Is Journalism Worth Dying For__ Final Dispatches - Anna Politkovskaya [186]
“One?”
“One.”
In all the evenings of my visit not even that one Aborigine appeared. On the harbourfront Chinese musicians played passionate Latin American music which flowed out into the tourist shops, and there were heaps of Aboriginal bits and bobs: gift boomerangs, knick-knacks made of kangaroo hide, paintings in traditional colors and motifs on a variety of surfaces. Alongside sat photographs of the artists: smiling Aborigines. So many photographs, so few live Aborigines. One wondered anxiously whether they had all died.
There is a permanent exhibition of Aboriginal art in the National Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney with some 200 works dating from the 1950s to the present day, a period when there were no longer any conquerors, and the descendants of those cruel people were trying to atone for their sins. For all that, the most common subject of Aboriginal painting is conquerors killing Aborigines. Another is the family trees of Aboriginal tribes, certifying their right to their lands. The Aborigines draw all this in a unique manner: everything appears to be viewed from above, and the impression is that there are multiple visual planes. The kangaroos are flattened too, as if they are dead and have been dissected. The same goes for lizards, and koalas, and Aborigines themselves.
If you stand at the harbour waiting for the Aborigine to play his didgeridoo, you will observe a remarkable scene. White-collar workers, business people who work in the city center, stream out into it straight from the ferry at the harbour quays. Here people come to work in the morning, and in the evening go home on the little ferries and steamers. A ferry moors in the morning at Central Quay, and city workers in dark suits and clutching laptops pour from it as if an underground train had just come in. The city is built around the harbour, with people living on the shore and working in the center. The roads around the harbour are narrow and suffer from traffic jams, but nobody has yet devised a way of causing traffic jams in the Pacific Ocean. What’s more, the ferry is cheap, and always arrives on time.
I naturally boarded the ferry, and it set off. The first stop, still in the city center, was the Rocks. That is the name of a district, and is the point where Captain Cook landed. There he stands today, a statue by his own toy-like house, which is built of the typical reddish-beige local sandstone.
The ferry takes us further, to the quays in the dormitory suburbs. Such-and-such Street, only it is a quay. Rose Street, only that is a pier. There are signs like we have at bus stops, and a shelter in case of rain. Around the quays low houses grow into the cliffs, small stores and completely wild countryside. Ten minutes on the morning ferry takes you to New York with its soul-destroying pace of life, but on the way home you can meditate on the water flying by the side of the boat, the crests of the waves, the seagulls, the surf, and you must already be feeling better. Psychotherapists cannot be much in demand in Sydney, where the citizens have the ocean, and the major urban transport arteries lay themselves over it. There is nothing to build, and nothing to constantly maintain. What would Moscow’s Luzhkov find to do if he were Mayor of Sydney?
You can also take the ferry to the theatre, the museum, and the colonial-style Governor’s residence.
The ferry also takes you to the zoo, which in Sydney is called Taronga Zoo. Who or what was Taronga? None of the local people could give me an answer. Well, fair enough. The main thing is, I saw an echidna, a funny little animal, quiet and retiring, with a long nose and quills. Not the world’s most beautiful animal, perhaps, just as not all people are Apollo Belvederes, but why do Russians say damningly, “You are not a mother