another stanley

There is something about towns named Stanley. Every one I have been to has had an end of the world feel. The last Stanley I found myself in was the capital of the Falkland islands. So I got a bit nervous when I saw street signs in Northwest Tasmania directing me to yet another Stanley.
Stanley, Tasmania does indeed feel like the end of the world, but at least it is a beautiful end. It is on a peninsula, with clean blue water visible all around from most places. There is a hill in the middle, and we took a ski lift up to the top to get a complete view of the area. Below, you could see kids playing on the white sands of the beaches below. Above, it was scorching- at least 40 degrees, not that I have ever minded the heat.
Later we followed an aboriginal to their territory (returned to the community some years back by the government). Their territory is immense, but you have to wonder how people survive. It must have been a brutal existence at best. Yet the aboriginals lived there for 40,000 years (and maybe longer) before the arrival of whites. And their way of life changed very little in this time, so clearly their techniques worked some how.
Our guide Never Never (so named, as apparently he was never never to be found be sought…aboriginals often get their names after a few years of life, we were told) showed us where and how they caught fish, and where they lived during the different seasons. He explained the sharp division that exists between “women’s business” and “men’s business” and how the two cannot be blurred. He told us that until 1968, aboriginals were not classified as citizens in Australia, and when they died, their deaths were reported to the flora and fauna department, as though a tree had been knocked over. He described how he had stopped going to school when he was young because the white kids called him nigger and anyway, it was more exciting to be out in the bush with his grandfather, Pop Jiggles, learning how to hunt down mutton birds (you have to grab them in their hole, keeping your arm low so as not to be bitten by a snake, of which there are many, but they need to get their heads up in the air at least 6 inches in order to bite). He bemoaned the numerous social ills that plague the aboriginal communities- alcoholism, wife beating and teen pregnancy. A hardened man, but an interesting one to talk to. We got up to leave an he said with dead seriousness “thank you for respecting my culture.”