Her name is Elke. I am terrible at guessing ages of the fairer sex, so I put her at early 60s. I don't do this because of how she looks, but because of what she has done in her life and I think it is impossible for anyone to have done so much. We meet her at the Albany Entertainment Centre and she is to be our guide / assistant as we tour these parts of the country. Elke is a trained nurse, she has worked with indigenous Australians for three decades, living with them far into the desert. She is learning to play the saxophone, rides motorbikes on the weekends, was a sailor in her youth, is an amateur pilot, is more comfortable driving trucks and big cars than her little sports convertible, which though her twin daughters make fun of her about, she loves because it is perfect for driving down to the beach where she windsurfs. When she has spare time, or needs money, works in health promotions for the huge mining companies in this part of Oz. When she has more time, she gets away to a meditation centre and speaks openly about the deeply personal experience. Thierry reaches out to touch my arm as she speaks. On the night I really get to know her, we talk about everything and anything, from new scientific discoveries on the way we make decisions, to the global financial crisis, to how the milky way shifts on cloudless desert nights. She is German, taller than I am, blonde and her accent is strong. Inspiring is too reductive, there is a glowing tangle of things I feel about her. If I had come to Oz and just met her, I would not have been entirely disappointed. She is 52. My last play was called 'Untitled' about a child that grows up with no name and the repercussions of that - political, personal, occupational, tribal, mythological and cultural. Old witchcraft , it is said, works when you call something by its true name; you gain power over it. Even as a child, my mother would warn me that if I heard my name called out faintly, I should not answer until I made sure it was an actual person. When I came to writing the play I dug around to discover different attitudes to names, had I meat Elke, I think I might have written something different...

She tells me that in indigenous culture, death is dealt with once and for all. We in the west thrive on guilt and suffering; perhaps it comes from our religions; when someone dies, we hold wakes, bury, mourn, we keep photographs that haunt us, we return to the graves over and over again. The indigenous people mourn for a period, but once the short space of time is passed they destroy everything, everything of the person who died. Burn possessions, clothing, jewellery, everything and - this is what got me - if anyone else within the community shares the same name, or a similar sounding name, they loose that name. They have to change it, they become... Elke spoke a word that sounds like 'commoner' and go nameless for a while. She says in one lifetime, a tribesman could change his name up to ten times. Imagine the chaos this would causes in banking, health care, education and you begin to see the deep difficulty with reconciling the aboriginal people with the "developed" parts of Australia...

Comment