I woke up this morning in my wonderful Pool Manager’s complex. In all the remote communties (Indigenous or non-Indigenous) I’ve been to, Pool Manager’s seem to be the most important people going around. They are the ones that control what’s going on. They control whether the young people turn up to school (No School, No Pool). They also seem to be the hardest job positions to fill as every where I go they are vacant.

First stop this morning, was checking out the community court. Every month a Magistrate flies to the Tiwi islands to hold a Community Court. The Magistrate then spends a few hours in each of the Tiwi communities. I was fortunate enough to be invited to witness the Nguiu Community Court.

The Community Court is held around a rectangular table with the magistrate at one end and the defendant on the side of the table. Also around the table is the defendant’s lawyer, as well as the community’s Council of Elders. Before any verdict and sentence is reached by the Magistrate, he would consult the Council of Elders for the Community. I was told that the biggest law and order issues in the communities concern drugs and alcohol.

After this, I was invited down to the local school to talk with their students. It was all a bit crazy, as I think all the students were over the moon at not having to do something like maths. As I was leaving the school, I saw the teacher - who’s class I was leaving - rush out to the Principal’s office across the way and yell at him - “come help me, they are going BANANA’S.” whoops! hehehe.

In between going banana’s, they told me heaps about themselves and their place. They told me how important hunting was to them, and how their favourite times were spent hunting pig, snake, dugong, turtle, wallaby, and nearly any other animal you can think of. Their favourite delicacy was carpet snake.

The most important things to these young people we their family, their culture and (of course) footy. It was intersting how often I heard in the Tiwi’s that their culture was important. In the Community Court, out on the footy field last night, today in the schools - it was almost as if they had had the importance of ‘their culture’ drilled into them.

It was an interesting thing for these young people to say over and over again. I thought to myself, whether my culture was important to me. And (after thinking for a long time what was actually involved in my culture) I realised that my culture wasn’t the most important thing to me in the world, largely because I live in a place (Perth) which reinforces my culture. But in a place like the Tiwi’s, which in so many ways is different to places in mainland Australia, the important of your culture - that is a place where you feel you fit - must increase.

On culture - what was so exciting in the classrooms was that the young people were really keen to show parts of their culture off to me. On several occasions the young people broke out into spontaneous crocodile and shark dances with the whole class clapping. It was hard not to compare these to the dances that they were doing in the hangar last night. A bit different to say the least.

I also found out that a lot of these young people had down much travel. Often, much more than many of my own mates. Some had been right around Australia on footy trips.

After meeting and chatting with hundreds of young people, and completely exhausting my footy ability, I left Tiwi Islands on the 5pm plane. This time, in a four-seater plane I got to sit where the co-pilot sits. cool!

By 6pm I had landed in Darwin and was driving to meet the Darwin Youth Advisory Group (108Kb pdf) and members of the Grind Youth Newspaper. These guys were all legends! Grind is a newspaper written, edited and created by people under the age of 20. It has a distribution of 3000 and is released every three months. It is a really cool magazine and quite incredibe to think of all the logistics involved.

It was a bit weird meeting these guys, as they were SO thankful that I had come to visit them. They kept saying over and over again “thankyou for coming to Darwin - because no one ever comes here to listen to us.” I thought that was a pretty sad state of affairs if these guys - the young people that do have the opportunity to voice their views to decision-makers - didn’t think they were being listened to.

This was the biggest thing to come out of meeting these guys. They love Darwin, because it’s such a beautiful place to live (and it really is!), but the down side is that many of the people that these guys see as important - like bands, politicians, and footy teams - simply never come up here. They were sick of hearing about bands coming to Australia, but not coming to Darwin (and as a young lad from Perth - I have to agree). It’s a big deal for them. They said that they almost felt not part of the rest of Australia.

Another interesting thing that they mentioned (both girls and fellas) was that they absolutely loathed American sailors coming to town. They felt very unsafe - both physically and sexually - with them around. I asked them -because I had no idea myself - what they could do about voicing their concerns to people about their safety. Their answer was that no one would listed to them - Darwin young people - over the pull of the US Government, even if it did involve their safety. Pretty interesting…