Catching up on sleep in the "hippie bus"!! Yay!!

I had a lovely weekend staying in Penny's lovely Bedford "Hippie Bus" on her property at Jarrahdale. It was a lovely escape and I got the chance to do some gardening, helping to lay out irrigation pipes and bushwalking, together with lovely meals and great company. A fabulous weekend that went a good way towards my much needed attitude adjustment.

After some really long deep and meaningful conversations I realised that some of the problems I had been having adjusting to the work environment were affected by all sorts of other factors and it's nice to know that in most cases my intuitions served me well and I had been reading the organisation's culture pretty accurately.

Despite that, still feeling quite a bit of culture shock - I don't think I'll ever get used to receiving legal agreements to review that are covered in red dust!!! They come from all those small time prospectors out there scavenging a living in the WA outback, an interesting but undoubtedly tough way to scrape a living.

The work is incredibly interesting and provides me with so much stimulus for deep thinking about Australia, how (not) far we've come and how the process of deep colonisation continues. In a climate where the WA government has just overturned a ban on uranium mining and the choas surrounding native title is still so far from resolution, it's hard to stay positive but I keep in the forefront of my mind the words of an elder who has been fighting this battle for a very long time, affected by choices and government actions way beyond his control. That this is just another step towards a treaty and in the geological time scale of aboriginal culture, the journey has only just started.

I also enjoy immensely the humour and reminder of how ridiculous the legal system must appear to those who live outside it. After pouring through a ten year claim history and reading how lawyers have tried to explain the various amendments and new decisions to their aboriginal clients. You can almost hear the sigh go around the meeting - what now? what does this mean? we sick of talking same rubbish. We already told you. It's an incredibly salient look at how incongrous the two worlds are and it's us whitey lawyers that look the clowns.