Moving house is a challenge. Real Estate, property, land, tenants - all these things have different meanings for different participants, Indigenous and non-Indigenous.
The Suburban View
It's been a challenge living the last few months in suburbia after so many years in the bush. Now I'm shifting again, and the real estate agents are showing potential new tenants around. Talking to people about the place leads me to reflect on the different worldviews that determine the way people of different backgrounds can see the same place.
Some might say the place has three bedrooms and a driveway that is too long and too steep. It's small and there's no lawn, but it's pretty. There are lots of birds. Then there's a whole heap of other stuff about dates and leases and agreements and services and kilometres to amenities and minimum this and maximum that...
One Indigenous Viewpoint
By comparison an Indigenous viewpoint can frame the "property" very differently. I'd like to share with you how I see the place, as an example of one Indigenous worldview.
When I sit at the top of the driveway, there is a fruitbat highway in the sky that runs straight overhead. The remanant flock of bats fly over in their thousands most nights at this time. I feel myself at the top of a ridge, with a gully running to my right. That is a vacant block, that some might call "overgrown". There are soapy leaf trees in there, which I used as medicine to heal my swollen joints when I had Ross River fever a couple of months back. Those trees are flowering now, and I could put the the leaves in nearby waterholes to stupefy fish and catch them more easily, although those waterholes are probably poisoned enough already from the suburban sprawl burgeoning all around. So I probably wouldn't eat the eels and crayfish that I might catch in the creek that runs along the valley between this ridge and the next. It's the wrong time to catch them now anyway. To know the right time, I would watch the silky oak trees in front of my house. When the yellow flowers come, that's the right time. tawny frogmouth owls like to sit in those trees - they are the same colour as the bark. Their eyes are beautiful and scary.
Owls are special to me, because in the past when I have ignored my dreaming and tried to go my own way, they have come in their dozens in the daytime (even though they are nocturnal) and followed me around and harrassed me until I've gone the right way again.
Tree Talk
There are lots of wattle trees here - they're always the first to grow back after forest is cleared. I have made some really good boomerangs out of the dark heart wood from those trees in this place. When yellow flowers come on the wattle trees, that is a different time from the silky oak flowering time. That is the best time to get sugarbag - native honey. I've found the remains of a big old sugarbag tree in the valley below, still with the marks made by the old people (Turrbal language group in this area) when they used to harvest honey from it. The hive must have been massive. The honey is good medicine for colds, and actually kills streptococcol. The wax is black, and I use it to make mouthpieces for my didgeridoos. I made my best didgeridoo out of a tree I think of as yuk puth (Wik language), a eucalypt. I lost it in a flooded Cape York swamp, but found it again when I went back for it last Christmas in the dry season, when the swamp water was low.
Many eucalypts have gumnuts on them right now, as the nights are getting colder. This brings in the white cockatoos. There are magpies here too, and they still seem strange to me, because there aren't any further north where I was before. The crows are happy here, but there is a place nearby where they are angry, because of development on a place that I think might be a Bora place, or sacred site. Around here you know when those places are nearby when you see white ochre and sandstone together on the ground. Also, you can feel a gentle push in your gut like when you put the wrong ends of two magnets together.
Rainbow Dreaming
There are a lot of rainbow lorikeets here now. They came the same day I drew a big rainbow serpent with my wife and kids down the long driveway. As soon as we were finished a big rainbow came in the sky - the only rainbow I've seen since I've been here. It stayed for about twenty minutes, and it came up from further down the valley, from a place in the creek. It was not a rainy day. It came at a hard time in my life, when I felt like I had lost my path. It gave me some hope. After it left, the rainbow lorikeets came, and stayed. They congregate at my place and at a place further down the street where our only friend on the street has just had a baby. Her children are related through fatherside to a family I know from down south, who live in a nearby suburb. That family took me to the Bora when I first arrived here. The woman who had the baby is from the same place up north as my niece's family. It will be hard to say goodbye to her.
Stress
It will, however, be nice to escape the stress of the place. There is a strip of "bushland reserve" to make the place look natural, but it is an illusion. If you try to follow the creek through it, you find yourself trapped in a bottleneck of fences, funneling you into "private properties" with big dogs that will rip you apart if you can't run fast enough. Massive powerlines run along a swathe of destruction straight through the guts of the "reserve", making you sick to your stomach. But the possums that climb defiantly on these monstrosities can lift your spirits.
Holistic Knowledge
All of that information is really just on the surface. I could write a book on the interrelated knowledge and thoughts that come through me just looking at the grasses that are seeding right now. And I suppose that's what is different about Indigenous knowledge - no matter how hard you try, you can't describe any part of it as a linear snippet of isolated information to be recorded or owned. It is always shifting, and changes depending on the individual who observes and interacts with it. The observer/participant/component and the observer's family is part of the knowledge itself, and their subjectivities, stories and dreaming become interwoven with the reality.
Click here for Shifting Viewpoints Part Two
