What a title. Paraburdoo is not an "action" place. I sleep in, lying in bed reading until about 8am after waking with the sun. By myself packing is even quicker than usual since I don't have to worry about disturbing the group, and breakfast is still there from last nights dinner.
In town I find John and save him the hassle of discovering the town layout. We work out that the library doesn't open until 9am, so chatted until the librarian arrived. I scanned the newspapers while John hit the net. I never realised quite how little newspapers change from day to day until I read five after a month off. Maybe Dilberts "generic news" has a real place in life? Might go for the weekly paper instead I think in future.
Met a guy called Dave in the library. He's a rock climber, or at least wants to be. Also cycles a little, but gets bored a bit since Paraburdoo is a blip on a single road. You can ride to Tom Price, or back the way we've come. That's it. So he rides a bit to keep fit and no more. Rock climbing is also a little limited, the rock here is pretty friable and there are few good routes. He's a geologist for Hammersly Iron and fills me in on a lot of stuff I didn't know.
Hammersly Iron own not just the mineral leases from inland of here out to the coast (330+km), but also the pastoral leases. And they also have an aboriginal community or two that they are on happy terms with so that native title shouldn't be too much of an issue. I was surprised to learn about the pastoral leases, as I thought they had to be real farms. And also the extent of the ownership. The rail link to Karratha, for instance, is entirely on Hammersly land, so there are/ were no problems getting permission to build it. It's a big land area!
Dave also plots out a few things to see in Karajini National Park, and persuades me that riding the gravel roads is well worth the effort. He's quite enthusiastic about the gorges and finds a scenery book full of glossy photos to emphasise his point. Wow.
The action turns out to be a stall that the locals largely ignore, and a pile of kids who arrive to be babysat. We do child-minding for the afternoon. A bit of a flop as far as the message goes, but we get a few donations, including one to me personally from someone yesterday who took pity on my grubby appearance.
The useful thing today was that Sunny met an elder from a local aboriginal community, David Cox, and we're going to spend tomorrow at Bellary Springs, 30km down the road. Despite the directions we get we manage to camp at the wrong spot, the new cattle yards instead of the old ones. The old ones would have been a much nicer spot.
I found it interesting to listen to David, he talks in quite a different way to most of the people I know. By now at least I can understand most of the aboriginal accent when they're speaking English, which is good. At Bidyadanga I couldn't understand a lot of what the kids were saying, albeit they spoke really fast anyway and switched languages randomly.
David was born on the old Paraburdoo station, and grew up there and in Oxley. He worked on the station that covers most of the land between here and Nanutarra before the old owner died (the guy was over 100 when he died!), but then the station went downhill so he came back here as a traditional owner. The land is all owned by the mining company, and the town is controlled by them. The station is run by a salaried manager to the minimum required to keep the pastoral lease, and is not expected to turn a profit or interfere with mining operations. The aboriginal settlements are all on land leased from the mining company and the inhabitants have a pretty direct idea of where they stand - be nice or live elsewhere.
There's a native title claim in progress but it's a slow process. The mining company is good about some things, but not about anything that might cost money. They're not into recognising traditional ownership except under court order. What interested me was David saying that he doesn't know all the sacred sites in the area, and it's often a process of discovery for him. That's obvious when you think about it, 40000 years of occupation is going to produce a lot of history, and no-one is going to know all of it. How many of us can claim to know the history of our home, even for the piddling 100 or so years we've been in it?
The mining company bring in scientists occasionally, and the carbon dating can be useful. They do share those results, which surprised me but then I suspect that they share them in front of a judge. Mostly any sacred site at issue David just tries to record what he can then "you just have to let it go".
He also talked about growing up in this area. When he was a child they really did have to hide from the welfare men, and he remembers that quite strongly. Hearing him, and then coming back here to talk of the "stolen generations fraud" was quite a contrast. It's one thing to dispute responsibility, but to get into denial about it puts you out there with our friend Irving the holocaust man I think. Mind you, he's also popular in WA, so what can you say.