboards, patched lino floors, mismatched bedding, everything, was covered in gecko droppings. I tried to use the toilet in another volunteer’s bathroom, but it stood at a 45 degree angle and there was a big hole in the floor, so I simply had to make friends with the frogs – I would get no sympathy here. The next morning our electricity wouldn’t come on. ‘Welcome to the outback’ said Dianne.

Dianne runs this family cattle station, but she is widowed and her six children have left home so she now manages the place alone, helped only by one employee and an uneven trickle of volunteers. I asked if she felt isolated here. ‘No, the bitumen extends almost all the way to Yuendumu! And it’s only three hours to Alice.’ These distances are starting to seem small even to me.

Breakfast was at 6.30am and work started at 7am. Every morning we had a beautiful sunrise over the fields of long grass, and as soon as the sun was up, work began. In these semi-desert conditions, watering the garden was a major job. They’d had a lot of rain over the summer, but nothing for the last month. I managed eight hoses simultaneously, flooding each plant and tree for up to 20 minutes each. But weeding was wonderfully easy in the sandy soil. By 11am it was too hot for me to work outside: on several occasion the (admittedly not terribly reliable) thermometer read 44 degrees – and it was always hotter inside my room… I could have watered the plants with my sweat by that point. My pale Tasmanian skin gave me an excuse to go inside.

I cooked for the boys and cleaned the decaying homestead. From the garden at this time of the year we had an endless supply of chillis, lemons and limes, while the various cool rooms were piled high with crates of milk, apples, butter, peppers and beer. The freezers were filled with steaks, salted beef, stewing beef and sausages, and the pantry was so well stocked it would rival any shop. Housework here was not simply about appearances or creating a pleasant living environment, but was a matter of safety. Poisonous spiders were allowed to live over the barbecue, but not underneath chairs or on the hat stand. Centipedes in the house had to be crushed and disposed of. Grass was a fire hazard and had to be cut.

I was surprised that I actually saw any cattle at all. They live completely independently, partly due to the nature of the land and partly because a lot of work simply hasn’t and isn’t being done. Many of the fences have collapsed, meaning the cattle can’t be managed and simply roam free alongside the wild horses. The exceptions to this were the ones who were hand reared as calves and now choose to spend the rest of their lives around the homestead. It was my job every evening to make up the powdered milk and feed the calves using an old beer bottle. They were aggressive and fought for the bottle, head-butting each other and me, stamping on my feet and trying to wedge themselves between my legs or between me and whichever calf I was trying to feed. But by the end I realised that if I stuck my fingers into their mouths, they would suck on them and keep quiet (while cutting off most of the blood from my fingers). It was very cute to watch.

The actual number of cattle, I was told by the one man employed there, was probably closer to 12,000 than 5,000. He was aboriginal (and ‘becomes more and more blackfella the older he gets’) and spoke a beautiful type of rippling, fluid English I’ve never heard before – real Australian slang as only aboriginal people seem able to master with complete dexterity. Even the simplest affirmative answer had to be extended to ‘Yeah bloody eh’. He had incredible stories of the old musters on horseback, sleeping in swags, roaring up fires for hot baths, living on dampers and camp cakes. He taught me about fencing, road building, paddocks, traps, types of cattle, or how to use animal tracks to find water in the outback. When he and Dianne chatted during smokos, I could just about follow, but dinner conversation was beyond me – I just sat back and enjoyed the sound of their speech.

My favourite times were when we went driving across the station. Going to the tip was like going on a journey through time, from rusting cars from the 1950s to typewriters with clumps of grass growing through the keys, collections of washing machines, mountains of tyres, and pile after pile of metal poles, wheels, screws – anything you needed could be found there. We drove to where the roads and fences were being rebuilt, where herds of wild horses galloped past in clouds of dust and cattle scattered in terror as though they’d never seen such monsters before. Three of us squeezed into the front seat of a truck to go and see a dam, which we found by turning off the road at some unmarked but apparently significant point and driving right over bushes, trees and broken fence lines. I hadn’t expected the landscape to be so beautiful and to have so much character.

I loved living and working here so much. I loved the heat and being spoilt for sunrises, sunsets and the majestic Milky Way every single day. I loved getting up early and working hard, showering several times a day under water that refused to turn cold in a vain attempt to cleanse myself of red dirt. I loved the afternoons spent inside the cool homestead, drinking icy lime sodas, being domestic or doing patchwork, and listening to a calm Englishman’s voice reading Smiley’s People, while outside in the sweltering heat the grasshoppers and lizards and cockatoos carry on living, just as they always have.

Mad March is the time to be in Adelaide! It’s the end of summer, the heat is easing off, the crowds are out and everything is ON. There’s the Festival proper, things high brow and serious, and the Fringe, and then there are all the other events – in just the 5 days I was there we had Clipsal (car racing which drowns out the opera) and Writers’ week. But it’s the Fringe that dominates, with venues like the tantalizingly-named Garden of Unearthly Delights and (slightly more peculiarly named, and a little less exciting) Royal Croquet Club. Giants on unicycles and glittery women in tutus desperately flyered, vouchers for free champagne were thrust into our hands, and the beautiful coolness of evening was accompanied by twinkling lights in the trees.

So, the best thing (and sadly, if I’m honest, only thing) that I saw: Djuki Mala. The aboriginal Youtube dance sensation. It started with traditional dancing, what looked like an imitation of animals and hunting with spears. The audience clapped politely with a slight air of disappointment, until all of a sudden bright lights came on, the music changed and the dancing became frenetic. We now had Singin’ in the Rain and Michael Jackson. The audience cheered wildly – this was what everyone came for. The dance was a mash of as many styles as possible: hip hop, break dance, tap, techno, aboriginal, and all sorts of other things. They looked like they were having so much fun. One of the dancers had his tongue stuck out the whole time and looked totally mad. In between dances were videos from Arnhem Land describing the stories of the group. The whole performance was funny, exuberant, energetic, feel good entertainment.

The other really fun thing was a virtual reality arcade: I sat on a stool wearing goggles and travelled on rollercoasters, took part in a seance and got stabbed in the eye, saw a blue whale swim right past, and was eaten by a spooky black ghost.  It was completely immersive and tiring, but if this is the future of cinema, bring it on!

There’s so much to see, and I do enjoy things for free – but I wish I had money to do more things.