feral

Queenslanders cop plenty of stick from us southerners, and they sling it back in spades.

By day’s end The Lizard and I aren’t too keen on Queensland. Our two days at the SKIPS training coalface are a success by most measures, but it comes at a price, and at a bigger price than any other training we’ve run.

We sit in the late afternoon sun at the empty Coffee Club in Jimboomba and read the evaluations. Oh, they liked the training and they like us well enough. But some participants feel we should have sat on some of the other participants. And they’re right, dead right. I wanted to do it, didn’t know how.

On day one Madame M reveals herself as bipolar. She speaks eloquently about her illness, although she prefers the word condition. Her story is in context and appropriate as part of the workshop. We praise her, acknowledge her courage. Little do we know the beast we have unleashed.

An Indigenous woman, Auntie V, sits at the same table, loud, maybe funny. She interrupts constantly. Trouble is, neither the Lizard nor I can make out anything much of what she says; she mumbles rapidly and mostly with her head half turned away. She means no harm, but makes no sense.

On day two Madame M thinks she has carte blanche to comment on every sentence The Lizard and I utter as presenters. I can see the shut-the-fuck-up looks around the room, but how to tactfully ask someone with bipolar to stuff a sock in it eludes me.

At morning tea she approaches me in tears, tells me the session was pretty heavy for her. Well, I feel like saying, who’s fault is that? At lunch she approaches again, tells me Auntie K, another Indigenous participant, mute so far, is not well. What, am I a doctor? I nod sympathetically, mumble incoherently. I’m losing the plot here.

By early afternoon Auntie V seems to be in drug-fucked coma, head on the table, her comments more inane than ever. As if fed up with it all, the three of them depart early.

In the late afternoon sun, exhausted, flat, feeling a bit defeated, I listen to as The Lizard tells me the three roomed together somewhere last night, and some unspecified melodrama happened.

Frankly, I don’t give a rat’s. They seriously impaired the workshop and others’ enjoyment of it. They gave their ‘types’—mental health condition and Indigenous person—a bad name. They behaved in ways rednecks like to joke about.

Turns out they all came across the border from NSW.

Rock on.