Countless Brilliant Fragments

Martin Flanagan, the former Melbourne Age’s Sports Writer, visited Yuendumu in 1987. After a return visit in 2009 Martin wrote an article which included:

Three of the most momentous days of my life occurred in 1987 when I attended a football carnival at Yuendumu on the Warlpiri tribal lands north-west of Alice Springs. In three days, the glass tower of my preconceptions about Aboriginal Australia was shattered. I could tell a dozen stories as to why, each as important as the last…And I went to a party where a traditional man with initiation scars all down his chest played the electric guitar like Jimi Hendrix and a white geologist who lived in Yuendumu accompanied him like a jazzman on a trumpet. In that room, that night, Aboriginal people and white people mingled in a spirit of fraternal respect. Walking back to the car I was sleeping in, I thought there has to be some way of taking that spirit to the rest of Australia.

The guitarist was Micah Jampijinpa Hudson, and I was the trumpet player. The occasion was my 44th birthday party.

In Martin Flanagan’s original 1987 article, the glass tower of his preconceptions about Aboriginal Australia, had been shattered into countless brilliant fragments.

Black Fella/White Fella....

Neil Murray and George Rrurrampu 1985

The Yurntumu-wardingki, the people of Yuendumu, refer to Aborigines as Yapa and to whitefellas as Kardiya.

Yapa and Kardiya share a common humanity. We are more alike than we are different. Yet it is the differences between us, this diversity, that our Australian nation ought to be celebrating. We sometimes brag about our multiculturalism but invariably omit the First Australians and their descendants from this vision of an inclusive and fair society.

This story was initially sub-titled ‘Glimpses across a cross cultural gulf’.’ Too pretentious to my liking, so I dropped it.

Reading Alexis Wright’s essay ‘What Happens When You Tell Somebody Else’s Story’, (Meanjin Quarterly, Summer 2016) has reinforced my awareness of the minefield that is cross-cultural writing. So let me make it clear at the outset, that this is a story told by a Kardiya; perish the thought I’d claim it to be otherwise. Any occasional pearl of wisdom in this story is a Kardiya pearl, albeit one formed inside a Yapa oyster shell.

Yuendumu - the place

Yuendumu lies at the southern edge of the Tanami Desert, 293 km northwest of Alice Springs. The Tanami is not a barren desert. Even the northern half has ground cover, just mostly no trees. Here in the southern part we have plenty of trees, mulga forests, open country with bloodwoods, dogwoods, ghost gums, and many acacias, useful trees with edible seeds, good wood for cooking and keeping warm and excellent wood for boomerangs, spears, clapsticks and anything else you would need for a happy hunting life.

Central Australia is classified as semi-arid, with an average annual rainfall of 200 to 250 mm. This average is misleading and rather meaningless, in that some years there is virtually no rain and sometimes, with almost no warning, there is a deluge. It is hot in summer, over 40°C most days in mid-Summer, but the evenings and nights are pleasant and cool. Night time is socialising time for many Warlpiri. The heat of day is for sleeping. In winter the days are perfect, 25°C to 35°C most days, and although nights are cold, down to zero, by 8:00 a.m. short sleeves and sandals are all you need. The winter evenings are too cold unless you have a good fire and even then, you have to rotate yourself, like a rotisserie chicken.

Housing for Kardiya was luxury compared to mining camps, or Darwin with only fans and no air cooler. We have always had ‘swampies’, evaporative coolers which work very well in the dry heat and we have few muggy days. Even on the hottest days, under some shady trees there is always a little breeze. A smouldering fire, a little upwind, disperses the flies.

When I was an active radio amateur operator I was forever being told that in Japan it was very crowdy (cloudy), to which I would triumphantly respond with "koko-ni itenkidesu", (here it is good weather).

There is another season, "karapurda" when the gusty, dusty west winds come to waken up the goannas from their hibernating slumber. It’s spring, birds are nesting, emu chicks break out of their eggs and follow their fathers in a line. In a wet year masses of wild flowers, and even in a dry year there are always some flowers.

When looking through photo albums, colour photos from Yuendumu and Central Australia instantly stand out. They are so much brighter and the stark vibrant colours make elsewhere look grey and dull. The usually clear skies are so blue that we’ve even had a visiting scientist who studied and measured the blueness. The rusty red ground and rocky hills glow at sunrise and just before sunset.

Many Kardiya fall in love with the desert and keep coming back every few years. Yapa are overjoyed to see them again. They are soul mates because they share a love of Warlpiri country.

The climate here is changing, fewer zero nights, longer stretches of over 40°C and more muggy days, but I would still say this is paradise.

Aerial photo- Yuendumu 1970s

Yuendumu - the people

Yuendumu was established as a postwar ration depot in 1946 by the Native Affairs Branch of the Australian Government’s Department of the Interior. Yuendumu has a shifting population of around 800 to 1,000 predominantly Warlpiri people whose mother tongue is the Warlpiri language.

When destiny steered my wife Wendy, our children and me towards Yuendumu, we didn’t have a clue what to expect. What we found is the most friendly, generous, openhearted, dignified, nonjudgmental, interesting, welcoming people we are ever likely to meet. This is despite, as we were to learn, that less than half a century earlier and within living memory, they had been subjected to the random killings of the Coniston massacre.

The Warlpiri were among the last freely roaming Aboriginal tribes in Australia, some of the last to be dispossessed of their lands, to be subjected to a foreign invasion, and be systematically subjugated and herded like cattle onto missions and settlements.

I’ve come across Kardiya who seem to think all aborigines look the same and are the same. Nothing could be further from the truth. From early childhood Yapa are allowed to be themselves, however different. There is no pressure on them to conform to standards. They have very distinct individual facial features, expressions and ways of walking.

I’ve also heard it said that people who immerse themselves in another culture, are dissatisfied with their own culture. In fact we find that Warlpiri culture has made us more aware and appreciative of our European heritage. Customs and habits we took for granted, almost didn’t notice, or thought were unnesessary, now appear as essentials of our own culture, quite precious and without which we would be lost sheep. We need some everyday rituals, protocols, morals, things to revere, some rules for interpersonal relations, and some celebrations.

The Warlpiri have so much to teach us. There is much we can learn about ourselves by looking into the mirror they hold up to us. And they have a great sense of humour. Hardly a day goes by where we don’t share a laugh.

Story time

(photo @Bunbadgee)

My memory diamonds

Elke herinnering werd een diamant en zij sleep er telkens nieuwe kanten aan. (Every memory became a diamond and forever more she polished new facets onto them.)

A quote my sister found in a boring since discarded old Dutch book.

Telling my Yuendumu story is the least I could do to express my gratitude to the Warlpiri people of Yuendumu, who have tolerated and welcomed us in their midst, thereby greatly enriching our lives.

But I have never kept a diary, so these stories are from my treasure trove of memory-diamonds. Inevitably, when experience is put into words some of these diamonds are more polished than others and retelling always adds new facets. My family and friends have heard some of these stories many times. But I have been told I tell them well!

It was widely assumed that my wife Wendy and I would ‘go down South’ when we retired. That is what Kardiya do. They go ‘back home’. That is what we thought we’d do, but after nearly half a century living in Yuendumu, home is here and we are staying.

Often people would say to me, "You must have seen a lot of changes, you should write a book". Which is what I’m setting out to do but, as I explore my kaleidoscopic memory, it soon becomes apparent to me, that seemingly irrelevant events that happened far away and long ago, and which moulded me and shaped my way of seeing, have a place in my Yuendumu story. I don’t quite know where to begin, so I ask you to stick with me as we take this corrugated and potholed road from 1973 to 2021. Yuendumu is a very special place I’d like to show you, so switch off your TV, computer and mobile phone, pull up a chair at my dinner table or sit down at my campfire, join my friends, as, like the Ancient Mariner, I hold you with my glittering eye and tell you my tale of Yuendumu.

The muster

There are not many, if any, people alive today who clearly remember as far back as 1946, when Yuendumu settlement was first established. Only snippets of Yuendumu’s early days can be garnered from what people have experienced or been told. Searching the academic literature and written memoirs and official records yields a confused and at times somewhat contradictory picture, which I will not even attempt to comprehensively unravel. What can be fairly stated however, is that the limited availability of water resources and the competition for such from the pastoral industry, played a pivotal role in the destiny of the Warlpiri people.

Post-war, the authorities embarked on what can best be described as a mustering exercise. Yapa having been subjugated by the whims and terror of colonial power could be pushed from pillar to post with ne’er a whimper, just like cattle or sheep. On the other hand much movement of Warlpiri people in the early days of contact had been prompted by bad seasons and other factors, and was driven by Yapa initiative and resourcefulness rather than by Kardiya coercion. By the time Yuendumu Settlement was started, the largest concentration of Warlpiri people was at the wolfram mine near Old Mount Doreen homestead, fifty-five kilometres north west of Yuendumu. †Uni Nampijinpa told Wendy that she and her family had been tricked onto a truck and, instead of going hunting, as promised, they were hijacked to Yuendumu and subsequently put to work on clearing the airstrip, no ifs no buts.

There are stories about people being sent out like bell cows, to persuade other distantly scattered groups to return with them to the settlement. For example one group is known to have been brought in from distant Ethel Creek, west and well outside of Mt. Doreen Pastoral Lease. The Yapa man who told us this story felt that †Garden Jack Japanangka, the man who had taken the Kardiya out to find this group, ought to be recognised as playing an important part in the history of Yuendumu. Why there was this imperative to gather these isolated small groups who were minding their own business on land no one else wanted, was a bit of a mystery to me until †Harry Jakamarra Nelson told me it was the missionaries who were behind this herding. Of course! They were shepherds gathering their flock, the biblical parable of the lost sheep in action. There are Yapa who think this was a good thing and perhaps it was. It wasn’t so good for the bilbies, burrowing bettongs and bandicoots which, without fire management of their habitat, were doomed, roasted in their burrows to extinction.

In 1946 a small settlement at Rock Hill Bore (Wakurlpa), ten kilometres north of Yurntumu, very quickly grew and was moved to present day Yuendumu. By the end of 1946, officially there were approximately 400 Yapa at Yuendumu Native Settlement. Further movement occurred prompted by the successful drilling of Penhall’s Bore at 4-mile (Ramarra-kujurnu), seven kilometres south of Yuendumu. At some stage there was a group camping at White Point Bore (Kanaji), west of 4-mile, just north of the present day bore field, which supplies Yuendumu with water. No clear picture emerges about these first years of Yuendumu settlement, insufficient water and family disputes being the official reasons given for these meanderings. In 1952, an area of 850 square miles (over 2,000 square kilometres), was officially declared as the Yuendumu Aboriginal Reserve.

By 1948 a Native Reserve had been declared at Catfish Block, approx. 600 km north of Yuendumu. The name, Hooker Creek, was soon adopted which years later was changed to Lajamanu. That same year it had become abundantly clear that Yuendumu could not sustain its growing population and an initial group of twenty people were trucked to this new paddock, and placed on agistment. In 1952, another 150 or so people were trucked to Hooker Creek from Yuendumu. Warlpiri people from other places such as The Granites and Warrabri augmented the Hooker Creek population. That Hooker Creek was not on Warlpiri land doesn’t seem to have worried the possibly unaware authorities. British based Vestey Brothers had failed to renew their pastoral lease on the block and water had been found in a bore and that is all that mattered as far as they were concerned.

It is interesting to note that the indicated population figures for Hooker Creek fall short of the number of people recorded as having been trucked there. In 1954 anthropologist M. J. Meggitt in his 1962 book ‘Desert People’ estimated the number of Warlpiri people at Hooker Creek to be 165.

It is well known in Yuendumu, that whole families had walked back from Hooker Creek to Yuendumu. To put the approx. 600 km walking distance into perspective, this is twice the distance from the top to the bottom of the Netherlands, my country of birth, where you would never die of thirst. I’ve even heard that some families walked back twice.

On Mt. Doreen cattle-station in the summer of 1955, Meggitt saw a group of men, women and children en route to Yuendumu, who had walked from Hooker Creek in what he called ‘appalling heat’. Ellen Kettle, who had been Yuendumu’s first Kardiya nurse, mentioned in her 1967 book ‘Gone Bush’ that in 1952 ‘Willie’ with his two wives and two babies had walked from Hooker Creek. Their babies had perished on the way and so had their dogs. This family was †Little Willie Japanangka and his wives †Lorna and †Jorna Napurrurla Williams who were fifteen and sixteen years old at the time of the tragedy. Tommy Jangala Watson told me of three Japanangka men and their families, who had walked back from Lajamanu. These were †Pompy, †Barney and the very same aforementioned †Little Willie. Barney famously returned with his wife on horseback.

This Hooker Creek exodus seems to have embarrassed the officials as there appear to be no official records of it. The number of returnees was significant. They were middle aged when we arrived in Yuendumu, and have mostly been written out of history. It is worth mentioning that the officials perceived these exiles as having voluntarily mounted the trucks that transported them to Hooker Creek. No coercion had been applied when docile Yapa had, like lambs to the slaughter, and with little if any objection, let themselves be loaded onto trucks. I suspect that, at least in part, this subservient obedience was a result of vestigial fear resulting from the Coniston killings, which had taken place a mere two decades earlier and were still fresh in the communal memory. Yet many Yapa embarked on an arduous and perilous return journey on foot.

Tells you something about cross cultural communication at the time, let alone the power imbalance.

Then the heav’n espie…

In 1973, Central Pacific Minerals N.L.(CPM), the company for which I’d been working in the Darwin/Pine Creek region, transferred me to their Alice Springs office. CPM was exploring for uranium in the Ngalia Basin. On a map I spotted Yuendumu on the northern margin of the Ngalia Basin, so I rang the Department of Education to ask if there was a school in ‘Yuwen-doo-moo’ which our eldest son, Donovan who had just turned five, would be able to attend. I was told that Don would only be allowed to attend Yuendumu school if he lived there, but that there was no housing available except for community staff. Wendy had qualified as a teacher during our Canadian stint so I asked if there were any vacant teaching positions in Yuendumu. The fellow at the other end, as much as jumped through the phone. Yuendumu had a very high turnover of Kardiya teachers and had just lost a few. It was thus that Wendy got a job at Yuendumu School.

CPM was one of only a few mineral exploration companies that employed Yapa. Because of this many of CPM’s Kardiya staff and contractors left the region with a greater respect for Warlpiri people and their culture. Central Pacific Minerals is known by those Yapa who can remember as ‘Syphic’. Sounds more like a disease than a mineral exploration company. CPM no longer exists. CPM appointed †Murray Japangardi Wood as my offsider. Murray became a friend and mentor. He was my first Warlpiri teacher. As we ranged over the Ngalia Basin as a two man exploration team, we had a lot of laughs whilst Murray gradually taught me bits of the Warlpiri language and opened my eyes and gave me my first insights into the Warlpiri parallel universe that was to captivate me.

A man that looks on glasse, On it may stay his eye;

Or if he pleaseth, through it passe, And then the heav’n espie…

The Elixir-George Herbert (1633)

†Paddy Japanangka Doolan was another of CPM’s Yapa employees. Paddy and I were sitting on a rocky outcrop near CPM’s exploration camp at Wanipi. Paddy told me that the majestic wapurnungku, the ghost gum tree at the camp, is a fellow who is spying on a group of women who are grinding seeds in a green grassy enclosure below the Wanipi escarpment. These women are ‘wrong skin’ and thus forbidden for the Peeping Tom who is turned into a bird and has to fly away. For a few brief seconds in my mind the escarpment ceased to be the Vaughan Springs Quartzite and at its base a group of women were grinding grass seeds. Then Paddy said something I’ll never forget. Pointing at the ghost gum he said: ‘’Him still there". Perving for eternity.

It was the first instance in which the timelessness of the dreamtime, the Jukurrpa, was made evident to me. The ‘dreamtime’ or ‘dreaming’ are highly inadequate translations of Jukurrpa. To Warlpiri people Jukurrpa is everything. Jukurrpa is such a complex multifaceted concept that I can’t begin to explain it nor can I claim to even begin to comprehend it. I can only glimpse in wonder across this crosscultural gulf. The closest English translation of Jukurrpa I can think of is ‘Cosmology’.

Wendy recalls that, when she and some friends visited Wanipi camp, the women and children had dug up a large quantity of janmarda in the grassy enclosure where the dreamtime ladies are forever grinding seeds and being perved on. Cyperus bulbosus, the so-called bush onions, are in serious decline as a result of the introduction and rapid spread of buffel grass. Just as buffel grass is choking the janmarda, so too is Kardiya society choking Yapa culture.

Exotic beings

To see ourselves as others see us is a most salutary gift. Hardly less important is the capacity to see others as they see themselves.

Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception

On 12th May 1873, the explorer Peter Warburton camped near a pointy hill south west of Yuendumu. There was a lunar eclipse that night. Warburton put the hill on his maps and named it Mount Eclipse. In his diary Warburton described the area as uninhabited. Long before Warburton passed through the region the non-inhabitants had named the pointy hill Yikupali. I wonder what the non-inhabitants were thinking as from the next ridge they observed Warburton and his party. Perhaps that is the genesis of a story handed down, about when Kardiya first entered Warlpiri land and Yapa, watching from a distance, thought they were seeing two headed beings, which then mysteriously split in two. These exotic beings were men on camels. Today you can see Yikupali without travelling by camel. It’s on the cover of this book.

Murray Wood taught me the names of the places near where we were looking for radioactivity in the Carboniferous Mount Eclipse Sandstone. Names such as, Pikilyi, Yurnmaji, Warnalyurrpa, Wijinpa, Raparlpa, Palkura, Wanipi, Patumungkala, Kunalka, Warlukurlangu, Kanaji, Kirrirdi, Yipiri, Mijil-parnta, Ramarra-kujurnu, Rukurri, Ngama and indeed, Yikupali!

Some of my first friendships forged in Yuendumu were the result of my having bothered to learn these place names. It was a way of better fitting into Yuendumu society both physically and mentally.

I used air photos in my job with ‘Syphic’. Some Warlpiri men showed an intense interest in these so I laid down an air photo of Yuendumu on the ground and was immediately corrected. One of the men turned the photo around so its orientation matched the orientation of the real landscape the photo depicted. I then laid out air photos in a row due west all the way to Vaughan Springs. Within minutes the men excitedly were reading these photos and naming every little hill and creek. We had no television back then and most of these men had never been up in an aircraft. Drones didn’t yet exist. So much for von Daniken’s ‘Chariots of the Gods?’ Little green men in flying saucers had had nothing to do with the innate Warlpiri skill at air photo interpretation.

Recently I read a very beautiful illustrated book ‘Desert Lake: Art, Science and Stories from Paruku’, edited by Steve Morton, Mandy Martin, Kim Mahood and John Carty- CSIRO Publishing 2013.

Paruku is the Walmajarri name for Lake Gregory in Western Australia. The chapter written by geologist Jim Bowler includes:

When we looked at a satellite image the Mulan people read it in a way that would put most students of geology to shame. The Walmajarri ability to recognise and translate subtle features on the image to real places on the ground revealed a different sense of spatial perceptions to my own

As you can see I’m not alone in being intrigued and enthralled when realising that Yapa have a ‘different sense of spatial perceptions’.

Back in 1964 at Melbourne University I had been one of Jim Bowler’s students who the people of Mulan had, as he put it, ‘put to shame’. I recall Jim telling our small geomorphology class to go and see the film ‘Lawrence of Arabia’, not for its historical significance, but because in it all the desert land-forms on the curriculum are beautifully filmed, including Jim’s beloved crescent dunes, which led him to discover Mungo Man.

Pleased to meet you

Sympathy for the Devil-Jagger/Richards 1968

Let me introduce myself. I was born in occupied Holland in 1943. My full name is Franklin Delano Baarda, I was named after F. D. Roosevelt America’s wartime President. After the war my father got a job with a Dutch bank in Argentina where I spent nine years of my happy childhood. We briefly returned to the Netherlands and two years later, in 1958, we emigrated to Australia. English is my third language. I met my wife Wendy at Melbourne University where I studied geology. We married in 1966 and arrived in Yuendumu in 1973 with our three children.

Wendy came from the Western District of Victoria, which to me was effectively a foreign place. Sensing my anxiety and puzzlement at this different world, a mutual friend gave me Margaret Kiddle’s ‘Men Of Yesterday: A Social History Of The Western District Of Victoria, 1834-1890’ to read. This historical background brought sense to the beliefs and attitudes of the remnants of that squattocratic enclave I was confronted with. It is fair to say that Wendy and I took part in a cultural exchange which changed both our worldviews which would undergo further radical changes after we settled in Yuendumu.

The main reason I had chosen to study geology, apart from liking rocks, is that I saw it as giving me the opportunity to travel to foreign places. I mean this in the nicest of ways when I say that it doesn’t get much more foreign than Yuendumu. We are the longest ever Yuendumu resident Kardiya. Sam McKell comes a close second. Inshallah, hopefully, we’ll be here many more years to come.

When Wendy got her teacher’s job, she and the children were on a Tiwa bus en route to Yuendumu. The Tiwa bus service was one of many pioneering Aboriginal owned and run enterprises which sprang up in a window of opportunity and optimism during the so-called Whitlam Era. Tiwa Buses, through lack of support and other reasons, went the way of most such enterprises, the victim of industrial infanticide. It sank into the morass of historical amnesia. It was ahead of its time. After a long hiatus without buses, we again have a regular bus service. A fleet of government subsidised flash new buses now crisscross Central Australia. It is an entirely Kardiya owned and run enterprise. Yapa have once again been relegated to being clients and customers to be ‘serviced’ (my use of this double entendre is deliberate). But I digress.

It was a drizzly morning when I plonked my family on the bus in Alice Springs, and I was told later that the bus hadn’t arrived in Yuendumu until well after dark. Heavy recent rain meant the bus had to plough through mud to Napperby Station, and then more mud to Mt. Allan Station before finally reaching Yuendumu. Ranches in Australia are known as Stations. Wendy and the kids didn’t get to see much of the landscape, the bus windows were covered in mud. Wendy hadn’t yet learned to orientate herself and by the time the bus arrived at its destination she didn’t have a clue where she was. Sometime later she told me she was glad I’d got her the job. She liked Yuendumu. She still does, and now most definitely knows where east, north, west and south are, at least in and around Yuendumu.

Soon after we arrived in Yuendumu, Wendy’s parents ventured into the outback and paid us a visit. Not long after their arrival, Wendy’s mother answered a knock on the door. My mother-in-law was not expecting to be confronted by a Warlpiri man. Shocked, she waved him away as she exclaimed: "This is Wendy’s house, shoo, shoo!"

E.O., Wendy’s dad, came back from having been shown around the men’s museum and wanted to know what ‘dum-dum’ meant. My father-in-law thought ‘dum-dum’ might have some deep spiritual meaning because †Darby Jampijinpa Ross who had guided him through the museum, had several times solemnly used the phrase ‘Dum-dum in the dreamtime.’ Darby had been speaking Aboriginal English: ‘Sometime in the dreamtime!’

Aboriginal English, contrary to popular belief, is not bad or simple English. It is quite varied over Australia, is complex and subtle and follows grammatical rules. I’ve heard one of our granddaughters switch back and forth seamlessly between Aboriginal English (just for fun) with her friends and Australian Standard English, when talking to us, her grandparents. It was fascinating to listen to and reminded me of when a friend in Montreal had switched seamlessly from French to Quebecois depending on who she was talking to.

Before passing value judgements on Aboriginal English, Kardiya would do well to consider that, whereas nearly all Yapa speak English, almost no Kardiya speak Warlpiri.

I’d gone back to work out bush when Wendy’s mother decided to wait at home, while Wendy, her dad and the kids went to church to hear a visiting missionary from New Guinea. During their absence the power went off. When they came home they found Wendy’s mum had locked herself in and barricaded the doors whilst crouching in fear all alone in the dark. They soon lit a Tilley lamp and candles, but the power stayed off for several days and the meat in the freezer, a whole cut up bullock, defrosted. My mother-in-law felt compelled to save the meat and spent much of her stay making curries and casseroles, which would keep. The power stayed on after that and we were able to enjoy the fruits of her labour long after she had left.

Power outages were quite a common occurrence in those days, especially around breakfast time, but Tony Juttner or †Michael Japangardi Poulson would race to the powerhouse, and usually break the eerie silence by quickly restoring the electricity. Once I’d started working in Yuendumu, whenever the power went out, I would hurry outside and give a few blasts on my trumpet. Soon and out of the blue from the south side of town my reveille style trumpet calls would be echoed. A ritual, I like to think not entirely unlike the call-and-response shouts and hollers of the American slave era cotton fields, evolved between Yuendumu Housing Association manager †Blue Priestley on his bugle and myself on the trumpet. It didn’t take long for observant Yapa children to conclude that it was the trumpet and bugle combination that made the power come back on.

Switching on the power (photo - Neil Murray)

Not a good place to be - 1932

Our interaction with a new environment is very much shaped by the circumstances under which we grew up. I had a very fortunate and varied childhood and upbringing which prepared me to embrace, enjoy and appreciate other cultures and languages.

My grandparents on both sides were Dutch born socialists. My father was born in 1917 in Amsterdam, but grew up in a region known as the Ruhrgebiet, the industrial hub of Germany. My grandmother went to stay with her sister in Amsterdam to await the birth of her son (my dad), after which she returned to her home in Mülheim an der Ruhr where the Ruhr river runs into the Rhine river. Dad went to school in an ever increasingly xenophobic Germany, and learnt much about the nature of bullying, prejudice, elitism, authority, control, fascism, racism, sadism, patriotism, extremism, fanaticism, nationalism, totalitarianism, militarism and just plain mean spirited ignorance. Knowledge he passed on to us, his children. At the age of fifteen in 1932 my dad told my grandparents "This is not a good place for us foreigners to be" and he