The Incidental Nomad

Blinking up into the wan darkness, I realised with mild distaste that this was the first time I had really seen the stars. Lying in the dense form of my swag in the anonymity of the outback, I hadn’t appreciated the encroachment of light on our ability to see. A familiar feeling of surprise mingled with humility crept over me once more.
The last time I’d felt it was after watching an indigenous performance in Cairns. Invited to watch, and guided along the songlines of the tribe, we listened in darkness, blinking at the lit stage. Trying vainly to connect the explained symbolism to the movements of the dance. To understand the significance of names using a perspective so bewildering in its newness to our own.
As the last group of the day, the performers maintained their energy and passion in imparting their story and language to us. Inviting us at the end to take pictures, as they stood in native dress with fierce posed looks of aggression at the camera, for a small fee. That once developed, would illustrate the embarrassed admiration of a tourist cringed alongside the rehearsed theatre of an indigenous pantomime.
To preserve and continue this cultural centre, keeping traditions and stories alive. I felt uneasy about the silently delineated roles we were all complicit in wearing there.
Walking out, we left the auditorium across a bridge to the main reception. Looking down we could see the river turtles that informed the identity of this tribe, and acted as its totem. Clusters of black silhouettes, indistinct in the water, moved softly, unaware of their place in the stories we’d heard.
“What do you call them in your language?”
I turned to the blonde European woman, who’d similarly just left, now peering down at the turtles before peering back at me.
“You mean in English?”
No. That wasn’t what she meant. She had mistaken my South Indian traits, darkened in the sun of an Australian summer, for the traits of the indigenous performers we’d just seen.
Startled into silence as she walked away, I realised I wasn’t offended, but surprised at how easily identity could be grouped outside the darkness of the auditorium. It seems she had taken our delineated roles with her as she left.
Peering up, I preferred the distant light of the Milky Way. Pale yet ceaseless. Showing us the beauty of the stars to inspire story and identity. Heralding a different intensity of light that didn’t seek the extreme clarity that allowed us to see difference with such ease and eagerness.