Settling restless spirits
Honoring where you stand
As a teenager, I loved reading women’s diaries. I was drawn to the introverts like myself, Virgina Woolf, Anais Nin were particular favourites. Their ruminations on their inner lives allowed me to sink into mine. Before long I too was writing journals, full of both my day and night dreams as I waited for my life to find its shape out there in the world.
Fifty years on I still love journal writing and reading. But now what draws me are more worldly observations of the more-than-human kind. What I am seeking is the same as when I was a teenager – belonging and companionship. It’s just that what fascinates me now is the world I live within, rather than the world I dream of living in.
My latest diary discovery is Black Duck: A Year at Yumbarra by Bruce Pascoe with his artist wife Lynne Harwood. Bruce Pascoe is a well-known writer of Aboriginal descent, whose award-winning book Dark Emu has been a game changer in contemporary Australian culture. He presents evidence from early European explorers showing that Aboriginal people practiced crop cultivation, built houses and dams, and managed land through low intensity burning over many millenia in ways that thoroughly contradicts the hunter gatherer tag they have been given by colonising governments and peoples. This deliberate mislabelling of Australia’s First Nations peoples and cultures was used to justify invasions, massacres and land theft, setting up an ongoing legacy of systemic racism and trauma in Australia.
When Dark Emu came out in 2014 to wide acclaim and readership, it sadly and predictably also triggered a vicious backlash against Pascoe, led by right wing cultural warriors and media seeking to undermine the evidence he presented and his credentials. Pascoe has dealt with all of this with incredible patience and strength. Now reading his diary I understand better how he could meet these attacks with such insight and grace, letting the smears slide off him, like water from a duck’s back.
In the ten years, since writing Dark Emu, even more evidence has emerged backing Pascoe and other historical scholars’ writings on the intricate and sophisticated cultures of Aboriginal Australia. Some of these more recent findings are included in Black Duck , as Pascoe chronicles his visits to new archaeological digs which reveal ancient built settlements. But for most part, his diary is about daily life on his farm Yumbarra on Yuin Country, close to Mallacoota, a seaside town in Victoria which was devastated by the Black Summer fires of 2019-20. Pascoe and Harwood, like all the people in this region at the time, bear trauma from the horrifying intensity of the fires, and their efforts to fight and escape them . This diary, written over two years later tells the story of caring for their Country and communities in the aftermath.
Yumbarra is both a home for Pascoe and an experimental farm growing traditional Aboriginal crops of grains, grasses and tubers. Young First Nations people are trained and work there amidst a stream of visitors and events hosted by Pascoe. Despite being in his 70s, Pascoe is a dynamo of energy, not only organising the farm and promoting its crops but also doing hands on work repurposing old buildings, repairing boats and cars, restoring furniture, teaching and practicing low intensity cultural burning. And then there are many media interviews and talks. These activities however are not the substance of his diary. Instead, it is his loving observations of and interactions with the life of his Country which absorbs and energises him.
While I have read and heard about what Country means in Aboriginal culture over the years, reading Pascoe’s diary brings it alive for me. He chats and listens to birds, protects their nests, cares for dogs, chickens and ducks, respects eagles, snakes and dingos, fishes and swims with the tides and currents of the river fishing and swimming, teaches the young ones about First Nations cultural ways through storytelling and supports neighbours as they grapple with the trauma of bushfires. His diary shows, not tells; how to observe people, plants, wildlife, land, water and sky, cycling through six traditional seasons, recovering from and preparing for floods and fires.
Country is the sun around which Pascoe’s life revolves, cultural awareness instructs and gives meaning, resileince and hope to all that he does. He writes:
The psychology that allows the last tree to be felled and the golden goose to be killed is an aberration in human history. We must find ways of constraining our greed.Australian Aboriginal people lived as the oldest continuing civilisation on Earth while maintaining the fertility of the continent. It wasn’t an accident, it was a philosophic adaptation to the nature of resource preservation.
Like many Aboriginal people, Pascoe’s family history is one of displacement and dispossession. As a fair skinned man of Aboriginal descent, he was brought up in settler culture, only finding his way as an adult to his First Nations’ relatives and teachings. His story is an encouraging one for us all about what can be learnt when there is a willingness and openness to connecting with Country.
Pascoe writes that non-Aboriginal people living in Australia need to be encouraged:
to identify with the land or otherwise how can they care for her? They will be restless spirits forever feeling at a distance from their home.
His words resonate for me. I have lived in Australia for over forty years now but it is only more recently that I have really felt truly at home here.
When I first came to live Australia, my dreams were populated by Aboriginal people, reminding me that they are the traditional custodians and knowledge holders of the unceded lands I had come to live on. Yet, for a long time, I did not know how to respond, other than to take dance classes at the Aboriginal and Islander Dance school down the road and read up on what I could find about Aboriginal experience. I was horrified and sickened by what I learnt about Australia’s colonisation with its genocidal and violent practices and policies towards its First Nations people. While I loved my Sydney life, I questioned whether I should be here at all.
Across the Tasman, my homeland Aotearoa NZ was slowly forging a bicultural society based on the Treaty of Waitangi. Meantime, Australia, seemed caught in an endless cycle of enacting violence, incarceration and dispossession upon its First Nations people. However, as my immediate family had all by now migrated to Australia, I stayed and slowly began to learn how to better respect and honour First Nations people and cultures and to support them.
One turning point came twenty-five years ago, when I attended several residential workshops, one with Wirradjirri senior woman Minmia and another with Yuin elder Uncle Max Dulumunmun Harrison. Both elders taught that learning to listen to and care for Country, while paying respect to Aboriginal elders and their cultures, was central to living well on this continent. Uncle Max took us through a simple and moving sunrise ceremony to greet Grandfather Sun, while Minmia shared many teaching stories. While I had read Aboriginal stories before, hearing them told by elders on Country brought them alive, opening up many more layers of meaning. Yet still so much more lay beyond my experience and comprehension. I left the retreats full of respect for the sophistication and depth of Aboriginal cultures, and humbled by all that I did not know about where I lived and the connections and culture that it held.
One striking reaction I had at Minmia’s retreat was when she asked those of us who were migrants to Australia if we felt sufficiently at home here to commit to returning to this country in a future life. I immediately know I could not. Or not yet. Aotearoa still felt like my soul home, my place of ultimate return. While there were many compelling reasons for me to continue my life in Sydney, I was an unsettled spirit, not fully at home here.
Settling take times and lived experience. For the last twenty years, after years of being on the move around Sydney, I have been living in a valley on Wangal Country close to the inner city. Somewhere in this time, I have come home. I would happily return to this Country in another life and time, feeling able to belong here.
Looking back there was no pivotal event, no blinding flash of insight, or stirring moment of arrival. Just a growing commitment to observe and learn about where I am, practice tai chi in my park, stay active in the community and continue to listen to and learn from First Nations elders and scholars.
Looking back, two learnings in particular have helped me settle. One was hearing so many Aboriginal speakers talk about the Country of their ancestry and then the Country they are now connected to through their life history. It dawned on me as they spoke that we can be rooted in and love more than one place. There are soul places, birthplaces and heart places. We can love them all. The second was learning from Māori culture about tūrangawaewae. What this te reo Māori word literally means explains Māori environmental leader Murray Hemi [1] is:
a place for my feet to stand, but in life it covers a connection someone has to a certain place and a responsibility to nurture that land and all that comes from it.
In troubled and divided times, one powerful act we can all do is to make where we live our tūrangawaewae.
Modernity culture favours detachment, comparisons, categories, divisions and hierarchies. First Nations’ cultures recognise commonality, connections, kinship, starting from where we stand. I delight in the paradox of a te reo Māori word from Aotearoa New Zealand helping me to feel at home here on Wangal Country in Australia. Connecting to Country, recognising tūrangawaewae, my restless spirit has settled not by choosing one place over another but by embracing where I am.
[1] Quote taken from Nicola Harvey’s book Farm: The making of a climate activist .
I would love to hear how this resonates with you and how you connect to where your feet stand.
Turangawaewae is a beautiful word, and I resonate with all you have said in the article, Sally. I was born in London, lived in the South East suburbs from 2 to 17, yet never felt truly at home. I settled here in West Wales in 1973, and it is the home of my soul. There is word in Cymraig, the ancient Welsh language which preceded English is these islands, miltir sqwar, which means ‘the square mile in which I am known and which I know’ in other words Country, it evokes that sense of belonging to the fields, trees, hills and streams that is so much a part of living in, and loving, this incredible land which still beats with its ancient heart.
Thank you! There is so much needed wisdom in what you wrote. I found this quote from Bruce Pascoe particularly compelling: "to identify with the land or otherwise how can they care for her? They will be restless spirits forever feeling at a distance from their home."
This is what I am learning here, many thousands of miles away. And I am seeking to share it through my post: Living Earthwise. Thank you for your thoughtful and heart inspiring posts.