Some more Elcho Island

So here we are starting our last weekend on the island. And we are very excited to go. Not that we haven't enjoyed our experience here, we just thought it may be a bit different. You see, as it turns out, it is not easy in three weeks to really penetrate society here. To get to know people and join in their social activities, as we'd hoped. The general consensus seems to be that we are here to work in the store, and serve them, and for nothing else. Oh ya, except to give out free food to and from work. It is assumed that anytime we leave the house we are going to or coming from work so that's the reaction we get. I am disappointed, but realise I have learnt quite a bit about their culture and daily lives and rituals. I did see what I was planning to; sober and culturally involved Aboriginals living their lives in a traditional way.

There is one major cultural difference here that really starts to get to Carla and I: they yell. See, for us, in our culture, yelling is rude, and that is not the case with them, sometimes. They have no native word for "please" or "thank you", simply for lack of requiring it, because before we emerged I guess those sentiments were always assumed as part of a transaction. But in our culture we want to hear it. I sure as hell don't feel it here if no one says it. So sometimes we scold the teens, in a nice way. Always smilling...ok always trying to smile.

There was a disco last night, which is the flood lights are turned on in the basketball court next to the shop and music is played out of the back of a jeep with an mc and everything. It was so cute. And good music too. Made me want to go out and join in the dancing. There was even this really adorable group of boys. They must have been about age 7 to 11, and were dancing in sync all in a line. My favorit ewas to "Ice Ice Baby". Although at one point as they were throwing lit flares at each other, the mc threatened to shut it down reminding the kids "that's fire!". There are so many kids here, it is unbelievable. There must have been a few hundred munchkins under the age of 13. And they stay out all night. Even the 5 year-olds. Must be all those 1Litres of Coke and Sprite they drink, and chocolate bars they eat for dinner.

So we went walking yesterday to find Mission beach. Where the Macassans used to land to trade with the Aboriginals on the island. his is the first Aussie land that made contact in trade with the outside world. So I thought I'd include a bit of history on the relationship. This is also the only Aboriginal land tat flies flags, so that when the Macassans come back, they will know where to land (they never did understand why they stopped coming).

Macassan traders from the southwest corner of Sulawesi (Indonesia) visited the coast of northern Australia for hundreds of years to fish for trepang (also known as sea cucumber or sandfish), a marine slug prized for its culinary and medicinal values in Chinese markets, used for flavor enhancing, as a stimulant and as aphrodisiac. These visits have left their mark on the people of Northern Australia — in language, art, ecomony and even genetics in the descendants of both Macassan and Australian ancestors that are now found on both sides of the Arafura and Banda Seas. They first arrived around 1720 to Elcho and stopped trade in 1906 due to new trade laws and taxes.


While markedly different from their experience of colonisation by the British, the Macassancontact with Aboriginal people had a significant impact on their cultures. The visits are remembered vividly today, through oral history, songs and dances, and rock and bark paintings, as well as the cultural legacy of transformations that resulted from the contact.
(which is how we learnt it, from the interpretation of a painting, here on the island, in the art center)

The Macassans exchanged goods such as cloth, tobacco, knives, rice and alcohol for the right to fish in Aboriginal waters, and to employ Aboriginal labor. Such products brought with them new opportunities as well as new challenges, such as the dangerous combination of knives and alcohol.

Some Yolngu (Indigenous Australia People of the North) communities of Arnhem land re-figured their economies from being largely land-based to largely sea-based with the introduction of Macassan technologies such as dug-out canoes. These seaworthy boats, unlike their traditional bark canoes, allowed Yolngu to fish the ocean for dugongs and turtles.

Some Aboriginal workers willingly accompanied the Macassans back to their homeland across the Arafura Sea. The Yolngu people also remember with grief the abductions and trading of Yolngu women, and the introduction of smallpox, which was epidemic in the islands east of Java at the time.

A Macassan pidgin became a lingua franca along the north coast, not just between Macassans and Aboriginal people, but also between different Aboriginal groups, who were brought into greater contact with each other by the seafaring Macassan culture. Words from the Macassan language can still be found in many contemporary Aboriginal languages of the north coast. A widespread example is the word Balanda meaning 'white person' (which originally came to the Macassan language from the Dutch, "Hollander"). Some of the goods traded by the Macassans spread far across the country, even to the south.

So that's a bit more history for you. It is all very interesting, and I feel very privileged to be able to be in such a historical place.

-R