Chapter 6 – Kinship with the land

We who are Aboriginal Australian understand our spiritual connectedness with the land. Christians have an understanding of spirituality, and this is a place we can journey together. I believe that Aboriginal people need to acknowledge that other Australians born in this land have tasted the spirituality of the land, even if they haven’t recognised it. (Djiniyini Gondarra, Council 1997a, p. 39)

In this chapter I explore the significance of the land in the reconciliation process, especially the spiritual dimension of the land. In particular, my aim is to acknowledge not only that indigenous Australians experience the land as the very source of life and as the domain of the spiritual, but also that immigrant Australians, born of this land, are invited to empathise with the indigenous people who lost so much when they lost the land. A mutual appreciation of the spiritual in the land and the Spirit of the Land will help to facilitate one of the aims of the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation: ‘understanding country’.

Farming the land
Have I, as an immigrant Australian, ‘tasted the spirituality of the land’ as Djiniyini Gondarra suggests in the quotation above? Can I discern the spiritual in the land? What kind of relationship did my farming forebears have with the land?

This land is my place, my country; I was born here. This is the land in which I am searching for the spiritual; I am not searching in some promised land of long ago or in some promised land in the hereafter. This land, where indigenous and non-indigenous Australians have a vision of reconciliation, is my land.

My great-grandparents were German immigrants seeking a piece of land they could call their own. Australia was the land of opportunity where the pain of the past could be forgotten. South Australia, in particular, was part of a popular dream to establish an ideal community grounded in ‘Christian economics’. When they arrived my great-grandparents did not know that the local Kaurna of Adelaide or the Peramangk of the Barossa Valley had been excluded from this planned community. Nor did they discern, apparently, that this land of opportunity would soon become a land of oppression for these local inhabitants.

This ignorance on the part of our ancestors should not blind us to the fact that most of them were God-fearing people with a commitment to the land and their goal was to find land on which to make a new home. Having no money, my ancestors worked together at the goldfields for a short time to raise the capital to buy a small plot.

Between the shores of Lake Kennedy and Lake Linlithgow my great-grandparents ‘put down their roots’ and settled for life. They believed their piece of land was a gift from God. They were apparently unaware that it was stolen from the Aboriginal communities. They were told the Aborigines were ‘rootless’ nomads who spent their lives going ‘walkabout’. They did not realise that the Aborigines were the custodians of the land and had a spiritual kinship with the land. When these pioneer men and women ‘put down their roots’, they entered an unwritten covenant in which their God unites land and farmer in a symbiotic relationship. These farming families believed that if they were faithful to the land, the land would be faithful in return. Many farmers have a type of ‘land spirituality’, a sense of God’s presence when they ‘worked the land’ - though most of them would prefer not to talk about such things. A house, fences, sheds, an orchard, gardens and sometimes a grave or two were evidence that farming families had put down roots. They were committed to ‘making a go of it’ on the land - living on the land, dying on the land and returning to the earth of this land.

In their covenant with God, the farmers cleared, ploughed and sowed the land; God, in turn, was expected to bless it with rain, sunshine and fertility. They discerned the spiritual descending from heaven above - not from earth below - to animate the land. This agreement is reflected in an old hymn, written in 1861 by J.A.P. Schultz, and sung with gusto by my ancestors.

We plough the fields and scatter
The good seed on the land,
But it is fed and watered
By God’s almighty hand;
He sends the needed moisture,
the warmth to swell the grain,
The breezes and the sunshine
And soft, refreshing rain.
All good gifts around us
Are sent from heaven above.
Then thank the Lord,
O thank the Lord
For all his love.
(Lutheran Hymnal 1973, p. 563)

After years of battling the harsh elements of the Australian seasons, farmers had a strong sense of belonging to the land, a kinship with the soil. Small farmers knew from bitter experience what it meant to be a ‘battler’, to be locked in a life-and-death struggle, in a war of survival with the forces of nature and society. Droughts and depressions, floods and financiers - each took their toll. But as true battlers do, they believed that if they kept faith with the land, the land would keep faith with them until they ‘got on top of it’. They believed in the blessing that followed from farming the land in the way they believed ‘God intended’. When I lived on the farm, I too had a sense that I belonged to the land where my family lived. That piece of land was - and still is - part of me.

Within me I know
a piece of land
linking me,
soul and soil,
with other pieces
of that living map
I call my country.

Losing the land
It comes as a nasty shock when we immigrant Australians discover that the land we treasure and tend as home was once taken forcibly from another people whose names and stories are lost. It comes as an unwelcome surprise when we first realise that our God-fearing ancestors thanked God for their land as a precious gift when in fact it was stolen property.

The reality that we were ‘invading’ immigrants came very forcefully to me when I discovered that on Mengler’s Hill in South Australia’s Barossa Valley there is a line chiselled into a monument which reads, ‘The Lord has given us this land’ (Joshua 2:9). The German settlers quoted a text from the Hebrew Scriptures, justifying the conquest of Canaan by force, to thank God for the rich land they turned into vineyards. These settlers did not fully realise that their coming was a conquest; the local Aboriginal Australians clearly did. What it meant for Aboriginal Australians to lose their land - whether in the Barossa or Bankstown - may be something immigrant urban Australians today will never fully grasp. What it must have been like to be dispossessed by invaders who claimed to worship a loving God and ‘love their neighbours as themselves’ is hard to even imagine. I do not like to contemplate the desecration by axe and gun of a place held sacred, a place where dead are buried, a place where people’s spiritual life rises from deep within the ground. Yet the pain of indigenous people’s loss of land is an experience which we as immigrant Australians need to try to understand in the interests of justice and reconciliation.

Recent stories of battling farmers forced to leave their land when their banks foreclosed on their loans highlight that, for many rural people, their kinship with the land remains strong today. A collection of poems written by the local people on Kangaroo Island, South Australia, during a recent recession, illustrate their deep attachment to the land. A poem by Bev Wilson reveals a silent communion with place and paddock. Reading this poem reminds me of my own boyhood experience of walking through our property with my father, kicking at the earth with the toe of my boot, and feeling at one with the land.

Yesterday we walked the hills -
just Blue, the dog, and me.
I said goodbye to the patient land,
the hills, the trees and all my plans.
We talked a bit as good friends do -
the dog, the land, and me . . .
But now against the tree-lined hills,
the new day’s sky creeps pale and still,
and I must face this coming day
with knowledge of debts I cannot pay.
(Gloyne 1992, p. 55)

The Aboriginal people’s experience of losing their land is not simply a memory from a harsh and distant history. The pain and the anguish persist, as the poetry of many contemporary Aboriginal Australians testifies. The ‘mother’ they have lost still survives, but inhabited by someone else’s children. Something of that pain is reflected in a poem by Jack Davis - he longs to be enfolded again by his mother, the land.

Mother why don’t you enfold me
as you used to in the long long ago
your morning breath
was sweetness in my soul
The daily scent of woodsmoke
was a benediction in the air
The coolness when you
wore your cloak of green
after the rain was mine
all mine to cherish and survey
Then the other came
and ripped the soil
and plagued our hearts
yours and mine
The benediction became a curse
of cloven hooves
whip chain and gun
The sun became to me a blood red orb
Nails and flesh fell away
leaving only
whitening bones bare in the summer sun
My voice cries thinly in the dark night
mother oh mother
why don’t you enfold me
as you used to, in the long long ago.
(Davis 1992, p. 6)

One of the most painful aspects of the poems written by Aboriginal people is that the religion of those immigrants who intended to bring a blessing to the land is experienced as integral to the loss and desecration of the land. The ‘loving God’ of these immigrants had no love for those inhabitants who did not farm ‘as God intended’. The spirituality of the invaders was, for many Aborigines, experienced as alien to the Spirit of the Land and the people of the land. Mary Duroux writes of the land as being ‘crucified’.

My mother, my Mother
what have they done?
Crucified you
like the Only Son.
Murder committed
by mortal hand.
I weep, my mother,
my mother, the land.
(Duroux 1992, p. 20)

Aboriginal writers often portray losing the land as losing a mother: their source of life, identity and place in the world. Losing the land is experienced as death. Seeing the land violated is viewed as rape. Being removed from the land is understood as exile. Ironically, in his poem Jack Davis calls the immigrant invaders ‘the other’, the alienating destroyers. Given the language used to describe these experiences, it may be difficult for us immigrant Australians to empathise with indigenous Australians - especially since many of our ancestors immigrated here so long ago. Yet, if the reconciliation process is to be more than superficial, I believe that those of us who have a sense of kinship with this land also need to empathise with indigenous Australians and acknowledge the trauma of losing the land, especially land experienced as ‘my mother’.

The land as spiritual
There are numerous books and articles by non-indigenous anthropologists and indigenous Australians about the spiritual nature of the land in Aboriginal culture. My concern here is not to cover again the range of ideas relating to those spiritual links that have been identified in different Aboriginal communities across Australia. My goal is to highlight that the land is experienced by Aboriginal peoples as spiritual and to explore the significance of that spiritual experience for immigrant Australians - both in terms of our relationship with this land and our concern for justice for the surviving indigenous peoples of this land.

The primacy of land in the life and spirituality of Aboriginal people is expressed forcefully by Michael Dodson when he speaks of the need to ‘begin with the land’.

To understand our law, our culture and our relationship to the physical and spiritual world, you must begin with the land. Everything about Aboriginal society is inextricably interwoven with, and connected to, the land. Culture is the land, the land and spirituality of Aboriginal people, our cultural beliefs or reason for existence is the land. You take that away and you take away our reason for existence. We have grown the land up. We are dancing, singing and painting for the land. We are celebrating the land. Removed from our lands, we are literally removed from ourselves. (M. Dodson, 1997, p. 41)

In Arnhem Land, according to Galarrwuy Yunupingu, the spirit of a baby is believed to be born in a particular water hole; the spirit then enters the mother. ‘The land gives a spirit to that baby and that baby will be a baby of that country.’ The land is the spiritual mother; the land is the source of spiritual life and the spirit binds each person for life to the ‘country’ from which the spirit emerged (Yunupingu 1996, pp. 5-7).

The Aranda of central Australia believe that the spirit, or ‘second soul’, as Strehlow defines it, enters the pregnant mother with her first bout of morning sickness, or with the first stabs of pain within her womb, or when she has a dream of the future child brought on by a ancestor being seeking rebirth. According to Strehlow, ‘[e]ach person’s second "soul" therefore was a part of the total living immortal essence of a totemic ancestor or ancestress who had sought reincarnation in a new human being’ (Strehlow 1971, p. 616).

The way the spirit of an individual relates to the spiritual world within the land may vary from one community to another. Aboriginal spirituality necessarily means that the spirit of a person is linked to the spiritual world within the land, a particular place in the land, and a particular ancestor.

We all come from the land and that is where we will go back when we die. My bones will join those of my ancestors, so I feel I am part of a link that started over 60,000 years ago and will go on forever. (Yunupingu 1996, p. 6)

Many Aboriginal communities’ stories recall how, in the beginning, the ancestor beings or creator beings also emerged from the land - or in some cases the sea. These emerging spiritual forces walked the land, transformed the landscape, and returned to the land where their spiritual presence persists for all time. The entire landscape is filled with the trails and sites where these creator beings travelled. The country becomes a story written on the land for those who know how to read the land. Myers summarises this spiritual dimension of the landscape among the Pintubi people.

The actions of these powerful beings - animal, human and monster - created the world as it now exists. They gave it outward form, identity (a name), and internal structure. The desert is crisscrossed with lines of travel and, just as animal tracks leave a record of what happened, the geography and special features of the land - hills, creeks, salt lakes, trees - are marks of the ancestors’ activities. Places where exceptionally significant events took place, where power was left behind, or where the ancestors went into the ground and still remain, are special sacred sites (yarta yarta) because ancestral potency is near. (Myers 1986, p. 50)

Sacred sites where ‘ancestral potency is near’ are those places in the landscape where direct access to the spiritual world of the land is gained and sustained through ritual and story. Violation of these sites means severing that access to the spiritual and violating the sacredness of the place. The full force of this loss can hardly be imagined. Cecil Grant states that ‘one of the saddest things it [dispossession] brought was disconnection with our spiritual heritage’. That heritage, he says,

was handed down faithfully in a connected, unbroken line, through initiation from generation to generation for thousands of years until around the turn of the century when it was broken. The impact of invasion, the corruptions of colonisation, broke that connection. (Pattel-Gray & Brown 1997, p. 3)

The struggle of Aboriginal people today, partly through the process of reconciliation, is to restore, where possible, these broken relationships with the land and the Spirit of the Land. This involves communities making connection with the spiritual world of their country. The struggle for land rights is part of the struggle to restore these spiritual connections.

The land as suffering
The land experienced by Aboriginal people as a spiritual mother ‘feeds and nurtures all the time, just like mothers always look after their children . . . That is why Aboriginal people sing about land, dance about land, tell stories about land - because we have such a belonging to the land’ (Yunupingu 1996, p. 7). Just like a human mother, the land responds to the rites and experiences of those whom the land embraces.

The suffering of the land, says Yunupingu, is communicated to those who are sensitive to the language of the land.

Even when I am not on my tribal land I am able to speak sign language; just like people who don’t speak each other’s languages have always communicated in sign language. I do the same thing by looking at the hills with no trees. I understand that maybe those hills are suffering a bit. I understand that Mother earth is suffering because there is so much devastation. Trees are dying and have to be cleared away, lands are being cut by floodwaters, and many other types of environmental destruction are taking place. That is when you experience the suffering of the Spirit of the Land because of the carelessness of the non-Aboriginal people who call themselves ‘owners’ of this country. (Yunupingu 1996, pp. 9-10)

The suffering of the land because of pollution and desecration is a theme in the biblical prophets that has not been taken seriously by most Christian immigrants to this land. Yet, as the prophet Jeremiah suggests, when the land suffers, God suffers (Habel 1996, p. 5). Or, in the words of Yunupingu, ‘the Spirit of the Land’ suffers because of the folly of non-Aboriginal ‘owners’. The suffering of the land reflects the suffering of that spiritual presence in the land that some have called the Creator Spirit. However specific writers may designate this Spirit of the Land, Yunupingu confronts us with the reality that we non-indigenous peoples have caused the Spirit of the Land to suffer.

Can we, as non-indigenous peoples, hear the crying of the land as the crying of the Spirit of the Land? Are our spirits also capable of being in tune with the spiritual in this land? Can we empathise with the Rainbow Spirit Elders’ understanding of the suffering Spirit.

The Creator Spirit is crying because the deep spiritual bonds with the land and its people have been broken. The land is crying because it is slowly dying without this bond of spiritual life. The people are crying because they long for a restoration of that deep spiritual bond with the Creator Spirit and the land. (Rainbow Spirit Elders 1997, p. 42)

Those of us who are immigrant Australians may not have experienced direct spiritual connections with specific places in the same way as indigenous people. We may not believe we have links with the spiritual stories and sites of a particular part of the country in the same way. I suspect, however, that if we accept the challenge of Djiniyini Gondarra, many of us will admit to an awareness of what Yunupingu calls the Spirit of the Land, and perhaps even the suffering of that Spirit. Gondarra’s challenge, implicit in the lead quote of this chapter, is clear.

I want to challenge my Aboriginal brothers and sisters to recognise our unique spirituality and fight for its survival. I’m saying to other Australians, ‘If you are born of this land, you’ve tasted its spirituality, but what have you done with that?’ Indigenous people have cared for this land for maybe 100,000 years; in the last 200 its spirituality has been ignored as it has been progressively raped.

Reconciliation, friends, is about healing the scars on the land and within the land, and within us as Australians - indigenous and others. (Council 1997b, Book 2, p. 72)

Gondarra invites non-indigenous Australians to recognise that though people such as myself have an immigrant heritage, we are also ‘born of this land’. We are not branded as invaders - even though that may have been true of some of our ancestors. We are addressed as people of the land who can potentially understand something of the culture and experience of indigenous peoples also ‘born of this land’.

Gondarra’s challenge is also an invitation to recognise the spiritual in this land, something we may have already tasted unawares. Again, we are not set apart as Western Christians whose knowledge of the spiritual has been associated with a ‘Father who art in heaven’, inviting pilgrims to leave the ‘earthly’ land for a better place in heaven. Discerning the spiritual in the land as the Spirit of the Land is presented as a mutual possibility and a pathway to ‘understanding country’. Following that path will help facilitate reconciliation. Discerning the Spirit of the Land leads to discerning the suffering of the Spirit. The suffering of the Spirit of the Land commenced with the invasion, persisted through 200 years of racist sin, and continues today with the environmental degradation of the land. For those of us less in tune with the language of the earth, the cries of the indigenous people may mediate the cries of the land (Habel 1996, p. 10). For others, the suffering of the Spirit of the Land can be linked with the suffering of God at Calvary, and seen as a spiritual continuation of that suffering presence in the Australian landscape.

Native title
It is not appropriate for me to enter the discussion about the precise legal meaning of the concept of ‘native title’ in common law as people such as Noel Pearson have done (1997). More significant in this context is that some indigenous people use the term ‘native title’ as a symbol for justice in the reconciliation process - as the collection of papers commemorating twenty years of progress since the Aboriginal Land Rights Act 1976 clearly illustrates. William Deane, Governor-General of Australia at that time, says in the preface ‘[this book] shows us there is a way forward towards reconciliation on the basis of friendship and equality between the Australian nation and its indigenous peoples’ (Yunupingu 1997, p. x). Galarrwuy Yunupingu highlights how the notion of native title has become a symbol of Aboriginal Law and culture and much more than a legal concept.

Native Title is not a piece of paper or words in a book. It is our living Aboriginal culture. It is our songs and our dances, painted on our bodies and written in the sand. It is our law which has been unchanged for thousands of years.

If it is taken away then everything is lost. And Australia has lost its last chance for reconciliation. Our children should be able to grow up equal, as mates, in a fair country. Killing off our law and culture will make this impossible. (Council 1997a, Book 1, p. 39)

The Native Title Act 1993 validated the 1992 decision of the High Court of Australia (Queensland v Mabo No. 2), which held that, among other things,

the doctrine of terra nullius has no application to lands which were inhabited or occupied by Australian indigenous people - consequently, the traditional rights of indigenous people to land survived the acquisition of sovereignty by the Crown; the common law recognises these traditional rights as a form of native title, subject to any extinguishment arising from legislation or executive action; the nature and content of a native title is ascertained by reference to the traditional laws and customs of indigenous people. (Yunupingu 1997, p. 235)

The significance of this decision is that, for the first time in 200 years, indigenous people can come to the negotiating table ‘with legally recognised rights to land and resources’ (Ridgeway 1997, p. 65). What Aboriginal people had always believed to be true under their own Law was now acknowledged in Australian law. Now they had the ‘right to negotiate’ in cases relating to their land - their social and spiritual home. Any attempt to tamper with the Act, or the subsequent Wik decision based on this Act, was viewed by indigenous Australians as negating Aboriginal rights and sabotaging the reconciliation process. Upholding native title, therefore, represents justice; as such it is a necessary prerequisite for reconciliation. Land rights ought not be reduced to a legal and political game. This process relates to the land, the very source of the spiritual reality known to Aboriginal people.

The search
I accept the implied challenge of Djiniyini Gondarra to acknowledge the spirituality ‘other Australians born in this land have tasted’. That spirituality, I believe, belongs to Australia’s soul. I may not have experienced the Spirit in the same way that indigenous peoples have known the Spirit of the Land. I may not have been as acutely aware of the suffering of the Spirit and the land as indigenous Australians. Whether my heritage is linked with pioneer farmers, urban settlers or indigenous ancestors, I am linked with this land as a spiritual place.