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Okay, I'm back from Van Diemen's Land, where I've spent a week playing frisbee with albino wallabies in an open paddock at the edge of a national park. If you ever get the chance to go to Bruny Island, my friends, take that chance and hold on tight. Christmas and New year were the obligatory overwhelming time-tornado that sees me scratching my head a week into 2005 trying to work out if I've come up with a plan - any plan - yet. So while I'm sorting that out, I'll regale you with a Crimbo-concomitent occurrence. Christmas took place at the family estate in sunny Ballarat. Papa Ford has been doing some work in the front garden of late, and while digging a hole for a fencepost, as you do, he came upon an artefact direct from my childhood, circa 1983. I'm not sure if this is a behaviour that's exclusive to me, but growing up with both a sandpit in the back yard and a bunch of Star Wars figures to call my own, my desire to act out scenarios that provided the requisite danger and tension would often see me carting my toys oustside and burying them - sometimes up to the neck, sometimes covering them completely - underneath handfuls of sand. This was thematically consistent with the middle sequence of Star Wars and was further encouraged by the opening third of Return of the Jedi, with its oh-so-Freudian Sarlacc Pit encounter. My imagination wasn't content to limit itself to sand, though. If the little plastic guys could handle the hazards of being buried in the sandpit, then they were surely up for other kinds of burial - in the veggie patch, in the flowerbeds, in piles of leaves, in the compost heap, in the mounds of sand and gravel that turned up every now and then when dad and mum were re-doing the driveway, or whatever building-type grownup stuff it was that they did. And of course, being a kid, like I was when I was a kid, at the end of the day when I got called in for tea, whoever was underground at that time would be left there as I dropped whatever I was doing and ran inside. The next day would see a parent-initated salvage operation, but inevitably there was attrition in the number of figures that made it safely back inside. Which brings us back to Dad's fencepost. Among the debris he unearthed when preparing the hole in which the post would stand, he found this guy:
I was impressed with how well the sheepskin dhoti has survived its 20+ years of burial - no rot, no mould, no worm-bites at all. If you click on the pics and look at the enlarged version you can see some of the sand still caked into the folds of the breast of his shirt. If memory serves, this is Klaatu, a character from Return of the Jedi, one of three monsters from Jabba the Hutt's palace who are named after "Klaatu barada nikto", the famous line from the 1950s scifi classic The Day the Earth Stood Still. You've got your Klaatu, you've got an alien called Barada, and you've got Klaatu's work-buddy who goes by the name the Nikto Warrior. In The Day the Earth Stood Still the phrase was used to summon Gort, the robot, back to Klaatu, his master. Nerds the world over have debated the exact translation of the phrase (it's never given in the movie). It's thought to mean something like "I need your help" or "Don't hurt the humans", but when I was studying first-year Russian at university, I found three Russian words that were pretty similar, which hinted at an alternative meaning for the phrase. "Kladu"is a form of the word that means "to lay", as in laying bricks or masonry; "boroda" is the word for "beard"; and "nikto" means "nobody", so in the Russian-subtitled version of the film, the magic phrase translates as something like "lay down your beard for nobody". A code, I'm proud to say, that I live my life by. |
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