Finding Spirit in Australia

Brian Doyle has been the editor of the University of Portland in Oregan USA, renowned Portland Magazine since 1991. On a recent visit to Australia he penned a cycle of poems in which he captured his experiences of the spirit here.
He is author and editor and prominent figure in US Religious circles.

 

On Woolloomooloo Bay,

In New South Wales,

I meet a tiny old woman

Who turns out to be a nun,

The very poorest of Clares,

As she says with a smile.

She is maybe five feet high

And thin as a stick and says

She is just on the good side

Of a cancer that tried to eat her

For most of the last four years.

I figured it was like Jacob

Wrestling with the angel,

She says. We fought it out

And I can’t say as I won,

But I can say I outlasted it

For the moment. You never

Get cocky after a cancer,

I can tell you that. It might

Be back. But I am not afraid.

I tried to get to know it,

To figure out its patterns

And habits and customs.

It was like a chess game,

Or a silent fencing match.

I fought it with clean things,

Songs and prayers and people

Laughing and telling me stories.

Also lots of fruit and the walking.

I don’t forget it either, she says.

I think of it every day as I walk

Around the bay. Keep your friends

Close and your enemies closer, eh?

                                    -- Brian Doyle

Broken Songs, Rainbows and Ecology

reviewed by

Frances Devlin-Glass, Deakin University.

Carpentaria was the surprise outsider which won the Miles Franklin Award this year (edging out Peter Carey, multiple Booker and Miles Franklin winner).  It has also scooped up the Gold Medal awarded by the peak body for Ozlit, the Association for the Study of Australian Literature. Its credentials are certainly literary ones – this author is knowing and well read in third world literatures, and first world ones, for that matter too. But for me, its main claim to fame is the way it reaches out to both her own Waanyi community but also to those outside that group to communicate the Waanyi sacred, and aspects of it that are incommensurable with European ways of grasping the sacred.

Carpentaria is an exciting read, and a timely one given the threat posed by mining to the McArthur River, and when I started the novel, I felt that Australian literature had not seen anything so dramatic or ambitious since Herbert’s attempt to alert white Australia to its appalling race policies and failure of welfare/education/legal/religious bureaucracies in the Top End in Poor Fellow My Country (1975).  Reading these novels gives much insight into the current disastrous failure of European engagement in the Top End. I’m not at all convinced that invasion of the homelands by army and medical forces is the answer to the problems. It seems to me that whitefellas need a great deal more education in Indigenous cosmology and culture as a necessary first step towards the kind of Reconciliation that is based in real cultural respect. I believe such mutual respect is yearned for on both sides of the race divide in this country. This novel goes some distance towards trying to communicate what in Aboriginal cosmology is foreign to westerners.

What is not well appreciated in non-Indigenous Australia is that the triumph of Aboriginal culture inheres in the particularity of its knowledge of tiny, self-contained but interrelated territories, the deep ecology of these domains, and the sacred songs that create and are seen to bind humans and the more-than-human phenomenal world into relationship.  Two works have greatly assisted my understanding of how the eco-centric (as distinct from the egocentric) self might operate in Indigenous practice. By way of primer, Deborah Bird Rose’s Nourishing Terrains (www.ahc.gov.au/publications/generalpubs/nourishing), which draws heavily and richly on traditional owners’ understandings and voices, is a good start. Her very dynamic and multi-facetted account of ‘dreamtime’ cosmology helps one realize how the very term leads Europeans into morasses of misunderstanding and trivialization of the cosmology for which the terms dreamtime/dreaming have become shorthand. It’s a book that warrants several readings as it appears to be simpler than it is.  Much richer, and unfortunately available only in a limited edition (a few university libraries have copies – Deakin, Monash and Queensland), is the cultural Atlas of a single Indigenous culture, which John Bradley and Nona Cameron have compiled in collaboration with Yanyuwa families, ‘Forget About Flinders’:A Yanyuwa Atlas of the South West Gulf of Carpentaria (2003). Designed for Yanyuwa use in small groups (A3 format opening to double that for the foldout maps, and with large print), what this extraordinary book does is to map visually the public knowledge of Yanyuwa in a variety of modes of discourse. First, it restores Yanyuwa names to country and these are sometimes readable in terms of their etymology by using the (as yet unpublished in hard copy) dictionary of Yanyuwa online (http://www.deakin.edu.au/arts/diwurruwurru). Secondly, it maps in cartoon form (a form in which visually literate youngsters, especially Yanyuwa ones, can most easily digest huge quantities of information) how dreamings move dynamically across country. Thirdly, it gives the sacred text in prose and poetic (performance) versions, as well as other connected stories. These are organized in terms of slices of country, this being the condition under which such stories would normally be received, thereby enacting Yanyuwa pedagogy. Fourthly, in the margins are to be found discussions of variant and contested versions of the stories. What the Atlas eloquently attests to is how precisely literary, sacred and ecological knowledge is mapped onto the land, and how the songs express and create the relationship with land conceived of as interactive, living, breathing, sentient.

What Wright does with the mythology of Waanyi (which adjoins, overlaps with and shares Yanyuwa dreamings) is to dramatise and convey the affect in these relationships between people, their totemic identifications and the more-than-human world of plants, animals and landforms, all understood in terms of relationship and interrelationship. This notion, better understood since the Australian ecophilosophers Freya Mathews (The Ecological Self) and Val Plumwood (Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, Environmental Culture: The Ecological Crisis of Reason) began to critically interrogate and refine Deep Ecological principles, that human identity and meaning make no sense except in relation to the more-than-human world perhaps owes more to Aboriginal cosmology than Mathews or Plumwood admit, fears of being appropriative (properly) being what they are in the tense postcolonial world. However, such ecological principles make perfect sense simply in scientific terms, as we progressively, and to our cost, discover as global warming turns our farms into dustbowls and offshore mining interests (like Xstrata and Century Zinc) seek to divert and irretrievably pollute with lead great tropical rivers like the McArthur and the Gregory.

Alexis Wright delivers both the deep ecological/scientific knowledge of the relationship between land and sea and climate but also, and more importantly for the project of cultural understanding, that sense of wonder and passion for country. What Indigenous cosmology does is to marry good ecological sense with the sense of wonder, and it is wonder that, in the west, is the work of poetry and novels to give us in superabundance. The novel posits that humans are only a small part of greater awesome forces that can obliterate human endeavour, especially that of the extractive and coercive kind, in single events like cyclones. It is the rare writer who tries to convey that sense of wonder in humankind’s place in (not above) the natural order. The novel helps me as a European reader understand what we failed to learn from Aboriginal culture: ecological science based on long and deep observation of nature, but also the passionate commitment to country.

Wright is a Waanyi person, of mixed race descent. Her Indigenous grandmother was a key educator, and she has had an extensive political education working for various Aboriginal agencies, including Land Councils in the Northern Territory. She offers from an Aboriginal perspective satiric analyses of contemporary and toxic Indigenous lifestyles, minus the rant and the preachiness of a writer like Herbert.  The book gives us the grainy realities of life for the Pricklebush mob who live in the dump on the outskirts of town.  We become familiar with not only these fringe-dwellers but also the breakaway group on the east side of town (ironically named Desperance) who are more inured to the life of the town and who fake Aboriginal identity in order to profit from the mine. There is also a manifestation of the Rainbow, the wandering Ford and Holden dreaming separatists, who follow the songlines and keep up the traditions, who are loosely articulated with the extreme separatists who blow up the mine, in the name of the Rainbow. The plot is a fictionalization of an historical attempt by separatist activist, Murrandoo Yanner (whose Rainbow Serpent tattoo, superimposed on a tropical riverscape, graces the handsome cover), to protect his environment from the mining giant Century Zinc. He was outvoted by one vote by his fellow Land Councillors and the mine went ahead. The novel’s central action, blowing up the mine, is therefore a wish fulfillment fantasy, and the reasoning behind it is carefully articulated in the novel. Wright gives us in this novel a knowing and affectionate dramatisation of the multiple politicised fractures of Indigenous communities, where cohesion is made difficult by shades of politics around selective adoption of features of modernity.  We watch these colourful characters negotiating with the (European) town council that wants none of them, and with the police who, on little evidence, take innocent boys into custody and kill them. We see Queenie (what a superb character) commandeer the virgin’s statue and indigenize its features and clothing in the hopes that that whitefella ‘bijnitch’ might enrich her, and watch her inevitable decline into prostitution and rape.

The social realism is both funny and sad, though there is no Indigenous victimhood in this book; indeed Wright’s satire makes the settlers of Desperance the real losers as they fail to understand the rigours of their environment.  For me, what is most admirable in the novel is the nuanced way in which she reanimates the old Rainbow Serpent and Groper Dreamings. The moments of wonder that erupt into this narrative are pure magic: we watch in astonishment as the port built on the riverbank needs to be relocated when the mighty force of the Rainbow Serpent relocates it, ‘spurn[ing] human endeavour’, several kilometres away. The writing is breathtaking in its energy, and it is a power underwritten by deep sacred knowledge:

Picture the creative serpent, scoring deep into – scouring down through – the slippery underground of the mudflats, leaving in its wake the thunder of tunnels collapsing to form deep sunken valleys. The sea water following in the serpent’s wake, swarming in a frenzy of tidal waves, soon changed colour from ocean blue to the yellow of mud.  The water filled the swirling tracks to form the mighty bending rivers spread across the vast plains of the Gulf country.  The serpent traveled over the marine plains, over the salt flats, through the salt dunes, past the mangrove forests and crawled inland. Then it went back to the sea. And it came out an another spot along the coastline…When it finished creating the many rivers in its wake, it created one last river, no larger or smaller than the others, a river which offers no apologies for its discontent with people who do not know it. This is where the giant serpent continues to live deep down under the ground in a vast network of limestone aquifers. They say its being is porous; it permeates everything. It is all around in the atmosphere and is attached to the lives of the river people like skin….

The tidal river snake of flowing mud takes in breaths of a size that is difficult to comprehend.  Imagine the serpent’s breathing rhythms as the tide flows inland, edging towards the spring waters nestled deeply in the gorges of an ancient limestone plateau…Then with the outward breath, the tide turns and the serpent flows back to its own circulating mass of shallow waters….

To catch this breath in the river you need the patience of one who can spend days doing nothing. If you wait under the rivergum where those up-to-no-good Mission-bred kids accidentally hanged Cry-baby Sally, the tip of the dead branch points to where you will see how the serpent’s breath fights its way through in a tunnel of wind, creating ripples that shimmer silver, similar to the scales of a small, nocturnal serpent, thrashing in anger whenever the light hits its slippery translucent body, making it writhe and wrench to escape back into its natural environment of darkness.

The inside knowledge about this river and coastal region is the Aboriginal Law handed down through the ages since time began.  Otherwise, how would one know where to look for the hidden underwater course in the vast flooding mud plains, full of serpents and fish in the monsoon season?  (pp.1-3).

What I find magnificent about this writing is its truth to the sacred (mythology-driven) realities which are simultaneously ecological ones, and the skilful melding of discourses – the oral narrative framework and the sharply observed satiric impulse. This is a writer who uses pastiche (in this case, Aboriginal oral tales) and relocates them in a naturalistic matrix in order to make serious political comment.  The black humour that has settlers uncannily unsettled by the natural forces they hardly even know exist is empowering.  What I find astonishing too is the fineness of the writing that brings those powerful forces into sharp focus: what else but a powerful Rainbow could breathe like the tide?  Carve out the sandstone in sinuous curves, and re-carve again in the next tide or storm? Move the river several kilometers in defiance of the puny human port structures?  The fine deep knowledge such writing exhibits makes sense of Indigenous people’s resistance to monocultures like grazing or mining, precisely the kind of loss of biodiversity which forced them to the toxic towns and which compromised (for ever?) the biodiversity that made their existences on Country rich.