Life in Poatina – episode 4 Uluru strikes back

Some may know that recently (by standards here anyway) that I have moved out of 20 King Street – although any mail gets forwarded to my pigeon hole anyway so you can make up the most bizarre address you like. There wont be any prizes for strange addresses but it will make me laugh so please go ahead – one of Tim’s letters the other day was addressed to ‘Stud Street’ as I recall.
The moving story and pictures can be found on my blog, it was a traumatic time but much has changed since then – like the fitting of electrical cables so that we have power and hot water. Hurrah.
Anyway my new address is: 3 Possum Lodge, [postcode obscured for security reasons – e-mail me to find out] Australia
Technically it’s actually ‘3 Wilmot Street’ but I renamed it Possum Lodge and it seems to have stuck.

2 weeks ago now I did in fact embark upon that which is known as: The Pilgrimage to Uluru – or Ayre’s rock for anyone not in the know that the name got changed.
Uluru (henceforth the shortening of ‘The Pilgrimage to…’ ) is a 10 day 24 hour youthwork marathon. Some describe it as life changing, many fusion people say it is profound and challenging. This I have discovered is often a code for ‘flipping hard work’, and sometimes ‘hell’. True to form Uluru was all of the above and a little more.

Sunday (16th) starts with us traveling down to Hobart to go to an Easter march and to meet our small group for the trip – 3 Tasmanian boys and a dude from Sudan – before going to the airport and flying to what people affectionately call: real Australia. For me it also means doing some filming for a tv mini series that ******* are producing. Scary you might say because if I stuff it up they’ll have to wait a year to try and get the footage again. Or stage a fake Easter.
A short plane trip to Melbourne then it’s on to a coach to travel to our first stopping point – a place called Stawell. Stawell is known for its tendency to try and be the coldest place on earth. My small group cope admirably until they get tired, as 13 year olds do, and then they get cranky. We get to bed quite late (midnight), get up quite early (6 ish as I recall) to observe the next ice age happening around us.
Breakfast, norms, showers (I have no towel, so I improvise and sacrifice my tea towel for the sake of having clean hair) and soon enough we’re onto the coach again. This will become an easy routine until one day we spend almost 14 hours without killing each other on said coach. A series of days follow where we reflect, eat, travel, pitch tents, sleep underground, go ‘noodling’, get less and less sleep, do bus aerobics, watch landscape change from green countryside stuff into desert, do the best we can to cope and eventually arrive at Uluru – the Uluru, the whopping great big rock I mean. Slowly those around me become more and more proud of the fact that they’re Australian, and in general become more and more Australian. I can only begin to describe what this does to me as an English person stuck inside a moving metal box with 69 others and so I wont. It is at least an interesting experience.

3 days at Uluru pass too quickly and we only spend really one morning at the rock – which is more impressive and more beautiful than even I had imagined. Then it’s back through the desert - writing a few songs along the way – until we reach a place called Camp Koorong where we meet an Aboriginal elder dude called Uncle Tom and get taught to basket weave. This is probably the most amazing part of the trip because we actually get to connect with someone who has these impressive stories and culture to share with us.

What’s the real point I hear you ask? Well I guess that seeing 85 kids on the next breakout (a story in and of itself as all breakouts seem to be) some of whom became Christians, most of whom have now heard about God (unless they were trying really hard not to listen), some of whom have changed destructive behaviours, opened up more…..I mean how do you measure internal change anyway? I look the same but I’ve changed on the inside. The young people look the same but they’ve been on a week long trip – some for the first time away from home or the state – to see some of who they are, learn values and be loved as best we knew how for 10 days. If that isn’t worth it then what is really?
And Zac says that episode 4 should be: a new hope crushed. He’s probably right.