First contact with 'monster' rock that came alive

[JI7]

WHEN Yuwali saw the truck, she thought it was a rock — a rock that moved. Turning to her companions, the 17-year-old Aboriginal woman, who had never seen a white man, said: "You know those big rocks that we always play on? The rock has come alive."

Terrified, Yuwali and her young friends fled across the desert, too scared to sleep lest the "monster" and the "devil men" inside it catch up and eat them.

In 1964, almost 200 years after European settlers first arrived on the continent, Yuwali and her mob of desert-dwelling Martu were the last Aborigines untouched by the modern world. That changed when patrol officers entered their country, in the Percival Lakes region of the Western Desert, in Western Australia, to clear it in preparation for a series of rocket tests. This historic episode and the subsequent "first contact" is now the subject of a documentary by Sydney filmmakers Bentley Dean and Martin Butler.

The encounter ended the Martus' nomadic way of life, one they had led for at least 5000 years. Yuwali's group was taken to the mission at Jigalong, 200 kilometres south, where they were fed by missionaries and given some money. (Thinking it was worthless, Yuwali buried it in a riverbed.) She got work as a domestic helper on cattle stations, married twice and had four children. Now 62, she lives with two of her children at Parrngurr, a Martu community in the Pilbara.

"At first we were sad to leave our country," Yuwali says. "But we've been swept up in our new lives. We were carried away by something we never knew before. We left our hearts back in our country."



http://www.watoday.com.au/national/first-contact-with-monster-rock-that-came-alive-20090529-bqb0.html

[Deja Q]

1. Was the rock ignorant of good and evil, and requires Kirk to split his pants?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kD4wuv8bWeI

How's that for a wardrobe malfunction? :D

[Buzz Clik]

3. Fascinating. I was thinking more in terms of a silicon based life form

that looks a lot like fake puke:





Dammit, Jim! I'm a doctor, not a brick layer!"

[Octafish]

2. ''We left our hearts back in our country.''

Thank you for the heads-up, JI7. The film sounds fascinating.

I remember a study done on the last major community untouched by television in North America. This town, IIRC, was in the Canadian Rockies. Around 1967, a cable TV system went in.

Before TV, kids played sports and got in the band and did all sorts of after-school activities. Adults would sit on their porches in summer and play cards with their neighbors.

After TV, kids raced home to watch cartoons. Grown-ups stayed in, rather than engage with their neighbors.

We cannsee this effect when we look at America today. The country's going to hell and practically no one bothers to get off the couch to do something about it.

[JI7]

4. now you see it even when people get out with their cell phones, text messaging etc

even when you go out with a group of people there is always someone who is off in their own world talking to someone on their cell or text messaging someone.

[MilesColtrane]

5. Oh, Fuck Me!

That shitty, interminable "Like a Rock" Chevy campaign finally freaking died after more than 10 years.

If this brings it back, I'm putting a bullet in my brain pan.