Suffice to say that yesterday probably wasn’t the best day out of my 15 years or so in business. I have always enjoyed crisis management situations, but there is a tipping point. I think I got pretty close to falling over the edge yesterday.

When I got home I went to the gym to get it out of my system. When I got back up stairs the sun was just going down, so I grabbed a beer and sat on the balcony. This time of year there are heaps of Dragonflies around which I am told signifies the end of the Wet Season.

I watched in awe as the Swallows danced around the sky trying to catch them for dinner. It is amazing how quickly a not such enjoyable day fades into oblivion when you are marvelling at nature.

I had a friend some years ago who made T-Shirts with her small business when she was at Uni. She was a friend’s girlfriend and would always be giving people T-Shirts for their birthdays and things, mainly with words or logos on them way before it became main stream. I asked her one day if she could make me a T-Shirt that she thought suited me. She came back with a plain black T-Shirt simply with the work ‘LOST’ on it.

This was around the same time I started DJ’ing in nightclubs. One night at Cube Bar, Planet Hollywood, a guy came up and said, hey DJ Lost… The name seemed to just fit.

When I started writing this blog it also seemed to make sense. I was going to live in a city that I had never been to, more than four hours flying time, leaving my friends and family behind. When I got here I did feel somewhat lost.

I bought a CD on the weekend, Armin van Buuren’s latest compilation, and what do you know. There is a track titled ‘Lost’ by Sunlounger (featuring Zara). It is a fantastic song, and the lyrics have been stuck in my head for the past two days. This is the chorus:

Just let your fears go

You might find your way back home

Let your fears go

You might find that you’re not lost

I just cannot believe how well this describes my life right now.

It appears that the definition I gave last week of Long Grassers is only a fairly recent meaning. The term itself actually goes back thousands of years as I found out over the weekend.

If an Indigenous Man left his tribal region it was usually for one of two main reasons. One was to search for food in another part of the country, and the other was due to being banished for committing an indecent act such as incest. Incest to the Indigenous has a different meaning to what we are used to in Western Society. We see it as an act between siblings or first cousins, many of whom turn up on Jerry Springer. Indigenous people can hark back to fourth cousins or even people from the same ‘skin group’ (more on this in a later post) and still be seen to be committing a terrible offence, and be forced to leave their group.

If you think about it, what happens when a farmer leaves his farm? The grass grows long as he is no longer caring for it. The same happened when Indigenous men left their tribal regions. The grass grew long, and they became known as Long Grassers.

When I was growing up we used to visit some family friends who lived in Paddington. Back then it wasn’t the gentrified neighbourhood of multi-million dollar terraces that it is today. At one particular point walking from Kings Cross Station to their home we used to walk past a half way house for men, where they would be strewn all over the pavement. It was quite a frightening experience as a child, we even had eggs thrown at as once (mind you, I did asked mum for eggs to throw back). Since that time I have learnt a lot about the plight of such individuals, mainly through reading The Big Issue.

In Darwin there are some Indigenous people living on beaches, on the streets and on park benches. The locals call them Long Grassers because quite often they live in exactly that, the long grass. Most have been displaced somehow by their remote communities (remote in an NT sense!) and cannot afford nor find accommodation in the City.

The local authorities see them as a homeless nuisance. They are homeless, but only in the sense that they do not have a roof over their head. Many of them have lived rough, or in the Starlight Motel as some call it, for years and consider themselves residents of Darwin, not vagrants.

In the 1990s the Police began issuing them with ‘sleeping in public’ infringement notices of about $50, which they of course could not afford to pay. Once an individual had been caught a few times and had not paid their fines they would receive a court summons and would be put in jail under mandatory sentencing laws (introduced by the NT Government in 1997). Reading between the lines you could interpret this as the forced gentrification of Darwin. It’s sad to think that the New South Wales Government did a similar thing leading up to the 2000 Sydney Olympic Games.