ninme

BBC – Home guard in Australia’s outback, By Nick Squires

L/Cpl Evans is a soldier in Norforce, a reservist unit whose job it is to patrol northern Australia looking out for poachers, gun runners, illegal fishermen and, potentially, terrorists.

What makes the regiment unusual is that about two-thirds of its 600 soldiers are Aborigines, a stark contrast to the regular Australian army, which has very few indigenous troops.

That’s so cool.

They use Landrovers, planes and inflatable boats to patrol a massive area of desert, scrub and coastline. It stretches more than 1,200 miles (1,931km) from Western Australia to Queensland, and reaches deep into the red desert around Alice Springs.

“It’s a fair patch of dirt,” concedes the regiment’s commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Dick Parker, with typical Australian understatement.

Hehehe.

Aboriginal troops are held in high esteem for their tracking abilities, their stealth and their instinctive knowledge of the land.

“You won’t get a better set of eyes than an Aboriginal soldier in the north,” says Captain Jack Olchowik, a white Norforce officer in charge of training the unit.

“Their bushcraft and their foraging skills are second to none.”

How cool would it be if we had a unit of Comanches patrolling the Mexican border or something.

Corporal Tommy Munyarryun is a Norforce veteran of 15 years and a respected elder in the Wanguri tribe. He grins as he lists the food which can supplement his normal army issue rations: wallabies, turtles, witchetty grubs, wild oysters and a type of crustacean known as “long bum” for its unusual shape.

Dugong, or sea cow, is also something of a delicacy.

“The white fellas teach us army stuff and we teach them what bush tucker they can eat when we’re out on patrol,” Tommy told me.

That cracks me up.

The regiment’s white officers have to be sensitive to a whole range of cultural differences among their soldiers. Lt Col Parker recalls the example of one Aboriginal soldier who simply disappeared one day, without explanation.

A year and a half later, just as officers were despairing of ever hearing of him again, he reappeared on parade.

“He’d just gone off into the bush,” said the colonel. “We call it going walkabout.”

Not exactly the sort of conduct you would expect in a regular army, perhaps, but then Norforce is no ordinary regiment.

Hah! I love it!