ABSTRACT
I was talking to my boys about Budjaar, our Creator, and how much love comes from everything given to us through creation, and my 16-year-old son said to me … ‘I been thinking lately… you realise worms are more important to the earth than we are. If all the worms or bees or green frogs were destroyed there would be devastation to the eco-system, the planet may not even recover because they are all so important to life … if man was destroyed the planet would flourish and repair itself …’ I just looked at him in amazement … he was right. There was a time when we played our role, even managing the environment though we are seen as primitive because we never built massive skyscrapers or monuments to ourselves – but through eco-land management, biodiversity and cohabitation our lands flourished … a time when we truly had domain over all things and yes, were just as, if not more, important than the worms, bees and green frogs. I have mentioned throughout the book the way the greater majority of non-Aboriginal Australians, and therefore the world, still have no idea of these advancements, innovations in science, eco-farming and organisational structures we possessed. What I haven’t mentioned is another major division propagated by the belief that we receive millions of dollars in entitlements purely based on our being Aboriginal, which like our untold history creates division and hate. Most comments you see on Aboriginal threads by white Australians posted on social media are either based on our being primitive savages, or benefiting from such entitlements, both of which are not true. My son didn’t just say what he did, he doesn’t live in a vacuum, it comes from his being part of collective ceremony and culture since he was a little child. It comes from his having to collect sandalwood and ochre prior to ceremony and being told the importance of kinship systems and how the sandalwood and ochre tie into the land. In having the ochre crushed up into a powder with water from the Macintyre River creating the paste worn on his body. Being told of the importance of the Gawuban Gunigal (water systems …) connected across Australia as Kubbaanjhaan (bloodlines …) within the landscape sustaining life and ecology. Suddenly current debate about memorials and dates of significance for me went far beyond any history wars … in listening to my son I remembered the Facebook post from my cousin on 27 August 2017:
The first people of this land don’t need statues of our hero’s we have mountains that remind us of our people. We don’t need painted portraits we have rivers that flow with stories n dreaming. Our songs are filled with culture n language of the land. So we don’t need books. Our history our connections our hearts are true to this country.
(Baker, 2017) I had a light bulb moment realising the effect on all those millions of kids around the world who are never introduced to an Aboriginal education the way my children have been. This conversation, again with my boys, and the above post from my cousin, reaffirmed everything I have been trying to say in writing this book, better than I ever could. That without such involvement, denied access to Aboriginal pedagogy, these kids growing up in the Western world, rather than becoming sophisticated, as we are told, instead are lacking in the most basic knowledge of self and their connection to the environment. And how these children denied input from Aboriginal knowledges and sustainability become instead active contributors in generating environmental wastelands (Monbiot, 2012). This is because instead of the worldview so inherent to my son, they accept without question the dominant culture’s dependency on/addiction to fossil fuels, as entitlement, which to us as Aboriginal people along with commercialisation remains part of environmental terrorism generation upon generation. Not only environmental terrorism and commercialism, but also bordering on cultural genocide; why? … Because it is done at the expense of renewable energies, biodiversity, cohabitation and our Aboriginal ways of life. The conservatives, our own people included, have tried to silence such views by proclaiming, rather than an Aboriginal connection to the environment, we are only following the greens and the left as puppets controlling our voice. No … sustainability and environmental issues have always been essential to the Aboriginal worldview.