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A great little natter with the english owner of the Short Street Gallery in Broome;
That’s what’s nice about Broome. It’s the most multicultural town in Australia. One has to remember it’s 40% indigenous 40% white and 20% Asian. And on the whole we all mix really well. It’s very strange here, because it’s the only place in Australia that didn’t have the whites only policy and if you look at old photos at the 30s, 40s, 50s, you see house parties, there’s black people, white people, Asians all dancing together and that didn’t happen in any other part of Australia, except in Broome. You see the old house parties, you got Mrs Fong, you got the white guy, you got the indigenous guy, all up on the dance floor, and that’s part of the spirit of the town. It’s also a very strange place, Broome. It’s a weird place, like in a good way. It’s like a weird David Lynch film, when you actually live here. Strange things happen. Not evil, just weird stuff you can’t explain. Especially, one of our artists, Spider, he died, he was a senior law man. He died, and his life before was a dog and nobody knew where he was, except Lydia, who said “he don’t come back.” And nobody never found a body, nothing. But in our headquarters where he used to paint we suddenly found a canvas on the floor but with a dogs claw mark through it, after he’d gone. Just to tell us he’d gone. We don’t even know how the canvas got out of the headquarters, but it was on the floor with a dogs claw down it. Weird things like that happen all the time.
It’s like a cowboy town. It’s one of the few frontier towns left, in Australia, to be honest. And because it has that weird history and that long multicultural history, I don’t want to say there wasn’t racism, because there’s always been racism, but they had to depend on each other here, where as down south you were separate. You never see an indigenous person. You know if you had children your children would play with the indigenous, and then kids were bought up playing with indigenous children and it lessens the racism. Of course a lot of people that live here have never even talked to an indigenous person. Of course they hear indigenous people shouting at each other and think they’re all like that.
We had a funny one. We had these 2 rich women from Sydney here, very rich. Lydia came in. She come in with her bare feet and every thing. She goes “rurrrr,rurrr,rurrr.” I said “what’s up?” She said “my skin.” I said “what’s wrong?” She just pulled up her dress and wanted to show me, but she had nothing else on and these women were like “ahhh!” but, I mean she didn’t wear clothes for the first 18 years of her life. Y’know? That did make me laugh. But its lovely to see their art get so much respect now. It’s due, because it’s the oldest, but also the most modern.
A lot of people complain they get too much money, but you go out to their place and they don’t even have fresh water. Like you go to a first world country, it’s disgraceful. In the cities they can’t get in their head; these people don’t wanna be like white people. We’ve always assumed they want to go to school and live like white people, they don’t!
Y’know, they wanna be under the stars and that, but its difficult, they do live in our world now, and the kids do need an education, so it’s very difficult to get the 2 together.
