In your own communities back home, you would rarely attend the funeral of a person you didn't know. Its strange how in this place, because so much of these people's lives have been documented I guess, or because there are so many participants maybe, or perhaps because they go on for so many days that a funeral can be misconstrued as a spectacle, rather than a private event.

We were advised not to attend this funeral, during all these weeks unless we were accompanied by family. Makes perfect sense to me. I once attended a funeral of a person I didn't know as part of my community responsibility. I felt like an interloper then.

But you can not be here and not be affected by ceremony in some way. Roads are closed erratically. School is out of session. Houses are swollen with family, and family is eeking out the back door to find some peace. New faces to us, old friends to everyone else seem to be appearing and disappearing like ghosts. A city of tents sits near the ceremony ground and the gossip around town is all about the when, why, what happened and how long will it last and then there are the other sounds.

Far more important to ceremony (or so at least Randy has read and I've heard) are the clap sticks (bilma) and the song man. The bilma are two sticks, sometimes the same size, sometimes not, sometimes little, sometimes big as a baseball bat, sometimes painted, sometimes plain. When the song man strikes one stick against the other they make a single beautifully clear "clap." The flashiness is in the clarity. They are created from ironwood trees(among others), which is extremely hard and difficult to work with.

On returning home from the art center tonight we heard the most amazing sound moving through the Eucalyptus forest opposite our house near the school. It was the procession of the men's group moving from Shady Beach, through the school yard down towards the ceremony ground. We could not see them, we could not see anything but we could hear,

The song man call out

a single "clap"

The song man call out

a single "clap"

and then voices moving together through the trees. One does not have to attend to be affected by ceremony. I spent the rest of the night in coping with the onset of a tropical virus, alternating between sleeping, aching, sweating, reading

--and listening.