In the cool piriyitja mornings the flowers are full of honey. Even at the height of the day the flowers cover your fingertips with abundant syrup if you touch them. They are bracingly delicious. The Anangu kids call them lolly flowers.
Read MoreInsidiously, the work undermines a caregiver’s self-trust and self-love. This is a danger inherent in the work itself — you have to deny your own needs and desires twenty times (or a thousand times) a day.
Read MoreIf a ball of lava is coming towards you, you focus on it and watch its trajectory, then move sideways, that is, not down the mountain or into the volcano, so that you can avoid it. I have missed catching so many balls in my life that I figured I’d be fine.
Read More"One of Mary’s eyes became permanently closed thanks to that common disease that afflicts long-living dolls treated roughly by toddlers. I did have to take her head off once or twice to see how she was made inside."
Read MoreNext time an Australian with fair skin reveals their Aboriginality, whether by their clothes or jewelry, their tattoos or their story, let your heart swell with gratitude that the web of Aboriginal cultures continues to be woven.
Read MoreSome of the Aboriginal babies she cared for were thin and irritable, with watery diarrhoea and scalded nappy rashes. They were diagnosed with Failure to Thrive — a diagnosis which puts a child’s parenting directly under the spotlight. Their mothers seemed powerless. Health workers wondered what was going on in these babies’ homes?
But Christine wondered if it could be something else.
We needed to be needed. For some, there was a lingering appreciation for high status, a medical degree being final proof that you were good at school work. Some did want to relieve suffering, usually poor souls who’d seen a loved one through a long sickness as a child.
Read MoreWe had some seriously ill people in the clinic this past summer. They had deteriorated to a critical condition in the fifty degree heat, not because of dehydration but because of a deficiency of sodium — salt.
Read MoreThat sounds mad. But for a while now I’ve quietly believed that rocks have consciousness. It’s not that I hear gravel crying when I walk on it, but rocks do speak to humans, albeit in their own way.
Read MoreI’ve known her to use sixteen layers of translucent paint to get the depth of the doll’s complexion right, greenish veins just showing through the different shades of brown. Weighting the doll’s head, by suspending a steel ball inside it (without smashing the glass eyes) makes it loll on your shoulder.
Read MoreThe stage was a plateau of red sand under a starry night. People sat on the ground around fires that warmed them. A set of headlights lit the stomping ground stage. Performers were painted up in the dark behind bushy mulga trees.
Read MoreI can’t say that I know how it would feel to have the small purchase I have on this world blown away by a fierce wind, to have your house torn up as if it were made of wet cardboard.
Read MoreThe driver asked if we could help. We got out feeling helpless. We had to get closer to see the car, a small crumpled vehicle lying upside down about fifty metres into the stony roadside brush.
Read MoreI’ve learned a thing or two, but sometimes there’s a moment. A moment when I realise that the emergency won’t be deflected, that the patient’s pressing need — the threat to life or limb — won’t be met or rationalised away or quickly ameliorated.
Read MorePleasure in babies and young things is natural in humans in all stages of life. In many of the Indigenous cultures, including the local ones here, child-raising was the norm for grandparents before the British came. Young people were good at having children, but not necessarily good at raising them.
Read MoreThe waterhole surrounded by rock carvings is not marked for people to visit. There is no reference to the millennia of art, learning and healing there. It is nothing but a miner’s project now. They will smash it all up.
Read MoreI help my father-in-law gather buckets of apples. They’re crisp and sweet, the first crop of decent apples from a tree he planted twenty years ago. The tree has survived years of hatred and resentment and being dismissed as useless, to bring a bounty of exceptional fruit.
Read MoreI didn’t want to get too close to the mother whale. The calf looked tiny in comparison to its mum but it was about the size of a sedan. When they’re born they’re about a tonne. If that one was a week old it might have been one and half tonnes already.
Read MoreThe Key Feature Problem exam frustrated me. If the answer was ‘cancer’ and you wrote ‘malignancy,’ you were incorrect.
For those of us working across cultures, translating medical language into plain English, this was irritating. I failed the KFP twice, by four points and then by one point six points.
Doctors working with me, excellent judges of my abilities, wrote letters of appeal to the College on my behalf, to no avail. The exams cost thousands of dollars in fees, study materials and lost work time.
Read More“It’s the nature of medicine. They’re hurt and we learn,” he said, looking over his reading glasses.
“I reckon when you’re an intern they should just give you a patient to kill and get it over with. As a doctor, you’re going to make a mistake and someone will die. It’s just a matter of time.”
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Slot Canyon photograph in banner by Sebastian Boguszewicz
Creative Writing by Dr. Janelle Trees
Photo: Claudia Jocher
I'm a doctor of Aboriginal descent living and travelling with my photographer wife, Claudia. I see myself as a bridge between 'races' and cultures, gay and straight, the child and the crone, arts and sciences. I am inspired by Nature, including humans in all our splendid individuality.
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