What would I say?

If I saw my Cambodian friends from years ago, if I finally saw them after being away so long, what would I say? Sorry for the flooding that has swamped your country. Again. Sorry for the corruption that resulted in so many of the development problems that means the flooding is getting worse not better? Would I repeat sorry that another activist has been killed? And a further sorry that there is no easy solution and that all I can wish for is to stand beside them, in support.

Except I am here in remote red dirt Australia working, not there. Working in/for a community that has no idea how good it has it. Sorry is such an impotent notion but it’s what I would say.

http://www.phnompenhpost.com/national/no-motion-shooting-probe

Prejudices - what I wish PM Gillard had replied

“Oh that’s absurd …… are you wanting to have an open discussion about gay rights or are you raising this to attempt to belittle me, to say that I am not in a real relationship? That the relationship is somehow flawed, as judged by the criteria of your own prejudices?

What does your attack say about the prejudices that all male hairdressers endure? The prejudices you are revealing about bisexual people is especially offensive and sad.

So what exactly are you attempting with this line of questioning?”

How I wish someone would speak up against the consistent insults, prejudices and jokes about bisexual folks. In the discussions of our PM’s situation of being ridiculed by journalists and some politicians, it’s been fine for some, to make even more jokes about gay hairdressers. I am so over it.

And I am annoyed at Australian activists. If only all those liberal middle class marriage equality advocates would focus on the real issues of homophobia instead of all that (for me anyway) unimportant nonsense about marriage equality.

How about they put their efforts towards defending male hairdressers right to be hetro, gay, queer, bi or however else they roll, just like every other human being should have. Annoyed after another slick joke is made on ABC about the PM’s partner’s looks and if they are ‘macho’ or not.

##  http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/4753660.html      a great opinion piece by The Drum

 

### Separate but I was reminded of the often arrogance and sanctimonious attitude of expatriates towards national colleagues, donor recipients and ‘them’, when I worked in Cambodia and Timor also made me sad and disappointed in regards to gay rights. Now ‘we’ Australians are going to export a homophobic attitude to all male hairdressers? My observations were that it was completely normal and usual to have male hairdressers in the Asian countries I visited. What I dread is that Australia’s narrow minded prejudices get exported …….

Red dirt homelessness

I have never been before to this particular red desert and yet the spinifex and red sandy earth feels familiar. It feels home-like. I know (or knew) the other side of this desert, over state borders to the north east, where Alice Springs is 1,500km away from here. Now I am in the prosperous mining area known simply as the northern goldfields. Although it is far south for me being as I am coming from Timor, so geography gets as puzzling as my homelessness already is.

My usual where-is-home puzzle has begun. Even when completely expected, this enduring puzzle is occasionally emotionally intense, social awkward when answering supposedly simple questions about where I come from and yet it’s a weirdly comfortable puzzle to me; maybe the perpetual traveling for work is resulting in a gypsy addiction to the puzzle of where is home.

My choices of what I consider ‘home’ to be, include at the moment; returning home to the Australian red dirt desert; home in Dili where I loved working and playing although by the end I was over the environmental and noise pollution as well as the crazy traffic; NSW because its only 3 weeks until I fly east for special time with family and friends; Ratanakiri, Cambodia because the similarities in remoteness and redness and thus my homelessness includes missing Dave, my Rat’ri timber house and the volcanic crater lake.

artist coloured mining 'tailings'

Being as I was convinced I’d be moving to far north Queensland or the Northern Territory there is a sense that home is the Australian ‘top end’ and I am now the intruder visiting the wrong patch of southern red dirt. Yet it’s now 12 years since I lived in central Australia so that link could have been overwhelmed by my more recent love affair with feeling at home in south east Asia.  

The facts are that currently, I am a stranger in a familiar landscape with all the homesickness of Timor, sentimentality for other locations and the odd sense of returning to desert dwelling. A combination which is allowing me to be immensely happy.                               

I am privileged to have my gypsy puzzle of where is home.