by Sally Morgan
...in this dream, I was a man who was drowning in a violent storm out at sea. Amid the terror and desperation of the situation, I knew I wanted to live, I wanted to grow old with my family and my last thought was that I would die far away from my country, and they would not know that I had died, would not know where my body was, and would not mourn me properly. [17]
Other stories speak of the spirits of our old people still operating in our present lives. Dr Joan Winch writes:
The spirits have always guided me throughout my life, so I am following in their footsteps. My mum and dad told me that even when I was a little baby the spirits worked through me. It was me they used to warn them of impending danger. [18]
This land is still not the inert possession the British thought it was when they arrived over two hundred years ago. There are still powerful spirits here, in the deserts and the forests and the beaches, beneath the cities and the houses and the roads. As Noel Nannup tells:
People don’t realise it, but there is some very strong country here around the City of Perth. Take a place like Kings Park, for example. It’s an important place now, but it was important in the old times, too. The spirit in that land is so strong that it has saved itself from development. That happens sometimes, the land protects itself. [19]
The stories in this anthology speak of the relationship between Aboriginal people and the land, and they all share the theme of love. A love for country, of both its hard and soft faces, of our relations in the animal and plant worlds, of the fresh and salt water, and of the ancestors in the land and sky. They are also stories of the awe-inspiring way the land loves and cares for us all. But it is the deepest love that causes the deepest grief. To be heartsick is to be brokenhearted, or full of sorrow. To be heartsick for country is to speak of a feeling deeper still. It encompasses the emotions of loss, loneliness, sadness and grief. It is a profound wound of the heart, mind, body and spirit. Aboriginal people are heartsick over what is happening to the land; it is a stress we carry in our bodies. As Dr Joan Winch writes in her story:
My mother’s family ... feel very concerned with the damage done to the land. In our way of thinking, if the land is in bad repair, then so are the people. If the rivers dry up and become polluted, then this can be equated with the body’s lifeblood; and it means that life can’t be sustained. [20]
And as Irene Watson says in hers:
Caring for country can invoke romantic images of Aboriginal people and the land and it can be all of those images but it can also be a lot of worry, sadness and hopelessness over our dealing with a dominant culture that doesn’t care in the same way that many Aboriginal peoples care for the land. [21]
The destruction of the environment, of our relationships with other life, is mirrored in the vast damage within us. We are all made less when we make country less. But perhaps there is now an opportunity, not just for Indigenous peoples, but also for all who dwell within country to work together to heal the wounds of the past. As Joe Boolgar Collard comments:
While it is our responsibility as Aboriginal people to maintain and protect our natural and cultural heritage, there is also a collective responsibility to take care of this country and to be strongly involved in environmental sustainability. This hasn’t happened in the past, but it must happen in the future if we are to survive and look after this country. [22]
If we are to solve the multitude of environmental problems that we face, then we must begin with our connection to country. We must repair and regrow the relationships between peoples and peoples, and people and country that have been damaged by dispossession. Despite the environmental devastation that has been wreaked upon Australia, this ancient continent continues to nourish and sustain all who live here. It gives us our water and food, and it protects us in ways we often do not imagine. We cannot survive here without a loving land that cares for us, and all Australians, Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal alike, are bound to its rise and fall. And if this ancient land is to survive, then all who now make their homes here must learn to see the land as a living, connected being, to realise we are all a part of something so much greater than ourselves. And if we can come together to return that care, that nourishment, that protection that the land gives us, then perhaps it is this love of country that will, in the end, redeem us all. For, as Sally Morgan writes:
If we, as human beings, continue to cut ourselves away from the web of life, then we embrace a story that, like terra nullius, can have only one ending—death. Far better then, to embrace a story which not only honours life, but returns it a thousandfold to all those who will come after us. [23]
GLADYS IDJIRRIMOONYA MILROY
is a Palyku Elder, whose country is in the Pilbara region of Western Australia. Gladys is a poet and storyteller.
JILL MILROY
is a Palyku woman and Gladys’ daughter. Jill is Dean of the School of Indigenous Studies at the University of Western Australia. (Image 1.1)
Image 1.1
Different Ways of Knowing: Trees Are Our Families Too
Aboriginal people have different ways of knowing. One of the ways we know and make sense of the world around us is through stories given to us from the Dreaming. Stories tell us about the spirit of the world, and they come from trees, animal, rocks, rivers, the moon, stars, and country itself. Sometimes these stories come as dreams, or messages from our old people whose spirits are still with us, even though they have died. A dream can be a warning, given because you’ve gone the wrong way. Or there may be something you need to know to prepare for what is coming, or something you must do. It can be a way of reassuring and comforting us by letting us know we are going the right way. It’s like a message stick, a way of communicating. In dreams we can be taken to other places, times, and the worlds between spaces. In dreams we must listen whether we like it or not; it is hard to walk away. We may do so when we awaken, but by then we will have been given the knowledge. Sometimes we do not know what we have been given or why, so it may take a long time to ‘know’. Timing is uncertain; it goes its own way. Things can change. Knowing may come in the depths of sleep, between sleeping and waking, or when we are awake but restful and quiet. In these times it is easier for us to listen to those other ways of knowing that are available to us. This is when we can tap into the deep knowledge all around us, not just the surface. So knowledge comes in many different ways and these ways are common to Indigenous peoples around the world. As Leon Secatero, Spiritual Elder of Mother Earth and Headman of the Canoncito Band of Navajo explains:
For a while when I talked about sacred things like this, I used words like ‘revelation’ and ‘prophecy’. But those words do not represent real Indigenous thought. More appropriately, I would speak of ‘a way of being’, or a ‘knowing’—the knowing that’s in us. [24]
This kind of knowing is not unique to Indigenous people: knowing lies within us all. Unfortunately, it is a way of knowing that has been discarded by many of the world’s cultures, and removed from their formal knowledge and learning systems. Western knowledge, as it is currently constituted, excludes or marginalises many ways of knowing, including its own ancient ways. Western knowledge is increasingly problematic because of its dominance over other people’s world knowledge and learning systems, its innate belief in its superiority over all other forms of ‘knowing’, and its claims to universality when it is only a ‘particular’ way of knowing. The westernisation of knowledge has meant that many Indigenous ways of knowing have been labelled as myth and described as anecdotal and unreliable. This type of denigration has damaged people and their relationships with each other and with the natural world around them. As one of the senior Aboriginal women of Coober Pedy, who fought successfully to keep a nuclear waste dump from being built on their country, Eileen Unkari Crombie says:
The learning isn’t written on paper, as whitefellas’ knowledge is. We carry it instead in our heads and we’re talking from our hearts, for the land. You fellas, whitefellas, put us in the back all the time, like we
’ve got no language for the land. But we’ve got the story for the land. [25]
For Aboriginal people, the land is full of stories, and we are born from our Mother the land, into these stories. The old people tell us stories that nurture and sustain us through life into old age, so that we can tell children the stories they will need to sustain them. The great life-story cycle has been the way for millennia. It is the birthright of all Aboriginal children to be born into the right story. Indeed, it is the birthright and greatest gift we can give all children. The right story connects us intimately to our country, giving us our place and our identity. The right story embeds us deeply in nature, connected to the living spirit. As Bill Neidjie, the legendary Kakadu man, explains:
Tree
He watching you
You look at tree,
He listen to you.
He got no finger,
He can’t speak.
But that leaf,
He pumping, growing
Growing in the night.
While you sleeping
You dream something.
Tree and grass same thing.
They grow with your body,
With your feeling.
If you feel sore,
Headache, sore body,
That mean somebody killing tree or grass.
You feel
because your body in that tree or earth.
Nobody can tell you,
You got to feel it yourself [26]
My grandmother Daisy could not read or write but gave all of us kids’ stories. My mother Gladys and I continue to see the world in stories. When we began to talk about what story we should write for this book, what kept coming to us was a cry from the trees to help them tell their story. Not just because it is important for them, because it is important for us. To help us begin, my mother, Gladys, was given a dream about the first tree.
The first tree
In the dream I was a young girl again, about twelve years old. I was walking around, searching for a tree to sit under, but everything was desolate and empty. There were no trees, just dried grass. All the trees were gone; it was as if they had just walked away. So I sat down on the dry grass by the road, and even though the sun was shining, it was very cold. Then I saw a man wearing a business suit and carrying a suitcase fly down from the sky and land a few yards away from me. He opened his suitcase, took off his wings, folded them up and put them inside his case. Then he picked the case up and walked to the side of the road. A yellow bus came and he got on it. I called out to him, but he took no notice. I walked over to where he had been and picked up a little grey feather he must have dropped. The feather stuck to my hand and carried me up to a high mountain all made of crystal. When I landed there, the feather flew from my hand and stuck in my hair, I noticed that it had got bigger. I walked into the beautiful crystal mountain and saw a lot of people, like nurses, running around carrying babies wrapped in baby blankets. They were placing them all together in a large room and took no notice of me, they all seemed to be in too much of a hurry.
I wanted to look at one of the babies so I pulled the blanket back from its face and saw tiny little leaves growing out of the blanket. I realised they were baby trees, not people. When I lifted the blanket, all the baby trees started crying. A nurse hurried into the room to see what was happening. She saw me standing there with the grey feather sticking out of my hair and looked shocked. She grabbed my hand and called out to the others, who all crowded around talking loudly, only I couldn’t understand their language.
They took me into an enormous room, so high you couldn’t see the ceiling. A beautiful, old, wise-looking tree sat at the end of the room, it was ancient and had thousands of branches reaching in all directions and disappearing into the ceiling. I thought it was so beautiful and so old it must be the earth’s first tree. A little branch reached out and plucked the feather from my hair. A strand of my hair clung to the feather as the branch placed it in the tree. The feather started growing bigger and bigger turning red and gold. I saw the crystal mountain starting to disintegrate and realised it was made of ice. I felt cold now the feather had left me, so I stood in the glow that was melting the ice. As the feather grew larger it became a beautiful golden-red firebird. The branches of the ancient tree started glowing, they reached out and began picking up all the baby trees. The ancient branches covered the world, planting the baby trees all over the earth. The firebird flew around the world three times, then came back to its nest in the ancient tree. I looked out at the landscape and saw it was covered with wonderful trees of all colours. I wanted to find my own special tree, I turned back to thank the first tree and the firebird for bringing the trees back, but they were no longer there. I felt so happy the trees had returned, I laughed and danced among them looking for my special tree friend. The sun was warm again, black cockatoos flew from the earth, singing and calling to each other. They gently lifted me up and flew with me across a shining blue lake with a mirror-like surface. I glanced down at my reflection on the lake and saw that I was no longer a young girl; I was a lovely red-tailed black cockatoo flying with my family back home to country.
It is through the eyes of our children that people will see the empty world we have created. We, who have folded away our spiritual lives and packed them into suitcases, expect our children to do the same. We wish them to find wisdom on wheels within the Western education system, not in an Aboriginal one with living trees. Trees are families too, and they give birth and nurture and care for their babies, just like humans. Children, trees and birds are all meant to grow up together. When we make our children pack away their spiritual lives in little brown suitcases, they learn only half of what they need to know. The full knowledge of the world gives children the feathers from their suitcases, the means to fly. In my mother’s case, she became the red-tailed black cockatoo because this is her special bird (what is often referred to as her ‘totem’). Of course, red-tailed black cockatoos need old forests to live in. They are big birds and need the large old trees to provide hollow logs big enough for them to nest in. Trees, birds and people are intimately connected; we are meant to be in the same story. It is people who break this connection, and create separate stories.
The story nomads
In Western scholarship, those writing about Aboriginal people have often called us ‘nomads’. This really had a pejorative meaning, labelling us as wanderers, with no fixed home. ‘Nomads’ were the opposite of ‘settled’ people like the British and other Europeans who lived in agricultural and industrialised societies, and who had cities from which had come civilisations. The label, ‘nomads’ of course, has been very useful in undermining Aboriginal claims to land. Yet Aboriginal people never ‘wandered’ far from country and always struggled to stay close to it. We did not leave it but were taken from it and we still grieve for country we lost, as country grieves for us. We did not seek other peoples’ country to make our own, we lived in our country and moved as country showed us. We followed song lines, Dreaming tracks and stories within our country, keeping country healthy through our presence and ceremony, which in turn kept us healthy. We cared for country, and country still cares for us.
The real nomads, of course, were the people who gave us that name: the British never stayed home, they have wandered the world. As a consequence, Aboriginal people have had to contend with what we could describe as story nomads. These story nomads wander about in other people’s stories, mucking them up and changing the endings; disbelieving most, stealing some, selling others. They often come too late to understand what the story is about, starting in the middle of a story but claiming it is the beginning. They may leave before the end, so they don’t have to face the consequences of broken stories. They are the perpetual travellers of the story world because they have ‘disremembered’ their own stories, consigning them to myth, mysticism, religion, allegory, metaphor or narrative: the ‘not quite true’ category. By dis(re)membering stories, they create limited knowledge systems. Te
lling other people’s stories for them, story nomads believe the ‘new’ stories they create are true and more important than any others. Aboriginal people know these aren’t proper true stories, but they are often trapped in them nonetheless. So are trees, and we can gain some insight into this strange situation through two Aboriginal storytellers, Dingo and Wombat.
Dingo and Wombat
It is important to understand who Dingo and Wombat are. To begin with, they inhabit a real world. Wombat guards the green world, the inner world. We can’t see his secret life, as he sleeps deep in the earth. Dingo guards the outer world and talks to the moon while we sleep. Dingo is always finding things that are lost and Wombat is always trying to help him with them. Together, they give us lessons in how to restore everything to its proper place in order to ensure the future. They also help us understand what is important and what isn’t. Their wisdom is useful to all people, particularly story nomads. If the current attorney-general, Philip Ruddock, had had access to Dingo and Wombat’s wisdom in 2000, then he might not have been reported in the French newspaper, Le Monde, as attributing the then Aboriginal disadvantage to the nature of Aboriginal society itself, by virtue of the fact that ‘Aborigines were hunter-gatherers not familiar with the wheel’. [27] Similarly, the prime minister, John Howard, might not have agreed that no apology or censure was needed, because Ruddock had been merely stating a ‘historical fact’. But like a coin, there are two sides to a wheel, as Dingo and Wombat discovered.