Imagine this: You have a child playing in your front yard. As you watch through the window, a van of policemen pulls up. They walk past your front gate and take your screaming child away. You never see your child again.
And it’s all legal.
This man never knew his real family.
Aboriginal pupils in the junior class of St. Joseph’s Catholic Mission school at Hammond Island. (Photo: Alan Lambert/The AGE/Fairfax Media via Getty Images)
This is what happened to Deanne Kenyon’s grandfather and countless other Aboriginals in Australia from 1906 up until the 1970s — all because of the color of their skin. Children who were very dark were allowed to stay with their parents, causing many indigenous people to dye their children’s skin dark using the sap of the milkwood tree. But if a child looked as if he had any white ancestry, he was taken away. Some, if they were white enough, were adopted by white families, but the majority were sent to harsh missionary schools, where they were purged of their history, past, and memories and taught how to “fit in” to white Australian society.
Aboriginal Elder Nancy Hill-Wood from Sydney holds a protest banner in front of Old Parliament House on February 11, 2008 in Canberra, Australia. Aborigines arrive in Canberra for apology to the stolen generations. (Photo: Andrew Sheargold/Getty Images)
The Australian Outback is a lot like the American West — vast, beautiful, and lonely. Animals outnumber the people about 500 to one (depending on your source), and everywhere you look are canyons, deserts, and flat. Lots of flat … and a never-ending sky. But Australia’s outback is about 10 times larger than the American West — and millions of years older.
Once, around 350 million years ago, much of the Australian Outback was covered by a huge inland sea. Today, nothing is left of that ocean except huge salt flats that dot the landscape around Uluru (formerly known as Ayers Rock), Kata Tjuta, and Mount Conner — the three most recognizable features in the Outback.
The wide-open landscape of the Australian Outback. (Photo: Paula Froelich)
Unlike Uluru or Kata Tjuta, Mount Conner, while still considered sacred by the local Aboriginal people, lies in the middle of a million-acre cattle farm owned by the Severin family. (The land was privatized in 1938, and all Aboriginals were moved off. But because Mount Conner isn’t as sacred as the other sites in the area, no one has come to claim it, so the land remains in private hands.) Located off the Peterman highway, a one-lane dirt road, many people call it “Fool-uru” because of its similarities to Uluru and its history.
“Back in the day, people would come from Alice Springs on the Peterman Highway — it was the only road out here from Alice Springs for years — and they would see Mount Conner and say, ‘Oh! Uluru!’, and turn around and go back home,” my friend and guide Stacy Beswisk laughed. “Many people never actually saw Uluru.”
These days, only the Severin family members have access to the top of Mount Conner (the youngest son was married there several years ago) but, as with Uluru, the drive around it is spectacular.
Mummified bug in the salt lake. (Photo: Paula Froelich)
Even more interesting is Lake Swanson, also on the ranch but about 10 miles away from Mount Conner.
Surrounded by salt bush and a few desert oaks, which Beswisk estimates are around 450 years old, the huge salt lake is all that’s left of the inland ocean.
“They used to mine salt here,” Beswisk said. “No more. … Now you can’t take it out of the country.”
Named Ayer’s Rock by colonists, Uluru is a massive sandstone monolith in the heart of the Northern Red Centre desert – in the southern most part of the Northern Territory.
While I’d visited Australia a few times [full disclosure: I almost married an Australian so had to make the trip several times, despite the hellacious 24 hour flight], I’d never made the 1,000 mile, Sydney to Uluru trek. In my defense, I was busy meeting the at the time, soon-to-be-future in-laws that never were. But it has always figured large in my mind and was number one on my Bucket List.
It’s not an Aussie selfie unless Uluru is in there.
So when I got the chance to visit the Outback, my first stop was Uluru.
Rising out of what seems like nowhere, Uluru is sacred to the local indigenous nation – the Anangu – and believed to be about 700 million years old. While it seems massive, rising 1,000 feet high out of the ground, like an iceberg, what you see is just the tip.
“It is a huge solid rock,” my guide Ryan Clark, told me. “It is embedded in the ground. Sometime about 300 million years ago it turned on its side which is why the sandstone (stripes) look like they are going up and down instead of left to right.”
Dually listed as a World heritage Site for both its cultural and geological significance, Uluru went through a dark period starting in 1958, when the government took it and the surrounding land from the Anangu people and set up an air strip with motels directly next to the rock (on sacred ground). Tourists were allowed to climb Uluru, walking onto land that the Anangu considered holy. But, on October 26th 1985, the government returned the land to the Anangu people – this year is the 30th anniversary of Australia handing back the land to the indigenous owners – and the motels were moved several miles away. Today there are four resorts around Uluru, but at a respectful distance.
Australia is an English-speaking country — but, like with England, there are a lot of differences between here and there. So many, in fact, that if you hang with the locals at a pub in the outback, you won’t be totally off base if you sit for a second and wonder, “Just where the hell am I, anyway?”
Because quite often, Australian English actually needs a translation.
For example, where you might say, “Sharon’s been working very hard, so when we gave her her birthday present she started crying. She needs to toughen up a bit.” — an Australian would translate that to: “Shazza’s been flat out like a lizard drinking. When we gave her a bidet prezzie, the sheila started crying. She needs to drink a cuppa cement.”
Confused? Don’t worry. I’m here to help so that when you take your big trip down under, you’ll fit right in! Watch the video and then, just for fun, translate your thoughts into Australian in the comments below.
When I went to Greenland in April, there was nothing I was looking forward to more than sailing through the country’s fjords and seeing the polar ice cap up close — plus possibly spying a polar bear. These things are all beautiful, but each also has a darker history.
The (disappearing) ice sheet, which is around 110,00 years old, covers 80 percent of the country and is 3 kilometers thick at its deepest point, but is generally 2 kilometers thick. The glaciers spread over the middle of the country and flow outward, breaking off in the fjords, which are filled with icebergs and sheets of floating ice called floes.
Sailing around the fjords is dangerous. Just as in “Titanic,” only the tip of the bergs flowing around you are visible. “You have to be very, very careful when sailing around here,” said my guide, Yakob Mathiassen. “But we are fine — we have an Inuit boat driver.”
It’s beautiful, but global warming is changing things. The ice sheet decreased 16 percent from 1979 to 2002, and as a result, polar bears — which generally stay to the very north of the country — have been coming south.
“There was one they had to shoot last year because it got too close to Nuuk City central,” Mathiassen said. “The theory is he came down and around the tip of the country on an ice floe with the current.”
(Fun fact: If you run into a polar bear and you don’t have a weapon, do not run away. They can run 40 miles per hour, so you can’t outrun them — you have to try to distract them. To do so, you have to get naked. Seriously. Take a piece of clothing off. Drop it on the ground and back away slowly. Then take another item off and back away slowly. Repeat until you are naked (ish) and then run. “Polar bears are very curious,” Mathiassen said. “They will inspect, bite, or play with objects they come across. Leave enough clothes for them to forget about you and run as fast as you can.”)
As you sail along the coast of Greenland, you also see picturesque but empty settlements. In the beginning of the 20th century, Nuuk was not the capital. At that time, most of the country’s population, which now stands at 50,000, was in small settlements which ranged from a few families to a thousand people dotted along the coast. People lived by hunting and foraging what they could. Supplies, mail, and even schools were shipped in.
When someone brings up the hottest gourmet, gastronomic foodie scenes in the world, places like Paris, San Francisco, or Madrid come to mind. But ever since Noma, in Copenhagen, was named best restaurant in the world in 2010 (and several times after that), the focus has moved north. And even farther north than Scandinavia is Nuuk, Greenland, which has two world-class gastronome restaurants in a town that has a population of 17,000 people.
There is Nipisa, on the edge of the Labrador Bay, andSarfalik, located in the Hotel Hans Egede — the four-star hotel of Greenland (yes, there is one). The chefs at both are Danish, but Bjorn Johanssen, the chef at Sarfalik, is the new Wylie Dufresne (aka molecular gastronomy genius) of the Arctic.
Luckily, while I was snowed in in Greenland, I stayed at the Hotel Hans Egede and got to eat at Sarfalik several nights, sampling dishes made with local meats.
“In Greenland it’s OK to hunt whale and seal,” Johanssen explained. “We all hunt here, and we use everything on the animal.” The local meat is also cheaper. As expected, not much grows in Greenland, and despite a few greenhouses in the southern part of the country, most fresh vegetables have to be shipped or flown in at considerable cost.
The first of nine courses … it was a long night.
Johanssen has a nine-course tasting menu — which combines Arctic fowl, duck, muskox, lumpfish, lumpfish roe, seal, whale, and whale skin — some served with something called “hot shell foam” yogurt, shaved ice, and frozen berries. Every now and then there will be polar bear meat (you read that right), but “it’s not so tasty,” Johanssen said.
About to dig in to some serious yumminess.
Final verdict: Seal, meh. Whale — tasty! Whale skin: tough and gummy. Muskox: delicious — like lamb and beef, but better! If you get the chance, eat it. Greenland, the cuisine capital? Who knew?
One of the most important things in a culture is its folklore — tales that have been passed down over the centuries from family to family that shape the morals and fabric of a society. In Western society, these folktales have been watered down via Disney or the Internet, but in a secluded country like Greenland, which was isolated for so long from traditionally modern society, the tales are not only still told verbally, but also performed.
The story telling isn’t just about the dance. (Photo: A Broad Abroad)
At the National Theatre of Greenland, I met the principal, Makka Kleist, and her dance student Kimmernaq Kjeldsen.
When I first heard about the Arctic Winter Games, my head immediately filled with snowboarding, skiing, dog mushing, and possibly ice fishing. But that’s not all that happens…
Occurring every two years, the Arctic Winter Games are the Olympics for athletes in the places that inhabit the Arctic Circle: Canada, Russia, Alaska, and Greenland. Within the games are the Arctic Sports, a series of competitions that derive from Inuit culture and survival techniques that the Inuit needed to have when hunting or camping out on the ice for weeks on end. While now performed inside a warm gym, some of the sports — while featuring some seriously dubious names — can still be dangerous: Greenland’s Prime Minister Kim Kielsen is missing the middle finger on his left hand thanks to a game called the Finger Pull.
According to the Arctic Winter Games website, finger pulling occurs when “Two competitors sit on the floor facing each other and lock middle fingers. Competitors pull steadily at the fingers while bracing their opposite hands on their opponent’s ankle. The object is to pull the opponent over or touch the opponent’s hand to one’s chest.” Again, this can be oddly dangerous.
2. The Kneel Jump
“The competitor begins in a kneeling position, with buttocks resting on one’s heels, toes pointed backward, and hands on knees. From this position, he then jumps as far forward as possible, lands on his feet in a squatting position, and maintains balance.”
“Two competitors lie on the floor, their stomachs facing each other. A looped band is placed over the back of each head above the ears. Rising to a ‘push-up’ position with only hands and feet touching the floor, the athletes pull with their heads, bracing their hands out in front and using their whole body strength to pull steadily backward. The object is to pull the opponent over a line that is drawn between them. (Males only)”
“The competitor starts with a running or standing approach with feet no more than shoulder width apart at take off. The target must be clearly struck while both feet are parallel. Maintaining balance and control, the competitor must land on both feet at the same time, no more than a shoulder width apart.”
“In the starting position the competitor must brace himself with the elbow of the balancing arm tucked into the body. The competitor begins by lifting his feet off the floor while balancing on his hands. With one hand the competitor reaches up to strike the target while maintaining his balance on the other hand. The striking hand must touch the ground before any other part of the body does so. (Males only)”
“The competitor lies on the floor, face down, with arms straight out in an ‘iron cross’ position. Four assistants lift the competitor two to three feet off of the floor and carry him forward at a constant speed. When the competitor’s body or arms begin to sag, he drops. Longest distance before dropping wins. (Males only)”
7. The Triple Jump
“Using a running or standing start, the competitor completes three consecutive jumps. Feet must stay no more than shoulder width apart. The shortest distance from the back of the starting line to the nearest point touched by any part of the competitor’s body wins.”
While there are more self-explanatory Arctic Sports – including arm pull, stick pull and other jump categories, these were the most… illuminating of the bunch. In 2016, Greenland will host the games solo for the first time ever, so Arctic champion Tonny Fisker took me to the local high school gym where he and other athletes were training… Check out the video above for all the arm pulling, head pulling, stuffed seal kicking, and airplaning in action. It’s pretty fascinating. I swear.
Most people don’t associate the Arctic with couture… and many people would cringe if told a jacket was made from polar bear (a threatened species), seal, or arctic fox. But then again, most people don’t live in Greenland — population: 50,000 — where clothing needs to be functional and warm. Very warm.
In Greenland, the majority of the populace are either full or partially Inuit, a people who have lived self-sufficiently on the island for tens of thousands of years — it’s only relatively recently that they have incorporated outside trade into the culture. So they hunt and eat and wear what they kill. The clothing they made hundreds of years ago is still being made today — in the same way.
Yes, that means they wear things like polar bear fur and skin (which is banned in most countries) and Greenlandic sealskin (which is exempt from the EU ban because it is considered ethically correct — the animals live in freedom until the day they are shot). Plus, the animals are shot for meat, with the skin being secondary. (They do eat polar bear in Greenland. Not a lot of it, but they do. It is supposed to be very fishy.)
Hansen in her national costume that has fit her since she was 13. We are jealous.
“We use every part of every animal we kill,” Louise Lynge Hansen, owner of Nuuk Couture, said, noting the meat is eaten, the skin is worn, and even the bones, claws, and teeth of an animal are used for adornment.
Each community has it’s own take on the traditional costume: in the far north, it is basically a huge polar bear coat and seal leggings, but the further south you go, the more colorful and intricate the costumes become.
Details of Louise’s national costume.
But Greenland isn’t just about old school Inuit costumes — thanks to a new wave of designers, it is now trying to establish itself as a fashion hub. Hansen and a few other local designers are starting to combine function with style, using traditional materials like wool, silk, and seal skin to create unique, new looks.
Hansen, from a Western tribe in the South, still wears the national costume her grandmother sewed for her when she was 13. She keeps it wrapped and stored carefully in a suitcase, only taking it out for special occasions. The outfit is comprised of outer boots with minute pieces of colorfully dyed sealskin hand stitched onto white bleached sealskin, sealskin leggings, fur shorts with more detailing, several inner shirts, an outer coat, and a beaded neckpiece.
It’s probably the only country on earth where people think it’s totally cool to leave their babies in their strollers outside of a cafe while they eat and drink inside, child-free.
It is called ICEland, but it is way more green than icy.
Every two feet is a different landscape … Iceland physically doesn’t make sense.
And, as I’ve reported before, people believe in elves. And trolls. And “hidden people.”
This Viking sees elves. And we love him for it. (Photo: Ricky Montalvo)
As locals will tell you, there’s a lot more awesome weirdness that goes on.
And as we at Yahoo Travel always say: Know (the local customs) before you go. You will have a better time and make more friends — which, in a country like Iceland, is easy to do. Trust.
Watch this video, learn the country’s customs and revel in their oddness. They’re fascinating!
