Kicks like a Melbourne Mule
Just two more days of festival to go over here, all gone so quickly as always and even with a week off to explore with a campervan i'll never even get close to seeing all the things i'd like to. Such is the case with a three week run of the rice i've been through a mill of emotions from nervous excitement, boredom and back again. Like going out for a long walk - you think you'll never make it and suddenly it's all over.
It was very busy in the show yesterday with 6 different school groups coming through alongside general public with a whole range of needs, questions and responses. My groups included a rural private school group with a quite worrying split of pupils - half white australian, half chinese with little or no communication between the two. a fantastic group of younger pupils who really engaged before even coming into the main hall, and a thoroughly mixed group of recently immigrated students.
It felt to me like they were using the show as a catalyst to make sense of their checkered personal histories, those of their friends and others, and that in this country famed for rejecting difference it was a chance to feel a little more at home. At one stage i was talking to 3 students from Malaysia, Sudan and Tibet about their journey to the country, the HIV epidemic and sub-saharan africa.
This just after a very emotional talk with a man who was returning to the show to see how it was used educationally. He told me that as an australian Jew he had intially been outraged by the placement of all the people killed in the holocaust close to all the russian civlilans who died in world war two. It transpired that he wanted to return to tell someone how angry he had been, and how on reflection he had realised that because the rice is so neutral in terms of statement - a visual representation of two accepted and horrifying death counts - his anger was a result of his own preconceptions and agendas. It's completely understandable of course, and as we stood there, two strangers sharing a moment of monumental personal and historical significance, it was impossible not to well up with emotion.
Take a breath and it was back to asking a kid to stop running, picking up a few stray grains of rice,wondering why the world turns so quickly.