End of the first week...

It's Friday.  Not sure how we got here so fast, but time is flying. 

We are waiting on our key project stakeholder to arrive back from Cairns as he's been held up there.  We'll be catching up with him and that project over the weekend, maybe make back some time. 

In terms of what that means?  Tomorrow morning we are getting picked up by one of the Rangers (Robert who we just met today coincidentally, happens to be our friends Hersey and Kenlock's daughter's partner) at 9am, then head out to the APN outstation for another two days of camping in a swag.  We'll combine our briefing sessions with experiencing what the traditional land owners have to offer, see what their plans are and just get a feel for the place.   There are tourist operators looking at packages (talking to them maybe next week to potentially put together a plan for them), there is a marketing plan, tourism plan, cattle station plan, ecological plan, ranger plan - all these are in the pipeline.  We will work with Bruce (director of APN) to prioritise which of these we tackle first.  There has been a few secondees before us, who have a cattle station viability model (which is apparently excellent), the online marketing briefs (see http://www.apncapeyork.org/ which they've just launched).

In the meantime, we have met with a variety of different people in town, discussing issues and opportunities with programs, how we can leverage the govt options available (there is federal, state and local council initiatives to look at) and work out how we can help some locals move further towards their own business.

This is all done in their Aurukun time, and generally we try about three times to get a meeting.  We go with the flow and have a few options up our sleeve for next person to talk to.

Apres work - can't say that boredom is an issue, far from it.  Haven't even turned on the tv, so the rest of the world has disappeared for a while. 

Last evening we went to the local basketball court (half a block away happily) to have a run around.  We lasted about 30 mins playing a bit of one-on-one before we had about 10 kids all playing with us.  We finally had to pull the pin about 7.30pm, with lots of complaints and "are you playing tomorrow" questions...lots of fun.  

Right now, as everything shuts up shop for lunch, a good chance to catch up on things back at the "office".  Need to get off to our next meeting, where we are discussing expansion options with a local couples small trucking company.

Still hot and dusty.

Appow

S