I wish I had a cool heroic story to go with the stiches. I got it when I saved a baby from a falling piano by stopping it with my face. I was attacked by the Mexican pissfish on an expedition in Greenland. I was running a marathon with scissors, just to prove a point, only to be choked and tripped by the ribbon at the finish line.
Here are two
Finnish lines.
Truth is me and a mate got drunk and bored, and smacked our skulls together while we were wrestling in the backyard. Sheer stupidity. It was kinda funny at first until it became fairly evident that I’d need a few stitches to close it up. I did seem to be bleeding a bit. Luckily there’s a hospital in town, but I had to wait until morning to get it fixed. The only doctor in town just happened to be the other pissed idiot that I’d been wrestling with when we smacked heads. So we had to wait until he was sober enough to stitch me up again. He did a great job. I just hope not so good that I doesn’t leave me a really cool scar.
This unfortunate series of events seemed like as good an opportunity as any to talk about alcohol and boredom. It’s pretty safe to say that they are the two greatest causes of problems in the community. Maningrida is basically small town anywhere Australia, and I’m not just talking about Aboriginal communities. We have the same problems with drug and alcohol abuse, mental illness and suicide as any country town, but if anything the troubles are far more transparent here because everybody lives at such close quarters, not scattered out on farms. The average house here has about 15 people in it. I live alone – that makes me feel incredibly guilty - but my guilt is another film entirely. Think about the impact one alcoholic can have on a house of 15. Or on a house of one, for that matter.
You can’t buy grog here. You get a permit, like a license I guess, and you can get 2 slabs shipped in on the barge from Darwin once a fortnight. Doesn’t sound like much, but it with 30 can blocks its breaks down to about 5 cans a night. Any doctor will tell you that that is classified as full-blown alcoholism. Yet, everyone who has a permit – black or white - will knock over their allotment without flinching – usually in the first week. The grog is handed out by the police every second Saturday at what is patronizingly referred to by Balandas as ‘Grog Ceremony’.
A huge part of Aboriginal culture is a notion of give and take. If I ask for something you’ve got, you give it to me – pretty much no questions asked. And vice versa. It probably goes back to tribal times when stuff like that might have meant the survival of the group. Now, more often than not, it just means that people who have had their alcohol permits revoked can usually still get pissed after a grog shipment. Sadly that also means that these same men might start fights in the community or go home and beat their wives. It’s a time-honored tradition brought to Australia by the Irish around the time of the gold rush. I’m being flippant. Sometimes the whole situation here gets a bit overwhelming. That’s my way of dealing with it.
The fact is that the vast majority of the community is unemployed. Alcohol and boredom keep self-esteem way down and depression way up in a group of people that have already been massively marginalized. Nobody can honestly say they are surprised to find out there are issues” here.
But what are you going to do about it? You can’t take the grog away from them. Aboriginals aren’t children, they have to be able to make their own choices. But what can we really expect them to do? I can’t even take a drink without smacking my face into something. Maningrida is not a special place. It’s not particularly dangerous or violent. It’s desperate, but no more desperate than any big city in the world I’ve ever visited. Drugs – be they alcohol, heroin or television – are eating way at every single community in the world. And what do we do about it? …what do we do?
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