The Art of Listening: Enhancing Dialogue in a Divided World
Photo by Denise Jans on Unsplash
Understanding Gun Culture: A Personal Perspective
Last night in a regular Zoom meeting I participate in each fortnight, I referred to an article in the ABC news that impacted me: ’24 hours, seven mass shootings’ in the US. I had read something earlier in the week how the right to carry guns is integral to the identity of many Americans. It seems odd from where I sit here in Australia and wanted to understand it better.
Childhood Experiences with Guns
I grew up on a farm where guns were kept in the house in an unlocked cupboard, this was the 1960’s. My dad had a double barrel shotgun that had been his father’s, a bolt action shotgun of his own, an ex-army 303, a 22 and his favourite, a wildcat .25-303. The latter was a version of the 303, modified to take a smaller bullet using a modified 303 cartridge. It producer higher muzzle velocity and a flatter trajectory for the bullet.
It was used to ‘control’ kangaroos on the wheat shoots after sewing, and for a time dad would go to the Pittsworth shooters club for competitive events. Two events resulted in that being short lived. Each Saturday the club met, shooters would retire to the pub for a few beers afterwards. Dad was a teetotaller. So the club didn’t offer the kind of male companionship he was looking for. It seemed strange to me at the time that he would go to the gun club in Pittsworth anyway, because it wasn’t part of the church community, it was an outlier. But he spend many nights with his reloading kit, putting new caps in used cartridges, filling them with powder then pressing in a new bullet. The whole business felt dangerous and scared me. I had a fear as a four or five year old that while getting changed for bed at night a shooter out the window in the dark had gun-sights trained on me. Going with dad to shoot kangaroos and to skin them for hides and butcher them for dog food unsettled me to the point of anxiety.
One day at gun club, the last time dad went, he was taking a shot when the cartridge failed at the cap end of the cartridge case. A jet of burning gasses ejected from the breach and into his eye. There was concern for his sight for some time. His vision eventually returned to normal, but his interest in gun club never did. The sheep skin padded jackets and coats that mum had painstakingly fashioned on her treadle Singer hung in the lowboy in the spare room for many years. Eventually they were given away or thrown out.
Comparing Gun Cultures: Australia and the USA
Attitudes to guns remained fairly lay back throughout Australia until 1996 and the shock of Port Arthur. My parents had taken a holiday to Tasmania and had visited Port Arthur the week before the massacre.
I read up on gun laws in Florida last week and was shocked at these particular provisions: ‘open carry’ is permitted in restricted circumstances, a ’stand your ground’ allows the use of deadly force in self-defence without a duty to retreat, ‘Castle Doctrine’ allows the use of deadly force to defend oneselves, your home, vehicle or other legally occupied space without a duty to retreat.
The image of John Wayne in the many frontier confrontations, the common fare of afternoon TV at the time, came immediately. The ‘hordes at the gate’ motif or ‘David and Goliath’ being repeated over and over.
A constitutionally enshrined right to bear arms is a cornerstone of identity for many Americans, and while the opportunity for gun control was embraced in Australia, the context was quite different for Americans.
Given that gun regulation would be near to impossible in the USA, I wondered how much the attitude to guns set the scene for mass shootings and could it be that there is some truth in the gun lobby who emphasise the shooter rather than the gun, a siege mentality writ large, defend or perish.
Which brought me back to Australian frontier wars. The fact that Europeans were rarely willing to negotiate with First Nations Australians. That for many, the ‘defend or perish’ doctrine still applies. Where after all has there been good faith negotiations on land ownership in Australia. The country was claimed for the crown from the outset. Where treaties were attempted, for example the Batman treaty in Victoria, it was rejected by the government. The officially sponsored and condoned massacres, and the ‘Protectorate’ system was clearly designed to protect European interests. Native Title is a legal instrument for European interests to access resources on Aboriginal lands. The defeat of the ‘Voice to Parliament’ referendum suggests that ‘hordes at the gate’ mentality is still a poison running in the veins of this country.
Reflections on the Art of Listening
During my writers group this month, someone made a comment about the art of listening; how in listening we could adopt the position of listening silently and only speaking in a way that supports the trajectory of the speaker, whether we agree or not. Naturally there is no obligation to say anything. When your turn to speak comes, you are afforded the same courtesy and support. The process takes longer but finds agreement through consensus rather than victory (or defeat) through conflict.
Challenges in International Negotiations
This morning I awoke at 4:30 with these things on my mind. So outraged by the laxity of US gun laws it occurred to me that I might have fallen prey to misinformation. I reached for my phone to check. I went recall that Australian gun law had been premised on the perspective of the invader. An attitude that is still prevalent within our society, and while I would cite Howard’s greatest achievement was gun control, his worst legacy was Tampa, an absolute lie that many Australians still cling to, which Baxter, Nauru and numerous other detentions centres attest to.
Regardless of its merits or otherwise, AUKUS nuclear submarines follows those same waggon ruts. Is the reason that we find so much difficulty in trusting international negotiations that we are frightened they might be too much like us collectively?
The beacon that shines through all of this is the earlier reference to the art and craft of listening. I caught myself recently, following a curious reflex. A friend on FB posted about the three types of awareness. My mind immediately went to ‘3’, why this number, surely there are more, why, I don’t know, just seems like it. As I read the post, I was double thinking numbers and descriptions. Is there a hierarchy in the types, are their subsections that should be promoted and are there categories that are omitted. A fight for hemispherical dominance ensued reducing the post to alphabet spaghetti until I recognised the futility of it all and called time. It was clear that the writer of the post recognised a trinity of types in the nature of awareness. It could be a vagary of the English language that these form a constellation anyway.
Consider how there are, some say, 50 Inuit words for snow. On deeper investigation we find that there are numerous Inuit languages not just one. But then there are many more, perhaps descriptions of snow. Defining an actual number will always be context specific.
Promoting Neurological States in Conversations: A Quest for Reciprocal Wisdom
To actually listen in the way described above, I will needs to have an kind of executive awareness of my thinking style in the moment, maybe in time it will become muscle memory and I will experience extended periods of peacefulness in my mind and body. Why body? Because conflicted thinking promoted the production of cortisol, if you’r going to have a fight you have to prepare for it whereas peacefulness is more likely to promote oxytocin, perhaps even dopamine.
Finally I’d like your thoughts or advice; if we are able to these desired neurological states in ourselves, it must be possible to conduct conversations in a way that promote those same states in others. Some people do it naturally, conversations that make us feel better, not only that, but promote a little high as well. How do they do that. And before we go to ‘love bombing’ and cult like behaviours that definitely happen under the ‘hordes at the gate’ warrior archetype, I’m thinking more reciprocal wisdom tradition. Any thoughts?
"Decolonising Our Minds: Learning to Hear the Language of the Land"
Introduction: Growing Up on the Southern Darling Downs
As a boy growing up on the southern Darling Downs, my family settled on grazing land to till the soil and begin cropping. But for a kid, time is a durative thing with no real sense of beginnings and ends, a kind of forever thing. Instinctively, I was aware of Aboriginal voices, or rather, their absence, they should have been there. How could they disappear without trace? It was an open secret that we were not the first people to live on that country. In that colonial maelstrom of our little village, my desires to discover either a stone axe head or a nugget of gold were equally matched.
Gold Rush and Historical Significance
Gold had been found 12 miles down the road at Leyburn. A rusted quartz crusher still rests absently there abandoned in the bush where 22 canvass pubs stood in its brief heyday in the 1860s. In the other direction, accounts of the original Domville station said it was built with rifle windows, narrow slits in the walls that enable defence while under siege. What does that say?
Those who see the Voice as a transactional thing, where indigenous people make demands on settlers, are against it. ‘No need to enshrine that,’ they say, ‘legislation will do that and may even be better. There’s plenty of ways of finding out what First Nations people want from settler folk.’ But those voices hush when reading the Uluru Statement from the Heart, and you quickly realise that that is not the proposal at all.
The Misconception of the Voice
Recently, I attended a ‘kitchen table’ conversation in Unley Town Hall, where parts of Australia’s dark history were brought out of the shadows before retiring to tea and biscuits and polite conversation. Moments of guilt and outrage were briefly aired before equanimity was restored.
Again the ‘No’ campaign is instructive, in drawing attention to the question of who should be compelled to listen. ‘No one,’ they say, arguing that there are already many ways, the chief being electoral, for messages to be conveyed to government, or just like any other lobby group. And they would be right if the Voice, in the absence of Uluru, were to be a transactional device. But it isn't.
Connecting with the Land: Yandilla and Cultural Insights
Sitting on the black soil banks of Yandilla (Gaibal = running water), or walking through the Red Gum flood plains, watching the wallaroos and goannas amongst the bloodwoods and Moreton Bay Ashes on the red soil sandy ridge or kangaroos and a very occasional emu in the open country, country talks to your secret inside voice. Not the voices of hunter/gatherers eeking out a squalid existence in a harsh landscape, but an ancient culture finely tuned to the entire ecosystem.
They were voices of a people who observe and monitor relationships of plants and trees, of critters and humans. Knowledge of the seasons, when to move to high ground, when to put restorative flame to the grasslands, when to anticipate flood waters making the country impassable with black soils that become both sticky and slippery, when frosty mornings turn to scorching summers.
Mapping Songlines and Cultural Connections
Earlier this week, a friend, a senior lawman, from the Centre sent me an email with a map of homelands, communities, townships, and regions which I know to be interlinked by a particular set of songlines. It brought ‘Yorro, Yorro: Everything Standing Up Alive’ to mind, a book co-authored by Mowaljarlai in which he illustrates the story matrix embedded in country. I had been reminded of it in a PowerPoint at the ‘kitchen table’ conversation.
You see, I could look at the map with circles and rectangles denoting places that carry songlines, and ‘intuit’ the invisible linkages. Or I could look at Mowaljarlai’s songline matrix and ‘intuit’ the unmarked towns, cities, and regions. The first is a map of the places, the second a diagram of the connections.
Philomena Cunk and the Doomsday Book Analogy
Lately, I found myself captivated by a BBC mockumentary series featuring the comedic character Philomena Cunk and her unique worldview. One particular conversation stood out to me, centred around the Doomsday Book - the earliest surviving written record of land ownership and resources in late 11th century England. In a conversation featuring the famous Book, she asks an historical expert a question that is both absurdly idiotic and profound at the same time. “How did they get the sounds into the ink so that when you read them, the words play back in your head?” she asks.
It brought to mind the koan of the sound of one hand clapping - a paradoxical enigma that, like Philomena's query, both defies and invites understanding. For me, the point is that a voice without an audience is like ink on a forgotten page, a language lost to time. It echoes the silence of the countryside, where the whispers of the land and its people still hold sway if we listen closely enough.
Listening to Overtones and Harmonies
Learning this language takes time and patience, much like unraveling the mysteries of the universe itself. Yet the irony is that our bodies and psyches already possess a deep understanding of it, woven into the very fabric of our being. We need only allow ourselves to break free from the constraints of our modern world, dare I say decolonise our thinking, and embrace the wisdom of our ancestors.
It's a challenge, certainly - one that requires us to resist the urge to turn away from uncomfortable truths or to privilege our own voices over those of others. But by tuning into the overtones and harmonies of a living oral tradition, we can unlock a universe far richer and more vibrant than anything captured on a static page.
I was reminded of a childhood game I used to play, where I would drown out unpleasant sounds by chanting "blah blah blah" and covering my ears. It's a childish impulse, to be sure - but one that we often carry into adulthood, whether through wilful ignorance or outright prejudice. By learning to listen with an open mind and an open heart, we can break free from this narrow worldview and discover a heroic new world beyond ourselves.
It's not always easy, of course. The voices of doubt and fear can be overwhelming, drowning out the subtler melodies of the land and its people. But if we are willing to listen - truly listen - we can hear the resounding "YES!" that echoes through the universe, beckoning us ever closer to a world of being, becoming, and belonging together.
