This morning I went for a long run along Yarra Boulevard. A lot of other people were enjoying the area too - either walking, running, and many many cycling. Occassionally a car would pass by, but I'd estimate the people-in-cars to people-not-in-cars ratio at roughly 1 to 80. So it was startling to say the least to have a lycra-clad cyclist pass me, slow down, and turn to yell at me to "get off the road". I was running in the bike lane because the footpath is very narrow, there were lots of people walking on it, and we're currently dealing with a deadly airborne pandemic. Everyone else was getting along and sharing the road, but to this guy it was more important that we all knew our place than that we were all safe. Childishly, I silently gave him the finger. He rode off.
I've been thinking a lot about places and knowing your own. I have no Indigenous Australian heritage, but six generations of my ancestors were born here before I was. At what point do you get to say you belong to a place? I've come to the conclusion that the answer is right there in the question. When you realise that you belong to country, rather than it belonging to you. When you are possessed by it. When you feel a responsibility not just to other specific humans, but to other specific lifescapes.
For much of my life—perhaps twenty years or so—I rejected "Australia". Bush Poets, "mateship", people talking about "the bush", lamingtons and native gardening. It all repelled me. In those couple of decades I have changed (of course), but so have the stories that Australians are telling to and about each other. Just before COVID I bought a batch of books on various aspects of Australian history, and decided to start reading them "chronologically"—starting with Billy Griffiths' "Deep Time Dreaming". It came into my life just as I was ready for it. I curse Billy every time a museum curator or amateur historian says something like "This homestead is really old, it was built in the 1840s", because I can no longer take such statements seriously. I've started to have trouble with the elasticity of the word "ancient" — Ancient Egypt, Ancient Rome, Ancient China. Are the joking? What's 2000 years compared to 65,000 (or more)?
It's not a competition, of course, but Billy Griffiths' journey through the history of both Australia itself, and modern Australian archaeology, did some weird things to my brain. I've turned from being actively hostile to learning about Australian history, to being slightly obsessed with learning about pre-1788 life here. As I learn more, things I heard or read earlier come back with new clarity of meaning. Distinguishing between agriculture, religion, dance, song, mythology, and Law seems increasingly non-sensical. Everything is bound up in everything else. The latest book I'm reading is arguably the one that kicked off a renaissance in Australian historical understanding: Bill Gammage's "The biggest estate on earth". Gammage's research makes it clear why Aboriginal people have so often had disdain for "environmentalists" and the Green movement. I found this perplexing for many years, but once you understand that "wilderness" comes from the same place as "barbarian" or "wasteland", it all makes sense. There is arguably more "wilderness" in Australia in 2021 than there was in 1787 — "caring for country" is something you do actively. Calling actively-managed lifescapes "natural" or "wilderness" simply shows that one can't see what one is looking at.
And now perhaps we never will. One of the most extraordinary cultures in human history, with continuous transfer and growth over at least 65,000 years to become masters of a dry and delicate continent, was massively damaged in mere decades. Whole lifeworlds and communities wiped out. The remaining people tolerated at best. And then, as the conquering society convinced itself that Australia's original people and their culture were about to be snuffed out completely, anthropologist, linguists, and others decended on Australia and the Aboriginal people living here to record what was left. A last chance as Australian culture passed through the doorway from one cultural word to another.
In July I attended ("virtually" of course) the CAUL Indigenous Knowledges Symposium. Much of it was a little disappointing, though my "Zoom fatigue" may have had something to do with that. One sentence, however, hit me like a truck and has stuck with me since. Te Rarawa and Ngāti Porou Māori woman Abigail McClutchie announced with a twinkle in her eye: "Some people might not like what I'm about to say." I sat up to take notice.
I don't have time for White Guilt.
What McClutchie meant—I thought I understood this at the time, but I didn't quite—was that she's not interested in talking to people who come to her to apologise, or seek absolution. When we bring nothing to conversations with Indigenous people, we are, effectively, a burden to them. McClutchie is interested in learning. She wants non-Indigenous people to come to her as equals, with pride and confidence in our own knowledge and our own cultural traditions. Margo Neale writes something related to this in "Songlines", and I hear it again and again at cultural training events and similar forums where Indigenous people are talking about what perhaps we called "reconciliation" twenty years ago. "This is how I connect to land, sea, and culture. How do you do those things?" This is an invitation not just to learn, but to teach. But as equals.
So to braid all these threads together. I'm not an Indigenous person. I don't come from the thousands of generations who made Australia. But I'm also too far removed from the culture built from an affinity with the lifeworlds of the British Isles. Arguably, many of those connections were already broken for my ancestors when then moved willingly or otherwise to Australia. There's no lane for me to stay in, I can't go back to where I came from, and I can't appropriate another culture.
But nobody is asking me to do any of those things.
When those European and European-diaspora scientists thought they were "smoothing the pillow of a dying race" they were, in a sense, correct. They were just confused about what was dying. We're still in that liminal space, but we're walking through it together. There's no going back to pre-1788 Australia. Too much has been destroyed, changed, and created. But "New South Wales" was a misunderstanding as well. Terra Nullius was a lie told about Britain as well as about Australia. The lie that culture can be independent of country. That a society can simply expand to new lands without changing in fundamental ways. Australian settler society is — slowly — confronting itself. The massacres were crimes of our families, not some generic hand-wavy "early settlers". But when they murdered the people who belonged to this country they took on their responsibilities, and they have passed them on to us. Country still needs to be cared for, and some of the knowledge remains, in the settler archives and in the land itself. It's the settler society that is dying, because ultimately it was picnicking.
I won't stay in my lane, but I'll be courteous about sharing the paths. "These are your stories too", says Margot Neale. And they are. That means the losses are ours, and so might be the gains to come. The university I work at has funded a four year project working with Dja Dja Wurrung people to regain and extend an understanding of Kangaroo Grass as a human food crop. This is an example of
McClutchie's preferred approach: two knowledge traditions working together to enrich, extend, and nurture each other. It's also a hopeful project, for me. A "climate change adaptation" project that is also a "mitigation" project that is also an "Indigenous knowledge" project that is also an "agricultural improvement" project.
=> Djandak Dja Kunditja – Kangaroo Grass Project
As I was running this morning, I was listening to an interview with British professor of English (slash geography) and author Robert Macfarlane. The interview included several soundscapes inspired by various phonemena, and Macfarlane spoke about landscapes and lifescapes of the British Isles. Of the moors being full of life and endlessly varied, if only people care to look. Macfarlane clearly has a deep connection to country. It was a little mesmerising, though I was simply hearing all this through some tinny earbuds. Macfarlane is passionate about the words we use to describe the world around us. He no longer speaks of "the environment", finding it too clinical. I agree with his sentiments, though I suspect we may have subtly different ideas about "nature". I will no longer speak of wilderness. But like "ancient", I'm now struggling with everyday words like "agriculture", "natural", and "religion".
One thing I do think I've changed my mind about during COVID is in my attitude to time. I had a period of (fairly mild, compared to some) climate anxiety. The sense of being near the end of time, or of time running out, is a common trope. But this is just temporal narcissism. Things will be difficult for sure. Certainly, we should do all we can to end capitalism and reduce carbon emissions. But time will not end. People will endure for longer than most of us can conceptualise. Thinking in Deep Time has helped me to get through COVID Time. If you're thinking in millenia, not knowing what day of the week it is doesn't matter so much. Perhaps, in the long view, this few centuries will be merely a traumatic bend in the human history of Australia, rather than a schism.
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