Aboriginal & Ecological Understandings of Country: Final Reflective Journal EMILY GRACE CORK
Unsettlers
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“Australians have no culture.” Sneered over sausage rolls and warm VB tinnies with a knowing smirk, four words facetiously repeated by white Australians who relish in their ignorance. Growing up in a whitewashed middle-class suburb (sacred land of the Boon Wurrung people, but we just knew it as ‘Aspendale’) I was unfortunately no stranger to this phrase. School kids scoffed at the hilarity of their whiteness, revering Kath & Kim as cultural icons and labelling lamingtons as traditional cuisine. Ostensibly self-belittlement but in reality, the calculated building of a brigade against those who didn’t share in this colonising whiteness. A mentality that reeks of privilege and an inherited superiority complex. “Australians have no culture”. Four words that should never be uttered on this ancient continent, home to the world’s oldest continuing culture and over 60,000 years of rich spiritual connection. This thought pattern is a national disgrace, a by-product of this settler-colonial ‘Australian Dream’ that is rooted in cultural genocide. I lament the years I’ve spent ignorantly living on stolen land with little knowledge of its custodians, and the twinge from this thought helps put in perspective the unimaginable struggle faced by Aboriginal people whose cultural fabric is still fractured by this past that has not passed. My ancestors have come from a variety of places - from Ireland, to South Africa, to a hastily documented departure of some Jewish relatives from Poland during WWII - but the common denominator is their role in settler-colonialism on Australian soil. I am not only an ‘unsettler’ myself, but the descendant of generations of cultural thievery. This is an uncomfortable truth, but justice will never be served until we, as ‘unsettlers’, learn to feel uncomfortable. We must go through this process of unlearning and begin to recognise, to take responsibility for the pain carried in the afterlife of the colony. We need to rupture the unspeakable and disturb the ‘peace’, and this begins with our own learning. In this reflective journal I will build upon my previous insights and encapsulate my learnings in Environment & Culture: Aboriginal & Ecological Understandings of Country.
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Reading the landscape:
from songlines to ‘supermarkets’
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Pre-colonial Australia was a land of deep ancestral knowledge, and its labelling as ‘terra nullius’ inhabited by simple hunter-gatherers is one of history’s greatest tragedies. Over tens of thousands of years, Aboriginal people had developed a rich and complex understanding of the intricacies of the environment in which they lived, from the arid central deserts to the rugged alpine regions. They were the ultimate readers of the landscape, maintaining a rich oral map of local food and water sources and seasonal intuition. Drawing on accounts from European explorers, Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu (2018) exemplifies how Indigenous practises were grounded in a deep understanding of the landscape and its evolution, despite being dismissed as inferior to British agriculture. There is evidence that Aboriginal people engaged in ‘seed propagation, irrigation, harvest, storage, and the trade of seed across the region’ (Pascoe, 2018, p.29), however, they were in tune with the landscape enough to know that regimented monocultural farming akin to British methods was not the most profitable pursuit. I had been looking forward to visiting Wil-im-ee Mooring after finding myself captivated by Adam Brumm’s paper, The falling sky’: symbolic and cosmological associations of the Mt William greenstone axe quarry, Central Victoria, Australia, however it took on a whole new meaning when I found myself physically present on the landscape.
As I gazed across its undulating hills I saw it as part of a sprawling network of ‘home’, full of nourishment and medicine and shelter. I tried to imagine how it must feel to recognise every bird call and have a vast mental catalogue of its ecology. Wurundjeri elder Uncle Bill Nicholson, who had brought us out onto his country that day, was explaining how native Australian grasses grow in tufts that allow bulbine lilies, yam daisies and chocolate lilies to grow in surrounding spaces in the soil. This was the opening of a week-long exploration of ecological knowledge, incorporating stories of kangaroo apple plants used for contraception, kangaroo sinew for thread and bone as needle, greenstone for axes and tree bark for canoes. Uncle Bill referred to the environment as a supermarket; if you knew where and when to look, it would supply an abundance of all that is needed to sustain life. Landscape reading was also imperative for holding events and gatherings. I was fascinated when Uncle Bill explained that in order to feed hundreds of people in a time before modern supermarkets, you would need to know your local food sources inside out - such as when the iilk (eels) were fattest and when the edible tuberous planets were ripest. Each gathering was rich with intention, insight, and innate knowledge deeper than we could imagine. Songlines were another prominent theme of our conversations on Country at Wil-im-ee Mooring. Uncle Bill outlined how they are central to the ongoing knowledge and existence of Aboriginal people, creating an intricate oral map to help navigate, find resources and preserve cultural knowledge. He spoke of stories that stretched halfway across the continent, with one making its way from Bundjalung country in Byron Bay across to Arnhem land in Central Australia. Ritualised song and dance would be used to communicate religious and spiritual knowledge, or to extend invitations from one country to another.
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Brumm’s paper also touched on the potent power of songlines and the complex role of song-making in Kulin society, recounting scenarios recorded in settler’s journals. Across the Kulin Nation, it was believed that a fearsome spirit known as ‘Myndie’ inhabited a mountain to the northwest of Melbourne in the form of an enormous serpent, and was only able to be controlled by Bunjil and senior members of a Kulin clan called the Munnie Brumbrum (Brumm, 2010, p.186). After the arrest of a ‘particularly revered member’ of the Munnie Brumbrum clan in 1840, the entire Aboriginal population of Melbourne fled in fear that Myndie would be summoned, the message having rapidly spread over distances of 300km (Ibid, p.186). I find that stories like this speak volumes to the depth of knowledge carried by Aboriginal people. To deeply understand such an enormous landscape and rapidly transmit messages across it requires spiritual and instinctual knowledge to the highest degree, a power that non-indigenous people may never be able to truly grasp.
greenstone axes
kangaroo apple
bogong moth
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Mt. William Greenstone Axe Quarry
The Simpler Way:
a life of sophisticated sustainability
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‘If the test of sophistication were whether or not all were fed regardless of rank, or whether all contributed to the spiritual and cultural health of the civilisation, Aboriginal Australia might have a much higher rank than some of the nations considered the hallmark of human evolution.’ — Bruce Pascoe, Dark Emu, p. 146
It is apparent that pre-colonial Australia was home to sophisticated yet sustainable communities, whose unwavering respect for Country allowed them to prosper alongside it. Living in harmony with the land rather than seeking to exploit or profit from it ensured that there was always enough food and shelter to go around, and according to Uncle Bill, “everybody knew their role�. In a world without neoliberal notions of greed and capital, daily tasks made sense and never had to be questioned. Without needing to impose ownership or borders, communities were able to produce abundant diets of tuberous vegetables, bandicoots, yabbies and iilk, children were raised and cared for by multiple adults, and elders would pass down ancestral knowledge and guidance. Food sources were prescribed by seasonal changes, and were never exploited to the point of scarcity. While there is plenty of evidence pointing to the existence of some agriculture in pre-colonial Australia, as illustrated in Dark Emu, it seems as though Aboriginal people were aware that an industrialised agricultural lifestyle was not beneficial to themselves or to Country. While it is difficult to know, as so much knowledge has been lost under the brutality of British colonialism, I think it is an important angle to consider. In Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (2014), Yuval Noah Harari explores the Faustian bargain made between humans and grains as the agricultural revolution began. He argues that hunter-gatherer populations gave up their freedoms and became enslaved to domesticating plants and animals, noting also the famines and conflicts that came along with this lifestyle change. In many ancient cultures it marked the beginning of capital exploitation of land.
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“Wheat didn’t like rocks and pebbles, so Sapiens broke their backs clearing fields. Wheat didn’t like sharing its space, water, and nutrients with other plants, so men and women laboured long days weeding under the scorching sun.”
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— Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, p. 68
In contrast, Aboriginal people demonstrated a sound ability to live in harmony with land, taking only what was necessary. The practise of scarring trees to take portions of bark serves as an example of this sustainable mode of life. Bark was one of the most commonly used materials by Aboriginal clans in southern and eastern Australia (Long, 2005), yet they did not decimate forested areas to construct canoes, shields and shelters. The scarring process was not designed to kill the tree, instead, it allowed it to continue growing while taking a manageable chunk of bark for it to regrow over. This is vastly different from our westernised concepts of mass logging for profit in today’s capitalist society. During our week of field trips, Bruce took us to the edge of a property in Plenty, a north-eastern suburb of Melbourne, where several scar trees can be found. It is probable that they mark the site of a once established Aboriginal camp, situated near river rapids which would have been an ideal spot to build fish traps. If this is the case, the sporadic nature of which trees had been scarred demonstrated a respect for not over-plundering the area, as they were spread somewhat thinly across the site.
In my own political journey, I came across UNSW academic Ted Trainer’s theory of social change labelled ‘The Simpler Way’, an anarchist and sustainable framework for restructuring society. Trainer advocates for the need to descale our energy-intensive lifestyles and instead meet our basic needs in highly localised and low-impact ways, and his theory strongly resonated with me. Yet as he describes this alternative neighborhood model as ‘full of familiar people … common projects, animals, gardens, forests’ with ‘most of the basic items we need produced close to where we live from local soils, forests and resources by local skill and labour’ (Trainer, 2010, p.9), I can’t help but draw a parallel between his vision and the depiction of pre-colonial Aboriginal life that has become clear to me over the last few months. It’s ironic that it takes a degree in philosophy and decades of thinking for settlers to arrive at the same concepts that Aboriginal people had mastered millenia ago. Indigenous people successfully maintained this mode of ecologically sane and socially responsible living until the British colonial plague swept through the world, so we must turn to the rightful owners of this land to lead us back there.
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Scarred tree at Plenty
Welcome to Country?
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In the Monday afternoon sunlight at Wil-im-ee Mooring, Uncle Bill Nicholson pointed out that the Wurundjeri word ‘Wominjeka’ does not truly translate to our version of ‘welcome’. Instead it is more conditional, inviting the visitor to enter with purpose and respect. It is frustrating that this word, somewhat lost in translation, is now almost ubiquitous across left-leaning spaces in Melbourne, but little time is taken to consider what it actually means. Uncle Bill explained that welcoming someone onto Aboriginal country is akin to welcoming someone into your house, a conditional act that is likely revoked at the first sign of disrespect. Recognising what being welcomed onto this land truly means is one of the steps we must take to deconstruct the difference between indigenous and non-indigenous understandings of Country. Aboriginal interpretations of Country will of course differ from one individual to the next, but in a broad sense, it is not just a place of belonging but a living spiritual entity within itself. It is often capitalised to add emphasis and differentiate it from the many diminishing uses of the English word “country” to refer to rural countryside or bordered, governed regions. Aboriginal Country is spiritual, communal, managed locally by experts and revered with utmost respect. In a 2013 speech, Australian academic Bill Gammage defined Country as something “people felt intensely [for]. “It was alive. It could talk, listen, suffer, be refreshed, rejoice. They were on it and others were not because they knew it and it knew them. There their spirit stayed, there they expected to die. No other country could ever be that.”
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Western interpretations of country are vastly different, viewing it as a commodity to be controlled, exploited and profited from. Land in our current society has profound ties to the deathly matrix of capitalism. It is owned by the rich but not rightful owners, with homeless people sleeping rough while investment properties sit empty. Strict borders and boundaries are drawn up to determine who owns what, a concept only introduced into Australia with colonialism. While there are hundreds of Aboriginal clans and language groups, the borders are more fluid just as water flows and seeds disperse themselves across the continent. Colonial management of country often leads to rivers acting as boundaries or edges of regions, whereas indigenous culture celebrates them as central meeting places abundant with life and activity. This disconnection from the landscape has also led to devastating mismanagement, with out-of-control bushfires and senseless destruction of old-growth forest to create wood pulp. Perhaps ‘unsettlers’ cling to this thievery because we have nothing else, our ancestry lies in theft so we perpetuate it rather than face the uncomfortable truth. In itself, settler-colonialism is a particularly pernicious construct as it is based upon elimination of a cultural history. Settler-colonists come to “settle” forever rather than for a temporary period of profit gaining, and generations later there is nobody willing to take the blame for such a brutal history.
Justice will never be achieved until white ‘Australians’ begin shifting the discomfort and pain from Aboriginal people onto ourselves. A close friend of mine, Mununjali man Jai Allan Wright, encapsulated his struggle with journeying back to Country so powerfully. “It is difficult to express what my own blocks are to fulfilling my responsibilities to myself, to Country, and my community, without taking into account how much my spirit hurts from a lifetime knotted within the colonial regime. And that my journey back to Country is found in that unknotting, facilitated through cultural engagement. In large, it becomes a paradox, and one in which I must question the nature of my reality and being each and every day, to continue on my true path to liberation. All of us blakfullas have this story, and there is more at stake than you think.” White ‘Australians’ need to stop being ignorant, stop being delicate, and learn to sit with this tension, this heartbreak, and begin listening to the rightful custodians of this land. We must break this cycle of silence and complicity in cultural genocide. So-called Australia is not at all young, and absolutely not free.
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References Brumm, A. R., 2010. ‘The falling sky’: symbolic and cosmological associations of the Mt William greenstone axe quarry, Central Victoria, Australia. Cambridge Archaeological Journal, 20 (2), 179-196. Gammage, B., 2013. Writing The Australian Landscape. Conference. Saturday and Sunday 3-4 August 2013, National Library of Australia, Canberra. Harari, Y., 2014. Sapiens. Harper.
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Long, A., 2005. Aboriginal Scarred Trees In New South Wales. Hurstville, N.S.W.: Dept. of Environment and Conservation. Pascoe, B., 2018. Dark Emu. p.29. Trainer, T., 2010. Transition To A Sustainable And Just World. Canterbury, N.S.W.: Envirobook.
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Printed on unceded Wurundjeri land.