DP9-Aboriginal-Spirituality

The late Jack Davis, Nyungar Elder from south-west Western Australia, a celebrated poet, playwright and writer,
is also included in this anthology. His poem ‘The Firstborn’ expresses the relationship between the people and
the earth, with the earth a living, feeling entity, expressing longing and even anger:
Where are my first-born, said the brown land, sighing;
They came out of my womb long, long ago.
They were formed of my dust—why, why are they crying
And the light of their being barely aglow
I strain my ears for the sound of their laughter.
Where are the laws and the legends I gave
Tell me what happened, you whom I bore after.
Now only their spirits dwell in the caves.
You are silent, you cringe from replying.
A question is there, like a blow on the face.
The answer is there when I look at the dying,
At the death and neglect of my dark, proud race (Gilbert 1989).
Perhaps the most celebrated of contemporary Aboriginal writers is Alexis Wright (2006), of the Waanji people
from the highlands of the southern Gulf of Carpentaria, whose novel Carpentaria won Australia’s most prestigious
literary prize, the Miles Franklin Award, in 2007. Her work is representative of Aboriginal Spirituality in many
respects, not least of all the way in which it was conceived, arguably in the tradition of a song cycle. She says:
And further:
Song
From the start, I knew Carpentaria would not be a book suited to a tourist reader, someone easily satisfied by
a cheap day out. I wrote most of the novel while listening to music… One of my intentions was to write the
novel as though it was a very long melody made of different forms of music, mixed somehow with the voices
of the Gulf. The image that explains this style is that of watching an orchestra while listening to the music.
Within the whole spectacle of the performance fleeting moments occur, in which your attention will focus on
the sudden rise in the massiveness of the strings, horns, or percussion (The Australian 2007).
The book, she admits, is no easy read. ‘I wanted to take Australian literature and throw it over the boundary…
I always credit my own people for teaching me how to read and write in the first place, and not the universities
I have been to.’ Carpentaria is very much about ‘giving something back to my own people’, in as authentic a
way as possible, without giving away that which is sacred to the Aboriginal peoples (Dhar 2008).
How I wish I was back in the Dreamtime
Hear the didjeridu droning in the night
Where the corroborees are seen by the firelight
Where the white man’s ways won’t bother me no more.
Roger Knox, ‘Streets of Tamworth’, composed by Harry Williams, from the album Warrior in Chains
(Knox 1993)
Song is an important and enduring part of Aboriginal cultural expression, with its roots deep in the spiritual
practice. Strehlow, linguist of the tribes of Central Australia, became accepted by Arrernte Elders as a worthy
recipient of spiritual knowledge during the 1930s and spent many months transcribing the sacred songs of
the people, published as The Songs of Central Australia (Strehlow 1971). He wrote in the preface that this verse
is original, primary and radical, that it is highly developed in terms of language, rhythms and forms, and that
it incorporates universal themes (Strehlow 1971). Indeed, this work places Aboriginal poetry in ‘the Greek and
Anglo Saxon, Norse and Hebrew utterance… inhabiting poetic universals’ and, ‘it contains words of sacred
beginnings… it is a hymn of praise… the work sings as it retrieves the ancient lore and poetry’ (Hill 2002:6).
Ronald and Catherine Berndt published the first book-length Aboriginal verse, the remarkable Djaggawul, in
1952. They had also published The Moon Bone Song Cycle, a translation from Arnhem Land (Hill 2002:489–91).
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