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Forgotten people in paradise

By Stephen Hagan - posted Monday, 10 July 2006


If I thought that would be my only encounter in Darwin with public drunkenness, albeit from a respectable distance, I was sadly mistaken.

The conference for the next three days was held at the impressive Northern Territory Museum and Art Gallery located at Fanny Bay: tourists flock in the thousands to view the impressive museum collection and to take in the wonderful tropical gardens and spectacular, uninterrupted views of the Timor Sea.

Although there were many fine non-Indigenous authors speaking on a wide range of topics, I was most interested in hearing from the Indigenous participants; Ali Cobby Eckermann, Richard Frankland, Charlie King, Alec Gruger, Tom Lewis, Jared Thomas, Ali Mills, Romaine Moreton, Boori Mony Pryor and Tara Winch, just to name a few.

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The one non-Indigenous person who did however leave an indelible impression on me at the conference was Kirsty Sword-Gusmao. If you didn’t recognise the name and took her on face value, then this humble writer, who wrote A Woman of Independence (2003), would go unnoticed. I was fortunate to share the autobiography - The Human Journey panel session with the First Lady of East Timor along with Alec Kruger who wrote The Long Way Home and John Harms who wrote The Pearl - Steve Renouf’s Story.

Kirsty Sword-Gusmao shared her story of how she fell in love with the people and country of East Timor from her first visit in 1990. She spent the next decade working as an undercover activist in Jakarta, becoming an increasingly valuable operative within the East Timor independence movement. In her book she includes her relationship with, and eventual marriage to, the nation’s first president, Xanana Gusmao - a charismatic leader capturing the national headlines of late.

After the session, Kirsty agreed to have a photograph taken of us holding our respective autobiographies. Being conscious of the uproar by the press when Paul Keating touched the Queen on a visit to Canberra (the English press nicknamed him the Lizard of Oz) and wary of her minders, I stood rigid with my book held firmly to my chest - when unexpectedly Kirsty, an Australian by birth, put her arm around me in a warm embrace.

That evening at a Parliament House reception for writers and East Timorese expatriates, hosted by Clare Martin the Chief Minister in her honour, Kirsty spoke of how she broke the heel of her shoe at the entrance to Parliament House and joked with the co-ordinator, who kindly swapped shoes for the occasion: “Now you know what it’s like to stand in the shoes of a First Lady”, to broad smiles and claps all round.

However, on the last night of my stay in Darwin, I had cause to pay closer attention to another woman who stood out in a crowd - but in this instance it was for all the wrong reasons.

After a most entertaining viewing of Mission Impossible 3 at the city cinema, I decided against taking the direct route to my hotel and instead sought to walk along Mitchell Street to an Indian takeaway in Knuckey Street.

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By this stage, it was quite dark, perhaps around 8.30pm, and I’d ventured no further than 50 metres from the cinema when I came across a scene I thought I wouldn’t come across so soon after Aunty Delmae Barton’s publicised ordeal at Griffith University’s transit centre (she was left unattended after suffering a stroke).

If I wasn’t looking where I was going, I would have trodden on a heavy-set, middle aged Aboriginal woman lying flat on her back in the middle of the busy walkway. I wasn’t quite sure what to do, but I leant down to hear if she was breathing - a nervous, first instinct reaction - on hearing her breathing heavily, I decided the next thing to do was phone for an ambulance. Worse still I didn’t have my glasses with me to read the white pages’ small print and started to panic.

A thousand thoughts rushed through my mind - should I ask a backpacker at the nearest internet café to assist, dial 000, or go into a restaurant for help?

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Article edited by Shevaune Espinos.
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About the Author

Stephen Hagan is Editor of the National Indigenous Times, award winning author, film maker and 2006 NAIDOC Person of the Year.

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