Mutika # 15 – Meet me at Honeymoon Bore!

The thing about the Territory is distance, a majority of the work I do is in and around Aboriginal communities , and that means a lot of driving. The last big trip was down to Ampilatwatja where the locals walked out of their community in protest against raw sewerage flowing through their yards, substandard housing and a justified sense of marginalisation since the government intervention 2 1/2 years ago.
Banjo Morton Petyarr walked out of the community nearly a year ago with his wife and family and set up his protest camp at Honeymoon Bore and has been there ever since.
On assignment from the Age I had to first drive down “The Track” to Tennant Creek ,1080 K’s , over night and then take the back roads, another 500 or so K’s, to Honeymoon Bore , find a bloke called Richard , and then he will take me to meet and interview Banjo.

The second hardest thing about this sort of job is the nagging feeling that I have after 2 days of driving , where I have plenty of time to think about all the ways this could go pear shaped!
The hardest is trying to find some sort of common ground with the old man, so we could have a halfway decent chance of making a picture. Banjo has that upright , bow legged gait of a life spent on horseback and had worked on Stations his whole life before comming home to live in his own country.
There is no light to speak of but no time to wait it out another day and I’m praying that the sun will peek through at the end of the day, like it so often does on cloudy Red Center days, in the meantime I’ve got to keep this old man interested and engaged enough to want to do this portrait, So we talk about Station life and the common threads we have through the place names we both know, Lake Nash ,Atula , Manners Creek, Urandangie and Dajarra all names that are familiar through my recent and distant past but talking with Banjo brings them to life in ways I never envisaged, talking about driving cattle down the Barkly thorough Lake Nash down to the rail head at Dajarra, not far from my home town, I start remembering rodeos’ and race meetings with tall, straight black men in Akubras , Santa Fe Cuban heeled boots and rubbing smokes of Log Cabin tobacco in their palms , we just talk and scratch in the dirt describing turn offs to such and such a bore or creek and 2 hours have passed, the sun breaks through the clouds for 5 minutes and Banjo looks up and says ” We better get that picture now!”
The shoot went something like this over a period of about 10 minutes.
My Favorite!

Getting serious!

And the Age used this one , 6 columns on top of the fold on the front of Saturdays edition, can’t complain about that run.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 19th, 2010 at 3:24 pm and is filed under Aboriginal Issues, Central Australia, New Press, The Territory, The Track. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.