FINDING MY HEART AT WOUNDED KNEE

It’s pouring with rain as we sit in our vehicles across the road from the Wounded Knee memorial on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota.

It’s the site of the mass grave of around 300 Lakota men, women and children, who were killed on December 29, 1890 by the US 7^th Cavalry Regiment.

Our guide, Warren (Gus) Yellowhair, climbs into the seat next to me and closes the door to stop the rain filling the car. It’s unseasonably cold – in one day the temperature has dropped from 26 to 4 degrees.

I’m parked next to a big red sign which tells the history of the site but Yellowhair says there’s mixed feelings in the reservation as to how to properly commemorate this history.

If it was good weather today you would have people here selling you arts and crafts, he says.

 “Some would like to see this kept as a sacred site,” he says, such as that of the small but significant mountain, Bear Butte further north near Sturgis, where prayer cloths can be found tied to trees and Native Americans come regularly to pray.

                                                          Warren (Gus) Yellowhair

I hear that on that cold December morning the Sioux chief, Big Foot, and around 350 of his followers were camped at Wounded Knee creek. The proud people had been decimated, forced to live on reservations with cultural and religious practices forbidden and their precious buffalo almost wiped out.

Many had been drawn to a new cult, known as the Ghost Dance, preached by a Paiute shaman called Wovoka, who prophesised that the dead and the living would soon live once more in the old way – with no more white people. They were told to perform the Ghost Dance and wear brightly-coloured shirts with images of eagles and buffaloes, which would protect them from the army’s bullets.

These wild dances had spread fear through the white community, even making headlines in the eastern states. On December 15, another Native American chief, Sitting Bull, was killed while being arrested, and Big Foot led his people south to seek protection on the Pine Ridge reservation.

According to eyewitnesses, the massacre began when a shot was fired, and chaos broke out, with men, women and children running for their lives. Twenty-five soldiers also died that day.

Photographers “embedded” with the army later took photos of the bodies of Big Foot and others frozen in the snow, and other photos were doctored and sold for extravagant prices. Scattered fighting continued for several days afterwards, but this was the end of the Ghost Dance movement and the Indian wars.

 

 

The memorial at Wounded Knee.

Photo: Chad Coppess
South Dakota Department of Tourism

 That morning at the Pine Ridge Chamber of Commerce, I had met Tribal Historic Preservation Officer / Director Mike CatchesEnemy, who gave me an impromptu history lesson at my request: on June 25 and 26, 1876 the 7^th Cavalry led by Lt Col George A Custer had been defeated in Montana at the famous Battle of the Little Big Horn – also known as the Battle of the Greasy Grass, or Custer’s Last Stand. What happened at Wounded Knee some 14 years later in 1890 could only be revenge by those same soldiers of that unit, he says.

He told me that in his cultural resource management archaeology thesis he initially compared the trauma his people suffered after Wounded Knee as a premeditated crime scene similar to that of 9/11. His graduate advisor advised him to leave out the comment that these military acts were considered terrorist killings, that the general public would not be so readily acceptant of that correlation.

Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, home of the Oglala Lakota Nation (Oglala Sioux Tribe), covers around 29,000 square km, bordering the Nebraska state line to the south and Badlands National Park to the north and was originally part of the Great Sioux Reservation established by the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868, but which was later ignored when the US government opened millions of acres of the Black Hills to homesteaders and private interests.

I had driven in from the Badlands side, having done the loop from Sturgis in the west via Wall and its tourist trap, the Wall Drug Store, where a group of concerned citizens run the Wounded Knee Museum.

I travelled south through the tiny town of Interior and onto rolling pine-covered hills and ridges, dotted with farms and settlements.  Unlike Australian Aboriginal reserves I did not need a permit. Every few kilometres you come across trailers surrounded by piles of old cars and farm machinery.  This is pickup country.

After the small town of Kyle I found my motel, the Lakota Prairie Ranch, where dinner was a delicious fried chicken and dessert of mixed fruits pie.

Yellowhair takes us to the Woksape Tipi Library at the Oglala Lakota College, where archivist Tawa Ducheneaux tells us about how they are collecting and archiving Lakota historic resources, including a “few thousand boxes” of artefacts of the tribe’s records and that of the college, which was started in the early 1970s.

Ducheneaux’s name shows her French heritage – French fur traders were the first non-Native Americans to come through this country.

“We have a long history of our cultural history leaving the Badlands,” she says.

The college itself has about 1500 students. Each of the reservation’s nine districts has a centre and there’s also a satellite college and library at Rapid City.  Now nearly 60 per cent of the nurses on the reservation are graduates of the college and 70 per cent of the teachers are locals.

Wanda Reddy, direct mail clerk, tells me when we visit the Historical Centre, after playing us  an audio tape and a video telling the story of Wounded Knee, that she studied Business at the college.

What if there hadn’t been that opportunity, I ask.

“I would have worked in a grocery store,” she says shyly.

 

                                                                   Wanda Reddy

Tourists are welcome at the centre, particularly when there’s artists in residence in late June to early September. Graduation pow wows are also open to the public.

Driving off, Yellowhair tells me to tune my car radio to KILI (90.1FM) to catch what’s happening on the “rez” – staffed by college journalism graduates, who also work at the local cable TV station.

He tells me private ceremonies are still held where people are given Lakota names.

He was named Tasunka Najin by his uncle which means His Horse is Standing. At your puberty ceremony your name will be changed, only the first in several changes during the course of one’s life.

“Having a Lakota name means when I pass on my ancestors will know me,” he says.

At the small town of Pine Ridge, we find the cosy café, Higher Ground Coffee House, owned by Belva Matthews and chef husband Leon, who bases the unusually exotic food on recipes his mother gave him.

Leon, who writes a blog for the Lakota Country Times – one of two Native American newspapers covering the area - proudly poses for a photo against the red stone walls of the café in his matching Russell Means T-shirt.

Means, who died in 2012, was one of the leaders in 1973 of around 200 Oglala Lakota and followers of the American Indian Movement, who held a 72-day stand-off against corruption and racism at the Wounded Knee site.  An actor, his films include The Last of the Mohicans, and the Disney cartoon, Pocahontas, where he spoke the part of Pocahontas’s father.

                                          Belva Matthews, her sister and fellow chef

                                                              Leon Matthews

Our last stop is the Red Cloud Indian School, where Community Relations associate and former student Rilda Means shows us around what was started by the Oglala chief, Red Cloud, and Jesuits of the Holy Rosary Mission in 1888.

On a reservation which has a high number of social problems, the school is remarkable in that 98 per cent of the senior year graduate and their names can be found carved into the bricks in the old building, Drexell Hall.

Kids travel “1000 miles a day in 18 buses” to come to a school where Lakota culture and basketball is “a big deal”.

 “Every day we teach them you have a chance,” says Means, whose father was an alcoholic but mother was a teacher here, and who went on to graduate from the Black Hills State University with a Master in Lakota Leadership and Management.

The school has a renowned Heritage Centre, museum and gift shop, displaying Native American art, including beadwork and porcupine quillwork.

                                                Rilda Means

We leave the reservation via a quick look at the Lakota-run Prairie Wind Casino, which like the rest of the reservation, is “dry” but where you can still sip “pop or coffee” while you gamble.

Speeding north-west into the misty shapes of the Badlands along the Red Shirt road, I wish I had more time at Pine Ridge, a place I’d wanted to visit since reading the classic history by Dee Brown: Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee.

A shorter travel story was published in this week's The Saturday Paper:

https://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/2015/05/30/the-pine-ridge-reservation-south-dakota/14329080001924#.VWkoGWPGP4g
 

#Travel #SouthDakota

 

WHISTLING DOWN THE WIND

                                                             Photo by: Greg Gorman

Whistle Down the Wind starring Hayley Mills and Alan Bates is one of my favourite films from the 1960s.

But it wasn’t until I did some research before a press conference for Hayley and Juliet Mills here to tour a play, Legends, that I realised that it was their mother, Mary Hayley Bell (Lady Mary Mills), who wrote the novel which the 1961 film was based on.

The story is about a young girl who finds a fugitive hiding in the family’s barn and thinks he is Jesus Christ.

“Blakey” is wanted for murder and the police are searching for him, but Kathy and the other children are determined to protect him.

There are many references to stories from the Bible in the film. In one scene, a child is mocked and beaten into denying he had seen Jesus. After the boy's third denial, a train whistle is heard.

According to Wikipedia (I make no apologies):  “The strains of 'We three kings' can be discerned in the score as Kathy, her brother and sister march with the food 'gifts' they have acquired for the man in the 'stable'. They are spotted and followed by a group of country children (shepherds). The early core of children who are in on the secret number a dozen and are specifically called The Disciples in the cast list. The secret comes out at the end of a children's party/Last Supper. When the apprehended Blakey is being frisked by police, his posture, with arms outstretched to his sides, is a clear reference to the Crucifixion.”

I asked Hayley Mills (the daughter of the late great actor Sir John Mills who went on to star in so many Disney films, TV and theatre) about what it was like to act in a film based on her mother’s book.

“It was great because it was not only her story but it was directed by a very, very old friend of the family, Bryan Forbes, the first picture he directed,” she said. “The producer was Richard Attenborough, a very old friend of the family, so it really was a family picture. But the difference was that the book which our mum wrote was actually very sort of loosely based on all of us and it was set in the south of England on a farm and they were much more knowing and sophisticated children and the scriptwriters (Keith Waterhouse and Willis Hall)….transferred it to the north.”

She believed the “key to its success” was setting it in Lancashire around the village of Clitheroe.

“I loved the story,” she said. “It was one of those things where all the elements that came in worked so brilliantly, not least the music by Malcolm Arnold…and the whistle in that film was Dickie Attenborough, that was him whistling. And Alan Bates was such a brilliant actor.”

(I agree – this was his first starring role. Check out the totally insanely brilliant King of Hearts and of course Women in Love – can anybody who saw it ever forget Bates and Oliver Reed wrestling naked?) In the mid 1990s, Whistle Down the Wind was adapted into a musical by Russell Labey and Richard Taylor for the National Youth Music Theatre.  Andrew Lloyd Webber and Jim Steinman later created a more commercial adaptation of it.

Juliet Mills’ husband, Maxwell Caulfield, who plays the producer in Legends, was at the same press conference and he fondly remembers how “wonderful” it was to see Lady Mary taking a bow and a “royal wave” from the balcony during the West End Andrew Lloyd Webber production in the West End around 15 years ago.

Critics talk about the early 60s as being a time of high creativity in English cinema – Whistle Down the Wind is a perfect example of that.

TRAVEL FACES: Laila Spik, a woman Joni Mitchell would be proud of

                                                             Laila Spik, Sami guide.


The sad news this week that Joni Mitchell was in hospital reminded me that I had read that she is of Sami heritage.

The Canadian singer’s father's parents were Norwegian and she has told journalists she believes they were Sami people.  (According to a statement on her official website, Mitchell is now awake and undergoing tests.)

I discovered this information when researching a trip to Sapmi or Lapland in Sweden last year. Through my contacts I was introduced by email to Laila Spik, a Sami guide and writer of cookbooks and guides to native plants.

She lives between Kiruna and Jokkmokk near a place called Gällivare, above the Arctic Circle. She very kindly suggested she come to my Kiruna hostel to meet me, one freezing April morning.

I made her a cup of tea and she told me her story. Her parents were both reindeer herders from different areas of Sapmi. When they first met they couldn’t understand each other because they spoke different languages.

 She was the eldest daughter, so her father taught her about their culture so it wouldn’t be lost. She has written widely about this.

 Explaining Sami beliefs in animism, spirits and shamanism, she told me they believed in goddesses, including the fire goddess who must be respected and always fed first.

 “Every morning when we come to the tent to eat we boil tea and coffee and under the fireplace are seven stones, one stone for every day and one stone for baking and drying and putting the hot pan but there was somebody who lived under that and it was the goddess who helped the child be born and who protected the people and we never should forget her,” she said.

These days the Sami Parliament, with elected members who sit in Kiruna, works for increased self-determination, protects Sami languages and land including  mining negotiation and is the central administrative agency for reindeer husbandry. However many are still coping with the consequences of culture loss during the missionary years when from the early 19^th century they were denied their rights, including being able to speak their own language and practise shamanism and their children were taken away to boarding schools, Laila said.

The Sami are also the exponents of one of Europe’s oldest vocal song traditions, known as “yoiking”. When I visited the Sami TV station in Kiruna the young journalists there explained the “yoiker” and the subject of the yoik are intimately connected, which is known as “yoiking”.

Traditionally instruments weren’t used. Instead the music, which is said to create an emotional bond between people, animals and nature, uses melodic and often haunting vocal sounds and sometimes lyrics. Sami say they ”yoik something” rather than sing about something in a tradition that is becoming more popular now with one of its exponents winning a TV talent show.

I’m sure Joni Mitchell is very proud of her heritage.

**   Laila is available as a tour guide for individuals and groups, which can include gathering plants and herbs traditionally used in Sami cooking and medicine. Her email is:laila.spik@gmail.com

The Sounds of....Silence?

We’re at the Beng Melea  temple around 60km east of Siem Reap in Cambodia.

We’re hoping for less people here than at Angkor Wat but the sounds of cicadas quickly mix with the loud voices of tourists from a certain country.

Nothing can be said quietly. It has to be yelled across the temple complex. Never-ending selfies are taken while the ancient engravings  on the walls and the mystical trees growing between the stonesare ignored.  Blood-curdling screeching and laughter at the top of their voices. Guides screeching at their tour group.

It would be a magic place without all this noise pollution.

When a couple of tourists start climbing on the piled -up stones we have climbed to along rickety timber steps an Argentinian tourist can’t take any more.

“You have no respect, no respect. You are animals.”

We nod in agreement.                                                                                                    

We have seen the future … of Cambodian tourism. Hordes of tourists arrive in buses, take photos of themselves then leave.

An elderly French couple wander through complete in safari outfits, grey long-sleeved shirts and long pants and boots. Where are their pith helmets? I know I too look a sight in shorts and sandshoes, but temple tourism requires practical clothing.

I too am a tourist but I don’t wear crazy, mix-matched multi-coloured outfits and carry a pastel umbrella today. (At least my colours match!)

Later the reds of rambutans are reflected in the clothes worn by the market sellers, who smile and laugh as I take their photos.

At sunset we take a tuk tuk to the Terrace of the Leper King at Angkor Wat, attempting to find a quiet place to do our readings of the day. (I’m on one of Jan Cornall’s writing retreats.)

A throng of kids guided by two monks comes swarming around a corner through a stone gate. They chatter to us, saying hello and good luck. The older monk, one-legged and walking with the aid of a stick, smiles warmly at us.

It’s a totally different experience to end the day of temple wanderings.

TRAVEL FACES: GROETHE's LAST STAND - a photographer extraordinaire

Bill Groethe considers his most important work the series of photos he took in 1948 of the Native American survivors of the Battle of the Little Big Horn, better known as Custer’s Last Stand.

These portraits were taken at an event at Custer State Park in South Dakota, a place I stayed at in September, 2014 just before the annual Buffalo Roundup.

(On June 25 and 26, 1876 the 7^th Cavalry led by Lt Col George A Custer was defeated in Montana at what Indian tribes called the Battle of the Greasy Grass. I understand the people in the photo are Little Warrior, Pemmican, Little Soldier, Dewey Beard, High Eagle, Iron Hawk, Comes Again, Nicholas Black Elk and John Sitting Bull, who although not a survivor, represented his adoptive father, Sitting Bull.)

Later I visit the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation and while talking to archivist Tawa Ducheneaux at the Woksape Tipi Library at the Oglala Lakota College, my eye is drawn to the prints of these photos on the wall. I try to do the maths and work out what Groethe later tells me – these men were between 85 and 90 years old when he took their pictures.

Ducheneaux tells me Groethe is not only alive (he’s 91) but still working as hard as ever. I call him at his shop when I get to Rapid City and he says to come quickly as he and his wife are getting ready to do another trip to the battle site in Montana, where a frieze is being made of his photos, sandblasted into granite – part of a memorial to the Oglala Sioux area tribes, who fought there.

“They’ve had a memorial from day one almost of the troops; the battlefield used to be called Custer Battlefield but now it’s Little Big Horn Battlefield (national monument).  It took many years to get it changed,” Groethe tells me.

As for the background to the famous portraits: “I took the photos all in the one day. The youngest was 13 at the battle, 85 when I took him.”

So how did it come about? Well, as he says, they all knew this pesky, teenage photographer, who’d been hanging round taking photos of them for months.

“I grew up here,” he explains. “I used to follow them around. They called me ‘the kid’. I was always going to their dances and stuff and photographing them.

“They were disappearing fast. In ‘51, the 75th anniversary, there were only three of them left.”

I ask Groethe if he asked his subjects about their experiences at this famous almost-end to the Indian wars.

“I never talked to them…the battle’s over. They were trying to live and assimilate into the community, make a little money when they dressed up for a powwow.

“I concentrate on my job. I want to get the images right and (it) takes a little more time. Talk to and learn from the people so I didn’t have to take a lot of pictures because I couldn’t afford to buy so much film.”                                 

One of his subjects, Dewey Beard, also survived Wounded Knee, 14 years later.

 “He lost his wife and daughter and he and his brother escaped. He was the last to die. He has a double survival record. He died November 2, 1955 and that happens to be South Dakota Day.

 “It’s the most important work I’ve done,” he says explaining he started as an apprentice with  Bert Bell,  when he was 12.

 What have your learnt from the Lakota and other Oglala Sioux, I ask?

 "I thought I had compassion but they’ve got more than the average white man to put up with us, I tell you.  When you’re all in the same boat in the Depression you’re all poor. I had no problems. Today we have more problems all the time because disparity is increasing all the time.

 “I learnt a lot, these people are very gentle really, considering they’re the warrior bunch. After the war was over and they were made to settle down and so many of them are all over that. They don’t want to talk about that. I never ask them either.”

 One major regret he has is that a writer, David Humphreys Miller, who asked to use his colour slides of the Battle of the Little Big Horn survivors, never returned them.

 “I shot 5 x 7 black and white of each one and then I shot 5 x 7 transparencies in colour the same time, so the images are almost exactly the same but I was young, I trusted this man and he was going to write a story for National Geographic and I foolishly gave him the transparencies and he never returned them.

 “He’s gone, his wife’s gone, I know the family has them someplace because 20 years ago he tried to sell those to the battlefield and of course they recognised immediately that they were the same poses as mine. They refused him and they called me right away and I still haven’t been able to run him down and now he’s gone.”

 One of his projects is to shoot all the phases of what is known as the Lakota Moon, so laborious a task that he’s so far only taken eight shots in 25 years.  The moons represent the different seasons, based on information from the famous book, Black Elk Speaks.

 “The scarlet moon is September and that’s when the wild plums are scarlet in the reservation. The moon of ripe cherries, that’s when the wild cherries are a deep plum colour.

 “I’ve still got four to get. You only get a minute or two to shoot. The foreground and moon have to be at the same density. You can teach chemistry and how to fix a machine, but a natural view is God-given.

 “I sit there and wait and then I shoot. Otherwise I pack up and go home.  I’ve set up and packed up 100 times.”

 "You’ve had a very interesting life,” I say in awe of this modest and fascinating photographer, who never uses a digital camera for his own work, as he shows me his room full of cameras and lenses. (He also once owned production labs in seven states – all since closed.)

 “Well, it’ not past,” he answers. “I work every day. I work four days in the lab and I take Friday to get ready to do a shoot. I went to (Mount) Rushmore every Saturday all summer.

 "I’m a commercial photographer. I’ve done portraits. I no longer do that… I do a lot of the tough jobs, photographing murals, things that nobody else wants to spend the time to do.”

 *        A longer version of this interview/story is available at request.

Photos: Diana Plater. Apologies to Bill Groethe for the quality!

TRAVEL FACES: Fighting cocks, Bali starlings and fried chicken

Ollie Smith and I wrote Raging Partners back in 2000 and we are in the midst of turning it into an e-book.

Our new chapter will be about our love affairs with Bali and the Balinese. Here's an excerpt from the work-in-progress:

To the Birds: Fighting cocks, Bali starlings and fried chicken.

Ollie’s little house in Dalung was filled with Balinese men partying every night, and cleaning up each morning. Cigarette butts were swept away and all traces of alcohol – beer and arak, the sickly sweet palm brandy that Balinese love. They’d sit in a circle and pass a cup around, sometimes mixed with orange juice, gradually getting drunker and more sentimental as the night wore on. Music would blare from a tinny tape recorder. Their favourite at the time was James Blunt’s You’re Beautiful. I’ll never get that damned song out of my head.

In the morning one of the men would make us kopi bali – thick, black and sweet – and we’d sit on little timber stools on Ollie’s verandah and survey the comings and goings of the street. Ollie had met Nyoman the year before – a sexy, silver-jewellery-wearing Balinese 20 years her junior – which led to her buying this house.

Nyoman’s father had had 18 children to two wives. He was actually married three times, but his first wife died childless. So Nyoman had a string of brothers and sisters and cousins who would come to the house on their motorbikes.

One night I was sitting inside on one of the benches under a fan to try and cool off from the steamy heat when one of these half brothers turned up. Budi was wearing a white sarong and udung as he’d just come from a ceremony, which matched his shiny teeth. He sat on one side of the window with the men, flirting through the wooden slats with me like a priest hearing confession.

Budi was a breath of fresh air after what I’d just been through: dad’s death six months before and a divorce.

I guess I should have seen it as a warning sign though that his job was helping his cousin look after his fighting cocks.  These fights are held as part of temple ceremonies as blood sacrifice is entwined in Balinese Hindu culture. According to renowned writer Fred B Eiseman Caru is blood sacrifice to the demons, bhutas and kalas, or more philosophically to the negative aspects of the universe.  Killing an animal in this way is not considered a cruelty – it actually acquires Karma and they are treated with reverence.  The cockfight, tajen, also appeases the bhutas with the spilling of blood.

But illegal competitions where thousands of dollars are bet and lost are also held all over the island.

The day after we met I had to go to Ubud to stay at a traditional five star hotel to write a story. Ollie thought it would be fun to come up and meet me and bring some of the boys. We went to the Jazz Club and danced to salsa music but they dropped me alone at the hotel on the way back – despite almost getting lost. Who said Balinese know their island? And as for reading a map. Forget it.

The next day Budi rode for more than an hour to visit me – at my villa with my own huge swimming pool. I had been trying to get an interview with Kadek Wiranatha, a local Mr Big, and only minutes after he arrived I got the call. Come down now to Legian for the interview.

“Budi, can you give me a lift?”  And we took off on his motorbike. He seemed to understand my job which was a great plus to me and I felt very comfortable and happy in his company.

The following January I returned to Bali and Budi and we decided to go to Lombok, via his village at Tianyar, in Karangnasem on the north-east coast.

We stayed the night at Budi's father's house, and everybody seemed to be worried that he was going on such a long trip.

I thought this was a bit of an over-reaction; it was only a five-hour ferry ride and perhaps a few more hours by road up the west coast of Lombok.

The only problem I could see were the afternoon downpours of the wet season.

The next morning we had coffee with Budi's father's second wife.

After changing her blouse and putting a sash around her sarong she said prayers at the compound temple to give us luck for the journey.

"Is it holiday or work that you are going to Lombok for?" she called out.

 "Holiday," he answered.

  "You must pray in the village temple," she told him.

 While I waited on the back of the motor bike  he also put on a sash, put rice on his forehead, lit incense, tossed bougainvillea around and prayed.

 As he climbed back on the bike he still had crimson petals in his thick, black hair.

We drove the bike onto the ferry at Padangbai and watched as food sellers crowded on to sell rice, noodles, water and bananas before it headed off.

 Budi remained sitting most of the time while I looked out across the sea to the island of Lombok.

 It was almost dark when we arrived. We rode again in the rain through the capital, Mataram, and then onto Senggigi, where we found a room in an almost empty hotel.

 The next day we headed north, avoiding chickens, ducks and goats on the road to the little port from where we jumped on a tiny fishing boat taking furniture to Gili Trawangan.

 When we returned to Dalung, Budi's family and friends were keen to know how the trip went.

 "Fantastic," I said, "It was one of the best holidays ever."

 "That's OK for her," Budi joked. "She was on the back. I was the one doing all the hard work."

 Then one night just before I left to fly back to Sydney, Budi asked me something:

 "Did you notice I looked a bit worried on the boat trips?"

 "Oh no," I said sunnily, thinking he'd loved the trip too.

 "Well I was actually very scared," he said. "Did you know I almost drowned a few years ago?"

 "No!" I was shocked, although I did know that like many Balinese he couldn't swim.

 "It was when I was working on a Thai fishing boat, out near Maluku," he continued. "I was hanging out my washing on a rope and I lost my footing and fell into the sea. One of the fishermen - a Thai man - threw me a rope.

 "I was so traumatised, I flew back to Bali and hadn't been on a boat since."

 "Why didn't you tell me?" I asked, remembering then that he had clung tightly to the small boat's mast and didn't seem to want to look over the edge of the ferry. "We didn't have to go."

 "It would have ruined your holiday," he answered.

Much to my surprise, and I really mean this, I was getting involved with a Balinese guy – 20 years younger than me. Was that what I really wanted? Was that what I needed? Well I knew I needed fun more than anything else. 

I’ll admit it, I didn’t really know that much about Balinese culture. I was interested to the extent of spirituality and its meaning in people’s lives. But being a cynic about religion and in particular religious hierarchy I could never get into it. I didn’t want to become one of those Australian women who marry or live with Balinese men and take on the whole mantle – wearing sarongs and kebayas as if they were born in them, making offerings, attending ceremonies. Even having their teeth filed as part of the wedding ceremony, to get rid of the ‘animal’ in you. Nuh, I have a good dentist and he thinks my teeth are fine just as they are.

I did ask him lots of questions about his religion and beliefs but he found it almost impossible to describe the reasoning behind it all. “Please explain,” I’d say. “Sorry I can’t explain it,” he’d answer.

 Budi was determined to come to Australia. There was nothing he wanted more. Was I just a vessel to get him here? Would he have gone with any other woman who was mad enough to sponsor him to come and live here? He denies that. He says he still loves me. He just couldn’t handle the gambling temptations in every pub and club here.

So after more than six good years in Sydney, Budi’s back in Bali, working for a big businessman who breeds fighting cocks. He’s their “security” making sure people don’t climb the barbed wire to steal these incredibly valuable animals that are sold on the international market.

Rather than fighting cocks, I spent part of this last trip searching for the endangered Bali Starling. Way up in the national park in the north west of Bali, we bumped along a rough track, as monkeys tried to climb into the car. Across the sea was Java. Finally we reached a temple in the jungle and a sign, “Save the Birds, Save The Trees, Save the Earths”. A ranger came out and took me by the hand and another gave me a pair of binoculars. There in the trees coming out of her little wooden nesting box was a white-crested blue-eyed starling and her baby. The ranger told me there were only 25 now in the national park area after years of poaching for the caged bird trade.

Back in Legian we went to eat fried chicken sitting cross-legged  at a warung as the rain teemed down.

 I told Budi about my trip and the starlings and he said, “I call them Jalak.”

Then I asked him if he was lonely without me and he said: “No, I have my family and friends. My nephews always smile when they see me and say, Hi Uncle.”

I said: “I hope we will stay friends.”

“Close friends,” he said as he bit into the chicken.