It is Thursday evening and the working week is drawing to close. I’m lying in bed in the donga. It’s been very cold at night so I’m wearing my thermal top and my black beanie. The wind is howling outside. There are some street lights on the road beside the donga, just beyond the wire mesh fence. It is very quiet for a change, the cold and wind keeping the dogs huddled together on verandahs rather than barking at the moon and stars. In the morning we will go for a walk. We walk along the Sandover Highway, all of four meters wide and made of hard red clay starting to crack and tessellate as the summer wet finally dries out. The plains of spinifex and grass are dead yellow, faded from their rich summer green. Cockatoos and corellas group in masses in the few trees, looking like pallid tropical flowers amongst the leaves and branches till they erupt together into the air, keening and calling.

We walk over the plain, diverting onto dusty, nearly overgrown side roads , it would be too easy to get lost in the maze of intersecting tracks. We carry sticks to threaten the dogs nearer town if they get too cheeky. There is always a beautiful sunrise to the east, it can be vivid pink and red, or a burnt dry orange, lighting up along ripples of clouds. The sky is clear and deep blue, and fades only minimally as the day truly begins and the sun climbs above the horizon. 

After breakfast we head over to the clinic. It’s only a short walk. As Jennifer or I make up our coffees, we settle in for the morning meeting with the other staff. The clinic is badly understaffed and there is a too real possibility the nurse manager will have to forgo her leave. The logistics of providing staff to clinics such as Lake Nash are complicated and difficult. The nurses here have enormous responsibility, severe isolation, and really no hobbies they can pursue. Even walking safely can be difficult with the heat and the dog packs. It takes a tough, resourceful woman to do this job. I say woman because I have met only one of two male nurses in my time. One of the staff left to work elsewhere while we were here. Their level of competence and savvy clinical judgement is incredible. These remote nurses are the best. 
It’s been a quiet week for us. At least so far because as you all know, things can get pretty dramatic, pretty quickly even on a half morning’s work tomorrow. 

While we have been here in Lake Nash, the news on TV has been about a treaty between whites and blacks. No one has mentioned it here. The people here just get on with life. Politics seems a very long way away. The big players who are passionate about these sorts of things don’t come here. People still buy their coke, forget their tablets and miss important appointments. While other people care for their sisters, listen with intelligence and interest as we explain about their health, and proudly drink water rather than sugar riddled beverages. As a doctor, I see and hear the stories of their lives. Of being a stockman. Of riding hell for leather across this arid country till his horse is tripped by a deep crevice and he is tumbled off and the horse rolling over him. Of being a small boy and walking beside his father as he cares for a vast desert market garden used to provide food for personnel in WW2. Just one of many unwritten stories of the indigenous people’s contribution to this country’s war effort. Of the woman who accompanies her sister three days a week to the local dialysis centre, and does all the work setting up and running the hemodialysis. She will do this forever never complaining, never forgetting. This buddy scheme is the norm in remote communities and again it is an unwritten story of self sacrifice and commitment. 
My tapestry grows greater and richer with each person I meet and each story I hear.

 All of these stories and people, their voices and faces, are painting in my minds eye a vast canvas coloured by their resilience, warmth and vitality, but tinted with some sadness by the seemingly insoluble and ongoing problems these wonderful people face. I don’t think they care much about a treaty. I think they want to survive and enjoy life as much as they can from one day to the next. Unlike white people who struggle to exist in the present, many Aboriginal people, live far more in the now than we do. This is both good and bad. Living in the moment gives a warmth and spontaneity to life and reduces needless worrying but on the downside, it’s hard to take actions which have a pay off in months or years from now such as taking medication daily. The financial insecurity of Centrelink, the costs of food and services, the social commitments of communal life, sorry business, gambling, alcohol, isolation, the lack of much employment and issues around health, all produce a sometimes chaotic situation in many remote indigenous families. So is it really so very surprising that they want to live in the present moment and avoid focusing on a future which is hard to understand, just plain frightening or of pasts overburdened with loss and grief?

There are not the social and support services here in the bush that we all expect in the major towns and cities. So why do they stay here? Simply because they love this land and are a part of it. For all the difficulties of living remotely, this land is as much a part of them as they are of it. The men talk about the heat of summer, the cold winds of winter, and the satisfaction of having worked on the land. So maybe that is what a treaty needs to be about, their authority over this land. There is a medieval story you may know. A knight has offended a mighty witch and she will stay his punishment only if in one year, he can correctly answer her question. The question being ” Above all else what does a woman want?”. He eventually learned there is a simple answer to the question but it was confronting all the same; the right to choose for herself. I believe that the Aboriginal people in these remote communities should be permitted to choose for themselves too, to run their townships their way and to educate their way. I think we do live in interesting times. Could they do a worse job than white government? Now that’s hard to imagine.
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I have written before about the health impact of water in Central Australia but I learned something new. While we have been at Lake Nash, we met the dentist who comes out to this region. He has done this for thirty years. He told us about a problem at Ali Curung. Dental problems are severe with brown discolouration and loss of enamel, but no decay, due to excessive amounts of fluoride in the water they drink. It’s twenty times the amount added to drinking water in the cities. In addition, tea contains fluoride. And the longer it is brewed the more fluoride is leached into the brew. Here the Aboriginal ladies, brew pots of tea all day or have multiple tea bags in one cup. Unfortunately boiling water for drinking deals with bacteria and viruses but concentrates heavy metals and chemicals. No one has measured the intake for the average person in Ali Curung but it would be three or more times the maximal recommended intake at least. Now fluoride in normal amounts strengthens bone and protects teeth but in large amounts both of these beneficial effects are reversed as bones and teeth cannot form properly. Bones in the arms and legs become brittle and break too easily. Teeth never form proper enamel and pit and break even in adolescence. Normal dental repair and fillings won’t work as the scaffold of healthy enamel is not there. And yet barely forty kilometres away, at Murray Downs, their teeth are perfect aside from soft drink induced caries. Their bore pumps water from a different aquifer. This problem with fluoride has been known for decades but it is considered by government to be too expensive to fix. Water would have to be processed by a costly industrial process to remove the industrial quantities of fluoride.
All the water used in Central Australia is from the great artesian basin, the freshwater it contains comes from as far north as New Guinea and eastwards as far distant as the Great Dividing range. It travels over hundreds of years and thousands of kilometres through horizontal cracks in the sedimentary rock of our ancient seabeds into the rocks beneath central Australia. This vast underwater lake is the Artesian Basin. However it’s quality and safety vary enormously. It can be contaminated by pondages of effluent, or by agricultural chemical run off, seeping down from the surface. It will also be contaminated by the minerals in the earth at their location such as fluoride in Ali Curung, or Uranium salts at Laramba. Water quality is assessed by tallying up to forty different biological agents and mineral toxins, and I recall that very few community bores fulfil all the listed criteria for desirable water in remote Australia. The situation will only get worse as all water reserves are diminishing rapidly due to population pressures. Yuendumu is one example of a town with very limited water security, with a rapidly diminishing supply to its bore. The central desert is littered with communities abandoned due to the local bore dying. When communities run out of water, they have to move elsewhere with a duplication required of all their facilities, few as they are.
The assumption of clean, safe, reliable drinking water is currently not the case in many remote communities. Yet the costs and effort needed to address this issue and provide universal ” town quality water” would be enormous, and clearly quite beyond the capacity of the territory government. Yet would it not be possible to provide even one safe supply of drinking water, one tap adjacent to the shop so at least the locals can fill up water for drinking? Use the bore water for washing and cleaning but have a seperate source of imported or processed water for drinking. Solutions don’t always have to be big and industrial and mind-blowingly expensive.