The Ultimate Journey

Painting (and mossies again)

Thursday 14th May - Daintree Julia: Today, we had a lovely slow start to the day without a rush for a change. After breakfast, we went on a rain forest walk with a guide from our lodge, named Juan, who was from an aboriginal family. He was very More... Thursday 14th May - Daintree Julia: Today, we had a lovely slow start to the day without a rush for a change. After breakfast, we went on a rain forest walk with a guide from our lodge, named Juan, who was from an aboriginal family. He was very knowledgeable, telling us things that had been passed down from his father and grand parents about the plants and their medicinal uses. It was only a short walk but very interesting. Juan gave me a fern to bat away the mossies that were annoying me. We walked up to a waterfall which was a sacred area where the aboriginal woman used to wash and grind the fruits from the forest. As we entered the area he chanted something in aboriginal which allowed him to enter the woman only area. He and Jules and to stay on the lower level of the waterfall and Jamilah and I went to the upper level where only woman are allowed. It was a small, but pretty waterfall and the water wasn’t as cold as I had expected it to feel. Juan, showed us how they made the paints for the rock art from the ochre stones that were there. He mixed them with water and made about 10 different shades of brown, reds, yellows and greys. He then painted Jamilah’s face with the paints which she loved. After lunch, Jamilah and I met Juan at the restaurant for an aboriginal art lesson. Juan, showed us some paintings on canvas that had been painted by various aboriginal people and a few he had done himself. He explained what each picture meant and how each one told a story. After that, it was our turn to do some painting. He gave us some paints and a small canvas and said that we could do whatever we wanted, either to tell a story or paint some animals etc. I chose to paint using the aboriginal dot art and painted a story of us going around the world and crossing many oceans. Of course, you wouldn’t know that unless I told you what it meant. It was very therapeutic and I really enjoyed it. Jamilah did 2 paintings and also really enjoyed it. ***** Julian: Two items on our plans for today - a guided rainforest walk in the morning and then an Aborigine art lesson for Julia and Jamilah in the afternoon. Our guide in the morning was Juan, of Aborigine descent though with mixed ancestors. Juan is clearly in touch with his heritage and I enjoyed his stories of turtle hunting, fishing, camping et al all using the old Aboriginal skills he was taught. Turtle hunting involves firstly finding your target turtle, swimming down and grabbing the turtle with your stomach on his shell and then wrestling the turtle so it points upwards whereby the strokes of its back legs as it struggles will bring it to the surface where, with some help, you can haul it into your boat. The gruesome bit follows in that apparently, for reasons Juan is not wholly sure of but was passed down the generations to him, they have to cut up the turtle whilst it is still alive. Julia and I have a special affinity to turtles having gone to turtle island off Borneo on our honeymoon, and of course because they are such graceful creatures under water; however, listening to Juan and the fact that the Aborigines were in balance with their food supply, it seems no more an issue than hunting any other animal. Interestingly, in the seas up and down this coast they have a huge problem with the rather nastily stinging Box Jellyfish which stops all swimming int he wet season (in the dry season it goes up the rivers to breed); however, the Aborigines never had an issue with this before - apparently the turtles were much more numerous before they were hunted almost to extinction (they are now protected other than for Aborigines I think) and of course their favourite food is jellyfish! Juan showed us many examples of plants used for tools and also for a variety of medicines. I particularly liked the “route tree” as I would call it - a small sapling of a particular tree variety which they crack in two places and bend to make two right angles pointing in the direction of their routes - as the tree cures the cracks the right angles remain as a permanent route marker for them. A common Aborigine item is the Dilly bag made from Black Palm leaves; Black Palm (“Duwar” in Aborigine) is a very hard wood used for many tools. The Dilly bag, or “Bulgy” in Aboriginal language, is their general purpose bag, used to carry anything from food and tools to babies. Duwar has another use - if ever stranded in the Australian rainforest you can cut open the crown shaft (“Kakan”, pronounced “Gagan”) and eat that which give both a food element and moisture. Apparently a lot of the foods that the Aborigines used to eat were initially poisonous - they would cut and crush them and put the mash into Dilly bags and then put them in a pool or river of slow running water which over 3 or 4 days would leach the poison out of the food. At the top of the walk we came to a small pool fed by a waterfall. This was a ladies only pool, so only Julia and Jamilah were allowed to go and see it. Whilst they were at the pool, Juan started picking up various different Ochre rocks, washing them in the rivulets running down from the pool, and then vigourously rubbing them on a large rock to create paint that could then be applied to the skin or rock (because of the dampness in the rainforest the local Aborigines were more into body art than the cave art we have seen previously). Just by selecting different stones, Juan managed to quickly make at least 10 different colours - not by mixing, but because of the different minerals in the stones. Jamilah was suitably fascinated by the process and enjoyed applying the paint in stripes to her arms. As a final flourish Juan painted an Aborigine story onto Jamilah’s face which she sported all day - yellowy orange rain clouds on the forehead way up in the sky; grey dots on both cheeks representing rain falling to the ground; a dark red figure running up from the chin and over the nose with no head to represent the rain man with his head in the clouds. As we walked along, and also feeling the paper in my notebook, you can feel the dampness in the air - not a muggy humidity but a general dampness that pervades most things; a true rainforest damp. And of course I must mention the mosquitos again - more vicious little brutes that seem to ignore any spray used; however, our aversion therapy is obviously working as, despite a number of bites, they didn’t seem to trouble us as much as usual. At the end of our walk Juan showed us a number of tools that were used by Aborigines and also showed us a story about his grandfather, one of the “lost generation”, written by an American student that got to know him. In the afternoon, Julia and Jamilah, had an art lesson with Juan, whilst I read this story and some other books about the area. The story was grim in places when relating how he was taken from his family and on several occasions was just abandoned by missionaries that had taken him in and who he worked for almost as part of the family - the worst being when he had created over innumerable weekends a house for his family and some others only to have the missionaries leave after selling the land resulting in the new owners forcing everyone away thereby losing all his hard work. Despite the trials and tribulations of his life, there were many bright spots in what was written about the old customs he knew - I liked this quote: “The bush is like a supermarket, if you know where to look. But if you don’t know it’s no good to you”.Back