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Redfern Station during a storm.
"There's something about the act of moving, with nothing else to attend to but reaching the destination, which encourages the mind to clarify and focus thoughts. We view running as a kind of moving meditation, a time to share stories, ideas and philosophies, and jut to think. We run to be part of the 'great web of life' - everything that happens between sunrise and sunset, life, death and our struggle to adapt to the environment around us. Every day, every one of us faces challenges, mistakes and setbacks - life's 'pressure points'. I believe that how we respond to these pressure points defines us and gives us traction and purpose. This is the story of how we came to believe that unless we lose the fear of death, we will never be able to lose the fear of life."
Mark Simon in Project Sahara: Pressure Point.
Rain storms slice through the muggy heat, briefly interrupting the drinking, arguing and begging that characterises the area. Time is a crucial element. We travel to the core. We rip up the surface carpet of ephemeral events; and all else is lost as we burrow deep into the meaning of things. The area is suddenly crowded with thousands of university students as term has begun; the handsome sons and daughters of Sydney's middle class, off to begin their journey in the classrooms of nearby Sydney University. Suddenly it is impossible to find a park and often pretty faces populate the street.
But nothing interrupts the Block, which goes on as usual; the gathering, the drinking, the dealing, the squabbling all through the night, you wouldn't know where your kids were, you f'n mongrel, least I know where mine are, they're up in f'n Lismore. Or drunk Doris, dragged across the street and dumped in front of a white policeman. You look after her ya white cunt. Nonetheless, there's a different atmosphere since the national apology; and other people comment too. They look you in the eye. Sorry. It's alright, brudder.
These are the times we welcome our own souls home to rest; with the squabbling and the gatherings, as if by a river bank, the sunset barely noticeable as the streetlights take over; the discarded bottles gathering around them as they gather around in circles. There's no fires now, it's been too hot to bother. But soon enough any stray scrap of wood or furniture will be broken up and burnt; and they'll gather around for a good old yarn, while Nina Nina stumbles around shouting, as drunk as ever. The police make periodic raids, down through the abandoned and derelict houses, but none of it makes much difference. They're in for a few months; out again. At least the heroin dealing has moved to Waterloo.
They're very public drunks, this mob; and the kids are always ratty, hanging around in the streets, no parental supervision, long before a white kid would be allowed to walk the streets unguarded. I'm told, I've never seen it, that paedophiles cruise the aboriginal boys, tough little rat bags who'd do anything for a quid. They'd want to be careful, these kids are no body's fool, and would have little conscience. Bash you soon as look at you, the saying goes. But there's a lot of good hearted stuff, too, in all this drunken chaos. The school bus comes by each morning, making sure they get to school. Girls flash smiles. The yarning grows louder, the bottles mount.
All across the country, the newspapers now report, these scenes of drunken dereliction, alcoholic lives, neglected kids, insane humour in the scenes of human dereliction. Get the children out of here, the headlines scream. They want to make us worry now, be aware, have a conscience. There's no conscience, not really. There's welfare money and good intentions; and the insane denials of the left; who helped create these enclaves of people who don't work and see no reason why they should work. After all, you whities took our land.
In penthouses in Vaucluse rich drunks reach similar points of dereliction inside their own lives and in the privacy of their own apartments; but out here everything is visible, the grating voices, the overwhelming sense of grievance, the stumbling rush as they drink themselves into oblivion. Nothings wrong, brother, every thing's alright, we're going back to Kempsey soon and everything will be alright there. No sense of urgency. No work. Life dolloped out in fortnightly doll cheques; the begging in between.
Millions of dollars get poured down the Block every year. Forty thousand years, declare the fading murals, 40,000 years is a long long time. Archaeologists argue they could have been here even longer, surviving without technology. The Tasmanians, down on that cold misty island, even lost the ability to make fire. We see the remnants of everything, here in this place, washing up from regional towns, coming in by bus or train. Gough Whitlam, who established all this, was warned that it would ghettoise, and far from being a source of black pride would be a permanent, highly visible sign of the dysfunction in indigenous communities around the country. Back then, 30 years ago, all the locals came to look at the amazing new homes the government was building for the aborigines. Now they're almost all derelict, boarded up, burnt, shut down as drug houses and bricked up. And the gatherings, none of it matters in a land of disregard, in a place where theory failed to operate and reality hit home; public drunks are public drunks, whatever the place, whatever the circumstance, whatever the background. Don't shed tears for the wasted lives you helped create. Pleas for an aboriginal specific detox, to help people get off the drink and off the streets, have fallen on deaf ears while millions of dollars are poured into cosy, useless, culturally appropriate projects nobody uses. That's the disconnect; that's the heart of the matter, the core you foisted on us; doing so much harm.
THE BIGGER STORY:
http://www.theage.com.au/news/world/crackdown-on-protests-widens/2008/03/17/1205602289349.html
CHINA last night mobilised thousands of troops throughout Tibetan enclaves in an effort to avert a bloodbath in Tibetan areas as students joined monks in spontaneous protests. Beijing gave a midnight deadline for those involved in last week's protests against Chinese rule in Lhasa to surrender.
Tourists and other foreigners including media were being expelled from China's Tibetan enclaves as police and the army conducted searches of hotels and guest houses. The Chinese forces also threatened house-to-house searches for non-locals to try to prevent more violence.
Beijing has ordered monasteries to prevent monks from joining protests as it puts in place full military security forces to seal off Tibetan towns and villages from the outside world. Routes from Lanzhou into southern Gansu province, home to many Tibetan towns and monasteries, have been sealed off with police checkpoints.
In the Sichuan region of Aba, close to the Gansu border, monks in Xiahe said they had been told that at least 10 bodies were brought to the Kerti monastery after violent clashes on Sunday in which Tibetans hurled petrol bombs and set a police station and market on fire and police responded with tear gas and then live rounds. The Age could not confirm this.
An Aba resident told Reuters that fresh protests flared at two Tibetan schools yesterday, with hundreds of students from each facing off against police and troops. The resident, who declined to be named, claimed 18 people were killed when troops opened fire on Sunday, and a policeman was earlier burnt to death. Reuters could not immediately verify his account. There were also reports of hundreds of People's Liberation Army vehicles arriving in Aba.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/asia/article3566647.ece
The Chinese Army drove through the streets of Lhasa today parading dozens of Tibetan prisoners in handcuffs, their heads bowed, as troops stepped up their hunt for the rioters in house-to-house searches.
As the midnight deadline approached for rioters to surrender, four trucks in convoy made a slow progress along main roads, with about 40 people, mostly young Tibetan men and women, standing with their wrists handcuffed behind their backs, witnesses said.
A soldier stood behind each prisoner, hands on the back of their necks to ensure their heads were bowed.
Loudspeakers on the trucks broadcast calls to anyone who had taken part in the violent riots on Friday — in which Han Chinese and Hui Muslims were stabbed and beaten and shops and business set on fire — to turn themselves in. Those who gave themselves up might be treated with leniency, the rest would face severe punishment, the broadcasts said.
The worst violence in 20 years in the deeply Buddhist Himalayan region has drawn a tough response from the Government, facing severe embarrassment as the riots threaten to tarnish its image of unity and stability only five months before it plays host to the Olympic Games in Beijing.
Claims and counterclaims from Chinese officials and Tibetan exiles over the number of casualties and a ban on foreign journalists in Tibet have resulted in much confusion.
Champa Phuntsok, the ethnic Tibetan governor of the Tibet Autonomous Region, said that the demonstrations had left 16 dead and dozens wounded. Unconfirmed reports from Tibetan exile groups put the death toll at 80 — a claim he denied.
The governor said: “No country would allow those offenders or criminals to escape the arm of justice and China is no exception.”
Speaking in Beijing, where he is attending the annual session of China’s rubber-stamp parliament, the governor said that shops, schools, hospitals and banks had been attacked and bystanders beaten and set on fire.
“If these people turn themselves in, they will be treated with leniency within the framework of the law. If these people could provide further information about the involvement of other people in those crimes, then they could be treated even more leniently . . . [otherwise] we will deal with them harshly.”
The search for those involved began in earnest in Lhasa today, as office workers trickled back to work after a weekend of fear when most dared not go outside.
Soldiers began house-to-house searches, checking all identification papers, residents said. Anyone unable to show an identity card and a household registration permitting residence in Lhasa was being taken away.
Redfern Station during a rain storm.
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