Heartsick for Country

by Sally Morgan

  The changes that were made to the land, like the infilling of many freshwater springs and lakes, the way our land was given away in land grants, and the ways that water was wastefully used, made it impossible for our people to continue to live in the way they once had. And of course, this caused a lot of distress.

  Our spiritual connections to country

  Nyungar people have always been, and continue to be, closely connected to country in both physical and spiritual ways. We have spiritual experiences with country that we respect at a very deep level. I would like to share something that happened to me when I was younger, as an example. I was at Walyunga National Park, which is about thirty-seven kilometres north-east of Perth, doing a cross-cultural awareness session for the Department of Conservation and Land Management. Older Nyungar people were there, too, and it was my role to learn more and to keep on learning. That was my job. Over the years I have learnt from many experienced people and I am very grateful for it. On this occasion, I was very happy to be at Walyunga. I felt strong walking through there because my old people are there and they protect me and look after me when I am in my country. Anyway, we were looking at the traditional potato grounds that are there. The bush potatoes were a food source for our people in the old days, and even today there are some old people who can tell you where to get the potatoes and how to identify them. This is because there is a certain feature in the ground that shows you that there is a potato underneath. The same people can also tell you how to get wild onion and wild carrots. Anyway, while we were on this trip sharing this kind of special information with the participants, there was one man from the Kimberleys who unfortunately wasn’t that respectful to our knowledge or our generosity in sharing it. You have to be respectful when you are in someone else’s country, so he wasn’t really doing the right thing.

  But then something happened. When it came time to leave, I suddenly saw three old people with red bands on their heads appear. They were sitting down with their legs folded they and gave me a nod of approval for being respectful in the country. Shortly after that, that man from the Kimberleys who hadn’t had the right attitude was hit on the head by a branch. No-one said anything, but we all knew why it had happened to him and he knew as well. The action of the tree showed that he had been disrespectful, so he was reprimanded for it.

  You see, we live a spiritual life and we are spiritual people, and without spirit we are nothing. From a young age I was taught about spiritual things and some of that was to teach me respect and also to keep me safe. For example, as children we weren’t allowed to kick the dirt or whistle at night because the mamurries, the little spirit people who live in the bush, might come and get us. I remember the old people used to break certain leaves off certain trees and put them where we were camping to keep the bad spirits away. Sometimes they’d keep the fire going most of the night to keep the bad spirits away, too. The spirits are very strong at night, so we always made sure that we had a little bit of light: if not a fire, then an old lamp. Fire was very important because it kept us warm and a lot of the old stories were passed down around the camp fire. Fire also kept predators at a distance—both physical and spiritual predators. Also, smoke was used to cleanse people and to get rid of bad spirits. We liked our families to be strong, because families came first with us. In traditional times, when a baby was born it would get smoked and possum skin would be put over it to make the baby grow strong. They would also tie possum skin on the baby’s ankles and arms for about a year to help it grow big and healthy. These were the kinds of things that were handed down, so we knew what and what not to do. The spirit is important and we are sad people if we lose our spirit because then we don’t know what we are doing. That can cause us to get caught up in things like drug and alcohol dependency. That’s why you see some of our people walking around with those kinds of problems, because their spirits have grown weaker.

  Being responsible in country

  Everyone has to learn to be responsible for our families, our community and our country. There is a lot that our Nyungar values can teach us. Water is a problem now, but it is going to be an even bigger problem in the future. One of the major issues we have now is protecting our wetlands, waterways and significant sites on the Swan Coastal Plain from further development. The wetlands, which are a series of lakes and swamps, have always been important to Nyungar people. They are rich in wildlife, especially birdlife, and many birds, animals and plants depend on them. Unfortunately, since Europeans came, eighty-five per cent of the wetlands have been destroyed; they have been drained, filled in, or made into artificial lakes for new housing estates and other kinds of development. Perth itself is sited on reclaimed wetland. For example, where the Perth railway station and the Perth Entertainment Centre are located, as well as large areas of Northbridge, there were once lakes. Everyone knows that groundwater levels are affected when natural vegetation is cleared, but the clearing still continues and so do the problems with salinity and very high levels of sulphur in some of the remaining lakes and the soil. Over-demand by the general population and by industry for groundwater has created a major imbalance in the environment.

  The difficulty with many land developers and some local governments is that they don’t understand why wetlands are important or how they work. Councils are up to their necks in paperwork approvals for new developments and developers like to get in and get out quickly in order to make as much money as possible. No-one is taking enough time to seriously think about the long-term effects of what is happening. Some wetlands are seasonal and all wetlands support each other, but the continued development is affecting the whole system in a very negative way. Instead of detouring around wetland areas, the newer suburbs are encroaching on them. There are some homes in Perth that are actually about a metre below sea level, and if the prediction about a hundred-year flood comes true, then perhaps at some point in the future they may even become submerged.

  Over the years, Nyungar Elders have often told developers not to build in certain places because of the damage that it will cause, but most people don’t want to listen. Proper consultation with Aboriginal people is seen as a burden. It is time consuming and they think we are antidevelopment. In most instances, government agencies, developers and industry don’t know how to put proper processes in place. We need knowledgeable Aboriginal people in identified key positions who have a voice that will be valued and acted upon. They could also work on developing sustainable strategic practices. If non-Aboriginal people could learn to appreciate our relationship to country in a deeper way though, then it might be possible to make more positive progress. People seem to find it easy to forget that Australia is the driest continent in the world. Protecting our wetlands, our waterways and our underground water reservoirs is critical. Take the Gnangara Mound for example, which is a big underwater source. It is sensitive to climate change and to changes in rainfall, but what have you got sitting on the top of the mound? A large pine plantation! That plantation is sucking out far too much water from the aquifer below and it is one of the reasons the water table in the aquifer has been lowered. Even our winter rainfall is a concern, because over the past few decades it has fallen, so there is less water being caught in our above-ground reservoirs. This has led to the use of water from under the ground for public drinking water. Around forty per cent of our water is now drawn from underground sources. However, with the population growing rapidly and more and more housing estates being developed, how and when groundwater continues to be used needs to be very carefully looked at. (Image 13.3)

  Image 13.3: Joe as the Wetlands Indigenous Project Officer, when he was working at the Swan Catchment Council, Herdsman Lake, 2006 Courtesy Swan Catchment Council

  The environmental damage that we are seeing now is growing, and unfortunately there are also many areas where the disposal of poisonous waste is not being properly policed, so this is adding to our pollution problems. Pollution affects the fish and the mussels and everything that lives in the water, so y
ou have to be very careful what you catch and eat now. Our rainfall is also decreasing, so in the future the groundwater levels in some aquifers will get lower than they are now, and it is only commonsense that this will lead to further water restrictions. We need to take a really good look at ourselves, because our lifestyles need to change. We need to plant bush gardens, use less water and protect and manage the water we have left so everything becomes sustainable. In the early days, our old people taught the white settlers many things, such as how to read the landscape, how to read the signs through nature, how to find the gnamma waterholes and the bush foods and how to walk the tracks across Nyungar boodjar. The Nyungar wisdom and knowledge from the likes of Kaiber, Miago, Dylan, Windich and Kikit also helped the white explorers to reach other lands throughout Western Australia where they wished to live. This exchange should have been a two-way process, but it wasn’t. While it is our responsibility as Aboriginal people to maintain and protect our natural and cultural heritage, there is also a collective responsibility to take care of this country and to be strongly involved in environmental sustainability. This hasn’t happened in the past, but it must happen in the future if we are to survive and look after this country.

  SALLY MORGAN

  belongs to the Palyku from the Pilbara in the northwest of Western Australia. She is a writer and artist and is employed in the School of Indigenous Studies, at the University of Western Australia. (Image 14.1)

  Image 14.1

  The Balance for the World

  They set sail with noble endeavour to possess with the owner’s consent mystical lands beyond Never Never: terra nullius awaits those who dissent.

  Graeme Dixon, Nyungar poet, 2003 [96]

  The world is an old, old place and this island continent is the oldest of all. For thousands of years it lay hidden between Antarctica and Asia, pounded by the great swell of the Indian Ocean on one side and the reef-studded Pacific on the other. Here our many peoples lived from generation to generation in a vast dry land, one-third desert, with the world’s smallest rivers and mountains and with plants and animals found nowhere else on Earth. Down in the valleys and along the blue and purple gorges, in the rippling red desert, and on the plains and sandy ridges, along the winding, weaving gumlined rivers and around the inland lakes, among the glistening forests and shady woodlands and throughout the meandering coastal plains. Each nation made its own way, living life by following the laws laid down for their country by their spirit ancestors in the first creation. Through songs, stories, dances, art and ceremonies, the keys to life and wisdom were passed down, ensuring the survival of our world, including all the plants, animals and life-giving water sources. We knew everything there was to know about our countries; the strong and special places, the flash of silver lightning signalling a summer storm, the feel of the air before the heavy rains, the churning of the cyclone clouds, the roaring of a river running a banker, the whirling willy-willy, the whispering wind, the smell of the earth wet and dry, dust storms and a starry sky. This was how it had always been. This was how it would always be. And so it was for thousands of years, until the day when the oceans became a pathway to any land with a coast, and men of fear and men of faith took to the sea in ships to conquer the globe.

  The lost garden

  One of these hardy seagoing adventurers was a working-class man from Yorkshire named James Cook, England’s hero and the nemesis of my people. On the eve of the America’s giving birth to the idea that all men were created equal, with the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and of the French taking up the cry, ‘Liberté, égalité, fraternité, ou la mort!’ [97]—freedom, equality, brotherhood, or death!—Cook brought the winds of change to our shores, only he blew in on a mighty gust of Empire, not revolution.

  He was born in the Age of Reason, when the prophets of his time boldly declared there was nothing in the universe that couldn’t be known, ordered and understood. Even problems of human nature could be unravelled by using reason, and in the future reason alone would provide the happy-ever-after ending that troubled humankind had always longed for. Though nominally a Protestant, he prided himself on being a hard-headed man of science, not a superstitious observer of religion. So unlike other explorers who launched into the deep, he did not pray before weighing anchor, read the story of Jesus calming the storm to his crew in turbulent seas, or think the Southern Cross was God’s wonky thumbs-up sign in an unsaved southern sky. In James Cook’s eyes, the world existed to be explored, analysed and investigated, not saved; and if he was lucky and worked very, very hard, he might gain for himself a great deal of status and wealth in the process.

  Although the voyage of discovery he was secretly ordered to undertake by his no-nonsense superiors in the British Royal Navy was cloaked in science, it was based less on reason and more on imagination. For centuries men of learning had argued it was likely that a large rich continent lay hidden somewhere in the southern hemisphere. This was only logical. The landmasses of the northern hemisphere needed a counterweight, otherwise the globe would wobble and wobble like a giant bowl of Aeroplane Jelly until it destroyed itself. Cook’s mission then, was to find this magnificent missing country which, since time immemorial, had been the balance for the world; a silent, secluded land that for a thousand years the intelligentsia of Europe had imagined but not known, drawn on maps but not found, yearned for but not understood.

  Strangely enough, the continent which sheltered the country of my own ancestors lay in the south too, but it wasn’t our land they were searching for. Cook’s people dreamed of a fabulous lost paradise, a promised land where the streets were paved with gold and the inhabitants lived idle lives in polished marble palaces. There was none of that fatty, roasting woodsmoke smell you get from the campfire at dinnertime. And no sharp smell of eucalyptus, either. No plump death adders were lying in wait in the long damp grass and hungry crocodiles weren’t floating like bumpy logs beneath the salt water. There were no buzzing blowflies, stinging mozzies, croaking crows, swooping magpies or kookaburras laughing their heads off high up in gum trees. Nor were there any muddy rivers, beaches littered with seaweed, crazy cyclones, wicked willy-willies or droughts and flooding rains. The pitiless blue sky of a sunburnt country, the beauty and terror of a wide brown land, were not for these dreamers. They were haunted by a place of perfect happiness which they called Terra Australis Incognita, Latin for ‘the unknown south land’. And because of where their dreams would one day lead them, peoples like mine would become haunted by a Latin name too: Aborigines, Latin for ‘from the beginning’. One dead Latin word to describe hundreds of living nations. Like the mystical, magical land of Terra Australis, we would bear the burden of the dreamer’s inability to see clearly and intuitively.

  By the time James Cook set sail, Europeans were well aware of the existence of the west coast of our continent, which they frequently referred to in disgust as that ‘infernal southland’. When the winds and currents were too strong, their ships ran aground on our rocky shore and sank below the heavy, pounding, grinding swell of the Indian Ocean. On the seabed they rotted and fell apart, sending up bits of broken mirror, china, beads and gold and silver coins to litter our reefs, islands and long sandy beaches. Hard-nosed merchants and shrewd investors were convinced our treacherous and barren coast had nothing to offer. It was simply the barrier to the promised land they were all searching for. The real Terra Australis Incognita lay deeper in the South Pacific. Perhaps it might even encompass our enigmatic eastern shore in some way, if only it could be found.

  This wasn’t the first time an Englishman had been sent forth like a dove in search of a land where the rivers flooded with rubies and diamonds and the beaches glittered with gold. Finding it was a dream that had preoccupied the minds of kings and queens, priests and prophets, soldiers and sailors, and wheelers and dealers for as long as anyone could remember. On ancient maps, the lost country of Terra Australis Incognita was drawn as a mighty southern continent stretching north from Ant
arctica into every ocean. On some early, yellowing charts, the fearful warning, Here be dragons, was hastily scrawled across the land in thick black ink. Monsters might be found in the topsy-turvy land down under, or miracles. As for its location, all anyone could ever say was that it lay somewhere at the ends of the earth, down near the bottom of the world, below the equator, past the sunset and over the rainbow.

  For the English, this was the third time they had gone a-hunting; but this time they thought they had an ace up their sleeves. Captain Wallis, of His Majesty’s ship, the Dolphin, had just hit port with exciting news of the beautiful island of Tahiti. Better still, he’d glimpsed what he thought were distant mountains to the south, which might well belong to the fabled missing southland. Wallis’ crew were ordered to zip their lips, but sailors on shore leave aren’t known for their discretion and they were soon singing hearty songs about a tropical Garden of Eden in the local alehouses. ‘The beautiful Queen of Tahiti,’ they bragged drunkenly, ‘thought the English were Gods and felt very proud to embrace King George!’ There was no Queen of Tahiti. The Dolphin was a thirty-two-gun frigate and Wallis had bombarded the island to a bloody truce, then taken possession for Britain. Now it was to be Cook’s port of call on the way to Terra Australis. From Tahiti, he would disappear into the world’s largest ocean with the intention of scouring it for a land which, if found, would offer King George III more plunder than a pirate could poke a stick at; and guarantee global dominance for the wet and windy British Isles.