DP9-Aboriginal-Spirituality

There is an intrinsic and wholistic link between Spirituality and relationships to land and landforms, including
watercourses, since these are the tangible links between living humans and all that is unseen and eternal. This
is where the creation ancestors rest and are still actors in the creation drama, releasing spirit children and the
life force of their totem; the whole is sacred and contains sites of significance to the creation stories (Stockton
1995:56).
To 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 woven with, and connected to, the land.
Culture is the land, the land and spirituality of Aboriginal people, our cultural beliefs or 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 the land. Removed from our lands, we are
literally removed from ourselves (Dodson 1997:41).
Dodson goes on to argue that land rights flow from ‘a traditional relationship to land in which spiritual, cultural
and economic interests are integrated’, and although traditional relationships to land are ‘profoundly spiritual’,
they are also ‘profoundly practical’ (Dodson 1997:43). The spiritual relationships are also those that ensure the
preservation and sustainability of the natural resource base of the country.
Professor W. E. H. Stanner also explains the inability of the English language to convey the essence of Aboriginal
cultural relationships to land. He says:
No English words are good enough to give a sense of the links between an Aboriginal group and its homeland.
Our word ‘home’, as warm and suggestive though it may be, does not match the Aboriginal word that may
mean ‘camp’, ‘heart’, ‘country’, ‘everlasting home’, ‘totem place’, ‘life source’, ‘spirit centre’ and much else in one.
Our word land is too spare and meagre. We can now scarcely use it except with economic overtones unless
we happen to be poets… The Aboriginal would speak of earth and use it in a rich symbolic way to mean his
‘shoulder’ or his ‘side’. I have seen an Aboriginal embrace the earth he walked on… a different tradition leaves
us tongueless and earless towards this other world of meaning and significance (Stanner 1968:230–1).
The call for Aboriginal land rights is often misunderstood by the settler colonial society, whose main concern
with land is as an economic resource, to produce a surplus and so gain capital. Tasmanian activist Puralia Jim
Everett explains:
Aboriginal land rights does not simply mean that the people are entitled to land. Nor does the term mean that
the land owes anything to the people. Aborigines do not justify land rights in terms of economy, accommodation
or possession, Rather land rights represent a whole set of responsibilities, among which is the obligation to
preserve the unique essence of their Aboriginal law. Aborigines have the responsibility to be custodians of land,
sea and sky. They must remain accountable to the ecological world, which accepts Indigenous intrusion and
use of that ecology only on sound practices of interaction with the spirit of the land, manifested in strict rules
of respect and tradition (Everett 1994:xii).
When describing the impacts of colonisation on Aboriginal Australia, Deborah Bird Rose says:
Once a multiplicity of nourishing terrains, there is now a multiplicity of devastations. And yet, the relationship
between Indigenous people and country persists. It is not a contract but a covenant, and no matter what the
damage, people care (Rose 1996:81).
In this connection it is important to note the primacy of returning to country, as well as to family and kin, for
the children of the Stolen Generations. Archie Roach exemplifies this in song:
Back where their hearts grow strong
Back where they all belong
The children came back…
Back where they understand
Back to their mother’s land
The children came back (Rose 1996:81).
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