Dreamings

Melina owns a shop selling original pieces of aboriginal art, decorative didgeridoos, that sort of thing. It's not the usual sort of rubbish, it's proper artwork by proper aborigines, who, in my mind, are sitting around camp fires in the Northern Territory with a boomerang in one hand and a paintbrush in the other. I don't want to consider that they might have made millions selling splodgy artwork to tourists and spent it all on swanky flats at Woollomooloo wharf so I'm making no further enquiries.

The painting on the far wall caught my eye. It's the sort of work they refer to as a "dreaming". "Of all the paintings in my shop, that's one of two I would take home and hang on my wall" said Melina. Being married to a quack, I was trying to ignore her christian name, which has other meanings (and spellings) in the world of medicine. "It's reduced from $6,600 to $4,000 because we are closing the shop".

"Why are you closing the shop?" I asked.

She smiled and came over a bit dreamy. "I'm having my epithany" she replied.

I love the word "epithany" almost as much as I love "dichotomy". I've been hoping to have an epithany for years, just so I could use the word when somebody asked. Melina beat me to it.

"My whole life is aborigine art and culture, music, you know. My family own pretty much every aboriginal shop in this area. I need something else in my life, a new direction".

She took out a ring-binder and started telling us about the different types of indigenous art in the different tribal areas of Australia, which was generous given that we didn't seem any closer to parting with $4,000.

"The background is always black, that represents their skin. The white represents bone, the red is blood and the yellow is sun. All the things you need to sustain life. The paintings seem very simple but in fact they are complex. They represent tribal maps, the white dots are areas of cultural significance, the arcs between them are men sitting in their the tribal communities. Some communities are more secretive, they think that revealing their tribal maps is disempowering so they only paint vague maps with lines rather than dots. They kind of join all the dots up". She explained some more. It really is all very complicated.

"$4,000" we repeated over and over as we ate lunch. "That's like six shifts in the private hospital. Enough to pay for a holiday. It's not like that £100 glass bowl we bought in Greece". We can't justify buying the painting but I can't stop thinking about Melina and wondering whether we should go back and help finance her epithany.