Sitdown Up North

Ted Egan was born in Melbourne and spent his first sixteen years there, described in his The Paperboy's War. Since 1949 he has lived and worked in the Northern Territory, now based in Alice Springs, performing, writing, singing and recording his own songs, and collecting those of others. He speaks two Aboriginal languages, and often lectures on Aboriginal language and issues. He is an inaugural Life Member of the Australian Stockman's Hall of Fame. In 1991 he was awarded the Order of Australia for 'services to the Aboriginal People, and for an ongoing and significant contribution to Australia's literary heritage through song and verse'. He was at one time a member of the Prime Minister's National Reconciliation Council. Author of numerous books, his last was Justice All Their Own, an account of the clash of cultures when Aboriginals speared a group of Japanese fishermen and a white policeman to death in the early 1930s. Ted Egan, 17, was going to stop over en route to Brazil, but he still lives in the Territory. Sitdown Up North scatters our pre-conceptions of what Territorians are like. Egan's palette goes beyond red ochre and sky blue. There are nut-brown metho-drinking scholars, a white man whose first language is Cantonese, a dusky mother who pursued her 'stolen children' and an ebony-coloured son patiently decorating his revered father's bones in rainbows of intricate design, for starters. A love of song tuned his ear superbly to the vagaries of Territorians' speech. There's the ABC we expect of any good Outback yarn Adventure, Brawls and Close-shaves. But more than that ... The author's work gave him a rare, privileged position from which to watch change coming over the land. His acquaintanceship has been extraordinarily wide and diverse: bums and bureaucrats,…