Australia: Digeridoo Lesson

After a nice Saturday morning work out, I hopped on the bus to Freo with Brian and Nicole for a didgeridoo lesson. Didgeridoos are wooden instruments that one blows into by vibrating the lips together and sealing the mouthpiece entirely. Surprisingly, these instruments are not native to the indigenous people here and came around once Western Australia was colonized.

Didgeridoos are made by termites. Yes, termites. Didgeridoo makers start off by looking for trees with termite action at the bottom. The perfect piece of wood is already hollowed out by termites and just needs to be cut down, cleaned and polished. Now, the instruments are made out of many different materials, and not always just wood.

The lesson was enjoyable, but the didgeridoo is much harder to play than I anticipated. Some people easily got the hang of it and were making different sounds with the instrument. Meanwhile, I was lucky to get any sound out of it. It is really difficult to describe what sound a didgeridoo makes, because it can make so many. Traditionally, they are used to copy sounds of the surrounding environment.

After lunch, Brodie took the AIFS students to a really cool warehouse-type building that was split into different restaurants. We ordered about five kinds of pizza, salad and garlic bread. The food was phenomenal.

It was an extremely hot and dry day out, about 100 degrees Fahrenheit. After looking in one unique clothing store, Nicole and I headed home to escape the heat. I relaxed in my flat the rest of the day, and went out to a bar called Tiger Lily in the evening for another night out in Perth.