Blood ties, land ties

Regardless of their origins, Aboriginal peoples share a common devotion to their countries. No matter how stony, cold, barren, dry, hot or harsh their country might appear to others, to the indigenes their country is the only place that truly matters. It is where they or their parents were born, where their ancestors are buried, where the generations before them have lived and died. It is indisputably where they belong. It is where a correct life is possible; your true country is the Good Life incarnate.

They want me to go to Paris! Why would I go to Paris? I'd rather go to Tennant Creek for a week. - Central Australian Aboriginal writer, incredulous upon being invited to a literary festival.

For indigenous people steeped in meaningful tradition, to live outside one's country is to be constantly in peril, spiritually, emotionally and physically. Exile is a peculiar form of illness, and of blindness, since the stories that give life meaning - the pedagogies of the generations - are contained not in books or language alone, but in language expressed within and by landscape.

Melissa Lucashenko, 'Not quite white in the head', Griffith Review 2: Dreams of Land, Summer 2003-2004, pp. 17.

These words from yesterday's writing class were ringing in my ears today as I sat at the summit of Hanging Rock (25 minutes uphill climbing; I resisted a heart attack but I shall definitely feel it tomorrow in my legs :) In the sense as described above, I am still an exile in my own country. I shall never have the experience of strong generational blood ties to the land, of being able to speak the land. How much more I would be able to see and say if I did. And yet, the land still talks ...

I was just a visitor to Hanging Rock. Had never been here before, possibly would never come here again. I was aware of my visitor status - not simply because of the fee I paid to go into the area, nor the trail markers and stairs, signposts, toilets and a cafe to indicate that this was a place that people visited. But the land itself told me that I was a visitor. Not in an unfriendly way (although many Europeans in the past have thought so, comparing this land to what swam in their own blood and finding it wanting, so alien they couldn't begin to fathom its personality). I wouldn't be able to see the true intricacies, character and nuances of this place unless I lived there for generations. And yet the land was willing to talk ...

Much Australian scenery, to be captured properly, requires a camera many more hundreds of dollars more expensive than mine, or a photographer who could manually set F-stops and shutter speeds to capture the different colours of the rocks, the differing shades of brown and grey, the mint green of the lichen. Not for this environment the dramatics of the main street of Mount Macedon where, on my way home, the English-ey maples and elms and other treeish amazingnesses were coming into their autumnal glory, causing me to drive as slowly down the street as possible so I could stop and utter audibles to myself out the window. Beautiful.

But this land is different. It sings to me in a way that those beautiful Macedon trees don't. Englishness sings strongly through my blood, the unseen memory of those ancestors before me who saw with their own eyes and lived with their own hands and feet and heads and hearts those same trees back in the Motherland. That is my blood too. But England is not my country. Australia is my country. But Australians are some of the most itinerant people in the world, a reflection of our not belonging, of living uneasily upon the land, this willingness to pick up and take off at a moment's notice. Uneasy exiles in our own land. We think we can't learn the language. It takes a long, long time to learn a language. And yet, the land still speaks ...

As long as it takes to really get to know a place, the land reaches out and sings to us very quickly, if we are willing to hear. It just takes a while to be willing to hear. Sometimes guilt gets in the way. But when we do, when we start listening, that's when slowly, slowly, a place begins to seep itself into our own blood too.

I took my shoes and socks off and sat and rested for 15 minutes or so, on warm yellowish rock, the dog panting beside me, and gazed over the yellow dry of the pastoral land below, so much cleared, and wondered how it looked 200 years before, covered in trees. Even sitting there for 15 minutes, the colours and shapes and textures of my surroundings began taking on a significance, began revealing a bit more of themselves, showing a bit more of their gentle hues. I sat on the rock and I knew that at least these rocks were the same as they looked to those generations past. And even though I was a visitor, the land sang itself to me through my feet as they connected with the rock, was willing to seep itself into my blood if I stayed long enough. The land - the spirit of land is forgiving, even after being so ill treated.