LAUSR

If you are driving west from Katherine on Highway 1, headed into the Kimberley in the far northwest of Australia, take time to pause and look south down the Buchanan Highway; that’s the turnoff before you get to Timber Creek. Debbie asked me to just nod my head, once. “Say hi to the people at Yarralin for me; I haven’t been able to get up there lately.” Yarralin, on Victoria River Downs, is about an hour’s drive south of the turnoff, and Victoria River Downs is one of the biggest cattle stations in the world. The mob there wouldn’t have seen me nod. Or you, if you remember to do it, if you ever get to travel the country she once walked, that she came to love in so many ways. She was born in Orono, Maine, on October 29, 1946. Much of her childhood was spent in Seattle, Washington, in the Pacific Northwest, the region she considered her homeland in the US and also a region with very strong Native American traditions. It was her brother, Will Rose, who me that “the Pacific Northwest [was] the region she considered her homeland in America.” By adding “in America” he knows that she also made Australia her home from 1980, and Yarralin, I’m sure, was another homeland, though she lived and worked in other Aboriginal countries, mostly in the Northern Territory. City life, where her university work was carried out, was mainly in Canberra and Sydney. According to her brother Will, the early years in her family of five children were marked by frequent moves urged by her restless father: from Orono to Seattle, to Wyoming, Oregon, and Massachusetts, to France, and back to rural Massachusetts. Debbie’s year in France with her family, from 1962–1963, seemed to open her eyes to other cultures and languages, setting her up for later work, no doubt. As a student at the international Coll ege Cevenol in Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, France, where her family spent that sabbatical year and to which Deb returned briefly as a teenager, she was exposed, as Will remarked, “to a post-war ethic of compassion for others, pacifism, multiculturalism, and ecumenism.”