The Min Min

 I

He’s never seen the Min Min, but his Cousin Mandy has. 

It was after he got his first car that the country around Coonabarabran finally opened up, when the frustration of having travelled six hours from Sydney only to reach the beginning of the real outback was overcome.  He had his cousin and a green Mazda as willing partners and there were trips, hundreds of kilometres in a day.  Together over a latte at the Jolly Cauli café they planned; together they drew big circles in the sand, to the west and to the northwest.

Mandy would be the model of a farmer’s daughter had her father been a farmer.  Her trim figure, short wavy blond hair and the face that’s seen a season or two: there’s nothing to suggest she’s not a child of the country; and true to her origins she’s a storyteller. 

In Coonabarabran stories have their own life, such that to question the factuality of a narration is an activity without relevance.  City people don’t always understand this, but questioning the actuality of a Coonabarabran story is like trying to count the bulky rural raindrops as they hit the tin roof during a summer afternoon storm.  There was only ever to listen and enjoy, which is what he did when Mandy told him of her encounter with the Min Min.

Nonetheless he’s wondered what the secret to the success of her storytelling might be.  Perhaps it’s in her face that never lights up with excitement or drops in disappointment as she narrates.  She never gets carried away with her words.  He’s wondered if it might be the wheat field accent that, with its elongated and contorted vowels, soothes to make the dramatic sound as clear and obvious as sitting on a rock in the garden of a summer evening with a cup of tea in the hand.  The cicadas are loudly chirping. 

And when the telling gets eerie her tone doesn’t waver; when the telling gets hilarious there’s barely a note of laughter in it.  However she does it, Mandy can make wild statements sound as indisputable as reading off a shopping list.  He admires her skill.

And if she speaks of the city it doesn’t alter anything.  Even when the subject matter turns urban her storytelling remains a rural creature despite the geography of its words.

And he might not be telling it right.  It’s best that she should do it.

They made it to the unlikely Macquarie Marshes to west of Coonamble on one of their sand circles.  It’s a wetland at a junction of rivers in otherwise dry country.  He negotiated his first red-mud road to get there, the road damp from the marshes.  There’d been an eagle, as a human a third as high, sitting in the dry grass of the sunburnt reed lands along the road side.  Eagles can’t take off straight away, Mandy said.  As much as they are kings of the sky they need a run up to take flight. 

A few yards behind that eagle was a fox, pushing itself flat against the ground in that stalking posture and inching forward toward the bird.  What would’ve been the result he couldn’t say, because the dust-kicking rumble of the car scared fox and scared bird.  The eagle took a few ungainly steps and started to unfold its enormous wings while the fox ran away.

The sky grows ever larger in the flat country beyond Coonamble.  It’s blue and weighty when there’s no rain about, meaning most of the time.  The sky pulled them further, or was it adventure, and by lunch the two cousins had reached as far as the small town of Carinda, with its population of a hundred and ninety four.  Carinda seemed to have only one shop, a post office cum grocery store cum café.  There were pigeon holes screwed up on one of the walls with a slot allocated to each household.  Who could be bothered delivering mail when the locals have legs and can walk a few hundred metres to collect it?  To the side of the grocery shelves there was a single plastic table: the café.  They sat there and asked the store keeper for a menu.  But who could be bothered to write up a menu when people can just open their mouths and speak?

‘What do you want?’

‘What do you have?’

‘Well what do you want?’

‘Well what do you have?’

In that country where a flat white is a coffee with milk, they might’ve settled for a corned beef sandwich.

Turning back for Coonabarabran they came across the unlikely event of rain.  It was with city trepidation that he steered along the red-dirt-becoming-red-mud road, wetter than at the marshes, muddier than at the marshes.  It made the car slide sideways a bit as he drove.  A red-mud road was not too much of a worry, Mandy said.  It was the black-mud road that was the nightmare.

II

In another dirt circle to the northwest where the land grows rocky and lifeless, they one day reached Lightning Ridge.  Aunt Mary, Mandy’s mother, was with them then.  Lightning Ridge is a mining town, about two thousand people, situated atop the world’s largest known deposit of black opal gemstones.  Miners come from across the world to settle there, to spend days in backyard-type mines underground, in the hope of striking it rich.  They busied themselves at the mining museum and saw a house made of glass bottles.  By late afternoon they were still on their way home, not much beyond Collarenebri, and they’d chosen a short cut route with about forty kilometres of dirt before Wee Waa.  Well, in that country that doesn’t see much rain, by a city dweller’s luck it came again, as grey clouds rolled in from the west and the first drops started plonking against the windscreen.  There was a problem.  The road this time was black-dirt.

‘We’d better get out of here fast,’ Mandy said as the clouds closed in.

‘What happens if we don’t make it?’ the city cousin foolishly asked.

‘We’ll get bogged,’ the country cousin replied, ‘and it’ll be a week until the road dries enough to pull the car out.  Whatever you do, don’t touch the brake.  Keep moving or you’ll slide and if you go off the edge of the road we’ll never get out of it.’

Suddenly the mere forty kilometres seemed like four hundred as he kept the motion going, as the raindrops became more frequent and the road started to become slippery.  All the while there was the groaning and banging of black-dirt and rocks tumbling beneath the car’s underbelly.  It was the bloody four-wheel drives, Mandy said, that made the deep wheel ruts that made the road all but impassable for city sedans like his.  The rain kept coming.  The dirt and rocks kept groaning and banging.  The car kept rolling on.

‘Problem is,’ Mandy said, ‘if you do get bogged and it takes a week to get the car out, in the meantime there’ll be no one to guard it and whoever does happen to come along might take the tyres, the wheels, anything that can be salvaged.  After a week when you come to get it there might only be a wreck.’  It would’ve been impossible to guard the vehicle in that middle-of-nowhere country.  He was worried.

They took a risk in a patch where there seemed to be a bit of sand to the land and he stopped the car, cautiously applying the brake.  He wanted Mandy to take the wheel as with her knowledge of red-dirt and black-dirt she might be able to get them back onto the tar stretch faster.  It was a road that needed country hands.

It was a deep thankful city relief and a more exhilarated, humoured country one that greeted them when finally they emerged at the safety of the tar.  They’d made it through!  Her husband back in town would never believe how foolish they’d been to attempt that road in that Mazda with rain clouds about, Mandy said.  It wasn’t the end of trouble though.  By the time they’d reached the Newell and the last one hundred or so kilometre stretch back into town from Narrabri, it was the end of evening, the beginning of night.  It’s the perfect feeding time for kangaroos.  By the hundreds they lined the roadside and he’d never seen them so thick.  Any one of them could, with a singular hop and a splatter of blood, destroy the car’s engine. 

The semi-trailers that plied that route down from Queensland don’t even slow down for the roos, he saw, and the semis account for almost all the road-kill carcases along the way; but for his city sedan the impact could’ve been fatal.  With a limit of one hundred kilometres per hour they rarely reached sixty as his nerves climbed new mountains although the land is for the best part flat.  City people like the roos, Mandy said, and think they’re cute.  ‘Well they are cute, but on the road they’re a menace.’

And yet without incident they made it through, that too, they made it through!  The junction of the Oxley and the Golden Fleece roadhouse on the outskirts of town were the final symbols of a safe return.

 III

There and back they tried the Gwabegar Road on another evening, in a convoy of two vehicles.  Mandy’s husband drove one while she drove the other, because of the roos and the faster pace possible without a city cousin behind the wheel.  Along with Mandy’s sons, his sister was with them then and they’d stocked provisions for the evening, including champagne, for the swimming expedition under the stars.  It’s scrubby country out that way, the Pilliga Country of grey-leafed eucalypts and short Pilliga pines.  It’s sandy and rocky in the place where two of his great grandfathers, the maternal ones, had once become neighbours.  And it’s under the land the water is, in the artesian basin. 

They were headed for a bore where water was pumped to the surface to service the homesteads and cattle.  And when it comes up the water is hot.

The cattle dam they knew of was a good hundred and fifty kilometres from town in the middle of an unmarked scrub paddock.  Without any indication they’d reached the spot the cars pulled off the road and stopped.  There was a gate of the typical cattle variety, and after unclasping the chain they drove through, making sure the gate was closed again behind them.  The dam was some metres into the paddock.

It might’ve stunk, that place, of cow dung and the mud might’ve squelched underfoot but the water left no doubt it was mineral, delivering that inner body warmth that only mineral water can; and overhead there was no doubt why the astronomers had chosen Coonabarabran as the site for their observatory: in the scrub country without the light pollution of a single house the night sky was awash with stars.  The champagne cork popped.  Cows occasionally mooed.  The nearest human to their group was who-bloody-knew how many kilometres away.

They laughed at him, the country cousins.  It was on the way back when he couldn’t figure out how to close the cattle gate.  And yet, in the following days the tide turned.  They’d decided to head to Sydney in convoy, with Mandy’s car following his.  She wanted it that way because her car’s engine had the risk of breakdown about it as country cars often seem to; and after five and a half hours they’d crossed the Blue Mountains, with the final descent and the blanket of city smog on the Cumberland Plain of Sydney to the east before them.  It was there that Mandy asked him to take over the driving, while his sister could drive his car.  She was out of practice with city traffic, she said.  It made her nervous.

IV

But about the Min Min, well, as he remembers it, as she told it and as best he can, it was like this:  she was on her way back down from Queensland, it was in those days, and it was night.  She drove the road, without another car or a house in sight, much as they had, when all of a sudden strange lights appeared in the sky to the side of the road.  They were bright and at low altitude and seemed altogether not too far off the roadway itself, somewhere beyond the eucalypts in the nearest paddock.  There is no human factor that could be making lights like that, mainly because there are so few humans around and it was odd because the lights seemed to be following the car, moving parallel to it at some distance through the paddocks.  She could see their shine in the gaps between the trees. 

The lights seemed to be keeping up with the car’s speed easily.  She stopped the car.  The lights stopped.  She accelerated.  The lights accelerated.

Mandy thought it might be the Min Min.  The Min Min light is famous from the Gulf Country south to the start of New South Wales.  Many people have seen it and it’s mentioned in aboriginal legends.  Nobody can explain it. 

She thought it might be the Min Min, true enough, but she didn’t know what to do about it, in that country of vastness, in the darkness of the night without a soul to ask for help, in the days before mobile phones.  And then, after about half an hour, as suddenly as it had appeared the Min Min was gone. 

But he might not be telling it right.  It’s best that she should do it.

Dog house made from bottles

The Min Min Light is hardly the only unusual phenomenon the world has to offer.  Kashem Bhai in Bangladesh, for example, called on the help of Diabula and possibly the Portuguese to get him into the bazaar one day.  In Dhaka there's the phenomenon of the rishka wisdom to keep the wheels turning.  Meanwhile in Ukraine and Russia there's a phenomenon that's a bit more man-made: the cities that don't exist.


This article also published in Star Magazine, here: The Min Min

The Adventure Gene

The Bread Knife in the Warrumbungle Mountains

The six-year-old was crying.  He was sitting on the tan carpet with the cow-pattern texture to it, in the shadowy room at the end of the hallway.  It’s not that there wasn’t a window, there was, but the mulberry tree outside and the roof of the neighbours’ metallic carport took away most of the sun.  His bedroom was long and rectangular; and the curtains were brown with pictures of African animals on them.  There was no mystery or suspicion to the darkness of the room.  The shadow made it cooler than the rest of the house and he was used to it.

In front of him was a black suitcase with a cheap aluminium band around it where its lid met the base and two aluminium latches to spring open with a click or push down to grip the case shut.  There was a key hole but no key.  The six-year-old cried because he was going away and in what had been his school bag there were not now books and stationery but the bare essential supplies he’d thought he’d need.  There was no despair in the plan.  It was not because there was anything wrong with his life; there’d been no argument or untoward incident of any description.  He was crying from pre-missing his family, knowing that he’d not see them again, for he’d decided it was time to move into the dry grasslands and eucalypt forests of the extinct volcanic Warrumbungle Mountains at the zero point of the Castlereagh River, to live with the kangaroos. 

It was usual after setting up the campsite that Dad would be busy with collecting scraps of wood to stoke a fire and boil a billy for tea, or would be unpacking the esky, piling bread and a tub of butter on the boot of the Kingswood in order to make sandwiches.  His brothers and sisters would be helping Dad, lying in the tent or maybe climbing the hill across the small rocky stream that was lined with casuarina trees.

Dad never paid much attention to where his children were.  He must’ve been worried as he waited for the six-year-old to find his way back to the campsite from a nearby walk but he never said anything.  He never stifled his children’s sense of adventure because he always wanted them to be independent and confident and so, as the older brother had once climbed a quite high volcanic rock without ropes, a splendid outcrop arched as a dinosaur’s spine, the most Dad would say was, ‘You be careful.’  He liked to see his children trust themselves and believe in their abilities; and secretly he liked it better to see his eldest son come down again from the dinosaur rock safely.  

For the children there was magic in it, especially for the youngest.  On the hill across the casuarina creek the older ones had found a small cave and there were many six-year-old questions about it:  how deep it was, how big its entrance was and what it was like inside.  It was quite high on the hill the middle brother said and the six-year-old alone wouldn’t be able to get there, but his brother offered to take him, later, assuming he could find it again as the entrance was small.  Dad didn’t hear news about the cave.  Such things were strictly children’s matters.

But it wasn’t usually the hill that craved attention but the nearer grasslands.  Through the grasses there was a whole network of tracks leading off from the campsite.  Some of them were wide enough for a four-wheel drive and together they made a kind of cow-pattern across the landscape, diverging, re-emerging and joining, dipping down to meet the mostly dry stream beds where the stinging nettles often grew.  It was in that terrain, particularly in the cooler evenings that he would wander off.  It was there he would see the kangaroos.

In truth he never went very far but when measured in six-year-old steps distances are a good deal further and there were always animals to see.  It wasn’t only the kangaroo mobs that’d usually be resting under a tree, only getting up slowly and hopping lightly away as he got close, despite him having trodden as quietly as possible so as not to alarm them.  There were emus, often in pairs and sometimes with a clutch of brown striped chicks at their feet.  The emus had eyes like his teachers when they scanned the classroom from their desks to see who it was that was talking out of turn.  Emu eyes seem to look over the rims of glasses even though there are none.  They are intellectual birds except for when they run and their grass skirts of feathers sway about like a car wash machine, giving away their stupidity. 

View of the Warrumbungles

The country was full of rabbits and many a burrow entrance was inspected with the hope one would come out, and it was common to see them as they darted away or raced back into the burrow to escape that very visibility.  More occasionally it’d be their enemy, the fox, with his bushy reddish tail scurrying away from sight; and there were rarer animals: wombats with their bigger burrows and stories of tiger quolls and once, though it was up into the mountains and not by the campsite, high in a gum tree there’d been a koala.  Meanwhile the kookaburras would be laughing at him and at the scenery.

That trail network never seemed to finish and finding out exactly where each leg diverged, re-emerged and joined was exacting work.  And the further the six-year-old went the more he’d discover there was to discover, like the secret valley far down on the left side where there was the greenery of a few ferns to keep things looking cooler.  Being alone never worried him because he never was alone.  There were the roos, emus, rabbits and foxes at the least.  They all seemed friendly enough, albeit shy.  He knew there were snakes: red-bellies, yellow-bellies and king browns, and he’d heard the story of how his oldest brother had once stepped on a red-belly while on a picnic in the city and had to be rushed to hospital in an ambulance.  But he never actually saw a snake and he suspected that they were probably more misunderstood than vicious.  Why would a snake bite him when he meant it no harm? 

It was indeed not the animals but the plants that it seemed important to be wary of, less because of the spiky thistles and more because of the nettles.  It’d happened that he’d been stung and it was painful.  Despite the nettles being pointed out to him by his brother so that he’d learnt to recognise them, they grew in many places and sometimes from thinking about the roos and their society he’d forget.  But after he’d been stung a few times he didn’t forget; and he knew, his second brother had done it for a bee sting once, that if he could find some bracken fern it was possible to pull it out of the ground and rub its roots on the sting site.  His second brother had made that up of course but the six-year-old had felt slightly better once the newly discovered remedy had been applied.

It wasn’t a plan without practicality.  He’d thought it all through and knew it wouldn’t be easy.  For a start, the roos were rather shy and it’d take time to properly make acquaintance with them; and he’d have to learn their language and routines.  But once they trusted him he could pat them and feel the softness of kangaroo fur.  Even as they slept under the tree in the mob he could be there with his head on one for a pillow.  They wouldn’t mind.  They’d get used to him in the end.

And it’d happen, after some time, that he’d know how to communicate in emu, rabbit and fox too.  He’d know where to go to visit them at their homes and have accurate knowledge of where each trail and small valley led.  The nettles would be no problem then and if ever there was an accidental encounter he’d know precisely where the bracken ferns grew.  He’d know too where that cave was that his brothers had found on the hill.  Perhaps there were bats that lived inside it to become friends with.

He’d thought of water.  He’d have to learn to drink from the streams and truth is it’d happened anyway.  His oldest brother had taught him to cup his hands and hold them under a part of the stream that had a flow to it, where the water was wedged between two small rocks or such.  The water that flowed was cleaner his brother said.  He’d thought of food.  He knew it’d take time to adjust but the roos would teach him which grasses and leaves to eat and his stomach would get used to it after a while; but in light of the adjustment period for the new diet he’d asked Mum to put together a few sandwiches in a brown paper sandwich bag that was now one of the items in his suitcase.  She didn’t imagine those sandwiches were for the transition before he ate only leaves and grass.  She thought the six-year-old was hungry and didn’t know the packet she’d put together had been stored for later.

Most of the rest of the space in the suitcase had been allotted to his stuffed toys.  In particular there’d be no leaving the dog called Boowy that’d been a present for his third Christmas behind.  Boowy wouldn’t like staying in the house without him and he was sure to get along equally well with the roos.  He cared so much about his stuffed toys, not only Boowy but Zebra, Pink Spots, Keemore and the white horse called Blanco that he’d once taken sheets of white paper and painted in turn each of their portraits.  The portraits were stuck to wooden boards for display, but got piled up behind the red cupboard in the end.  And although they were all coming along he cried thinking of how he’d miss Mum and Dad and his brothers and sister.  Boowy would miss them too.  Yet when he thought about his life ahead with the roos he felt happy and excited.  It was a dilemma.

The Bread Knife

That was to be the last day with the human family.  Mum and Dad were already busy packing their own bags and loading the car for the six hour, five hundred kilometre drive from Sydney to Coonabarabran where his grandmother lived.  They would stay the first night there and in the morning Dad would leave early to drive down to the service station for fuel, perhaps to make sure the gas bottle for the stove was full, and to fill the esky with ice so that at least for the first day there could be cold drinks, butter for the bread and liquid milk for the tea.  He’d come back with the final provisions having been bought and the children would say goodbye to Mum who wasn’t as keen on camping as the rest of the family.  She preferred to stay in town mostly, to talk to her mother and her own brothers and sisters who used to randomly wander into the kitchen and sit down for a cup of tea.

The six-year-old knew not to say anything.  He wouldn’t be allowed to stay living with the kangaroos, it was certain.  So he was ready to dry his eyes and pretend everything was normal when he was called to the Kingswood he had secretly named Tigger, the white family sedan in the driveway out the back of his Sydney house, for the drive to Coonabarabran.  He only wondered if he would leave for his new life before or after the family hiked the Bread Knife trail that stretched and wound its way up into the peaks of the extinct volcanoes.  It would take the whole day and make everybody tired and probably he’d ride on Dad’s shoulders in the higher parts of the trail.  Maybe he’d wait until that’d been done.

As it turned out the six-year-old was a little too consumed with thoughts.  He’d been called several times but in his bedroom at the end of the hall he hadn’t heard.  They searched him out and of course his bedroom was an obvious place to look.  It’d been sudden that his sister had walked into the room and seen him sitting on the floor in front of his suitcase.  There’d been no chance to dry his eyes.

‘What are you crying for?’ she asked.

Well, the emotions were a bit overwhelming for the six-year-old, so as much as he didn’t mean to, he just blurted out the plan.  ‘I’m running away,’ he sobbed, ‘I’m going to live with the kangaroos!’

‘Don’t be stupid,’ his sister said.

Roo with Joey

Memories are found in many things, not only in kangaroos. Memories are in waterfalls, dance steps and even in the winter.

This article also published in Star Magazine, here: The Adventure Gene

A Concise History of Cinema

The Ranjit Talkies, photo courtesy of Hotel The Hadoti Palace, Bundi

 
And…rolling! They barely touched in the days of Twinkle Khanna’s debut, the hero and the heroine, as they sang and danced and sensually raised eyes to one another on their way through their love story.  Even with machine guns while fighting the bad guys on the roof of a moving train there was time to dance.  For the most part the choreography stemmed from the little yellow flowers in the sublime fields of the rolling hills which were otherwise not part of the setting.  Heroines wore full saris back then; it was before the cost cutting on cloth. Cut!

Scene two: for young western backpackers in Rajasthan a tour could not be complete without a visit to a cinema hall.  There should be an introduction with at least one Kajol or Madhuri Dixit figure.  Fades out…

When my mother was about twenty-five what they called the picture theatre was an entertainment hub in the small town of Coonabarabran, the only spot on the map for the most of one hundred kilometres in any direction, on the edge of the Australian outback.  People gathered of a Wednesday and Saturday evening to touch base with Debbie Reynolds and Elizabeth Taylor.  It was in the days when the hero and heroine barely touched and before the cost cutting on cloth.  With less than four thousand people in the town a night at the pictures offered a view to the world beyond sheep stations and wheat fields.  The word ‘film’ is generally considered to have two syllables in Coonabarabran: fil-em.  Zooms in on wheat field…

Scene four: Bundi in Rajasthan is not a large town, about eighty thousand people, and amongst its attractions is a solid cinema hall, the Ranjit Talkies.  It’s difficult to pass by.  The scene was of a crowd that covered most of the area in front of the building, vaguely forming two snaking queues on the day we tried to pass.  There was the excitement of anticipation.  With curiosity and spare time to lead us to a close encounter with Bollywood, we joined the queue.

It wasn’t long before heads started turning and there were whispers.  It’s not every day there are foreigners in Bundi and it must be even rarer for them to attend the Ranjit Talkies.  The queue seemed to have hardly any life to it but for us it didn’t matter as somebody plucked us out and took us directly to the small window at the counter.  We were guests.  I believe it cost ten rupees, each ticket, and we’d not realised that those were the most expensive seats available.  We were guided like two of the Khans to mid-centre in the front row of the gallery. 

With the crowd filling the seats in the hall below and despite the full-volume continuing chatter, the fil-em was about to start.  Add dramatic background music…

In the Doris Days of my mother’s trips to the picture theatre my father had just arrived on the scene.  He’d come from Sydney as an engineer to partake in the building of Coonabarabran’s water supply dam.  Many years later when the river suffered from seasonal algae blooms and the water used to come out of the taps a green colour I used to say to my grandmother, ‘you should call your son-in-law and ask him why the water from his dam is green.’ 

And how mother met father well, in brief it’s not unlike a 1960s Hollywood plot.  There was a scene at a dance at the Buckley’s Woolshed in Tooraweenah, and it can’t be said of all couples that they first saw each other in a barn.  And there were picture theatre evenings in the plot, with Vivien Leigh in re-runs and Julie Andrews singing and dancing, although her dance sequences lacked the syncopated Bollywood troops appearing from nowhere to further enliven the moment.  Fades out…

Scene seven: in the Kim Basinger and Dan Akroyd years as kids in Sydney we were more worldly, preferring serious documentaries like ‘E.T.’ and ‘My Stepmother is an Alien,’ and although there were instances of small round chocolates called jaffas taking advantage of the sloping wooden floor, with the sound of jaffas rolling adding a kind of ten-pin bowling ambience to the cinema near my place, we didn’t talk through fil-ems.  When the lights would dim the audience would hush. 

In Bundi the fil-em lasted a monumental three hours plus intermission, Bollywood usual, and it was not as passive an experience as in Sydney.  People talked unashamedly which was good because the local guy beside me was able to discuss the on-screen events to ensure I was following the families-don’t-agree-to-the-match-but-it-happens-anyway storyline.  It was particularly caring that during the scene when the hero was wrestling a tiger he reassured that I should not be worried as it was only acting.  It helped me understand why in some shots a large wooden pole could be spotted protruding from the tiger’s back and why its limbs didn’t seem to move.  Cut to shot of tigers prowling…

And when to make conversation I tried to explain that in Australia a movie ticket would cost the best part of ten dollars my cinema companion became Amitabh angry.  He’d understood the Ranjit Talkies’ management had overcharged us, ten dollars, and was on the verge of leaping out of his seat to heroically run off downstairs to have it out with them in the foyer.  Guests were really to be looked after at the Ranjit Talkies; fortunately I could clarify before the action scene started.

It wasn’t only my father who had taken interest in my mother, so the plot continued.  There was also a pharmacist.  My grandmother was concerned about my mother’s reputation so she told her, in front of my father, to make a choice and see only one of them.  ‘I agree with your mother,’ my father chimed in, ‘and it should be me.’  Well, my mother: she only could’ve done what Audrey would’ve done.  Cut to close-up of heart-broken pharmacist…

In Bundi the projector had a problem and at various moments the film burst into flame, the projector would shut down and the lights would be turned up.  There was nothing for the audience to do while the Ranjit management fiddled about fixing things so they all turned around to focus on that other spectacle: the foreigners.  They were waving and calling hello.  Well, we only could’ve done what Shah Rukh would’ve done. We waved back, and I believe they applauded before the fil-em re-started.

With tickets available at the Ranjit for just a few rupees we appreciated the importance of cinema: providing escape from the materially difficult lives that many in the audience presumably lived.  Just as in Coonabarabran it was at the picture theatre where something beyond the routine of small town life could be enjoyed.  In the world’s largest democracy across religions and languages Bollywood unites; and in Australia in the 1960s, in a cameo role, one mother and one father the Hollywood pictures helped unite.

As would later occur in Eritrea after a wedding, on the following morning in Bundi as we walked down the street someone called from across the road, ‘did you like the film?’  Yes, we very much had, although there rightly should’ve been a song and dance routine to accompany our answer.  That’s a wrap!




Please note: the above concise history does not consider Bangladeshi cinema due to the constraint which arises from its being 'concise'.  Nor does said article cover that Eritrean wedding or a lovely river in China on account of it being about 'cinema.'


This article also published in Star Magazine, here: A Concise History of Cinema



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