Vignettes of the World
In the beginning, Alice Springs (Mparntwe in Eastern Arrernte) was home to the Arrernte aborigines for 20,000 years, long before the arrival of the European settlers during the 1860s. The Arrernte aborigines hunted and gathered food in this area. The Lhere Mparntwe (Todd River) determined …
Perhaps I can take a break from the history, culture and the nature and discuss the food that I had in this part of Australia. Surely, I heard all about the bush tucker and the kangaroo tail, which are considered essential and delicacies in aboriginal …
Located right next to the Bethanie in Pok Fu Lam, the Old Dairy Farm of Pok Fu Lam is a wonderful lesser-known heritage that tells plenty about the history of Hong Kong’s milk production. Along with the Former Cowsheds, which is now within the administration of the Academy of Performing Arts (HKAPA) at the Bethanie, the Old Dairy Farm of Pok Fu Lam was a large ranch with complex production facilities. Cattle was raised and milked there. The company also processed the milk on site.
The Old Dairy Farm was Hong Kong’s first dairy farm. The ranch came into being as the Dairy Farm Company’s production facility in 1886, when Scottish surgeon Patrick Manson persuaded five businessmen in Hong Kong to invest in a ranch. The first dairy business in Hong Kong began its first page in Pok Fu Lam.
In those times, this part of Pok Fu Lam was very much rural in character. Both the existence of the cattle ranch and the Pok Fu Lam Village are ample indications of that fact. A few favorable factors made Pok Fu Lam perfect for the ranch. It was far enough from Sheung Wan, which was heavily populated with terrible hygiene conditions. Yet it was also close enough to the foreigners that lived in Central. Pok Fu Lam was also located on a higher point of the island, the seaside, hillside location supplied plenty of cool breezes, which would be essential in keeping the cows happy. Good milk came from happy cows.
Finally, the (very) nearby Pok Fu Lam Reservoir, established in the 1860s, supplied a steady source of water to the ranch. This was critical because cows consume a whole lot of water. Production facilities also required an enormous amount of water for both hygienic and production purposes.
The premises of Dairy Farm spanned 120 hectares. Initially, the company kept 80 milk cows here, at first they were imported from America. Thereafter, other breeds arrived at the ranch, as they were imported from Scotland, Australia and the Netherlands. By 1910, there were 35 cowsheds on site. The farm practiced segregated rearing, and these cowsheds were separated by 100 yards in distance. Each cowshed had its own staff to handle feeding and cleaning as well. The count of cowshed by 1950 had grown to 50. By now, only two such cowsheds have been preserved within the APA premise next to the Bethanie.
Although the site showcases other-era heritage, the Old Dairy Farm continued its operation in Pok Fu Lam until 1983. Thereafter, the villagers of Pok Fu Lam Village played a pivotal role in the conservation effort.
The revitalized Pok Fu Lam Old Dairy Farm is consisted of two buildings. One was the former Servants’ Quarter, and the other was the Main Office Building.
Both buildings have pitched roofs with double layered pan and roll tiles and a timber roof system. This feature is one of revitalization. The original structures were of pitched roofs, which were replaced with flat roofs at a later time.
The Main Office Building shows a half-hexagonal extension as its centerpiece. The wall of the lower floor is made of granite blocks, and the wall for the upper floor is made of bricks.
The windows have timber frames and blinds, and some of the original frames were preserved. By and large, the building shows classical features.
There is a veranda on the side, beaneath which there are three bullseye windows. These bulleye windows look a bit like the caged windows of a ship’s cabin. Both the veranda and the bullseye windows are intended to enable better airflow within the building.
The Servants’ Quarter is a one-story building that features also simple classical elements. Pay attention to the moulded copings and the horizontal moulded bands at the roof.
The Pok Fu Lam Village is likely the most famous village in Hong Kong. The century-old village is on the World Heritage Building Foundation watch list of 2014-2016. It is also deemed the first settlement in Hong Kong, before the British took the island under its wings. It lies a stone’s throw away across the highway from the Old Dairy Farm.
A lot of villagers in Pok Fu Lam Village grew up with fond memories of the farm. They grew up being tied to the land and the animals therein. For the village children, the Old Dairy Farm was once their playground. For the adults, the farm provided job opportunities. The farm represented every part of the rustic life that is now properly within near-forgotten memory in that part of Hong Kong.
As such, the museum on site showcases the history of Pok Fu Lam Village. The villagers were key players in the revitalization and conservation of the heritage site.
Hong Kong companies that stayed in the dairy business have had to adapt to the urbanization in Hong Kong that made our environment no longer suitable for large scale cattle rearing. There are a few local names, both still claim to deliver their milk fresh.
Trappist Dairy began its first page as a dairy business in Lantau Island in the early 1960s. A group of Catholic priests ran this business as part of the Trappist Monastery.
Trappist Dairy still markets itself as Hong Kong’s fresh milk. Its operations are now in Tai Sang Wai, Yuen Long, and it also gets supplies from a ranch in Tai Po.
The Kowloon Dairy Farm was established in 1904. It was run upon scientific principles. In the beginning, the company set up its operations on Boundary Street. At some point, it moved to Clear Water Bay, and now draws upon supplies in Guangzhou. The milk is processed in Tuen Mun, however.
Both of these local dairy companies maintain that their products are locally produced.
Usually at heritage sites the resident businesses feature nostalgic and native Hong Kong themes but at the Old Dairy Farm we get Pizza Express. And you just know what you are going to get there. They didn’t have the pasta that we wanted on the day of the visit, so we ordered a pizza for each of us. We were stuffed with good pizzas and packed some home too. We made a reservation for a weekday lunch and surely enough we were almost the only patrons there.
Descriptions on site at the Old Dairy Farm.
Hong Kong Tourism Board, Pok Fu Lam Reservoir.
The Official Website of the Old Dairy Farm of Pok Fu Lam.
Anitiquities Advisory Board, Historic Building Appraisal, Old Dairy Farm, No. N314.
Due to this part of the Uluru being the women’s section, there is no photo on the safe site for women. The Kitchen Cave could be photographed on the inside and the outside. Please respect the rule. Up close at the Uluru, you would naturally …
We had a fascinating lesson of the Uluru being the beloved nature that bestows life and meaning upon the Anangu peoples. But a basic understanding of the geology of the rock is another way to appreciate the Uluru. The Geology of Uluru Within its embrace …
The tour guide started speaking volumes about this scenery before us. Perhaps due to the prolonged hunger that I endured before lunch, I didn’t quite get the significance of this moment, “what are you speaking about, where are we?”
“The Uluru, girl,” my Texan friend was not impressed by my cluelessness as we stood before the soul of the Outback that is Uluru. The embarrassment aside, I knew why I was clueless. Up close, the Uluru is nothing like what one sees from afar, when the monolith stands as one enormous structure. At the Uluru, one might not readily recognize its color — even the signature rusty red surface felt different — let alone being enclosed within the myriad folds of the rock faces that gives an impression of malleability, like the ruffles of a silky party dress. When viewing the Uluru from within, its morphing rockfaces felt almost feminine.
Our first adventure at the Uluru was the Kuniya Walk.
Tjukurpa (pronounced “chook-orr-pa”) is a religion-based philosophy encompassing the initial world views, laws and mores for the two aboriginal peoples of Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara, together known as the Anangu peoples. It lies at the foundation of Anangu culture. While the westerners call it Dreamtime, the aborigines take offense at the suggestion that the stories are mere myths. For the people hold the Tjukurpa as every bit of their truth as the Bible is for the Christians in the world.
At the Kuniya Walk, we learned the details of the aboriginal way of life, seeing some significant rock art, the sacred Mutitjulu Waterhole and hearing fundamental Creation Stories that govern their beliefs. The walk is 1km in distance and there is no climbing at all.
On the Kuniya Walk you will be led through many aboriginal rock paintings. A lot of these paintings have survived 5,000 years, but there were also paintings from the 1950s.
Photo: The concentric circles in Anangu aboriginal paintings indicate waterfalls.
The science of the durability of the painting is one of age-old practice. The aborigines mix the charcoal and ashes of the desert oak tree, blood, water and oil to make their paintings.
Photo: Yellow leaves indicate plants with medicinal qualities.
The aboriginal children learn at a tender age about the meaning of the paintings, especially how each individual pictorial representation bear what meaning. The paintings often serve as critical indicators that concern survival, especially with regards to water and food sources. Otherwise, they stand as living instructions to the aborigines there.
Photo: Animal shapes are a way to teach aboriginal children the relationship between trees, animals and men. Where you see animal footprints (emu and kangaroo), they are signs for the children that there is food around.
For most of its history, the Pitjantjatjara language was not written. The elders of the Anangu peoples pass down their knowledge and culture mostly by the oral traditions of storytelling (Dreamtime) and song-singing (songline). Another way that culture is preserved and enshrined is through art.
The Anangu peoples express clear disapproval of the word Dreamtime or Dreaming to describe the Tjukurpa. As discussed before, some of these stories have such a sacredness that they cannot be retold to people outside of the tribe. There is explicit instruction on the uluru.gov.au website not to replicate or retell the story of Kuniya, and I shall respect that.
Photo: The “scar” on the rockface is a trail left behind by Kuniya.
Suffice it is to say that Kuniya is a woman that is an Ancestral Being of the Anangu peoples. Her ventures into this area of the Uluru resulted in a critical lesson in the upbringing of aboriginal children, and women’s role in that endeavour.
If you make it out there to Uluru and get to hear the story of Kuniya, be especially tuned in to two aspects of the story. One is how the dramatic fights between those Ancestral Beings left physical marks onto the nature. The tour guide will show you which physical qualities of the rock are the results of Ancestral actions. That is one critical aspect of the aboriginal worldview — that natural features are manifestations of their Ancestors’ spirited behaviors.
Secondly, be especially attentive when the tour guide tells you the moral of the story. Those morals are the very laws that govern the aborigines’ conduct and upbringing.
The Mutitjulu Waterhole is the only permanent waterhole in Uluru. While its sacredness is apparent due to this fact alone, it is also sacred for the fact that Kuniya’s spirit resides here.
The water at the waterhole was always coming from the top. The water forms the black waterlines, then they lay still in the waterhole. Only the aborigines can swim here. In 1873, the first European climbed the rock from this waterhole.
I want to say that the water of Mutitjulu whispered the spirits of the Ancestral Beings of creation, but to be honest, that was not the vibe there. Both before and after us there were tour groups there eagerly waiting to feel the spirit. We only had so much time to snap a few photographs and then we called it a visit.
That is not to deny that the spirit was indeed there. There was a moment of rare unity in the tour group when we heard the tour guide explain the Kuniya Creation Story to us. In silence and deference we received the Creation Story at the Mutitjulu Waterhole. There and then, it felt as if we were a group of aboriginal children being instructed by an elder.
Just an interesting fact. To serve as a guide for Uluru tours, one must be trained in the University of Darwin first. We heard stories that were carefully curated, deemed acceptable to be communicated to the world as fundamental narratives through which one understands aboriginal culture.
Out of respect to the Anangu peoples’ traditions, one must not touch the water at the Mutitjulu Waterhole. As in, don’t drop things in there (no wish-making!), let alone swimming or dipping in it.
Tour with White Emu Run.
The Luen Wo Market was once the lifeline for the people of Fanling. As a key marketplace, it served as the venue where the community interacted in their daily affairs. It was once a critical market for trade in produce and livestock in the New …
In the preliminaries entry on the Outback, I have given a brief overview on a tour to Uluru. I will say a few more things here. A trip to the Outback comes with many options. Experienced travelers can consider self-guided, self-driven tours that involve camping and hiking in West Mac and East Mac, or otherwise accommodation close …
The Ross River Resort is an oasis of living civilization within the deserted wild that is East Macdonnell. We went there as our rest stop after visiting most of the natural sites of East Macdonnell.
I very much looked forward to a wonderful lunch there. The walking had exhausted my breakfast calories. It turned out that we met a man from Coober Pedy there as well. As I heard the story of the early colonists’ lives there, the fate of the one million camels and the impossibly fatty kangaroo tail as an aboriginal delicacy, the experience at River Ross Resort exceeded the expectation of a good hamburger.
Let’s get the food out of the way first. My hamburger was good!
The history of settlement by the colonists in the Outback was closely tied to two critical developments of the late 1800s, one was the establishment of telegraph stations, and the other was the Gold Rush. The colonists arrived with the intention to exploit nature for resources, and such efforts came with some grave environmental and sociological consequences.
Charles Todd persevered through the rough terrains of the Australian hinterland and set up telegraph lines and stations in Central Australia. He immigrated to South Australia from London in 1855.
As he was appointed the Government Astronomer and the Superintendent of Telegraph, he set out to establish the key infrastructures of telecommunications. In 1877, he successfully completed the journey to set up telegraph lines between Adelaide and Darwin, having made his way through half of the unexplored Australian continent. As both explorer and key government official, he was tremendously admired and credited for connecting Australia with the rest of the world, very much an accomplishment of national stature.
Those were the times of an emerging frontier narrative in the nation. There is no question that all the conditions of the Outback were tough — the arid weather, the general lack of infrastructure, and a rocky landscape that would have necessitated significant menial labor for exploitation and development.
Even in 2024, the Outback was tough enough for me as a tourist.
Arltunga lies about 45 km northwest of the Ross River Resort. Once the town of miners during the gold rush era, Arltunga now stands in ruins as a ghost town with a lot of the old buildings being rusted by time. Established in 1887, Arltunga was the Northern Territory’s first gold field.
Both the expedition of Charles Todd and the Gold Rush years called for the introduction of camel as the key carrier of goods and people. This resulted in severe unanticipated consequences to the Outback.
“Hoof animals are not native to the Outback and they turned out to be bad for the environment here.” Kirsty said with a touch of disapproval. In the beginning, camels were perfect for the colonists of the Outback when they developed this region, chief reason being that camels could survive the desert here, where horses did not. A lot of the camels in the Outback were imported from Afghanistan. The Australians also requested cameleers, the camel drivers, to come to Australia on year-long contracts to help run the logistics of driving camels and cargos.
These cameleers, although not all were from Afghanistan, were collectively known as “Afghans,” so much so that the areas where they lived became “little Afghanistan” as early as the early 1900s. A lot of them were Muslims, who eventually built the first permanent mosque of Australia in Adelaide. The mosque remains the center of their descendants’ (and other Australian Muslims’) religious life today.
Both the humans and animals native to the Outback observed one rule when it comes down to water sources. Where the water is there for drinking, both humans and animals do not dip in it. The camels, however, did not understand this rule, and brought forth quite a bit of pollution of sacred water source for the natives. Although camels could go days without drinking water, when they are thirsty, they would gulp down tens of gallons in one go.
The hoof animals also graze, large-scale, on the vegetation of the Outback. Their traffic also affect the quality of the soil and results in erosion. Needless to say, by now, camels have long completed their historic role as indispensable modes of transportation and logistics in the frontier before the times of the automobiles.
Since 2009, various different stakeholders have been culling them systematically. The way that it is done is simply to shoot them. They die in the open, without anyone making the effort to bury or dispose of them.
This practice sounds appalling to outsiders, but the camels have caused significant adverse impact on the environment and human settlements (farms, mostly) in the Outback. It is believed that the camel population in the nation is one million strong, and they multiply rather quickly too.
The Red River Gum trees that we see today (at Trephina Gorge) are there because after a century or more the nature of East Macdonnell recovered from the heavy logging of the Red River Gum trees in East Macdonnell. The Red River Gum Trees are naturally hollow. The colonists learned from the aborigines’ heavy use of this tree to build their homes, first firing the hollows of the bark. They could be used for roofing.
The predecessor of Ross River Resort is the historical Loves Creek Homestead of 1898. It is believed that the foreman at Arltunga, Alfred Tabe, built the Loves Creek Homestead. The former homestead stands testament to the colonists’ interactions with the nature of the Outback.
The railway was moved at that time. As a result, all the sleepers and the beautiful trees were left there to rot. The people took those to the homestead. The roof is built with materials from a bridge.
A lot of the original features of the Loves Creek Homestead are preserved at the Ross River Reserve. The outhouses that we see, now serving as dormitories, were built from the leftover materials (the sleep cars of the trains) from the defunct railroad.
Its décor is truly representative of the frontier life: bar stools that are made from the old horse saddles, the fireplace that would have kept the living space warm in the desert’s unforgiving nights. There was a clear sense that, be it wood or metal, every piece of material must be put to full use.
Bower birds are much-adored in the Outback. The ones we saw at East Macdonnell were western bower birds, with beautiful colors in their feathers. The bower birds decorate their bower, where the male attracts a mate. This one collected plastic and glass, to make his matrimonial home. The rest was green grass, they make “only green and white bower.” It’s too bad that we didn’t see the birds, but the beautiful bower made a lovely impression.
When Kirsty took me back to the hotel in Alice Springs, I took home with me the lessons of East Macdonnell that I will forever embrace as the realistic version of Australia’s Outback. The relative roughness of East Macdonnell, be it in landscape or in narratives, represents the spirit of survival for colonists, aborigines and animals alike. It was with this learning that I visited the Uluru, the most-anticipated part of the trip in the Outback.
Tour with Red Earth Roaming.
Biograph.org on Sir Charles Todd.
Discover South Australia History, Red Gum: Crafts of Necessity.
The official website of the Ross River Resort.
Daily Urban Report, A Guide to the East Macdonnell Ranges: Ghost Towns and Gold Rushes.
Science Codes, How Australia Got the Hump Over 1 Million Feral Camels.
The Wikipedia on the Afghan Cameleers in Australia.
We were in the afternoon and the tour in East Mac was soon to end. On our way back home we stopped by the Corroboree Rock. The Meaning of Corroboree The corroboree is a nocturnal dance ritual for the aborigines. The aborigines gathered with face …