"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.
Wanna be a Farmer?
A Journey from Biloela to Tummaville
When my grandfather moved form Biloela to Tummaville with his five sons times, were looking up with the difficult war years behind them. As a dairy farmer, he and his boys were classified as having a reserved occupation - not merely exempt from conscription but forbidden military service. Being German speaking and with no soldiers in the family brought it’s own hardship especially in the playground especially from those who had lost brothers and uncles in the European theatre. It was in this context that the teacher at the country school advised my father at the beginning of his intermediate year that he already had all the education he needed. What’s more, he would be the only kid in the class and it would mean a lot of extra work for him. The there would be the added pressure from the fiercely uncompromising district inspector and he didn’t know if he could manage it anyway, un-resourced as he was with so many youngsters coming on and demanding his attention.
So next trip to town, granddad bought may father a pair of boots and long pants, and he became a farmer. Having been barefoot up until this time, the boots were found to be restrictive and uncomfortable. So he took a sharp blade and cut out the dome of the toes, turning them into, what would you say, a kind of elastic sided sandals. That action was immediately regretted not on account of ruining a new pair of boots, but because they now became the perfect vessel for collecting grass seeds that became a constant source of irritation. What’s more, hard earned money had been paid for them. Grandad had tried his hand at growing wheat alongside the dairy pastures. It was a great success and the first crop yielded eleven bags. Since he didn’t have a vehicle at the time he carried the full harvest just shy of a ton, bag by bag on his back the seven miles to the nearest railway siding.
A Rural Community on the Condamine River
The move to the block on the Condamine River would be a hard earned change, establishing a rural community with another large family of sons who already had plans for building a church. The farm was pristine with an elevated red soil sandy ride protruding above the rich alluvial black soil plains. The ridges were populated by Morton Bay Ashes, to me one of the most spectacular and stately eucalypts, crafted as it were, with a utility and precision that suited the germanic temperament. They had a rough tessellated base to about the height of a tall man or greater of scales the size of your hand, in a pattern resembling the black soil as it dried out, shrank and cracked leaving deep furrows between. Above the base a steely blue trunk that roses abruptly straight as a die, unless it had been damaged by fire or lightning in its juvenile stage. Overhead a canopy that whispers in the breeze and cast a cooling shadow in the hottest of summers. The very old ones are habitat trees for flocks of galahs, cockatoos and egg-loving goannas. Where the grassland is more open it is studded with smooth barked apples, actually an angophora species closely related to eucalypts, bloodwoods splashed with wattles and clumps of cyprus pine.
Within a couple of years of arriving the farm was paid off thanks to the buoyant European wool market and the family settles down to clearing the ancient river gums form the black soils plains. The Condamine flooded regularly before being dammed upstream and great expansesof water covered the country in anticipation of the lush grasses that would follow, something that occurs less and less now a-days and when it does it happens with a vengeance.
The family settled in with high prospects. The uncultivated paddocks were cleared of their ancient river gums and the kangaroos moved on. Those that stayed to grow fat on the sweet wheat grass were short lived, finding themselves within the farmers sights. Their carcasestipped the balance in favour of generations of goannas before they too became rare. The sandy ridges were unprofitable for grain growing as so a couple of family groups of euros, a smaller roo that prefers hilly woodland to the open plains stayed on.
So the sons married and had families. The eldest and youngest move away and the ones in the muffle became established. Families grew and soon I arrived, an easy and happy child, my mother said, but there are certain expectations on a first born son that only work were certain types personalities. As a loved up mummy’s boy who was sensitive and empathic with a sort of hapless naivety the incompatibility with those expectations would inevitable become obvious though not before everything else is tries. Old dogs, leopards spots, many aphorisms apply but now amount of teaching and no degree of harshness can make a person become who that are not.
The Abundant Beauty of the Farm
My feet dangled over the edge of the bench seat in the Holden ute, looking ahead to the round lines of the dashboard, feeling my skinny body rock and roll over as we drove over the bumpy track to see where the clearers were working. They had two huge Caterpillar tractors with a chain between them ripping the trees from the ground as the went. Ears filled with the roar of the tractors, diesel in the air gave way to the smell of sap, then the sound of straining wood, creaking, cracking, splintering. It sounded for all the work to me like screaming. I burst into tears overwhelmed by the palpable violence. Is this hell? My dad looks at me kindly, puzzled and says “What wrong?” I start up on the final seat and slide over to him and put my arms around his neck, he takes one hand off the wheel and pulls me close. I am comforted but not consoled, it will just have to take its course as we drive on down that bumpy track.
When I was old enough I was given an air rifle for my birthday. By that time I was seeped in the TV pioneer culture of the American west. Goodness, we call one of our horses “Trigger”! I sometimes trick ride standing on the saddle going down to bring in the house cow and put her calf in a pen over night so that there would be milk for us in the morning. We has a tank stand at the back of the house for rainwater that fed the house and garden. Beside it was a fig tree that bore delicious fruit year after year. It was a magnet to parrots from all around and many seasons they would strip the tree just before the fruit was fully ripe. This year I though I would save the crop, so with John Wayne in mind and slug gun in hand I went to teach them a lesson they would not forget.
The Weight of Guilt: A Lesson Learned
I took aim and pulled the trigger and immediately realised what I had done. I was ashamed that I felt so strongly and hated myself for it. But still this little creature lay dead on the ground. I felt compelled to make restitution form my own benefit but there was no way that I could think of to make amends. I got a spade and gave the little bird a Christian burial nearby, but it would take more than a fig leaf to cover the shame I felt. It didn’t feel as if the little funeral ceremony ‘took’, I felt God had turned away and I was as damed as that beautiful little parrot.
Seeking Forgiveness and Facing Consequences
A few days later I confessed to everyone what I had done in the hope of punishment that would make me feel better. None came. I was bewildered and sentenced to sorting it out on my own.
