OZtralia.tv Blog

Respecting Australia’s Oldest Communities

By: Phoenix Arrien

Travelling to Australia is a lot like many Western countries and you can pretty much get around without too many gaffs and goofs.

However there are also other cultures within Australia. We have a multi-cultural society and you will find different restaurants, places of worship, festivals and places where you need to be aware of different customs.

The indigenous Australian culture requires some thought before you go visit an aboriginal community, festival or accommodation.

You can make the most of the contact with local Australian communities by:

- Learning about Australian history and customs before you go

- Be sensitive to local Australian, eating, drinking and even toileting practices

- Ask permission to take pictures

- Try to learn some of the indigenous Australian language, even if only hello and goodbye

- Treat everyone as equals, but don’t assume that you can talk to everyone

The rewards that you get in return are priceless.

Travel Slowly In Australia

By: Phoenix Arrien

I believe in travelling slow. I do. I do.

Now get out of my way I‘m running late!

Just kidding!

Have you heard about the Slow Travel movement? It is a trend that is growing and I believe it is a great thing. Too many people rush into a destination, run around for a day, and then rush to the next place.

What do they see? What have they learnt about the place? What have they absorbed? How about relaxing and letting the essence of a culture or landscape or people seep into your pores?

Not interested? Okay, the plane leaves in five minutes, better run! Interested? Then here are a few suggestions:

Go to a destination via ground transport. Australia has a great network of city and regional town buses, trams and trains. Long distance coaches and trains will show you the amazing diversity of landscapes on this continent.

Take longer lunches

Sleep in longer

Sit and think

Sit and don’t think

Walk or cycle. See kangaroos and emus bounce and strut, smile as you pass sleepy towns and wave to drovers grazing their cattle on the Long Paddock (the side of the road).

Cities are the hardest in which to slow down. Their very nature is to buzz and buzz, faster and faster until we all fall down.

However, someone has done some homework and two books are out on going slow in Melbourne and Sydney.

The PR states that: “Slow celebrates all that’s local, traditional, handmade and conscious. It arouses the senses and is about quality over quantity, pleasure over pressure and mindfulness over mindlessness. ”

I like being aroused just like anyone else, so if you want to join me, check out the website www.slowguides.com

A Look At Life In Australia

By: Phoenix Arrien

The two artists-in-residence at the Mulgara Gallery near Uluru in Central Australia continue to talk about their passion for Australian desert art.

Liz and Helga have made extended forays into the desert, leaving the comforts of the resort behind. “We learn about bush tucker and use the coloured ochre for painting. Some places we are not allowed to sketch or take photos, other times we are sketching in 41 Celsius degree heat - only mad dogs and Englishwomen,” laughs Liz.

Liz is no stranger to extreme environments. She accompanied a 1993 Oxford Mabeta-Moliwe expedition to Cameroon in central Africa, where she spent most of the time in the rainforest. “Travelling to the third wettest country in the world - in the wet season - was a muddy and difficult challenge. I camped in the rainforest with five Oxford university students who collected the plants, which I then painted. This expedition finally ensured that this unique area became a reserve and ended the planting of rubber and cocoa plantations. From this I held a solo exhibition at The Royal Geographical Society in London.”

It was not her first expedition. Two years earlier Liz had travelled through Guyana in South America, painting the forests and winning a medal at the Royal Horticultural Society in London.

Helga’s strong bold colours emerged early in her career through contact with modern European art. Influenced by archaeology and prehistory, she incorporates the use of decoration from many different cultures. She also still uses traditional Batik techniques occasionally and sometimes switches mediums to cotton or linen.

In 1987, Helga spent a life-changing three months with Aboriginal women in Utopia near Alice Springs sharing her batik knowledge under the shade of Mulga bush or by open fires in the desert sands. “I feel I learned more than I taught.  I didn’t have to teach the women anything, they are so talented, so I really just taught them techniques.”

“Their whole outlook on life taught me that nothing, not even time, matters very much, only the rhythm of nature. The desert is so visually beautiful that at times I would sit for hours by a fire and feel like a tiny pin in the universe.”

These two not-so-tiny pins in the universe of art are bringing the brilliant warm colours and unique animals and plants of our central desert onto canvas and cloth.

Painting The Wonders of Australia

By: Phoenix Arrien

While I was visiting Central Australia, I met two amazing women, painters who spend part of each year, painting the glorious colours of the Outback. In a two-part series, here are their stories:

The paint dries on the brush even before hitting the canvas. At the height of summer heat baking central Australia, two unique international artists are seen at work in the Mulgara Gallery, surrounded by brilliant splashes of colour on swathes of textiles and palettes layered with of globs of colours that are an artist’s creed.

Based in Yulara, the tiny town near Uluru, it’s an artistic pilgrimage for Elisabeth (Liz) Sherras Clark and Helga Muschinski who faithfully return each year to see, absorb, paint and learn, interpreting the unique colours and textures, light and forms of the desert life and unique monuments of the arid landscapes.

Liz sees herself as a botanical illustrator and bird painter, painting the diverse wealth of flora and fauna around Uluru on canvas. She divides her time between a village in southern England and Australia, with Uluru being the highlight of her stay. “The rock is magnificent, as it stands over the flat landscape, its colour forever changing with the hours and weather,” she explains of her attraction to the area.

“I try to capture the brilliant stars and hanging clouds as well as the desert winds and plants, even the dry spinifex, using mixed mediums of water-based paint, dye and wax.” Visitors to the Mulgara gallery, to view its fascinating collection of hand-crafted glassware, pottery, textiles, metal and leather, stop and watch Liz work.

There is symmetry and form in her paintings, clarifying and transforming the mass of shapes, light and colour reflecting in the outside environment. Her pictures asks you to consider a tree’s bark in all its different colours, to watch a grass tree grow from the red soil and spiky leaves against an almost invisible sky or follow the changes Uluru presents as the day’s light waxes and wanes or the weather throws itself against the ageless faces of the rock.

Near Liz, works Helga Muschinksi who, painting on silk, responds to the organic forms of the desert environment. Helga’s work complements Liz’s during this annual pilgrimage to Uluru by bringing the irresistible textures of silks to the coarseness of the desert. Draped over frames, flattened on tables, bunched, hanging and wrapped, the smooth luxurious material beckons one to touch and in relation to Helga’s silks, to gaze.

Here are the animals one glimpsed before they scuttled away or the landscapes just travelled through. Here is the life and souls of the desert, ready to be picked up and worn, taken away and remembered. All the crazy reds and brilliant oranges; the yellows blazing through the greens and contrasting with the eggshell blues or stormy greys.

Across the materials fly cockatoos and galahs, a lizard grins from a rock, the sun shining on scaly skin; flowers, previously lost in the plethora of abstract desert forms, find a moment to shine on a scarf. Circles, lines and bold silhouettes capture the ruggedness of the desert and the way the environment - hot, intense and raw - grabs your attention. The silk paintings do the same thing, they are statements rather than backdrops, and they demand and hold the gaze instead of just existing quietly. One’s neck will never quite be the same again.

Helga uses the forms around the ‘Rock’ as the highlight of her year’s work. “I have spent the greater part of my life in Australia but I am still in a state of original surprise and wonder at the landscape, in particular the flora and fauna.” Both women are part of the monthly resident artists’ program at Mulgara Gallery, housed within the Ayer’s Rock Resort.

The resort is built using innovative artistic and architectural forms and is also a home for a number of plants and animals, so the women do not have to go far (though they often do). “I am constantly amazed at the insect life at Yulara. It is as if the resort is a magic carpet which had landed on an insect metropolis,” explains Liz.

Tomorrow: art forays into the desert

Returning From The Australian Outback

By: Phoenix Arrien

I am back in Alice and checking out other attractions including the Alice Springs Desert Park for close-ups with ghost bats, ostriches and big-eared bilbies; the spectacular cracks, holes, cliffs and desert plants of Kings Canyon, Stanley Chasm and Finke Gorge National Park.

Alice is not without its festivals. If you are here in June, don a beanie for the ‘Beanie Festival’ celebrating everything for the head that is woollen and beyond. Get into some high octane, low brain, insane on the desert plain (also in June) for the Tattersall’s Finke Desert Race where bikes, cars and buggies hurtle from the town of Finke to Alice. Then there is the Alice Springs Show in July or cheer Miss Camel on her Cup during the Voyages Lions Camel Cup also in July.

On normal days though, at the end of each fun-filled, sun-baked, dust-ridden attendance at attractions, I seem to end up, like everyone else, at Todd Mall located in the centre of town. It is a place to browse for goodies like books and camping equipment while being stalked by mangy camp dogs. Yup ya gotta be an animal lover out here.

Visit the Red Centre and get a new appreciation of a unique part of Australia.

A Visit To Alice Springs, Australia

By: Phoenix Arrien

Back on the hop-on-hop-off bus around Alice Springs.

First up is ANZAC Hill for great views of the township. The Anzac Hill lookout shows how Alice Springs kinda’ snuggles into a bit of a valley bordered by the MacDonnell Ranges. It looked relaxed and sleepy as it spreads out among green trees and bakes in the sun.

Each stop sees me wandering into unique places like the Royal Flying Doctor Service and School of the Air, both with enormous distances for their personnel to cover: oh, about the size of Britain.

The Docs look after the scattered population in need of medical attention, the School makes sure the local (read - within several thousand kilometres or so) kids didn’t have any excuse not to do their schoolwork, even though they are at home rather than in a classroom. The doctors and nurses buzz around in small planes that land in paddocks about the size of London, while the teachers sit in the best spot they can: thousands of kilometres away from their students and use radio and internet to scold Johnny into doing his 2 X table.

The Alice Springs Reptile Centre. Here you get to learn about wildlife, have a python wrap itself around your neck and learn how to kiss a lizard. The Reptile Centre has goannas, frill- necked lizards, thorny devils (met a few of those in my travels) and some of this country’s (and the world’s) seventeen most venomous snakes (met even more of these travelling the world too).

I become a kulcha vulture at the Cultural Precinct. To wander around here takes a few hours if you really want to check out desert life. There are eight buildings to explore as well as seven Aboriginal sacred sites and two ‘women dreaming tracks’. There is also desert art in the art galleries, bones in the Museum of Central Australia and aboriginal artefacts, found in the 1930’s, at the Strehlow Research Centre.

You can get into the insides of a giant caterpillar - the ‘dreaming animal’ of the local aboriginal tribe, via their metal outdoor sculpture. The Central Australian Aviation Museum has early planes including a restored DC3 dominating the hangar and other bits and pieces that once flew the sunny skies. More than a few planes crashed as they propelled across the desert skies during the first half of the last century, certainly a risky business being a desert pilot.

The Road Transport museum contains the Old Ghan train still perched on its railway tracks and ready to roll out and stream across the deserts of Central and Southern Australia. It used to go from Adelaide on the south coast to Alice, but the route often became flooded, so a new track was laid and a modern train now zooms along it in style, stopping in Alice but then going further north to Darwin on the north coast. So in fact you can travel across Australia in 48 hours and see much of the desert along the way.

Inbetween touring with the Wanderer, I munch on ‘roo and emu at the Overlander Steakhouse, heave around on camels on the dry Todd Riverbed and zip around town on the back of a Harley Davidson. Outsides of Alice the attractions include Kings Canyon, Palm Valley and tomorrow, my friends, I visit one of the great icons of Australia.

I am making my first pilgrimage out to Uluru, a red rock of mystery and legend.

Australians Celebrate The Silver Screen

By: Phoenix Arrien

And here is the roundup from the Logies. Yes the Aussie TV awards night was held last night and the small screen Australian royalty swept up the red carpet to a glitzy night of…of…well the frocks were quite nice.

Not much to tell really. A long-time actress in the soapie of soapies, ‘Home & Away’, a suburban Bay Watch without the Babes or Boobs, took out the coveted ‘Gold Logie’ while Kath and Kim stars (a US version is about to be made) took out a few little pewter statues as well.

However to end with a sweet little item: Bindi Irwin, the offspring of the late Steve Irwin the crocodile hunter, took out most popular female talent. Shows that squeezing pythons and cuddling koalas can take you places.

Australian Travel Humor

Editor’s note: Travel in Australia is an amazing experience. From our Australian blog writer based out of Melbourne we share with you some Australian humor.

By: Phonix Arrien

In honour of the Comedy Festival that has just tickled our tops here in Melbourne, I share with you a few Australian jokes that will kick your koala all weekend:

LOVE THEM TEXANS

A Texan farmer goes to Australia for a vacation. There he meets an Aussie farmer and gets talking. The Aussie shows off his big wheat field and the Texan says, “Oh! We have wheat fields that are at least twice as large”.

Then they walk around the ranch a little, and the Aussie shows off his herd of cattle. The Texan immediately says, “We have longhorns that are at least twice as large as your cows”.

The conversation has, meanwhile, almost died when the Texan sees a herd of kangaroos hopping through the field. He asked, “And what are those”?

The Aussie replies with an incredulous look, “Don’t you have any grasshoppers in Texas”?

And this one:

ANYTHING FOR A BEER

Three Aussie guys were working on a high-rise building project - Steve, Bruce and Kevin.

Steve falls off and is killed instantly.

As the ambulance takes the body away, Bruce says, “Someone should go and tell his wife.”

Kevin says, “OK, I’m pretty good at that sensitive stuff, I’ll do it.”

Two hours later, he comes back carrying a case of Fosters (beer).

Bruce says, “Where did you get that, Kev?”

“Steve’s wife gave it to me,”

Bruce replies. “That’s unbelievable, you told the lady her husband was dead and she gave you the beer?”

“Well not exactly,” Kevin said. “When she answered the door, I said to her, ‘You must be Steve’s widow’.

She said, ‘No, I’m not a widow.’

And I said, ‘I’ll bet you a case of Fosters you are’.”

And this one:

MINE COLLAPSE

The seven dwarfs went off to work in the mine one day, while Snow White stayed at home to do the housework and cook their lunch.

However when she went to the mine to deliver their lunches, she found there had been a cave-in, and there was no sign of the dwarfs.

Tearfully she yelled in to the mine entrance: “Hello - is anyone there. Can anyone hear me”.

A voice floated up from the bowels of the mine:

“Australia will win the Rugby World Cup”

“Thank god” said Snow White “at least Dopey’s still alive”

Ask me if you don’t ‘get’ this:

OUTBACK COMFORT

Two Aussie cattle drovers standing in an Outback bar.

One asked, “What are you up to, Mate?”

Ahh, I’m takin’ a mob of 6000 (cattle) from Goondiwindi to Gympie.”

“Oh yeah … and what route are you takin’?”

“Ah, probably the Missus; after all, she stuck by me during the drought.”

This may explain it:

AUSSIES IN BED

An Italian, a Frenchman and an Australian are talking about sex.

The Italian says, “When I have finished making love to my girl,
she levitates six inches from the bed.”

The Frenchman says, “That’s nothing! After six hours of continuous
love making to my girl, she levitates three feet off the bed!”

The Australian says: “Streuth mate, when I’ve finished ‘rooting’
me Sheila, I get off the bed, wipe me [censored] on the curtains…and
she goes through the roof!!”

Ha ha haaaa, arggh!

By: Priscilla Fox

I don’t know about you but I feel like taking a big break from the world as life gets very hectic in the 21^st century. There are constant emails, cell calls, appointments, time for the family, friends, dog, cat, bird, goldfish, pet hamster and oh, somewhere in there one needs to work too.

As I take a big breath after assessing the long to-do list that constantly haunts me, I think about finding a place to visit in Australia that can give me a different perspective on things; a place that will give me the ‘bigger’ picture.

While searching I realised that with only 21,251,958 us friendly folk, Australia tends to be a big place, but when it comes down to it, we do adopt a lot from our USA neighbors. How can I put it, it is just too ‘big’ to describe.

What I am really suggesting is that we have many big places to visit such as the Big Pineapple, Big Banana, Big Cow, Big Egg, Big Koala, Big Lobster, Big Orange and the Big Prawn (shrimp is the translation). For those who are partial to some Aussie beer, the Big VB (Victoria Bitter) can sits at our northern city Darwin and one can not forget the natural phenomenon that all tourists visit, the biggest rock in the world, Ayers Rock at Uluru.

Australia is just full of ‘big’ landmarks and I am sure the astronauts from NASA have no trouble locating our continent by these ‘big’ eye-catchers that are scattered across our soils.

After that thought I’m more relaxed so I’ll sign off as I am about to sit down with my favourite, a big cup of coffee and pancakes…maybe a trip to the USA will help me locate those.

By Priscilla Fox

Believe it or not Australia does have a winter season and although you may wonder to what possible extent we Aussies could understand what that really entails, let me take the opportunity to say that this sun-filled golden land also receives a good dumping of snow.

Alright, before I hear the snow shovels banging on my door, I will admit that the snow only really arrives in our southern most regions and for approximately 3-4 months but it still gets cold!

So along with this glorious season it makes sense to get warm and well… ugged up. Sounds very close to ugly and yes, I am referring to none other than a boot originally used by World War I pilots, called the ugg boot.

These Australian sheepskin wonders that live up to their name were made to keep the feet warm and have become a worldwide favorite, taken on by the shearers themselves in the 1950’s and the surfing fraternity around the 1960’s.

Ugly yes, but a big yes to being warm and comfy too. Although not a favorite to make the next runway show, these babies have also been famously worn by many fashionistas such as Britney Spears, Kate Hudson, Eva Longoria, Kate Winslet and Pamela Anderson.

The name for these snugglies definitely stuck early on and they could even go through a name revival. Their original name was ‘fugg boots’ short for flying ugg boots when the pilots wore them, however in our modern language, this could describe them as being uglier than ugly.

It’s not that they’re that bad ladies and gents. Before we start to feel really sorry for them they do come in all our favorite colors and styles. I mean, our celebrities have shown us that they can be matched to any outfit haven’t they? Well, I agree that these booties are a must-have item for our wardrobe but, well, I wouldn’t recommend wearing them for the next cocktail party any time soon.

Regardless of style preferences, our footsies still get cold down under and snow or not, fugg-wear is firmly entrenched in the Aussie fashion bible.