Easter 2021 has fallen into the cache we call memory. The imagined has passed, made real by action and inevitability. The arrow of time feels surreal these days, in the COVID19 New World of being-alive on planet contagion. Surreal is not quite it; perhaps vibrating uncertainty is a more appropriate tag? []
Yesterday I endured an hour in a suburban cattle-yard waiting for my first vaccination for which I was quite apprehensive. Staff were cheerful, confident and reassuring, strikingly marked against the silence, palpable anxiety and resignation quivering in the queue. An official, a voluminous man in high viz standing at the front of the hall, began to sing a slow love song. It was beautiful; people clapped and I heard a ripple of bright chatter. For a moment I was back in Ireland, where music remains the habitus of being alive and death. The man in a cap sitting beside me – 1.5 metres away – smiled at the singer and turned to ask me questions almost as if we were on a date. I deferred to the bland, generalising answers that are my default after sixty-plus years of practice defending my disinterestedness in men’s flirtation. After the vaccination, while I was waiting for possible shock, he found me and wanted to know why I had a better iphone than he did (enabling the vax app) and why I had already booked my second jab…as if taking initiative was a representation of crime. I walked out before he did, leaving him to sort his own future.
Today I’m expecting reactions to the jab – soreness, fatigue – but so far nothing more than my usual tiredness and a strange alertness that I’m sure is an adaptation to media fears for side effects, such as blood clots and symptoms.
Two weeks ago, I joined other artists at Easter on the trek into takayna/The Tarkine, this time to the north west: five days at Arthur River for the Art in takayna project, rolling art-activism organised by the Bob Brown Foundation.
There we were, a random collective of painters, botanical artists, photographers, dancers, poets, videographers, sound artists and volunteers camping on sand, hidden from the quad-bike fraternity behind tea-tree scrub in the Manuka camping grounds. Two Aboriginal leaders, Teresa and Nala, lead us to significant sites deserving protection by Aboriginal management. We were invited to look at petroglyphs, middens, hut depressions and seal hides along the takayna coastline, north and south of Arthur River, where Tasmanian Aboriginal people had carefully selected places where they could sustain daily practices and ensure shelter in, and wonder of, place. Before the horrors of settler invasion and Robinson’s round up. The shock to learn there are no descendants of takayna people remains with me, like a burning infection.
I was enthralled by our excursions, and learning of the legacy of Aboriginal knowledge and life. But I was appalled at the lack of respect given to Aboriginal country, and by illegal recreational bike-riders zooming along tracks, foreshore and beaches, marking middens and other sites, penetrating the silence with a rude sense of entitlement.
Activism in takayna is a solid, continuing and intelligent response to raising awareness of takayna’s plea for protection. May we go on campaigning
Quad bike and dirt bike and 4x drive tyre marks at Sandown Point, takayna, NW lutruwita