ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the spiritual question in a postcolonial context. European colonisers think of themselves as having won the battle and seized the land, but indigenous cultures exert an unexpected impact. They are urging the secular toward a postsecular attitude, and this is occurring in every postcolonial nation in the world. Settler society is unsettled by the Aboriginal sacred, by its powerful reality and connection with place. There can be no sense of belonging without coming to terms with indigenous cultures. There is a generalised anxiety of guilt and a sense of being inauthentic. The counter-cultural ecological movement emphasises the need to adopt a sacred attitude to land and place, but this movement is constructed as marginal and eccentric to the mainstream. Aboriginal elders offer the gift of belonging, but guilt paralyses the colonisers. They are unable to accept the gift because it is a spiritual endowment, and secular society struggles to understand it.
