CHRISTMAS THOUGHTS
“ … gallons of cool beer …”
As I write this, it is Christmas Day in the Northern Territory, Australia, and the hordes are sitting down to sumptuous Christmas dinners with loads of prawns, shellfish, crayfish flown in expensively from Darwin, gallons of cool beer, preparing for the annual orgy.
Because it is a refreshing day with a lovely, cooling breeze coming down the valley, I decided to get myself outside under the sun to do some refinements to a stone cairn I have been constructing over recent months.
So I’ve been swinging a sledge-hammer and breaking large rocks into smaller, more manageable rocks, then wheelbarrowing them to the cairn site and carefully positioning and bracing each stone as I move again around the perimeter.
Hard work. Sweaty, bending, lifting work. But done in thirty minute stretches, it’s easily managed.
While I’ve been slogging away I have been reflecting on other Christmas days spent in far-away places: on a dusty river bank between Victoria and New South Wales, huddled in the shade of a big gumtree with several Aborigines from a nearby camp. Our frugal Christmas dinner was a few shared tins of canned fruit, washed down with a swig of billy-tea that was boiled over a campfire. For a makeshift spoon to stir our mugs of tea, we used a sturdy twig.
We told each other stories.
They told me of long cattle droving trips in their younger years over hundreds of miles of the outback country, searching for grass and water every day for a year or more, sometimes finding some, sometimes not. Eating rabbits and goannas and kangaroos secured along the way. Sleeping every night on the ground, working 3-hour shifts throughout the dark hours, taking turns, riding quietly around the herd, softly singing Slim Dusty’s songs; the human voice allays their fears, they told me, allowing them to lie down and rest.
I told them of my adventures in Japan, staying with a Japanese professor, his wife and three daughters, in the ancient capital of Kyoto. Their “house” was made of bamboo strips and paper because of the danger of earthquakes.
Of having a bath with them, as is the custom, everyone naked, sitting in steaming water up to our necks, two of the daughters sponging me – one in front, the other behind – and me in the middle hoping like hell I wouldn’t get an erection.
Later, with the coming of night, walking slowly up a mountain path winding like a spiral to the peak, each person holding a lighted candle – hundreds of them fluttering like fireflies – as they re-enacted an ancient religious ritual.
It’s funny the things you think about on an introspective Christmas Day in the Central Australian outback.
-C. O’R.
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