gadget July 31st, 2008
What if God told you to kill someone? And your whole world, your epistemology, was founded on revelations from God, speaking softly in your head…
For the Morman Church, this is reality. It is part of their history, whether they like it or not.
Explaining -or more rightly- unravelling how this came to be is the task that Jon Krakauer sets himself in Under the Banner of Heaven.
Amanda July 30th, 2008
Suplejack Station: a large pastoral property surrounded by Aboriginal Land Trusts on the north western extreme of the Tanami Desert. Last week, I was there. What was I doing there? Uranium. To be exact, uranium exploration. Which of course, requires sacred site clearances. And, since it’s Warlpiri country, this means that you need a male and a female anthropologist. So I went up with a male colleague and a second troop carrier.
We were out bush for a week. What follows is a snapshot of fieldwork in the world of applied anthropology.
gadget July 27th, 2008
After a big bush trip, I’m back and I’ll be updating the blog with my latest adventure this week. To everyone who’s commented on the Podcast blog, thank you. I will get back to you and follow up your suggestions. Right now though, it’s great to be sleeping in my own bed again.
BTW. Kylie and Phil had a baby girl (Abbey) last Monday. Check out their blog on the blogroll.
Amanda
gadget July 19th, 2008
I love podcasts. You might have gleaned this from some of my previous posts. Podcasts inform, excite, inspire and entertain me as I walk to work, run my usual 6km, or drive the next 600km. They help me to sweep the floors and clean the bathrooms. In short, podcasts are like having you own personal coach or lecturer, and most of the time they’re free.
There seems to be two types of podcasts out there in the internet cloud:
So which podcasts do I listen to and why?
Amanda July 16th, 2008
The ‘market’ wants you to own an IPod.
But what if you don’t like the bland styling, the size and you detest that stupid wheel? In other words, you will never own an IPod. So what happens when you purchase an audio product that assumes everyone in the world owns an IPod? I spend a lot of time driving and like to listen to podcasts whilst I’m going along. One podcast I listened to led me to an interesting book, which I discovered was available as an audiobook. I purchased the audiobook and downloaded it and the file manager software that went with it. Easy? No.
Amanda July 15th, 2008
Today I received a call at work from the manager of Newhaven Station. She rang me about our blog post (7 July), following up on the comments I’d written about noisy campers. Turns out the person who read this post (wow!! thanks for reading!) was concerned about the very full campground and the noise I described, and thus decided to call up Newhaven and investigate.
gadget July 12th, 2008
A very busy couple of weeks for us, with trips to Watarrka and Newhaven, plus the usual world of work, home and everything. I am still writing up the Sandy Blight Junction post (although I need to snaffle the photos from Gadget’s camera so I can finish this). Now I’ve got to do a Newhaven post as well -thankfully all the photos are on my hard drive already so it’s just a matter of me getting to them.
I guess the exciting news (or maybe not so exciting) is that we have hidden our first geocache. I am planning to hide a few more – Gary and I have been formulating a list of places to hide them in parks around the centre in the interests of encouraging cachers to visit parks other than Uluru and Watarrka. I mean, Trephina Gorge is begging for a cache hide, as are several locations in the West Macs that aren’t even that far from town. I also have a few ideas about where to put a couple of extra town caches.
Anyway, we have a weekend at home planned, so I count on finishing at least two of those blog posts mentioned above.
Amanda July 7th, 2008
We are fortunate enough to have a number of long weekends in the NT through the winter. We have at least one every month from April through August. After this, we have long weekend drought – there isn’t one until Christmas. I SERIOUSLY think we Territorians need to do something about this. If we can have a holiday in May called ‘Picnic Day’ which no one really seems to know the reason for, then surely we could invent a day in October that we need to celebrate with a day off. Something like ‘Build Up Day’ (in honour of the tropical build up to the wet season), or ‘Tacky NT Stereotype Day’ where we could all dress like Crocodile Dundee or like the tourists that invade Alice Springs every year in those fake leather Akubras and photographer’s vests, drink a lot and walk around with inflatable crocodiles, buffalo and camels? What about having our very own Independence Day in October and declare ourselves a republic? That would grab everyone’s attention down south…
Anyway, this weekend was a long one (in honour of the Alice Springs show) so we took ourselves off to Newhaven Station, a private conservation reserve operated by Birds Australia and the Australian Nature Conservancy. You might recall that I’ve written about Newhaven before; I visited there during my bush trip to Nyrirripe. Newhaven is about 350km by road from Alice Springs – a good long weekend distance. It’s got two camping areas with showers and toilets, and a load of things to do. The main reason people go to Newhaven is for birdwatching. It’s one of the few places in Australia that Night Parrots potentially still live in.
We went to Newhaven in the company of Mark & Kelly – friends from Ormiston- and Chickenboy (Ben) who had a good time even if he’d whined about having to go camping with boring adults yet again. As we drove out, we saw Central Mt Wedge again -much to Gary’s disgust. I wasn’t allowed to take a photo to add to my collection, unfortunately. We arrived on Friday afternoon and immediately set up camp and started relaxing. One of the best things about camping is sitting around the campfire, having a few wines, some good cheese, and chatting about anything and everything with friends. The next day, we were up and about early. I took this photo from Lookabout Hill, just at the back of the camping area.
There’s lots to do at Newhaven, and self-guided drives through amazing Sandy Desert habitats are one of must-dos. We went on the lakes tour, which takes you to Lake Bennett, as large salt lake set amongst rolling dunes On our way to the lake, we saw a Bush Turkey – a large bird that generally walks around a lot. Apparently they’re good eating, so Aboriginal people tend to hunt them out whenever they see them. I don’t have a photo of the Bush Turkey, so you’ll just have to Google for a photo. Here’s some views from the dune overlooking Lake Bennett.
Leaving Lake Bennett, we drove to Dingo Hill and Mt Gurnier. We had a cuppa before climbing Dingo Hill, stopping at an old bore which was ‘capped’ with two very long pieces of PVC tubing. When you dropped a stone down the tube, it made a sound kind of like those vanishing sounds they used to use in Lost In Space (if you remember the TV series). So, me being the nerdy person I am, I recorded this sound and am now using it as my message alert on my mobile phone.
In the afternoon, we hiked (!) into Potato Gorge and then had sunset drinks on top of Lookabout Hill. It was then that we hid our first geocache.
That night at the campground -which had about 9 groups camped in it- a group of Grey Nomads got very drunk and noisy. We figured it was useless trying to go to sleep when they were talking and laughing so loudly, so we sat around the campfire and paid them out (hide the sausage was one thing we heard from them!). I pity the two young couples with very small children who were camped closer to this group than we were -and who went to bed early. That’s one reason why I hate some of the noisy, inconsiderate bastards who inhabit camping grounds.
The following day, we had a leisurely breakfast and packed up, then finished with a game of frisbee. Our last tour on Newhaven was out through the ranges which fringe the north eastern boundary of the reserve. Here’s the end of the adventure at Tilmouth Well Roadhouse (a place where we’re planning to spend a weekend over the summer months because it’s got a pool).
I hope you’ve enjoyed reading this post – we had a lot of fun on the weekend and thoroughly recommend a visit to Newhaven – and to our geocache!
