Chapter Thirty-Two: Find Your Own Dreamtime (~jinghan)

Its surprising how little one knows about Aboriginal Australian culture despite having grown up in Australia all your life. I remember going to Central Australia in year 9 camp to Uluru and wanting to respect that the Aboriginal people did not want tourists to clime the iconic “heart” of Australia but not really understanding why. Other than that I think we were told very little about our indigenous culture.

Later in life, despite being a religious outsider, I started to grow fond of the immense and culturally rich Catholic Masses that I attended as a chorister and school girl. I’d like to think that when I visited the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris and tried painfully to block out the raucous tourist buzz and distracting flashes of photography (despite signs asking specifically for talking and flash photography to be avoided) that I really started to realise what I didn’t in year 9. And even then, its only now that I’m drawing that connection between the two situations.

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Dreamkeepers: A Spirit-Journey into Aboriginal Australia
By Harvey Arden, coauthor of Wisdomkeepers

It was a book about aboriginals by someone who was very very likely Caucasian. Maybe I wouldn’t have picked it up if I hadn’t have been supposed to be studying for one of my exams. “What was a girl of Chinese ethnicity to care about Aboriginal Australians? Let them Caucasians fester in their guilt, I’ve heard plenty too much political word-mincing and have other cultural issues to worry about.” I didn’t actually think this… but maybe I did?

I’m not ashamed to admit that I’m not interested in politics; there’s too much word play for a simple-hearted mathematician like me. And everything I had ever been told about Aboriginals was political bla. Except for once: when a special speaker we had come in for our breadth subject (Knowledge, Learning and Culture) had told us about how Aboriginal ways are set in in finding patterns in the land and seasons and keeping tradition steady while western modern culture is a culture of perpetual progress. This nicked my interest.

And I guess it was this tiny nick that made me pick up the book.

I flick past the first few pages to where the real book starts. It reads:

“You’ll never discover the blackfella’s secret,” said the Aboriginal man in the flowered Hawaiian shirt, sitting on the concrete veranda of his small house just outside the remote port town of Wyndham, Western Australia, drinking a can of Diet Coke and confronting the two unannounced visitors before him with distrusting eyes.

…

He continued: “So don’t you whitefellas come round here sniffin’ after our Dreamtime stories like all those others do, those anthros and those journos and all them. Sure, maybe you get me to tell you a story from our Dreamtime, then you take it and write it down in your book and sell it for a million dollars. You white blokes are all the same. Can’t you understand? It’s not mine to give you, that story. I don’t own it. It’s the property of my people…

“I’ts like… it’s like a watch, a cold watch. Like I’m wearing the cold watch my father fave me and you ask me the time. So I tell you the time. But I don’t give you the watch, too, do I? Whitefella now, he asks for the time and then he want to take the watch too! That’s the Gadia way, the whitefella way. So don’t you come here askin’ me for any of our Dreamtime storis. Get your own Dreamtime. Don’t take ours.”

The words stung. I confess, I had hoped to garner a few stories form the Dreamtime on this “spirit-journey” of mine into Aboriginal Australia.

It wasn’t what I had expected, I guess, like the Aboriginal man had, I had expected some Anthro waffle. This was in-your face stuff. This was real people, lingo and all. You know it’s real when it feels like a conversations and the words like “blackfella”, “whitefella”, “Gadia” and the thickly pronounced “Awtha” start making their way into the vocabulary of your mind. When I talk to someone I can’t help adopting their accent, anthro waffle doesn’t do that for you.

It wasn’t what I had expected. It was written by an American. And if my word’s anything he’s maybe written a better book than any Australian has.

Here’s a favourite passage of mine:

“So I’ll talk to you fellas awhile and speak of some things,” he went on. “Ask me questions if you like… but remember the same question’s got different answers for different people. Maybe they’re true for you, maybe not. And never forget – everything’s a mystery anyway. Once it stops bein’ a mystery it stops bein’ true.”

Most of the book was just a “yarn” as they put it, between blackfellas and the looked-down-upon Awtha who was there to steal a dreamtime. But I found the language oddly poetic. And I can’t stop thinking upon that last line. “Once it stops bein’ a mystery it stops bein’ true.” could almost be a line from Keats “Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty.”

The book didn’t give you a lot in terms of facts or figures. But it was honest. Or maybe for that reason it was honest.

“This is my brand, my identity. We have to spill our blood on the earth, spill our blood in the country to make it ours. Once we spill our blood there we belong to that country. When another aboriginal looks at those scars, he knows where I’m from, what my country is, who I am. He knows my identity and I can look at him and know his.

“But these days my people don’t belong to their country anymore. […] Our people don’t know where they’re from anymore. They don’t know their frandfather or grandmother. They don’t know why they’re on this earth. They hurt. They hurt in their heart. They dry up like a desert. They’re empty drum inside. Got no life inside ‘m. That’s why they want the grog so bad. To make the hurt go away. To make it wet again inside.

“So they get into all kinds of humbug and kill ‘mselves and each other. […]

“And it’s all because they don’t know their right place. They don’t know their country anymore. They don’t know their borders, their boundaries. Everyone needs to know their place and where their border is. If they don’t know that then they don’t know their own identity. […]

“Even worse, today’s generation, they don’t want to listen. They’ve lost it and they don’t want to know it. They don’t want to know who they are. So that’s why I go around teachin’ about Aboriginal identity. Teach white people, teach black people. Teach ‘m about Aboriginal culture. I’m tryin’ to give the Aboriginal back his identity… That’s my work, that’s my life.”

As I copy this out from my library book that I’ve held on to for the maximum possible time my library will let me (it’s due tomorrow), it mildly reminds me of reciting bible passages in the school chapel. Words from another culture, another time, far removed, and yet in there something catches me and relevance rings out.

“They don’t know why they’re on this earth,” I read again. And for some reason it makes me wonder. When was the last time I touched the earth?The real earth – not turfed grass, concrete, the sole of my shoe or even potting mix spread over real earth. When was the last time I touched the real earth? And more importantly how often do I really touch this real earth?

Suddenly it feels important to me.

“Everyone needs to know their place and where their border is.” Where is my sense of place? Where can I find my dream time? No, no, I don’t want your dreamtime. I want my own.

“Even worse, today’s generation, they don’t want to listen.” Oh dear!

Maybe just questions and uncharted thoughts in my own mind for now, and maybe forever. But I have faith that beneath all that I’ve learned from touching and talking to people, from those Catholic Masses and this (and all the other) books a little seedling Dreamtime is taking root. And that I will find my place in the world.

Where is your place? Your Dreamtime?