{"id":2302,"date":"2017-12-19T13:47:47","date_gmt":"2017-12-19T03:17:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wakefieldpress.com.au\/blog\/?p=2302"},"modified":"2017-12-19T13:58:39","modified_gmt":"2017-12-19T03:28:39","slug":"bush-mechanics-book-extract","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wakefieldpress.com.au\/blog\/2017\/12\/bush-mechanics-book-extract\/","title":{"rendered":"Bush Mechanics: From Yuendumu to the World"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Bush Mechanics: From Yuendumu to the World<\/p><\/div>\n

Below is an extract from the new release\u00a0Bush Mechanics: From Yuendumu to the World<\/em><\/a>, edited by Mandy Paul and Michaelangelo Bolognese. The book explores the\u00a0wildly popular TV series of the same name that aired on the ABC<\/a> from 2001 – 2002, and goes behind the scenes showing readers the highs and lows of life in the remote Australian outback.<\/p>\n

Aboriginal and Torres Straight Islanders are warned that this extract and video may contain the names, faces and voices of deceased people.<\/p>\n

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Extract from page 8 of Bush Mechanics:<\/strong><\/p>\n

‘While memories of the humour, indignity and anguish associated with a technology of\u00a0invasion opens the Bush Mechanics <\/i>series, the stories soon turn to the ways that Warlpiri\u00a0themselves have taken to automobiles. While Europeans first brought motor vehicles into the\u00a0Central Desert, now these Warlpiri men leave the community to bring them in for their own\u00a0purposes and according to their own values. Cars and the things that yapa <\/i>do with them have\u00a0become saturated with meanings and embedded in practices that reflect the possibilities and\u00a0constraints of life in Yuendumu. Perhaps most notably, the distinct car culture portrayed in\u00a0Bush Mechanics <\/i>is a contemporary expression of an earlier subsistence economy that continues\u00a0to be strong in the present.<\/p>\n

Crocodile, the dapper advocate of humpy living in the fourth episode, wonderfully\u00a0demonstrates the ongoing importance of bush food in contemporary Warlpiri life. As he digs a\u00a0kangaroo out of the ashes, Crocodile proudly declares that he is able to provide his family with\u00a0a big feed without a supermarket. Automobiles are similarly placed, by choice and by necessity,\u00a0within a local subsistence economy that continues to thrive alongside the cash economy. By\u00a0incorporating cars within that system, the bush mechanics have devised ways around the\u00a0material deprivations that characterise their lives in Yuendumu. They have created their own\u00a0ways of being men with wheels, based on an impressive disregard for the orthodoxies of individual\u00a0car ownership, the economics of the car market, and the professionalisation of automobile\u00a0repair. In so presenting the bush mechanics as mobile makers \u2013 foragers of mechanical parts\u00a0and disseminators of alternative solutions \u2013 the series offers upbeat parables of the men\u2019s self-determined\u00a0survival within settler colonialism.’<\/p>\n

A brilliant example of the ingenuity and determination of the Bush Mechanics can be seen in the following video. The\u00a0mechanics are returning home after a paying band gig in a nearby town and run into some trouble with their car – more than once!<\/p>\n