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Okay, this blog could be about Sammy the Seal, Sunny the Seal or Sherman the Seal. However, unlike each of these options there is no Google listing for Solly the Seal, so I can now tell this story without fear of getting sued. For those who want photos, just “friend” me on Facebook and have your fill!

We are on Kangaroo Island in Australia, so it makes convoluted sense that our first touring site was Seal Beach. And, since this island is down under and everything is turned on its head (e.g., the sun is in the northern sky instead of the southern sky), these animals are actually sea lions and not seals. However, being in the Aussies’ homeland I will deferentially refer to Solly as a seal.

Solly is a young adult male seal. He is incurably curious, and we met him while watching a young construction worker dig a hole for a new bridge piling with a backhoe. Solly came bounding up a sand dune and sniffed around the machine, upon which the young man smiled, turned it off and backed away respectfully. The seals live here, and the people are spectators who are well coached not to interact.

The backhoe had just dug this apparently awesome hole, so Solly slid inside to check it out. The young man, grinning yet perplexed, pulled out his radio to call a ranger, “G’day, could you please give me a hand to get a seal out of this hole?”

Solly didn’t hang around for the ranger. Instead, he struggled out of the hole pushing with his flippers. He sniffed the backhoe again, triumphantly, and decided that its highest and best use was as a shade tree. So, he crawled underneath to take a nap after his exhausting exploration. We allowed Solly his sojourn and stopped snapping photos, and we proceeded to the beach to view his relatives alternately playing, sleeping and posturing.

Australia is a serene country in the way its people coexist with the wildlife. The sheep farming family we stayed with didn’t complain about the kangaroos and wallabies that emerge nightly to dine throughout their fields. “It goes with the territory,” Graham explained. His family has farmed here for three generations. Even the wildlife that is poisonous is respected.

The way people coexist, however, stands in sharp contrast. Unlike Kangaroo Island, which was first settled by European explorers, the “Red Centre” around Alice Springs and Uluru (Ayers Rock) has a large population of Aboriginal people. Tour leaders tout the culture of the Aboriginal people in well appointed cultural centers, in art galleries and at sites in the bush where they carved and drew on rocks. These drawings educated children and passed along generational knowledge about the location of precious water holes and how to track animal species.

However, neither we nor other visitors with whom we spoke witnessed a single Aboriginal person leading a tour, hosting a cultural center or staffing an art gallery. The Aboriginal people were nowhere to be seen in these settings; however, they were highly visible wandering around Alice Springs. Some Aboriginal people are seen living outdoors in the dried riverbed. Some live in developments that by all appearances resemble public housing projects like we have in Richmond. Some, we were told, have assimilated into modern culture. 

These benign observations exploded one evening while we were enjoying fish and chips and wine with newfound friends at a local watering hole at the corner of a busy Alice Springs intersection.  A white woman braked abruptly at the intersection, and a group of Aboriginal people poured out of the car that screeched into her from the rear. Amid crumpled metal and shattered glass, yelling ensued, first between the occupants of the two cars and then among the Aboriginal people. The incident escalated into physical violence, as one of the Aboriginal men grabbed a young Aboriginal girl by the hair and pulled relentlessly as she followed helplessly and screaming to the curb.

Our friends were helpful. One called the police, and two (one of whom is a social worker) ran over to help. The social worker remained with the young girl after the fight ended until the police took her and some of the other Aboriginal people to the police station.  The accident and subsequent incident warranted the response of 7 official vehicles including police cars, a paddy wagon, the fire department and the rescue squad. The racial tension that we had surmised from our prior observations was laid bare.

The social worker who was so helpful happened to be the proprietor of our delightful B&B. Deborah spoke with us before and after the incident, and she clearly represents the part of society that seeks purposefully to address the needs of the Aboriginal people as they try to cope with or assimilate into present day society. Other residents we observed in Alice Springs reminded me seem of the stereotypical Old West, when people took the law into their own hands.

We have only spent two weeks in Australia, so it is too soon to draw firm conclusions. This being said, my first impression is that the Aussies in general are far more comfortable living among a wide array of indigenous wildlife than they are coexisting with indigenous people.