Ernie Dingo

Hello, Mr Dingo.

I'm sorry for abandoning you several days ago. I hope you didn't feel rejected. Hey, don't take it personally. It was just bad timing. Your name happened to come up on the wrong day.

But I'm here now.

So....

Let's begin.

Lord Wiki says that Ernie Dingo was born on 31 July 1956.

Birthday website time!

He's a Leo in astrology and a 5 in numerology.

I picture that person to be quite entertaining. The keywords here are dramatic and freedom. Being with this type of person would be a wild ride. Does Dingo fit all that? I have no earthly idea.

Dingo is indigenous. I kind of figured that. I'm not sure if the name clued me in, or if I just knew from running into his name previously. I have forgotten pretty much everything I had read about him. But I did remember the indigenous part.

He was born at Bullardoo cattle station. That name sounds very familiar. I'm not sure why. Maybe I encountered it in a book?

Lord Wiki says the town he grew up in was Mullewa. That's in Western Australia.

I'm going to look at the map.

I like looking at maps.

I'm so tired. It's three in the morning here right now. I should be asleep.

Mullewa is about an hour and a half away from Geraldton.

Oh. It's in Western Australia. Have I mentioned that yet? The lack of sleep is probably messing with my mind.

Anyway....

Lord Wiki says Dingo went to Mullewa Primary School and Geraldton High School.

Then he moved to Perth and joined a basketball team. He met an Aboriginal entertainer named Richard Walley. If I'm reading this right....they met while being on the same basketball team.

Okay.

Now Lord Wiki lists the shows Dingo has been a part of.

He's the host of a show called The Great Outdoors. He's been on that since 1993.

He co-starred with Cate Blanchett in a show called Heartland. I didn't know Cate Blanchett was on a TV show. Well, that being said....I don't really actually know that much of anything about Cate Blanchett.

Dingo narrated an Indigenous segment of the 2000 Olympics.

He's in a movie called Until the End of the World. Lord Wiki describes it as a sort of science fiction road movie. I'm not sure if I've ever heard of it. Have any of you seen it?

Dingo was in Crocodile Dundee II. I think I saw that movie, or maybe I just saw the first one. It was so long ago....WAY before my Australian obsession. I do sort of remember an indigenous person in the movie. So there you go. Dingo and I have met before.

Fairly recently, Dingo has been part of a reality TV show called It Takes Two.

Dingo married someone named Sally Butler. Her name sounds so familiar to me. Now she's Sally Dingo though.

Mr. and Mrs. Dingo now live in a small town in Victoria called Warrandyte. It's not too far from Melbourne....about forty five minutes to the east.

All right. That's it for Lord Wiki.

He has links to two of Dingo's TV shows. I'll look at that.

Let's start with It Takes Two.

This looks like something my parents and sisters would love. They like reality talent shows. I don't. I feel the shows are too mean. I don't like meanness. I want everyone to be nice to each other.  Or at least TRY to be nice.

I don't see Dingo on the front page of the site. I'm too lazy to search. Maybe I'll run into him later.

Let's move onto The Great Outdoors.

It looks like a travel show.

I like travel shows sometimes. They're usually not mean to people.

I think I can actually watch an episode. Maybe I'll keep it on while I work.

This one is about Hong Kong. Did you know Hong Kong means fragrant Harbour? I'm LEARNING something from this show. Maybe I should try to watch an episode that Dingo is doing. This one has a female host.

All right. I'm trying to find Dingo....

I keep clicking on videos and getting other hosts.

All right. I found him! This episode is about wildflowers. I like wildflowers.

I like Dingo.

I like his accent.

And he looks very huggable.

I'd like a hug right now.

I used to think that whole free hug thing was dumb. Now it brings me comfort to know that there are people out there who want to do nice things for strangers. I'm not sure if it helps, but at least they're TRYING to be good to their fellow human beings.

I just started paying attention to the video again. There are running camels.

Oh! Wait. The episodes are automatically changing on me, and they're not full episodes. They're just little clips. Without me realizing it, we switched from flowers to camels. Now we're on snowy mountains in New Zealand.

Here's some info from the Museum of Broadcast Communications. I've not encountered this website yet. I wonder why. I would think it would have come up in my previous research.

The website talks about his transition from basketball to acting. It says his basketball team formed a dance and cultural performance group.

He then did some stage work.

Then in 1984, he was in a miniseries called Cowra Break Out. This was about that time some Japanese folks escaped from their POW camps.

He was then in other 80's movies.

There was Tudawali in 1987. It's about the first Aboriginal film star...Robert Tudawali. An IMDb user says, This is, without doubt, Ernie Dingo's finest acting performance: his portrayal of Robert Tudawali, the first Aboriginal film star (in JEDDA), is outstanding, and he deserved to win an AFI Award - unfortunately they didn't give them out for teledramas until very recently.

There's Fringe Dwellers. This is about an Aboriginal family that decides to move out of the fringe world and into white society. IMDb trivia says that someone in the movie is shown reading The Storm Boy. I read that a few weeks ago. I liked it, but I can't say it put me in a happy joy joy mood. The book is basically about how some people can be incredibly cruel, and sometimes there's not much the rest of us can do about it.

Next movie....

State of Shock.

Weird. I plugged in State of Shock to IMDb and got some freaky looking 1978 movie called Power Play. What's up with that? This movie has Donald Pleasense in it. Isn't he that guy from the Halloween movies?

Okay. Yep. He is.

Back to Dingo.

He was on a show called Fast Forward. It seems to be a comedy sketch show. Dingo did 22 episodes in 1989.

The show Heartland (the one with Cate Blanchett) was a drama. The story involved a cross-cultural romance. Oh wait. It wasn't a TV series. It was a miniseries. I was thinking it was a weekly kind of show. A viewer of the shows, says on IMDb, As an Australian who has lived in communities similar to the one depicted in this TV series, I can assure viewers it is *not* over-stated or exaggerated in any way - and in some communities even now, similar problems are occurring.

I think I'm going to close to museum website now and just look at IMDb itself. That's what I've been doing pretty much anyway.

It seems Dingo was on Home and Away. He played Tom. IMDb is a bit vague though about which episodes he was on.

He was on a show called Heartbreak High. Abi Tucker was in it. I don't know much about Tucker, but I've watched a YouTube video of her in a TV show doing Karaoke. She sang Paul Kelly's "To Her Door". Maybe the scene was from Heartbreak High? I'm going to try to find the video. It was on my Aussie music playlist; but about half those videos are no longer available.

Yep. It's listed now as unavailable. Oh well.

And Dingo was only in five episodes of the show. I guess he was more like a recurring guest star.

Dingo is going to be in an upcoming movie called Bran Nue Dae. Cute title there. Say it aloud and you'll see for yourself.

The movie takes place in Broome in 1965. Geoffrey Rush is in it and so is Missy Higgins. Interesting cast there.....

All right. I have to pee. Then I shall return and do more research.

It's five in the morning now.

It feels weird to be working in the middle of the night.

I'm going to look for more websites.

Awesome! Here's a website done by children at a school in Victoria. It seems there are six kids who worked on it....Michelle, Erin, Asha, Alice, Gabriella, and Daniel T. I guess that means there's another Daniel in their class. I wonder what the initial of that other Daniel's last name is.....

So, what do the kids say?

Dingo was a lover of sport.

I'm not. But I'm trying to tolerate it more since one of my favorite friends is a huge fan.

The Great Outdoors is on at 8 pm on Tuesdays. We never saw it when we were in Australia. At least I didn't. Maybe Tim saw it.

Dingo's Aboriginal name is Oondamooroo. That's a pretty awesome name.

He had his first girlfriend when he was nineteen. They had a baby girl together. The mom and baby moved to England. Dingo stayed in Perth.

According to this website, Dingo doesn't like rugby and softball.

I'm wondering if I should be trusting facts coming from school kids.

Well, I don't know. Right now I trust children more than I trust adults. Or maybe I trust them equally.

Here's an article about Dingo's mysterious secret daughter.

It seems Dingo never realized he had the daughter until recently. The mother became terminally ill and decided to reveal the truth to her daughter.

From the article, it seems Dingo has been quite welcoming to this new-found family member. It says, A friend of Dingo's said he was delighted to discover the existence of his daughter and has since embraced her into his extended family.

That's refreshing. It's nice that he accepted her instead of denying her.

The article talks about his other children.

It gets a little confusing....well, maybe not for someone who's operating on a reasonable amount of sleep.

Dingo has another daughter that popped out when he was eighteen. I guess that would put her birth year at about 1974. So, she's older than the secret mystery daughter. That one was conceived in 1988.

Dingo and his wife Sally tried to have a baby together, but they had fertility issues. They tried IVF treatments for awhile, and then went the adoption route. They also helped raise Dingo's eldest daughter's children. Well, the article says they have two grandkids, but it only mentions them raising one. I'm not sure why. Maybe the other one is old enough to take care of herself?

Here's a fairly recent article about Dingo's relationship with his wife. It talks about how they first met. The article says there wasn't an immediate spark between them. It's funny how people enter our lives sometimes. Sometimes the most important people in our lives float in with so little fanfare. Maybe there IS a spark, and we just don't notice it.

Dingo says for him it WAS love at first sight. His wife just thought he was was weird. She felt he was invading her personal space.

Sally is from Tasmania.

They met, because Sally was working with a charity. She was a publicist for a concert involving Aboriginal people. She promoted the event by getting Dingo on a show called the Ray Martin Show.

Although Sally didn't feel that initial spark, they did form a bond that evening.

They had to deal with interracial relationship crap--the usual don't date him. He's not one of us. And....don't date her. She's not one of us.

Dingo has had to deal with a lot of racism. Why? Because we live in such a lovely world.

I shouldn't be sarcastic.

Sorry.

Dingo wrote a poem that's quoted in the article. It says:

when I am in the presence of others, I adapt to their moods. When I'm alone, I'm me.

I like that. I can relate to it.

I'm ashamed when I feel sad. I feel sometimes that I have to be happy.  Because I'm afraid if I'm, no no one will want to be around me. And then I'll be lonely on top of everything else. I wish I had more trust in my friends, that I believed I'm not ruining things by being grumpy and sad sometimes. This is not a dig at my friends. They're wonderful caring people. It's just my own insecurities. And I know sometimes they have the same insecurities. They too apologize for their whining/whinging. The thing is I have no Eeyores as friends. All my favorite friends complain a bit but for the most part, they're fairly upbeat. We all have our problems and bad days. We all have things we need to get off our chest. I wish we'd get to the point where we could do this and not feel guilty about it.

I'm going to stop reading and watch some videos maybe.

Okay, there's some video with Dingo fighting a man named Kyle Sandilands. I'm going to get some background info before I watch it.

Sandilands is a shock jock. I guess Dingo was offended by something he said.

I'm not really hearing what Sandiland said that was so horrible. It seems Dingo was mad because there was something said in the promo of the show about a dingo taking a baby. Ernie Dingo was offended for two reasons. He thought it was a dig at his last name, AND he was offended on behalf of the animal dingos because he believes they didn't take that baby.

From what I'm hearing, I'm more on Sandiland's side. It seems like he was just trying to be funny and Dingo twisted what he was saying. There could be background stuff, though, that I don't know about.

There's a lot of drama between these two.

What's up with that?

I gotta go see.

Oh well. Lord Wiki says the Sandiland guy is controversial. I still don't think he deserved Dingo's wrath.

But what do I know?

Oh well. Here is a video with Dave Hughes talking bad about Sandilands. Apparently Sandilands threatened violence against Hughes. He said he would kick Hughes in the throat.

It's sad when people feel the need to resort to violent threats.

Maybe he deserved the wrath of Dingo. I doubt it, though.

But....

Who am I to judge?

If I WAS the judge, everyone would have to be nice to each other.

We could disagree without fighting.

We could understand and forgive each other's mistakes.

I can't really find any more videos.

Here's an article about Bran Nue Dae.

The movie is going to be the closing film for the Melbourne International Film Festival. I guess that's going to be on August 8. Tickets are $90.

It's a musical!

Cool. I like musicals.

That's another thing. If I was the boss of the world, not only would everyone have to be nice and forgiving....they'd also have to sing instead of talk.

Rachel Perkins is behind the Bran Nue Day movie. She's the woman who made The First Australians.

I'm tired.

I'm going to try to get some sleep now before Jack wakes up for the day.