Rosella flower (calyx/petals tightly held around the seed pod)

Here’s a recipe for jelly that uses small quantities of rosella leaves. Absolutely delicious and the most beautiful red colour (without the artificial colouring)!

Ingredients

• 1 cup water
• 1 cup caster sug
• 7gm gelatine powder
• 1 tbs boiling water
• 1 cup Rosella calyx (the petals around the seed)

Method:

1. In a small saucepan add water, sugar and rosella calyx; bring to the boli and cook for 5 minutes until the rosella calyx has softened. Remove from the heat.
2. In a separate bowl mix the gelatine with a little hot water to form a thin consistency. Stir through the jelly, pur into a serving glass and refrigerate until set.
3. Serve with ice cream.

I’ve just had some unexpected time  in Alice  so I got serious about a hen hunt. On my first night in Alice Trevor had rung with the news that our bantam hen was missing. She wasn’t in any of her normal hidey holes, and between us we said that she had to be dead – once she was out of the run the dogs would make short work of her. But I was still holding out hope that she had found a new secret space where she was sitting out one of her broody states.

The next morning Trevor rang to say that he had found Miss B in the front yard – dead but not eaten.  I was unexpectedly teary – she was a weird bird but a character who had endeared herself to us.  She was right down at the bottom of the pecking order and hung out by herself all the time waiting for scraps left over by the other two chickens. We would feed her on the side with titbits to make sure she wasn’t too left out, but it was a lonely life I would think. She slept separately to the other two but on the night before she went missing Trevor said that he saw her cuddled up to the other two on the roost.  I think she was planning her escape and this was her goodbye to the other two.  In tracking how she got out Trevor found scratch marks under the run gate. There is a little gap there and she must have squeezed herself under it to get out. It must have been quite a chase that went on when the dogs discovered her.  She didn’t have a mark on her and I suspect that she either died of fright and stress or that one of the dogs shook her to death.  A total surprise though that two part dingo dogs didn’t proceed to eat her.

So back to the hen hunt which now took on another dimension. Our supplier of fertile eggs (and consequently the hens that lay them) was out of town, the pet shop had had some but had sold out, Laucke Mills (the source of many wonderful things for farmers and homesteaders) had had hundreds of chicks but had sold out really quickly.

It’s true that chickens are the new “hot” pet.

Isa Browns in moult

Anyway I saw a sign at Laucke’s from a person selling Sussex Whites,  Barnvelders and Australorps all at point of lay. A phone call and I’m on my way to check out the chickens.  To cut a long story short I headed back to Yuendumu with two beautiful Australorps.

They are big birds, even for 16 weeks old, which is just as well as the Isa Browns are none too pleased. There isn’t anything really seriously aggro, and the Isas did allow the Australorps to roost with them last night, but there are clear demarcation lines being set of what they can do and where they can do it.  We are keeping an eye on it all to make sure that the Australorps do get some fun time as well. Plus putting out separate water feeders and feed trays to make sure there isn’t a hogging of the food and water by the Isas.

Daphne and Orphelia trying to work out how they got to Yuendumu

The Australorps seem rather befuddled by it all and of course are still trying to work out how they ended up in Yuendumu with two cranky brown hens as compared to be surrounded by other Australorps, Sussex Whites and Barnvelders.  The Isas are just coming out of moult and are still looking very tatty. Against the Australorps, now named Daphne and Orphelia, they look very dowdy. But they are still cheery with us, and flit around us and between our legs and supervise us when we are working in the run.They are quite charming, even though they have a nasty reputation when it comes to their being mixed with other breeds.

The Australorps seem quite surprised to have people around in the run not realising of course that they have entered into an arid permaculture setup where they will have a range of jobs helping us to garden. We’ll break it to them slowly.

Isas doing compost work

I’ve just finished a very long scarf for Trevor (Dr Who length). But finishing it was hard – I really didn’t want to finish it and found lots of little things to do it to prolong the inevitability of it being finished. Fiddling with the fringe, putting a single crochet row along the long edges, all prolonged it. But finished it is, and Trevor curled up on the lounge last night (it’s starting to get chilly at nights here) with it around him.

There is something delightful about seeing someone you love wearing something you’ve made for them. I think we’ve got out of the habit of this kind of “homeliness”, giving higher value instead to what is bought and expensive. I can see all the little faults in the scarf (it’s my first attempt), but it has a history now of Trevor and me sitting up late and doing the fringe together. And it will forever hold the memory of place – I made it for the 4 weeks of bitter bitter cold we get here to help keep Trevor warm as he runs about the place doing this and that.

Now I have started on a rug. Amie, our wonderful daughter-in-law taught me how to make a corner so now I am able to make a square, although very very roughly.

Trevor and I were having a conversation about making things and the desire to perfect your skills. My crochet work is definitely less that perfect. Out of that conversation rose talk of the Islamic approach to perfection – that is that only Allah is capable of perfection – in a sense of perfect unity.

Here is a delightful article about Islamic textile art. And a quotation from it:

“…. This is why the “mistakes” we see in kilims have significance: were the kilim-maker to become too proud of her own skill, to seek perfection in her work and too great importance upon her own abilities and creations, this would place her in danger. To be an act of devotion her work needs to show humility, an acknowledgement that her skill is given by God, her materials and leisure provided by God … any beauty which she creates from her labours is a small light from Allah, a hint of the unlimited beauty created by Allah in the next world”.

It was a huge feat to get it completed, but with Trevor’s usual care in design, plentiful materials from the tip and sheer hard slog it’s at last done. We have just planted out one bed so far, and let a pumpkin vine run free in the chicken scratch area. But with it being mid April, we are about to start moving on planting out the other two beds.

We’ve just planted out a whole new batch of seedlings (cabbage, broccoli, artichokes and broadbeans) and have covered over each with a plastic drinks container as a way of keeping the grasshoppers at bay. During the day the grasshoppers somehow seem to do minimal damage, but its night time when they are at their worst. munching everything in sight (but not the buffel grass!!!) So we have a bottle off during the day and bottles back on at night routine.

When we got back from holidays last week our blood orange tree was completely stripped, and our other citrus had suffered significant damage from the vast array of grasshoppers at night. The kale has been stripped as well and other plants are under severe attack. And the buggers have the arrogance to sing grasshopper love songs outside our bedroom window at night just to rub in our faces that there is going to be a new wave of the little buggers in the spring.

So the plastic bottles are our defence line for  the new seedlings. But at the end of a long week we had just tumbled into bed and forgotten to put the bottles back on. Hence Trevor’s stirrings and getting up with me staying in bed dozing awaiting his return.

Half an hour later still no Trevor. There’s something round midnight that makes you fear the worst. I made it to the seedling bed looking for the flash of light from Trevor’s headlamp. Nothing. I called out. Nothing. It was a moonless night so getting a torch from the house I hurried back to the seedling beds sweeping the torch over the ground expecting to see a prone Trevor, his headlamp downwards into the earth perhaps overtaken by a swarm of grasshoppers attacking his eyes and ears and nose. Nothing. Had he been spirited away by one of the spirits that abound where we live? Was he having a chat to a neighbour?

A sweep of the front yard, a flash of light. Trevor is there catching the buggers still having a go at the citrus. He’s got a drink bottle container half full of grasshoppers dazzled by the light and now captive.  He can’t understand the fuss I make about where he has been – its kind of normal here to be at midnight plucking grasshoppers off plants, and placing bottles full of them into the fridge to feed to the chickens in the morning.

In the morning I push past the bottles to get to the yoghurt – the grasshoppers are soporific with the cold and barely twitch an antenna as the bottles get jiggled around. I have no sympathy being cranky with interrupted sleep.

For those of you who recognise the jazz reference (even though the title used on this clip is a little out of whack):

And another jazz favourite:

It was that all that, but as well I found myself moved to tears when the story shifted to the post-Tsunami Andaman Islands.  Reynolds had had his architect licence revoked in the US due to his unconventional buildings. But in the Andamans his low cost, earth centric, sustainable housing was just what was needed.

Now of course the edit of any DVD is aimed at maximum impact, and I have no doubt that a lot of not-so-nice story was left out that did not suit the theme of “warrior man against machine” that underpinned the story.  But nevertheless what an amazing story it is.

Here at Yuendumu our streets are a rich source of plastic bottles and aluminium drink cans. The wind blows constantly, along with willy willys, and picks up all such materials and deposits them against fence lines and  in people’s yards. The amount of energy that has gone into making the containers and transporting them to Yuendumu is breathtaking.  There is no recycling – its just too hard to get the recycled stuff back down to Alice, so it just ends up as landfill or street rubbish.

So the question is – if I care about this waste, how do I change my thinking to start recycling these materials right on site and into structures? We need for example proper fences, not just our bits and pieces of wire strung together.  We could make a fence out of aluminium cans using Reynold’s ideas for this. But it’s hard – we have specialised our skills and knowledge so much in a westernised society that whatever needs to be done with a house (other than housework) we need to bring in an outsider to do the work. I suppose it has created an interdependent society enabling jobs and an education/training system aimed at fitting people for jobs that has helped spread wealth around.

But out here in the desert where tradespeople are in short supply, if available at all, then the limits of such a system are quickly reached. I am immensely grateful for the engineering and technical skills that Trevor brings to our everyday life, but mostly I am grateful for the attitude of independence that he carries with it.

Consider for example what it must have been like prior to settlement of Aboriginal people in Yuendumu. If a spear broke no-one would think about going to another place and finding someone who could fix it. You had to have the skills yourself to fix the tools that you needed to survive.  Yuendumu still needs that “way of being” but the westernised constructs of living in a town overarch the settlement and so things fall apart without people having the skills to fix them. And worse the workmanship by outsiders is often shoddy, and people here don’t have the knowledge to pull up tradesman on the work that has been done, and/or local people are not employed on the jobs to bring their local knowledge onto the job. For example a great deal of money was put not so long ago into building a community centre in one of the Tanami communities.  Timber was used for vital parts of the building. The building is now falling down because termites have eaten into it.  Sheer stupidity.

I think my teariness was over all that has been lost as people in towns and cities have been removed more and more from the technologies of basic shelter and food supplies. Whilst I love the city, and all of the amazing technologies that have come from the growth of the city, at the core something has been lost.  The Garbage Warrior DVD touched that loss as well as showing a way forward to use the detritus of the city for the building of beautiful structures.

While the edges of The Intervention are being played with by Minister Macklin, mainly by discriminating against welfare benefits recipients generally,  rather than just against welfare benefit recipients in remote Aboriginal communities so that it can be argued that income management is not racially discriminatory, remote communities are being visited by the Remote Services Delivery team.

(As an aside we were privileged at the Remote Services Delivery meeting to be given an explanation by a government representative about the difference between late 2007 and early 2010 – in late 2007 it was called The Intervention, now it is called the NT Emergency Response).

One of the goals of the Remote Service Delivery (RSD) program is to develop Local Implementation Plans (LIPs).  As usual there are lots of acronyms when government introduces new programs. The areas that need to be developed are already worked out by government and the role of local people is to say how they want government services delivered within these parameters.  Apparently this means that the LIPs will be about grass roots involvement and the plans being developed at a grass roots level.   More and more Orwell’s 1984 world is played out in NT Aboriginal communities, but the public servants and consultants delivering these new programs with evangelistic zeal, say no no, this is going to be about local involvement. The divide is fundamental and all the power belongs with government.  The fear is palpable – if we don’t get involved we will miss out, our children will suffer, this is the only way to get what we need.

And so the meeting moved to nominating people who would be on the LIP – I resist the temptation to pun about this being LIP service. Twelve would be a good number says the RSD spokesperson.  It should represent the skin groups says a senior Aboriginal woman – that will mean 16 at least. The traditional owners need to be on it (noting that the main TO was not at the meeting – but as it transpires turns up at the end of the meeting because he hadn’t been told the meeting was on).  And what about that senior person says another – that person is really important for this group.

At the end there were 36 names on the board representing key families, skin groups and TOs.  This is the kind of democratic model that sits under Warlpiri communities like Yuendumu, and one that works on consensus rather than majority rule or small groups of “decision makers”.  Another fundamental divide between whitefella ways and Aboriginal ways.

And so the week rolled on, with a Local Advisory Board meeting (a local advisory group for the Central Desert Shire) where only three recommendations are permitted per meeting to be sent up to the Shire Council itself.

Friday night never looked so good as a way of vegging out watching ABC Friday night crime.

We shared soup, homemade spring rolls, Chinese spiced pork. a beautiful prawn salad and a huge watermelon. And of course we talked about life and gardens and chickens and ducks as we shared this lovely meal.

Magali comes from the Auvergne in France and Maria from Vietnam.  Both grew up in a village and agricultural environment.  Trevor grew up in the same kind of environment. So there was lots of talk about the ways that food was prepared on special occasions with family coming together to do all the things that needed for a feast – plucking ducks and chickens, slaughtering and butchering pigs, making special meats using fermentation methods and lots more.

Magali’s niece in France is now running an organic chicken and goose farm where all the animals are free range, and when slaughtered are hand plucked.  This got us onto talking about howthe whole animal was used, including the feathers and down. Magali remembers having a feather mattress and how all the children in the family complained in summer because the bed was so hot, but in winter there was no better place to be. She also remembered that the main meal was lunch and there would be a soup or cassoulet always that was kept going. Her mother would put the soup “to bed” by placing it in the midst of a feather mattress, where it would never lose it’s temperature, and be ready for the next day’s additions to it.

Trevor and Maria shared stories about the ways in which meats were prepared using rice that would ferment and pickle the meat.  And about the markets were meat produce was bought live. Maria said how she  got homesick at the thought of how meat was carefully wrapped in rice and banana leaves and kept for a couple of weeks in anticipation of family coming to be together for Chinese New Year. Each member of the family would be given a slice of the meat to take home, and her sister who could never wait would always peak at the meat and just have a little taste to make sure it was all going OK.

These were the days before refrigeration when people had to be creative to make sure things lasted. And when food couldn’t be sent thousands of kilometres without rotting.

Refrigerators, washing machines, electric stoves – I’m not going to complain especially if a dishwasher is thrown in to – they’ve made it possible for me to do things other than be a home keeper. At the same time the separation of people from “straight from the ground” or “straight from the animal” food has been profound. Is it too much to link these changes directly to climate change? Don’t know, and I am not sure that I want a life that involves a lot of chicken feather plucking, but I suppose part of the issue is that life in the “old days” was based on having extended family with you living in family compounds with grandparents, parents, children, grandchildren, where work would be shared.

These things aren’t anymore and personally I blame refrigeration.

Yuendumu is a prescribed community in the Northern Territory. This means we are subject to the NT Emergency Response legislation, otherwise called The Intervention. There is a lot to say about this in terms of the reach of the legislation into aspects of daily life in an Aboriginal community.  Things like compulsory income management, compulsory leases of Aboriginal land, banning of alcohol and X rated materials. And the implementation of Government Business Managers (GBMs) who live in the community, a role that we have never really understood.

Yuendumu has been a dry community, as instigated by the community, for over 20 years.  Policing has always been an issue though and the community has found it hard to battle the grog-runners. The Intervention with the increased policing has been promoted as a way of reducing grog-running. But it has been galling for the community to be classified as having alcohol problems when its attempts to thwart the grog-runners were not backed up by adequate policing for over 20 years.

Today in the midst of all this we had a good laugh. Our GBM is going on an alcohol fast for the month of February  – Feb Fast. He sent around an email to all and sundry in Yuendumu asking to be sponsored for this for charity.

Now as far as we understand it, just living in a prescribed community means that you are in an alcohol free zone no matter what. So we all laughed, in a kind of sad way.

Getting older

And one more final laugh from a friend’s email. Subject line – How True. Here’s the email.

CONGRATULATIONS TO ALL MY FRIENDS WHO WERE BORN IN THE

1930’s 1940’s, 50’s, 60’s and early 70’s !


First, we survived being born to mothers who smoked and/or drank while they carried us and lived in houses made of asbestos.
They took aspirin, ate blue cheese, raw egg products, loads of bacon and processed meat, tuna from a can, and didn’t get tested for diabetes or cervical cancer.

Then after that trauma, our baby cots were covered with bright coloured lead-based paints.

We had no childproof lids on medicine bottles, doors or cabinets and when we rode our bikes, we had no helmets or shoes, not to mention, the risks we took hitchhiking.

As children, we would ride in cars with no seat belts or air bags.


We drank water from the garden hose and NOT from a bottle..

Take away food was limited to fish and chips, no pizza shops, McDonalds , KFC, Subway or Nandos.

Even though all the shops closed at 6.00pm and didn’t open on the weekends, somehow we didn’t starve to death!


We shared one soft drink with four friends, from one bottle and NO ONE actually died from this.

We could collect old drink bottles and cash them in at the corner store and buy  Toffees, Gobstoppers, Bubble Gum and some bangers to blow up frogs with.
We ate cupcakes, white bread and real butter and drank soft drinks with sugar in it, but we weren’t overweight because……

WE WERE ALWAYS OUTSIDE PLAYING!!

We would leave home in the morning and play all day, as long as we were back when the streetlights came on.

No one was able to reach us all day. And we were O.K.

We would spend hours building our go-carts out of old prams and then ride down the hill, only to find out we forgot the brakes. We built tree houses and dens and played in river beds with matchbox cars.

We did not have Playstations, Nintendo Wii , X-boxes, no video games at all, no 999 channels on SKY ,
No video/DVD  films,
No mobile phones, no personal computers, no Internet or Internet chat rooms……….WE HAD FRIENDS and we went outside and found them!

We fell out of trees, got cut, broke bones and teeth and there were no
Lawsuits from these accidents.

Only girls had pierced ears!

We ate worms and mud pies made from dirt, and the worms did not live in us forever.

You could only buy Easter Eggs and Hot Cross Buns at Easter time…

We were given air guns and catapults for our 10th birthdays,

We rode bikes or walked to a friend’s house and knocked on the door or rang the bell, or just yelled for them!

Mum didn’t have to go to work to help dad make ends meet!

RUGBY and CRICKET had tryouts and not everyone made the team. Those who didn’t had to learn to deal with disappointment. Imagine that!! Getting into the team was based on
MERIT

Our teachers used to hit us with canes and gym shoes and bully’s always ruled the playground at school.

The idea of a parent bailing us out if we broke the law was unheard of.
They actually sided with the law!

Our parents didn’t invent stupid names for their kids like ‘Kiora’ and ‘Blade’ and ‘Ridge’ and ‘Vanilla’

We had freedom, failure, success and responsibility, and we learned HOW TO
DEAL WITH IT ALL !

And YOU are one of them!
CONGRATULATIONS!

You might want to share this with others who have had the luck to grow up as kids, before the lawyers and the government regulated our lives for our own good.

PS -The big type is because your eyes are not too good at your age anymore
>:

We’ve got this problem (as far as noise is concerned)  that we live next to the Yuendumu Old People’s Place who provide a range of services including palliative care. We don’t want to have a rooster waking up the neighbours when the people staying there need rest and quiet.

So we’ve got this bantam hen that goes broody at the drop of a hat and having read all the chicken books and web articles we could find, we decided to get fertilised eggs from an Alice Springs person Trevor knows.

It’s not that easy – for one thing our trips to Alice are infrequent and generally unplanned so we didn’t have a nesting box ready for the eggs and the bantam. The hen house where the normal nesting boxes are gets really really hot in our area and having the bantam in there all day has already put her at risk a few times before when she has been in her broody state.

So Trevor made up a makeshift box after work with his usual care and bits and peices he has found at the tip and it looked really great. We put it in the  run on a couple of pieces of steel to keep it off the ground a bit and under the bit of the roof to make it relatively cool.

Next get the bantam out of the hen house where she was coincidentally in her broody mode on a nest and trying to hatch 2 unfertilised eggs. Fortunately chickens are really easy to manage at night so she didn’t protest too much. We stuck her on the nest and put the fertilised eggs in around her as best we could.

She sort of looked OK for a few minutes and then emboldened by the beam of light from Trevor’s head lamp she leaped out. I grabbed her and stuck her back in and Trevor got some fence grating and put it up against the entrance.

I dreamed that night of little chickens. But next morning she was no longer broody and the eggs were abandoned.

Consultations with the local chicken expert revealed that we should have put her in the nesting box with the eggs she had already warmed up. And then gradually introduce the new eggs.

So next time that’s what we are going to try. But I can’t help but think a rooster might be a better bet. Or failing that I’m on eBay bidding for an egg incubator.

A bit later the same night ….

Trevor’s got his old yoghurt maker out and set up an incubator. This is a great site for all sorts of information about artificial hatching - http://chickscope.beckman.uiuc.edu/resources/egg_to_chick/procedures.html

POSTSCRIPT – The yoghurt maker overheated and the eggs are now history. Back to the drawing board.