DP9-Aboriginal-Spirituality

What Does Aboriginal
Spirituality Offer Contemporary
Australian Society
Aboriginal society’s model for sustainability has the longest proven track record on earth (Sveiby & Scuthorpe
2006:xv).
‘Spirit of place’ is by now a cliché of journalism and a cash cow of tourism, but ‘spirit place’ is altogether different,
a powerful visionary claim that smashes almost everything we know (Tacey 2003:243).
Let these two worlds combine,
Yours and mine.
The door between us is not locked,
Just ajar.
Jack Davis, in the poem ‘Integration’, quoted by Lorraine Mafi-Williams (1993)
The reasons for the debasement of Aboriginal philosophy—its relegation to the category of quaint myths and
legends, suitable only for reproduction as children’s stories—lie deep within settler colonial constructions of
Aboriginal society as primitive, stone age and inherently backward, with nothing to offer the modern, progressive
ideals of the colonial project. These ficto-narratives, including terra nullius, the myth of an empty land, are the
necessary rationale for the take-up of Aboriginal lands and the salving of white consciences from the violence
of the colonial project. The subsequent base poverty of Aboriginal Australians only adds to the constructions of
their worthlessness as a people and the subsequent ignorance of the source of wisdom about ways of managing
the natural resource base, and of human populations, held within Aboriginal Spirituality. Aboriginal Spirituality
remains unsettling in its persistence and its very being:
The Dreaming [is]… the ‘other’ of the Australian awareness, for it embodies the hidden dimension or the shadow,
that which is unconscious, strange and unknown to the mode of being which is Australian and white (Cain 1991).
However, there is evidence to show that, in fact, Aboriginal philosophy, which incorporates Spirituality into
everyday life and actions, has much to offer the contemporary world. Australian settler colonials, privileged by
white race power, who have had the opportunity to spend considerable time with Aboriginal men and women
of high degree, have, nonetheless, come to appreciate and admire the philosophy and lifeways of Aboriginal
people, including the concept of Spirituality. An outstanding example is Professor W. E. H. Stanner (1905–81), who
explored Aboriginal philosophy and the concept of tjukurpa with Elders of the Arrernte in the early decades of the
last century. These men told him that the main problem they could see with others coming to live in Australia is
that the ‘white man got no dreaming’; that is, no real connection to the country and the species, hence the title
of Stanner’s book White Man Got No Dreaming (Stanner 1979). They also told him after much consideration that
perhaps the English word dreaming was the closest that they could find for tjukurpa because the state between
sleeping and wakefulness is the space that most connects people to the spirit world. Tjukurpa has meanings
beyond any single word in the English language, which is restricted to the principal concerns of the materialist
society that we now have. Tjukurpa means the Law and moral systems; the past, the present and the future all
in one (what Stanner came to call everywhen); the creation period when ancestral beings, Tjukaritja, created the
world as it is now; the relationship between people, plants, animals and the physical features of the land; and
the knowledge of how these relationships came to be, what they mean and how they must be maintained in
daily life and in ceremony (DEWR n.d.).
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