1 Strengthening Communities Peoples, Places, Partnership A Conference at Sydney 29 April 2003 My People and Place. Why does Place Matter? A Presentation by Mick Dodson - CHECK AGAINST DELIVERY - No English words are good enough to give a sense of the links between an Aboriginal group and its homeland. i Mr. Hatzistergos - Minister for Justice and Minister Assisting the Premier on Citizenship Ladies and gentlemen, My first duty is to acknowledge the traditional owners of this part of our, for now troubled country. The Gadigal peoples of the Eora nation I salute you it is great to be on your ancestral lands. Today, I m going to talk about place and it s importance to me and my people. The opening quote is from W.E.H. Stanner. It comes from the ABC s Boyer lecture series broadcast in the late 1960 s. In my view the Stanner lectures are works of poetry, beauty, genius and above all honesty about black and white relationships in this country. They
2 are as relevant today as they were overdue back then - over 30 years ago. The opening quote I used is part of a longer quote and I want to present it in full. It is as follows: Our word home, warm and suggestive though it be, does not match the aboriginal word that may mean camp, hearth, country, everlasting home, totem place, life source, spirit centre, and much else. Our term land is too spare and meager. We can scarcely use it except with economic overtones unless we happen to be poets. The Australian landscape country and sea has been a contested place since the British arrived to assert their sovereignty and commence the colonization process. We Indigenous Australians and our forebears the first peoples of this land - have fought for our place in this country in the face of this colonization. We have struggled physically, politically and through the imposed legal system and it s processes to try to achieve recognition for our inherent right to own and manage our traditional lands, seas and resources and the places in and on them. Many of our people over the course of colonization have been removed forcibly from homeland and place and have been resettled in strange places. Sometimes a long, long way away from their ancestral and familiar lands. Most people removed like this have never relinquished their attachment and longing for country. Most have fought fiercely by one means or another to be reunited with it.
3 But what is this Indigenous idea about country and our yearning for it. Well for one thing we are not on about the ordinary English usage of that word country. Country might mean to some a sovereign nation state that has a right to be a member of the United Nations. Some might even describe the word country as some place outside the urbanized cities. We have country roads and country towns we even had a country party in the long ago. There are of course lots of places in the country that were given names by the colonizers usually names reflecting the new comers and their history. Names about England or Ireland or Scotland and places over there in the motherland or they were named after people who were famous and maybe their ancestors and perhaps even notorious. The new comers no doubt felt more comfortable with familiar names to be living in Queen s land or in the new south Wales or in the noble and regal sounding Victoria. We of course have names for places names for places that have been around for quite some time before the British and the human convict cargo arrived in ships to reinvent and rename the landscape. The newcomers even retained some of our names or named places after our people. Not far from here for example is Bennelong point, named after a famed Aboriginal mediator. But, that s not its Aboriginal name. The Sydney Aboriginal name for this place is Djubuguli. It was a meeting place. ii When we talk about country we mean something different. In the Aboriginal context country has an altogether different meaning and sense. When we say country we might mean homeland, or tribal or clan area and in saying so we may mean something more than just a place somewhere on the map. We are not necessarily referring to place in a geographical sense. But we are talking about the whole of the landscape, not just the places on it.
4 Country is a word for us that abbreviates all the values, places, resources, stories and cultural obligations associated with that area and its places. iii The entirety of our ancestral domains. All of it is important we have no wilderness. It is place that also underpins and gives meaning to our creation beliefs the stories of creation form the basis of our laws and explain the origins of the natural world to us all things natural can be explained. Take Uluru for example some still call it Ayers Rock but it has always been Uluru to the Anangu anyway Uluru was built during the creation time what the anthropologist like to call the dream-time. It was built by two boys who played in the mud after it had rained. After they had had their play they went to a place called Wiputa to the south just north of the Musgrave Ranges (I m not sure who Musgrave was but he certainly was not Anangu!) they killed and ate a wallaby there and headed north again to a place Anangu call Atila some might know it better as Mt Connor again I don t know who Connor was. Not far from Atila is a place called Anari. One of the boys threw a club called a tjuni at a wallaby but missed and hit the ground. The club broke the ground and a spring of fresh water was formed. This boy refused to tell the other boy where the water was and the other boy almost died from thirst. Eventually the boys went to the top of the mount and you can see their bodies there today preserved as boulders. iv Similarly, on the island of Mer in the Murray Islands where Eddie Mabo and others fought and won native title for all of us, there is a rounded summit. It has a long sloping side this side is Gelam the dugong. He came a long time ago from the Island of Moa and settled down there. He had bought with him seeds and fruit and vegetables and good soil. He scattered these around the Island that is why Mer is so fertile and rich in food crops. It is through stories such as these we are able to explain the features of our places and landscape. It is the cultural knowledge that goes with it that serve as constant reminders to us of our spiritual association with the land and its places. Even without the in depth
5 cultural knowledge, knowing country has spiritual origins makes it all the more significant and important to us. These signals for us are everywhere, as one writer put it: There is no place without a history, there is no place that has not been imaginatively grasped through song, dance and design, no place where traditional owners cannot see the imprint of sacred creation. v So, Country is known people sing for it, there are dances known, taught and danced for it, it has its stories that are taught, learned and told. It has its mysteries. It has its rituals. It can be painted, it can be harvested, and one can care for and love it. We got something in it. The sea is country to many of us as well. The same is true of the sky. These are places we know. The lightning men and women live in the sky, creative beings have travelled this place we call the sky, and for some of us it is where some of our dead relations now reside. Fred Biggs, a Ngeamba man from Menindee put it his way in his poem The Star Tribes: Look, among the boughs. Those stars are men. There s Ngintu, with his dogs, who guards the skins Of Everlasting Water in the sky. And there s the Crow-man, carrying on his back The wounded Hawk-man. There s the serpent, Thurroo, glistening in the leaves. There s kapeetah, the Moon-man, sitting in his mia-mia. And there s those Seven Sisters, travelling
6 across the sky. They make the real cold frost. You hear them when you re camped out on the plains. They look down from the sky and see your fire and Mai, mai mai, they d sing out as they run across the sky. And, when you wake, you find your swag, the camp, the plains, all white with frost. vi There are, as most of you no doubt know, places we regard particularly significant, particularly special, places some of which might be dangerous. People sometime refer to them as sacred sites. It is not always easy to explain these places. It is more about the spiritual than anything else I guess. If you had an understanding of the dreaming tracks and all that goes with that it would help a bit. All things have their own sacred places and rituals. These dreaming tracks link these things and us to landscape and ecosystem. These tracks are about the journeys of creator beings. How they did heroic deeds and formed the landscape, its waters, its birds, the mountains and hills, the gullies, the ravines, the rivers and streams. All the animals and the people. They did important things at what are now important places to us. These places are testament to who they were and what they did and what we must do to preserve it. They are also about the living and who we are. Justice Woodward in his report on land rights in the Northern Territory put it this way: Land generally has spiritual significance for Aborigines but because of the form and content of the myths relating to it, some land is more important to other land. Certain places are particularly important, usually because of their mythological significance, but sometimes because of their use as a burial ground or an important meeting place for ceremonies. vii
7 Even in places where a lot of cultural knowledge has been lost through the sheer force of colonization and its attempts to assimilate, knowledge of these sacred and special places has generally survived such is their importance. Sacred sites are the cultural core of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander country. How then do we get connected to country and connected to its places? It s pretty simple really you get your connection to country and places at birth, even if you were not born on your own country. You immediately acquire right to country and will eventually have to take up responsibility for it and the places on it. You grow up knowing what place you have a right to speak for. viii And you grow up learning more about your country and it s places almost everyday. You know what you can do there. And you don t need to ask someone else. Country for us is also centrally about identity. Our lands our seas underpin who we are. Where we come from. Who our ancestors are. What it means to be from that place from that country. How others see and view us. How others identify us. How we feel about each other. How we feel about our families and ourselves. Country to us is fundamentally about our survival as peoples. I have said before that to understand us you have to understand our law, our culture, and our relationship to the physical and spiritual world. Everything about Aboriginal society is inextricably interwoven with, and connected to the land. None of it is vacant or empty, it is all interconnected. You have to understand this and our place in that land and the places on that land. Culture is the land, the land and spirituality of Aboriginal people, our cultural beliefs and our reason for existence is the land. ix We rejoiced in the work and achievements of the late Eddie Mabo and the other Murray Islanders who fought for land justice and achieved the seemingly impossible task of
8 getting our inherent rights to our lands recognized in the nations highest court. We got native title the common law recognition of our right to a place. What has happened since is the whittling away of our places, our lands, our seas and waters. Either by legislative means or the court processes our identity our sense of identity our very reason for existence and our survival as peoples is once again under attack by the colonial process. A new era of Indigenous homelessness beckons. Whatever gains we make it seems the powerless are worse off the rules change the goal posts moves and the obstacles are piled on like never before. Recent decisions by the high court in the Yorta Yorta and the Miriuwung & Gadjerong cases have been particularly dispiriting and disheartening. The government through the parliament has repudiated any responsibility for land justice to us and now the courts have delivered a similar repudiation. If you take away our land, if you take away our places you take us away. We have grown up the land. We are dancing, singing and painting for the land. We are celebrating the land. Removed from our lands we are literally removed from ourselves. If I cant put my Djalkiri x (to us the yolgnu word) on my land then I m nothing nothing, nobody my footprint needs to be there on my places that is key to my identity. i W.E.H. Stanner after the DREAMING 1991 edition ABC books with foreword by H.C. Coombes p. 44 ii Governor Phillip had a hut built on this point for Bennelong. The main feature today is the Opera House there is no memorial to Bennelong! See Aboriginal Sydney Melinda Hinkson photography by Alana Harris Aboriginal Studies Press 2001 iii For a succinct discussion on the meaning of country to Indigenous peoples see generally - Key Issues Paper No.1 Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation Understanding Country AGPS Canberra 1994 iv this story is a paraphrasing of an account by R. Layton in ULURU An Aboriginal History of Ayers Rock, Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies, Canberra, 1989, p. 5. Reported at P. 5. In endnote i v from Deborah Bird Rose in NOURISHING TERRAINS Australian Aboriginal Views of Landscape and Wilderness vi F Biggs in R. Robinson 1970 Altjeringa and other Aboriginal poems AH and AW Reed, Sydney. P. 25 extract from Rose previous footnote p. 9. vii Woodward Royal Commission Report 1974 viii see particularly comments by Mary Tarrant at p. 83 in TRACKING KNOWLEDGE in North Australian Landscapes edited by Deborah Rose & Anne Clarke NARU 1997
9 ix Dodson, Michael, 1997. Land Rights and social justice. In Our Land Our Life; Land Rights Past, Present and Future, Galarrwuy Yunupingu Ed. St Lucia: University of Queensland Press. x Literally foot or footprint in English this is said to be for Yolngu foundation for both Yolgnu culture and Yolngu identity.