It's not every day you meet the Governor General, not on half-returned Aboriginal land anyway. I'm pleased to say that I recently had this honour. I shook His Excellency's hand and called him mate at a place called Iga Warta* in the Northern Flinders Ranges. He was on a ten-day jam-packed promotional tour of the outback which would pass through Birdsville, Charleville and Longreach, having already paused at Port Augusta and Wilpena. Among an entourage of 11 persons (according to the Herald Sun, and not including media reps) was a vice regal physiotherapist, whose job, I can only assume, was to keep the former SAS commander's body limber so that he could move from admiring subject to deferential subject secure in the knowledge that if he should slip a disc or pull a hamstring, a deep tissue massage would be only a yelp away. No one would know better than the distinguished Military Cross awardee and former resident of Wiluna just how physically demanding it can be to shake the hands of unwashed well-wishers while offering them tedious anodyne platitudes about values, prosperity and cultural understanding.
Of course, the size of the entourage was entirely fitting for the Queen's antipodean milk monitor. There was a small (but muscular) posse of police and army personnel, a clutch of pointy-faced minions, Ted Egan, Ted Egan's wife and some born-to-rule-looking kids wearing moleskins and expensive riding boots.
Fair enough I don't hear tax-paying republicans say. But a
physiotherapist?
That said, he was quite a nice bloke.
* A settlement within Nantawarrina, the first (SA) Indigenous Protected Area, declared in August 1998.
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