The Land of OZ

Cairns, Australia

“Travelling is almost like talking with men of other centuries.” - Rene’ Descartes

We had the opportunity to meet some aborigines last night and today…these people are not only from other centuries, they’re from other millennia…like tens of thousands.

We arrived in Cairns, Queensland, Australia at 5pm late yesterday afternoon and prepared to spend the evening and all day today. Cairns is the main jumping off point for trips out to the Great Barrier Reef and is a burgeoning community. It is a city of 135,000 people that has grown by about 1/3 the past ten years after the world discovered the ecological significance of reef preservation and the fact that there was great opportunity here for people to experience all that the reef has to offer. Tourism is their number one industry and sugar cane growing is number two.

After we docked, the AMSTERDAM culinary staff arranged a ‘Cookout on the Barbie’ for the Lido pool deck starting at 5:30pm. They were grilling steaks, sausages, beer can chicken (using Budweiser), lollipop lamb chops, beef ribs, shrimps on skewers, and they had some whole roast suckling pigs on the buffet as well. The entertainment was by a local Cairns group, the SNAKE GULLY BUSH BAND. We lingered a bit to sample the lamb chops and to check out the music and then we went out on the main street of town to visit the famous Cairns Night Market. It is an interesting indoor mall site with about 125 vendors selling clothes, OZ souvenirs and handcrafts, food stuffs, aboriginal art, opals and opal jewelry, t-shirts, bush hats, Ugg boots, and whatever. We made a few purchases as the prices were less than anything we had seen in any of the shops we had passed while walking there (no opals for us though).

We returned to the ship in time for an aboriginal folkloric show at 10pm in the main show lounge. Five aborigine men came out in full body paint designs and loin cloths, performed some “dreamtime” symbolic dances, showed us how to play the didgeridoo, and explained the various folk legends and how they have been handed down for hundreds of generations. They brought people up from the audience to dance and chant for us and to let them attempt to make some kind of sound from a didgeridoo; it is not an easy feat. The noises they made sounded more like bad farts. At least the audience got some great laughs.

This morning (Monday) we went on a CSI tour out to an aboriginal heritage site, the Tjapukai Aboriginal Cultural Park…(Tjapukai is pronounced Jab-OO-guy). It was an educational four hours where we saw historical film footage, a multi-media production explaining how the Tjapukai explain the origins of life and the world around them, and their belief system about nature. Then we viewed a traditional set of dances similar to those we saw on the ship last night. After that, we went to an open field on the park site where we had demonstrations of and experienced spear throwing and, my favorite, boomerang tossing. Of the 24 people in our group, I made the best toss…it didn’t go a real long distance, but it came back…I cannot account for my proficiency but I graciously accepted the applause from our group.

The Tjapukai's are one of very many aborigine tribes or clans in Australia. They are as different from other tribes as are our Native American Indians…their languages are different; they use different artistic symbolism, they eat different foods depending where they come from geographically; their folk remedies differ. Their collective presence on this continent goes back thousands of years. Strikingly sad is the fact that they have experienced similar fates at the hands of the “whites,” the European explorers who “discovered” Australia. They are a racial minority and have had to struggle over the years for their human and citizenship rights,just as our Native Americans and former African slaves have had to. What we saw in this heritage park is an attempt to preserve their history and their folkways and share that experience with the rest of the world. What was interesting to me (but should have been obvious) is that, despite what these people look like in skin color and hair texture, and the fact that they were dressed in loincloths and body paint, when they open their mouths, they talk and sound just like other Australians. No accents; no substandard speech; just as witty and friendly as any Aussies.

OK, back to the ship for a quick change of clothes and we hit the street again, walking up the waterfront about a quarter mile for a spot of lunch at a dockside café, a quick stop to check out the big casino in town, and finally a stop at a convenient store to buy some packages of TIM TAM cookies, reportedly one of the great cookies in the world. We also stopped at couple of reef tour agencies to scope out the cost, schedules, and amenities for charter tours out to the Great Barrier Reef in case we come back here again. We chose not to go to the Reef on this trip because we had already had our share of snorkeling earlier back in Polynesia. Many of our shipmates went out there today and they have all been giving the various boat tours they took rave reviews. We don’t regret not going because our time in port was so short, and the reef is about a two hour ride out there, and that would have eaten up four hours we didn’t wish to waste.

Two sea days are ahead cruising down to Brisbane…further down under. - RBM

Oct 26, 2009

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