last time I looked for stars
I saw what was lit up
four made a simple cross
pattern I'd been taught not
what was between I felt
expansive knowledge bigger
held within sky
I grew up hearing stories about how the snake ate the sun and the emu in the sky. In year eight our English class was on an excursion in Gariwerd and went to the Aboriginal cultural centre Brambruk. Peeling off from the group and I looked at pictures of local people who lived at Ebenezer, the Lutheran mission in the Wimmera. My great grandmother had been born there, and I saw her in the pictures of the exhibit, my middle name the same as hers. Afterwards, we were assigned to write our own Dreamtime story.
‘A deep time awareness might help us see ourselves as part of a web of gift,’ said Robert Macfarlane, writing in 2019’s Underland, ‘inheritance and legacy stretching over millions of years past and millions to come’. He sensed the multilinear nature of our existence1. And, too, the inadequacy of Western spiritual practices. In Australia, First Peoples are holders of the deep time knowledge that I believe Macfarlane is referring to. He describes field research for the book, putting a hand out to an ochre handprint painted in a cave and feeling the connection to humans from another time. It’s this deep time awareness, long held inheritance and legacies that could soften existential anguish of today’s fears: our climate emergency, the global pandemic and on-going colonisation.
Deep time awareness is a foundational part of the knowledge systems of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities often called Dreamtime or Dreaming. It relates to the past, present and future, and interweaving understandings of people, place and time. Christine Nicholls offers this definition by Jeannie Herbert Nungarrayi in her 2014 article for The Conversation, referring to it as
an all-embracing concept that provides rules for living, a moral code, as well as rules for interacting with the natural environment. The philosophy behind it is holistic – the Jukurrpa provides for a total, integrated way of life.… The Dreaming isn’t something that has been consigned to the past but is a lived daily reality.2
My understanding of the practical, interwoven nature of Dreaming expanded during a research trip to Tiwi Islands, as part of my work for the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia. During research interviews for the 2015 exhibition Being Tiwi, I met artists Pedro Wonaeamirri, Timothy Cook, Maria Josette Orsto and others who shared the significance of their personal symbology or Dreaming. They explained that it was integrated far beyond their visual arts practice into seasonal cycles, ceremony, dance, food production and more. Totemic animals or constellations, might be generally referred to as their ‘Dreaming’ but the way they interact with it happens on multiple levels in a holistic way. As Nicholls writes,
Unfortunately, since colonisation, this multiplicity of semantically rich, metaphysical word-concepts framing the epistemological, cosmological and ontological frameworks unique to Australian Aboriginal people’s systems of religious belief have been uniformly debased and dumbed-down – by being universally rendered as “Dreaming” in English – or, worse still, “Dreamtime”.3
When I was younger, I thought everything was lost, that I needed to create something new, and writing the Dreamtime story for class affirmed it. It was an education that didn't create space for my identity and culture, housed within a system flattening what it means to be Aboriginal. It needed to forget and remove our complexity in order to continue the work of colonisation. My English teacher was encouraging and I liked her, but my story tumbled out like an episode of Blinky Bill. A bush forum headed by a noble kookaburra and a troublesome kangaroo that led to the creation of thunder and lightning.
References
Robert MacFarlane, Underland: a deep time journey, (London: W. W. Norton & Company, 2019), 21. .↩
Jukurrpa is a word used by many Central Australian Aboriginal communities as opposed to the English ‘Dreaming’. Jeannie Herbert Nungarrayi quoted in Christine Judith Nicholls, Dreamtime’ and ‘The Dreaming’ – an introduction The Conversation, January 23, 2014. ↩
Ambelin Kwaymullina, Living on Stolen Land, (Broome, Western Australia: Magabala Books, 2020), 23. ↩
Regular fixtures in Wergaia stories are two cheeky brothers Bram. Possums and spiders guarding lakes on Country, getting up to mischief. Though I know it wasn’t teacher's fault or her intention, the distance I felt from our cultural knowledge was the intention of the colonial project and reinforced by the education system. Cycles of removal and disconnection moving down through the years from my ancestors until it reached me.
Stories of Country relate to past, present and future, interweaving understandings of people, place and time. They may seem like simple metaphorical fables but they are full of meaning. Knowledge of caring for Country, seasonal knowledge of places to find food in abundance or camp safely. Ambelin Kwaymullina explains this interconnectedness in her poem 'Holism':
Ask an Indigenous thinker
to explain a hill
they might speak
about the river that runs past it
the plants and animals
to whom it is home
about the earth below
the turning stars above
about the Ancestor
who is hill
the Ancestor hill
who is family3
I grew up on Country where Wergaia stories and language had been spoken long before I came and will remain long after I go. From the hefty presence of Gariwerd, shouldering almost all of Western Victoria, mountains even out into wide golden expanses and desert towards the South Australian border. Occasionally the surprise of enormous lakes, pink saltwater and freshwater, emerging billabongs and rivers. The barenji gadjin (flowing waters) of the Wimmera river is the artery that feeds them, loping up to Lake Hindmarsh. Country is wiser than me, is alive with knowledge of deep time, could speak many memories and true stories.
Yet I feel the confines of existential dread, compacting and minimising me into the pinprick of my brief timeline. Even though I am a storyteller, crafting words and building worlds, it doesn’t feel authentic enough, doesn’t feel like it is built from the land. I’ve wondered whether conscious reconnection to Aboriginal mythological knowledges and spiritualities will give me the sense of ease that is missing from my life. If I knew all the cultural stories of my ancestors, would I feel at ease because I know I am connected to stories of deep time?
The health and wellbeing challenges and inequalities that face First Nations people across communities are well understood as an ongoing consequence of colonisation. To disconnect us from Country and our knowledges is a violent rupture that effects people on multiple levels and deeply impacts wellbeing. creates a despairing, vulnerable people for whom a carefree life and wellbeing is a foreign concept. Kingsley, Townsend, Henderson-Wilson and Bolam note that this ‘lack of control, stress and social gradient [has] been shown to effect peoples’ health outcomes across all population groups, this disconnect from Country may contribute an extra layer to this distress and inequality.’4 While there is a growing understanding of how nature and the environment has a positive impact on wellbeing, ‘they are still often overlooked in scientific arenas … local Aboriginal environmental narratives and knowledge should be accorded similar standing to scientific information.’ 5
The distance I felt from my cultural knowledge was intentional and continued the work of colonisation that settlers began. The disconnection from our place on Country resulted in trauma that still impacts on Aboriginal people today, playing out in a myriad of mental health challenges. Yet through making art, it is possible to soothe the legacies of this disconnection: ‘To reclaim spirituality [through arts practice] is to reclaim identity and to develop resilience in the face of generational trauma.’
Recently the honey scent of wattle called me up the mountain. Urging me higher. I put my hand out to the boulders jutting out of the base. Ochre layers teaching the story of deep time. Speaking the same language as it always has.
Jonathan Kingsley et al., “Developing an Exploratory Framework Linking Australian Aboriginal Peoples’ Connection to Country and Concepts of Wellbeing,” International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health 10, no. 2 (February 7, 2013): 678–98, 683.↩
Nerelle Poroch, Winnunga Nimmityjah Aboriginal Health Service Cooperative Research Centre for Aboriginal Health (Australia), and Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, Spirituality and Aboriginal People’s Social and Emotional Wellbeing: A Review (Casuarina, N.T.: Cooperative Research Centre for Aboriginal Health, 2011), 2.↩
Susie Anderson's poetry and nonfiction are widely published online and in print. She is a 2021 Black&Write! Fellow and is currently working on her debut poetry collection. Her professional practice is as a digital producer in the arts and creative industries ranging from Sydney, London and Melbourne. Leveraging her position within institutions, she attempts to bring about change by uncovering and amplifying stories from her own and other communities. Descended from the Wergaia and Wemba Wemba peoples of Western Victoria, she grew up in Horsham, Victoria and currently lives on Boon Wurrung land in Melbourne.
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