Fire Up
/The night is dark, lit by truck headlights, stars, torches and fires. The dancers are preparing behind the bushy mulga trees. Trained hands trace ancient patterns of ochres on their bodies.
Read MoreThe night is dark, lit by truck headlights, stars, torches and fires. The dancers are preparing behind the bushy mulga trees. Trained hands trace ancient patterns of ochres on their bodies.
Read MoreIn the darkness before sunrise, I blink as the kitchen lights come on. Pulling out a small white paper bag from the tea box, I see its pencilled name, ‘Hibiscus flowers’. I bought these more than a year ago, and forgot I had them. Delighted, I take a generous pinch of the blackish dried spikes, and throw them in the teapot.
Read MoreWe 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 MoreI ran hard, and enjoyed the feel of my feet on the ground and the grass. I was pleased with myself, and expected congratulations. But when I finished, one of the adults said, “Somebody has to come last, I suppose”. I could tell it was a bad thing to be that someone and resolved not to do it again.
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 MoreThey were sea creatures with never-before-seen limbs, fins and strange appendages, resulting in names such as Anomalocaris, Wiwaxia and Hallucigenia. They hinted at the explosion of possibility during the early days of life on the planet.
Read MoreI spent a bit of time browsing the leather tool belts in hardware stores before a colleague persuaded me that it was probably a little odd for an apprentice doctor to want to look like an apprentice plumber. Perhaps even more pretentious than wearing your stethoscope around your neck all day.
Read MoreBeing out in the desert at night is a pleasure. Wandering along the sandy path, we enjoyed the spectacle. Dad said, "What would happen if someone was lost in this field at night?" One of the workers said, “There was a pack of dingoes bothering some of the people,” he said.
Read MoreI’m not on call except for unusual emergencies. I sleep through the everyday emergencies — the heart attacks, obstructed gall bladders and car roll-overs — that my colleagues, the Remote Area Nurses (RANs) deal with at night. This week there are two RANs here with me — for a town at its peak population of around five or six thousand.
Read MoreMy friend gave me her pomegranate tree and lime tree. I’d been dreaming of a pomegranate tree and was well-read about limes. I knew they’d be a good match for our place. I still dream of olive and fig trees. “How many years are you planning to stay here?” asks Claudia.
Read MoreAt first, the stony path was unremarkable except for a closer look at some of the bright flowers. But cresting a rise at the end of the path revealed an immense and strange space — a panorama of desert dunes and volcanic cones.
Read MoreI saw Louise Hay speak in Australia in the eighties. It was perhaps her first visit. My friends and I were trying hard to dislike her. She addressed an audience of HIV positive people and their supporters, overwhelmingly gay men with their partners and friends, at the height of the AIDs terror.
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 MoreClaudia spent many early mornings hunting bats with her camera. They had complicated wings and hooky ‘hands’. Our garden was full of food for them and for us — fruiting banana trees, cannon-ball-sized breadfruit, taro, soursop and limes. Piglets fussed and rooted for fallen fruit below, following their mum.
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 More“It looks like a school of tiny fish or plankton,” I said. The pulsing mass extended all the way to the ground from the tall brightly lit pole. “It looks like a snowstorm,” said C. Every 50 metres or so, another column of multitudinous specks towered in the surrounding desert darkness.
Read MoreSlot Canyon photograph in banner by Sebastian Boguszewicz
Creative Writing by Dr. Janelle Trees
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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