My friend Linda is retiring from full-time teaching this year. To help celebrate, my friend Rachel and I made a digital story for Linda.

We were asked to create a video about Linda’s impact on the Australia/New Zealand Study Abroad program, which Linda and Rachel created as a result of their work with Digital Storytelling. Rachel and I realized the story could not just be about the international cultural exchange program, that it needed to encompass the power of storytelling as well. To get a look at the big picture, so we could distill it, we tried to map out, on a whiteboard, the entire series of events that culminated with an international exchange focused on indigenous culture. There were too many events, though, so we mapped what felt like the truly essential pieces.

We could easily have made an hour-long documentary film with all the material collected over the last ten years or so. Linda went on a sabbatical where she traveled the world interviewing storytellers. Linda and Rachel have taught Digital Storytelling classes for several years, impacting the lives of hundreds of students. They also teach the process to faculty, sometimes with my help. And the international exchange has been ongoing for the last four summers. We’ve also hosted at least four return visits. The metaphor of ripples helped us distill this material, and the impact of Linda in particular, to its utter essence, and into this 5-minute story.

We both felt it would be inappropriate to narrate, and instead we chose to let the stories do the talking. We excerpted them, but did not edit them, which means we left the voices and visuals intact. We added a bit of text, and some beautiful photos to accompany our words. We connected the dots of “aha” moments and experiences. We chose not to worry if anyone else “gets it.” This video is for Linda, and she gets it. If you feel it as a summation of years, instead of a linear narrative, you’ll get it.

Today, I am so glad I made this recording of the birds singing. I still think the crows have an Aussie accent. I know there were magpies around, and a mated pair of beautiful green parrots of some sort. And there was a little bird that looked a lot like a quail, only with the wrong colors. I don’t know all the other voices, but hearing them is still a form of sustenance.

Robert Croma asked if there is more from Australia. I’m actively looking for a few videos I remember making. I’m not sure if they are on tape, or already waiting my attention on a hard drive here in my office. But the travelogue I wrote with my mom still exists: Dreaming Down Under. And so do two photo galleries, one from 2004 and one from 2005.

I tried to record a lot of little moments that recurred daily at Korrawinga. There was a daily ritual the coffee addicts went through involving a personal French press. There was the daily walk down a gravelly, muddy dirt road to use one of the two outdoor showers. We had to watch for poisonous snakes on the way, and kick out the cane toads. There was being awakened at night by the dogs going through the trash, and awakened in the morning by the most beautiful birdsong I could imagine. And, every night, on the way to the toilet, there was the required stop to stand, shivering, staring at the sky, seeking out the new constellations, and searching for the familiar one we had in common, Orion, rising upside-down in the pre-dawn sky.

Good times.

Tim Tams in hand, you brew up your favorite tea or coffee. Take a Tim Tam and bite off two diagonally opposite corners. Seal your lips around one corner, dunk the other corner in your hot drink, and suck the liquid up through the Tim Tam. As soon as the liquid hits your tongue, slam the Tim Tam in your mouth and savor the melty chocolaty goodness.

Repeat as often as necessary.

This video was shot and edited entirely in my Xacti HD1A camera, my new favorite method for getting video up quickly. I have not been compensated by Arnott’s, but if they ever want to pay me in Tim Tams I’ll make all the ads they want. Yum!

Aboriginal Welcome Song by Cheryl Colan is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at hummingcrow.com.