John Strehlow, author, theatre director and more, has lived in the Northern Territory ‘off and on since 1972 as has taken an amused interest in the practice of importing experts from the rest of Australia to aid its development, This book is the result of his observations on this fascinating phenomenon’. Here are some cartoon illustrations from The Southern Expert’s Handbook…
A running joke in the book is that if a southern expert actually does take their job seriously they will be banished to far off Borroloola. As it happens Borroloola is now one of the centres of the innovative and effective Indigenous Learning on Country Program – (as I have learned from my brother Hugh), It is about shared respect and meaning. Sharing of knowledge and experience of living and working together through two-way learning.
More seriously, John Strehlow is the author of The Tale of Frieda Keysser, the 2400 page history of his grandparents, missionaries Carl and Frieda Strehlow, sparked by the discovery ‘of Frieda’s diaries, written in old script German, and the realisation that this personal record of her life in Hermannsburg, from 1897 and 1908 which revealed previously unknown details of their lives their and happenings in the community and more generally around Central Australia.’ John Strehlow sets straight the controversy stemming from Professor Baldwin Spencer’s denigration of Carl Strehlow’s anthropological research – and ‘exposes Spencer as a major scientific fraud‘.
Chris Ategeka has created a book of one hundred ‘one-liner jokes to survive the Road Trip of Life‘.
Here is a small selection from the 100 cartoons that illustrate Chris’s witty thoughts -with a few words from the jokes added just to give you a taste of his humour. To read more you will have to buy Puns and Chuckles, One-liner Jokes to Survive the Road Trip of Life! And to discover the more serious side of Chris Ategeka’s work click here.
Simon Kneebone - cartoonist and illustrator 