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October 09, 2004

Digeridooing it

Now from the last couple of entries I wouldn't want you all to start thinking life was all fun and laughs for me out here. Just a couple of days ago I went on a thoroughly miserable night canoeing trip as it was pissing it down. Also when I have to put on my backpack and walk for more than about 15 minutes I start to feel like Father Christmas carrying with his sack of presents except this year all the children have asked for anvils.

Now that I have your sympathy back I'll continue on with my journey.

Dingo, Outback Queensland

As part of the bus network I am taking the route takes a detour to this working cattle station where you stay overnight. Dingo itself is about 160km inland or just over 100 miles (this isn't very far outback but I think it still counts). This is the first time we had really left the coastline and the scenery changes pretty dramatically once you start to turn inland.The soil becomes much redder and the landscape just flattens. Also from time to time you could see kangaroos either by themselves or in little groups. I think I realise I was in the outback when at the service station just before we go there a middle-aged woman serving me referred to me as 'mate'. This was a first time experience for me.

We had a tour of this working cattle station which was spread over 40,000 acres (making it about the same size as Belgium). This is actually pretty small for a cattle station, the biggest in Australia is over 1.5m acres. We had a go at whip cracking which was pretty difficult but I started to get the hang of it. The evening was a fairly big drinking night (which, suffice to say it needs to be when they make you do line dancing).

We also decided to stay on a second night so we could make our own didgeridoo. We decided to do this on a complete whim as they only had one person signed up and they needed another to run it. So us and a New Zealander named Stu (a good guy who I enjoyed doing impressions of) decided to do it as well. The experience was pretty authentic. We drove 80 miles (and for a part of that at 75 miles per hour on dirt roads) to get to a collection of the necessary Yellow Box Eucalyptus trees. For the next hour or two we trudged around as Brian hacked at these trees in an effort to find ones that had been hollowed out by termites. From time to time he would find one and then fell it and more often than not find out it hadn't been hollowed out all the way through. After we eventually got one each we had to peel them then file them with a knife.

We went back to the workshop and painted them as we liked.
Didgeridoos have a totem animal on them which represented for the Aborigines the animal which their particular family did not eat. This was because if everyone in the tribe were to eat one paticular animal then it would be driven to extinction so each family had one animal that was their totem animal.
The day was really great and the finished product looked amazing (not the 'jobby effort' as Tuely said she was expecting).

A picture of the finished didgeridoo:

100_0592.JPG


Richard, 9th October, Katoomba

Posted by Richard on October 9, 2004 05:48 AM
Category: Australia
Comments

But do they play?

Posted by: Daniel on October 20, 2004 01:33 PM

Yeah it plays very well! One of the other guys took his with him to be a wandering didgeridoo minstrel. I will have to learn to play when I get back. No doubt there is some website about it.

Posted by: Richard on October 22, 2004 11:42 AM
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