Friday 28th June
Sailing from Elcho
Island to Cape Stewart was just beautiful.
The turquoise sea was full of mustard coloured clouds of sand; it looked
for all the world as if we were sailing through the sky.
And then Cape
Stewart was very pretty, with a white beach, bush right down to the shore, and ochre
rocks.
But oh deary me
it was NOT a nice anchorage. Shake,
rattle and ROLL was the theme for the night… Poor 2XS danced, willy-nilly, at the
end of the sturdy anchor chain, from dusk till dawn.
This morning we
left at a very civilized hour so that we could try to catch the tide to convey
us to Maningrida. We had both sails up,
and goose-necked them in a very picturesque manner:
Unfortunately there
wasn’t much wind and we ended up having to take all sails down but never mind;
we got here before sunset and have anchored in the big bay, which promises to
be just as rock-and-rolly as Cape Stewart…
Along our
way we got chatting with some nurses working in remote communities. We talked about names, in various far-flung
parts of the world. Pete and I told them how everyone in the islands we
went to had old-fashioned biblical or romantic names – Gwendolyn, Evelyn,
Malachi, Moses, Geraldine, Dorothy, Dudley. In Arnhem Land the people all
have indigenous names but also a Balanda
name (Balanda – a corruption of Hollander, which is what they called the first
white people to encroach upon their lives.) And the Balanda names can be -
ahem – interesting. A family of boys were called, one after the other,
Tarco (with an extra R, to add interest,) Tabasco and Tortilla, pronounced
Tor-till-er. Their next child will be Tortiya… One of our nurse
friends tried to tell the parents that this was actually the same culinary item
– tortilla - but…nobody listened… She also had dealings with a family of girls
called, successively, Taleesha, Kaleesha, Tyneesha, Shaneesha and
Kyneesha. I hope their indigenous names were nicer…
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