Can you believe it – it’s the 100th Blog – I don’t think I’ve ever written anything close to 100 pages, days, accounts, episodes….I enjoy it so much I’ve actually bought a bunch of books on travel writing in case I ever wish to change careers and need some advice on how to go about it. Tonight I’m sitting down at our fold-out table, a nearly empty glass of red wine (Yalumba Vintage Cabernet) with Jen adjacent, working on her paper. The kids are deep into the Lego and you can hear the hardened plastic balls of Bionical weaponry bouncing off the walls. We’re buying time before tonight’s main attraction – Top Gear – on at 8:30pm. Streaming from my wee ipod speakers squeaks some melodic Radiohead. I’ve just finished my last ‘day’ shift and have 2 nights yet to attend to here in the Broome Emergency. Bottom line - I get to sleep-in tomorrow morning and enjoy a day in Broome with the family until 5pm when I get to fly solo in the ER! Jen and the kids haven’t been up to anything extravagant but did have a sing-a-long with some street buskers today attracting a crowd of on-lookers and keen photographers.
We’ve only been here just over a week and I’m getting the itch – the need to get back on the road, hit the wide open spaces and see more of this marvellously enigmatic land. We are a privileged little mob. I feel a little guilty telling other colleagues of our escapades and plans as they are in such a different state of mind and living an existence caught up with the daily grind, mortgages, tomorrow’s clinic or surgical roster – something I too will soon be enveloped by. Our freedom to move and see the things we have and will be able to see was brought particularly to light in a story by our tour guide to Cape Leveque’s tale about an Aboriginal friend of his from one of the coastal communities we visited on the weekend. He was espousing his plans to visit some local gorges and geological sites to her and she envied his freedom of movement as she was governed by a different set of unwritten laws which forebade her uninvited visits to another Aboriginal community’s ‘country’. There are a good 20 different communities along the Cape coast north of Broome and each is of a different Aboriginal lineage and ‘country’ with physical borders and unwritten sacrosanct laws. She was scared to set foot in another group’s territory as the punishment – set down from ages past – was to have a spear thrust into one’s foot for trespassing. Seems odd in our 21st century that such archaic customs still persist but alas they do. In a moment of free time today, myself and a couple of the other doctors had a discussion of different perspectives of risk. The oldest and possibly wisest of us was full of information from recent literary adventures and experiences. Risk is apparently something that can’t be comprehended without at least a grade 3 understanding of mathematics and the concepts held therein. Cultures in which education has faltered to some degree tend to rely on superstition or spirituality to dictate how they live their life or understand fate. Cause doesn’t necessarily equate to effect. The overconsumption of alcohol on a regular basis doesn’t correlate with the associated physical effects but rather on ‘the Gods’ and chance. One’s brother may eventually die from kidney failure due to poorly controlled diabetes but it is chance alone that predicates whether this befalls the individual him/herself. It’s difficult for us doctors to sometimes get our heads around this mindset as it seems so contrary to our embedded way of looking at the world. We can advise until we are blue in the face and pulling out our hair, but without a comprehension of how risk fits into an individual’s world view our words are lost and empty. Without a change of perspective in which risk is understood from a cause and effect view of the world, preaching a healthy lifestyle hasn’t a chance.
We have but six weeks of adventure in Australia left. In the immediate future we hope to check out some of the impressive gorges and geological features of the Kimberley then head up to Darwin. From there we will make tracks across northern Queensland to Townsville and then down the coast. By the second week of June we hope to be sailing the Whitsundays and then trekking to Hervey Bay for a short excursion to Fraser Island. We’ve been promising the kids a session on the Gold Coast and its theme parks so will head there next, selling the Kluger and Caravan by auction in Brisbane and getting ourselves organized for our trip to Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos en route to Canada at the end of June. Once back in the Great White North we will join my parents in their new motorhome and make our way to a family reunion in Northern Saskatchewan before making the last little hop to Barrie, Ontario. Seems like so much to fit into such a short period of time but alas – you only live once. Carpe Diem !
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