Animals and minerals, plants and animals, and photoautotrophs and chemoheterotrophs are estimates—each is external to the other only if the scale of our perception is confined to the skin, to a set of epidermal enclosures. But human lungs are constant reminders that this separation is imaginary. Where is the human body if it is viewed from the lung? The larger, massive biotic assemblage the lungs know intimately—including the green plants, photosynthetic bacteria, nonsulfur purple bacteria, hydrogen, sulfur and iron bacteria, animals, and microbes—is now what is thought to produce the metabolism of the planetary carbon cycle, which may be on the verge of a massive reorganization due to human action. (Povinelli, 2014: 42)
My people have always been part of the earth. Every single inch of this land, and its waterways, is sacred land. (Lee, 2006)
When my father returned from WWII, during which he had been in active service in North Africa, a prisoner of war in Italy and later a fighter with the Italian partisans in the hills of the
101 There are two important relationships in Aboriginal life, the first ‘between land and people and, secondly,
Po valley, the first thing he did was don a pack and walk for three weeks across Aotearoa from Taranaki where he was raised, to the Hawke’s Bay, home of Ngāti Kahugnunu, where his father, grandmother and ancestors back to the first Polynesian settlers were born and raised. It’s a challenging walk. Starting from the black iron-sand beaches where Taranaki meets the Tasman Sea, up ranges, down into gorges, past the headwaters of the Whanganui, across the ranges of Te Urewera, mostly through dense rain-drenched bush, he ended at the white-sand rim of the mighty Pacific. Throughout the journey, he lived off that land. As a child, I asked him: ‘Why?’. ‘I needed to know my country again’, was his simple response. It was a pilgrimage. Being reconnected with that rugged, dense green place, the rich humus laden air, whipping coastal winds and bright blue Pacific sparkle was essential for him to resettle, to pick up life again. He needed to breath ‘the larger massive biotic assemblage’, feel the earth, hear the birds, wind, rustling leaves, and water, smell the bush and salt spray to settle again. He was taking his country back and into himself.
A lifetime later, on 8 March 2017, in the online issue of the science journal Nature, Ray Tobler et al., disclosed DNA research indicating the first people to settle what is now Australia arrived in the north of the continental landmass approximately fifty thousand years before the present.102 This research, however, went beyond confirming an ‘arrival date’. It traced further migration patterns of these first settlers. From the North Eastern tip of the continent
(connected at that stage by a ‘land bridge’ to what is now Papua New Guinea), one group went west then south along the western coastline, some settling along the way. Another group moved down the east coast, again some settling some moving on. Tobler et al., note two remarkable features of these migrations and settlement. Firstly, the speed they spread along the coastal margins: a mere 2,000 years after the journeys began, descendants of the original groups met up again somewhere along the coast at the south of the continent. Secondly, once groups settled a territory their descendants remained there. That means today something in the order of 2,000 generations of a clan have lived in one area. The authors suggest, ‘the central cultural attachment of Aboriginal Australians to ‘country’ may reflect the continuous presence of populations in discrete geographic areas for up to 50 kyr’ (Tobler et al., 2017: 4). They suggest, also, that to survive over the generations the clans had to ‘know’ their country well to adapt to the vast range of climatic, vegetative and faunal changes that have occurred over the period of their settlement.
102 This date has been revised by a more recent study of stone artefacts which indicate human occupation in
These two examples, my father’s walk and the Nature article, may seem disconnected. In a sense they are. Within these two paragraphs nestle two distinct epistemological and
ontological paradigms: the ages-old experiential versus the clinically scientific; the entwined versus the eye-of-God; the immersive versus the detached. It is the deeply entangled knowing of country that Tobler connects to ancestry, and my father connected to immersion, that is the focus of this chapter. It examines aspects of how some Aboriginal people of
Australia express their connection to country.103 Aboriginal legal scholar Irene Watson rejects the ‘scientific’ explanation of Aboriginal peoples’ arrival in Australia.104 It ‘breaks our
connection to country. It is’, she says ‘an explanation, which runs counter to First Nations’ understandings, belonging and connections to place’ (Watson, 2015: 12). Presumably, she would be equally scathing of the explanation Tobler et al., use to explain how Aboriginal people know they come from and belong to their country. Because she, like Bob Randall, know their ‘people have always been part of the earth’ (Lee, 2006: 8:03 minutes).
No other people on earth have a history of 2,000 generations growing in one place. Over 50,000 years each clan has taken root in country. The history of country and people is co-constituted. Together they have weathered ice ages, sea level rise and fall, drought, and storms, extinctions and flourishings: these changes are recorded in their stories (Gray, 2015; Reid & Nunn, 2015). Truths known to the clans are accepted by mainstream Australia only with scientific confirmation (Gough, 2015). Mainstream Australia has difficulty understanding Aboriginal connection to and knowledge of country. As of the 2016 census, 26% were born overseas, and those who trace their lineage to the convicts have maybe 7 or 8 generations of Australian living. Over 66% live in capital cities, at a disconnect from food production, wildlife, forests, watercourses and soils (Knaus, 2017).105 Law is constructed to monitor relationships between humans. Western scientific epistemologies are privileged, and Western structures and thinking drive politics, policy and education within the nation (Donnelly, 2017;
Henderson, 2014; Wootten, 2015). The ontological differences explored in the last two
103
‘Country’ is the ubiquitous Australian English term for Aboriginal home or clan territory. It means more than that though; country is a term that describes multidimensional spaces that carry history, ancestors, future generations, kinship relations, food, story, song, dance, obligations duties and the Law. Each language group, of course, has their own term or phrase. Here I need an encompassing term, and will use ‘country’ for this purpose, unless quoting from an Indigenous writer, in which case I will use the language term that writer uses. Irene Watson for instance uses the Nunga word ruwe.
Country will be italicised to distinguish that it is the hold-all, stand-in word used as the universal form of different
language terms, and to distinguish it from the standard English meaning of country.
104 Watson is a scholar of both Aboriginal and colonial law.
105 Of course many urban dwellers also head to the outdoors for recreation and feel real attachment to it. The
chapters: ownership and exploitation of nonhuman, and individualism, are also critical barriers to understanding.
When members of a Yolngu family from the far north of the continent, ‘elders and caretakers for Bawaka country’, published an article in the Voiceless anthology (Burarrwanga et al., 2012), Bawaka Country was cited as co-author. The piece begins:
They are not voiceless, you know. Animals that is. But then neither are rocks or winds, tides or plants. They all speak. They all have language and knowledge and Law. They send messages to us; talk to us and to each other. All we have to do is listen; listen, and then act. (ibid: Paragraph 1)
After introducing themselves and inviting the reader to learn how to listen to country the human authors continue:
We’ve also included our homeland of Bawaka as a co-author. That’s because the land, the water, the animals, the plants, the rocks, the thoughts and songs that make up Bawaka contribute to what we are saying here in important ways. They speak to us, inform what we do and have guided our thinking and talking. They’ll guide what we do tonight and what we will say. So we are a mixed group as we talk to you. We are human and non-human, tangible and intangible and everything in between.
We said that all you have to do is listen to animals to hear them, but there is more than that really. To say that it is just about listening makes it sound too easy. To listen closely, to hear, requires relating to the world in a different way, understanding ourselves in a different way. And once you do that, you have to act in a different way, with a different kind of ethics. You see, for Yolngu, humans are not inherently separate from animals, from Country, or from the world in which we live. We are part of it and are bound in relations of responsibility and reciprocity. We relate to animals as fellow beings, as kin. They make us who we are, just as we make them who they are. Maybe that seems esoteric, and it’s true that it is a matter of deep Law, deep spirituality and deep
knowledge. But this way of living informs our day-to-day life too. We live on the land, with animals and other beings, so while it is deep, it’s practical too. These ways of relating to animals and others are part of the way we think, act, eat, talk, dream and hunt. It is who we are and what we do. (ibid: Paragraphs 4 & 5)
There are concepts here that are repetitive of those present in the previous two chapters: an entangled human-nonhuman ontology; custodianship, kinship relationships with animal; an ethics of responsibility and reciprocity. Previously those ideas were shown to superimpose ‘new’ parameters on our conceptualisation of IEJ, parameters including: an ethic of
intergenerational custodianship of nonhuman that recognises a subjective nonhuman with something more than material values; and a self-constituted of a more-than-human community that expands beyond presently situated individuals. In these introductory
paragraphs of They Are Not Voiceless, however, we are introduced to another dimension of being that challenges the current boundaries of liberal philosophy. Human are not the sole bearers of wisdom: nonhuman can teach human—if only human will listen. Even further than
that, nonhuman is the source of (deep) Law, a set of rules that guide all human interactions with kin, animate and inanimate, material and spiritual.
From the land comes what there is to know, what it is to be, what it is to act. According to Mick Dodson,
[t]o understand our law, our culture and our relationship to the physical and spiritual world, you must begin with the land. Everything about Aboriginal society is inextricably
interwoven with, and connected to, the land. Culture is the land, the land and spirituality of Aboriginal people, our cultural beliefs our reason for existence is the land. You take that away and you take away our reason for existence. We have grown the land up. We are dancing, singing and painting for the land. We are celebrating for the land. Removed from our lands, we are literally not ourselves. (Dodson, 1997: 41)
Here we see an ontology in which to be human is to be more than an isolated being contained in a human form. Identity, to be ‘one’s self’, is to be in communication with, ‘inextricably interwoven with, and connected to, the land’.