North to south shoreline dune of Lake Mungo preserves stories where past meets present to inform our future.
In this special moment of Australian history, the nation faces a referendum on constitutional change to accommodate the voice of First Australians to parliament, a moment in national examination of conscience. As we contemplate attitudes towards the referendum outcome, we recall the reality of the 40,000 year Mungo People. Firstly, the 1969 cremated remains of Mungo Lady followed soon after in 1974 by the erosion surface appearance of an articulated skeleton. Mungo Man had arrived to complement the reality of Mungo Lady’s contribution to Australia’s history. They returned as ancestral treasures to remind us of many unanswered questions, questions of rights of occupancy, of unfinished business between rights of the First Peoples and those of us for whom occupancy began only after 1788. That arrival marked the beginning of 250 years of cross-cultural tensions, tensions that await resolution today. The referendum of The Voice seeks to address at least some of those issues.
In contemplating the situation between Mungo people and the Voice, I realise the Voice, despite its worthy and long-overdue options, does not resolve some fundamental problems. There remains a bigger story to be told. It is one within which the relationships between two contending cultures are in part addressed by the manner and which each learns from the other. This moment in which many minds have been turned to address huge issues of indigenous disadvantage opens doors to new consideration of the gap between us. While validation of the indigenous Voice to Parliament remains entirely justified, the debate inadvertently poses another question. Does not white Australia, indeed Parliament itself have something to learn from First Australian colleagues? The occasion of the referendum offers a timely moment to address that question. Its answers have long-standing implications far beyond the day of that historical vote.
Invitations to address that question are offered by ancestral indigenous voices of Mungo people on one hand, and by more personal confrontations on the other. Examples come to me by two different avenues.
Firstly, from Mungo treasures, I hear two disturbing messages: “What have you done to my land? What have you done to my people?” Answers to either are cause for national attention. But it was a third question that challenges my personal position. “By what right do you disturb my tranquility?”
Secondly, related challenges come directly from living people. “White man got no dreaming!” the voice of his indigenous informant to anthropologist Bill Stanner. Another came in a dramatic presentation by Lillian Holt and Marcia Langton in their joint address to Sydney Opera House audience on the eve of the bicentenary. “We know who we are! You don’t know who you are!” More recently, as per Inala Cooper (Marrul:Aboriginal Identity & The Fight for Rights), “It is they who must listen to us, learn from us and work with us.”
When the message I take from Mungo Man is joined by voices of living authenticity, we of the white western mold are immediately challenged to confront our own identity. From those who challenge us, we have something important to learn. They have something we need, a sense of belonging. That indigenous identity is frequently defined by “Connection to Country”. That identity is a mystical one, derived from the nation-wide concept of the “Dreaming”. What is the relevance to us today? While we may acknowledge the power of that conviction, that connection is not one that we can appropriate. Ours is a different story.Those white faces that came to Australia in 1788 were empowered by the European Enlightenment, the age of reason, the explosion of science, the industrial age and the expansion of imperial conquest. To a large extent, the outdated legacy of the Enlightenment, with its traditions of power over Nature, remains alive in the market-based economy of the world today. That power over Nature is the very opposite to that elusive sense of empathy, the glue we seek for our connection with the world that gave us birth. Our challenge to discover that glue is daily becoming more imperative as we face the threat of accelerated global warming. It involves an urgency to restore lost connections, both with the natural world and with the people in it.
Here in Australia we enjoy a country where unique landscape, plants and animals combine with antiquity of human occupation, a virtual treasure house of stories without parallel elsewhere in the world. When combined, those stories provide new insight into understanding of who we are in this context of land and people. Our challenge now is to bring together sufficient of those stories to reveal new insights into our sense of national identity, our own sense of “Dreaming”. Although based primarily on science, those stories open new avenues into the world of wonder, a world in which science opens doors to spiritual reality. From the rationalities of time and space, we encounter realties beyond more cryptic explanations of how or why. They involve intimacies of Land-People integration, the very questions proffered by Mungo Man.
The now widely accepted reality of cosmic origins, the Big Bang of 13.8 billion year ago, provides a time-space framework within which to imagine remarkable items of our own destiny. They reveal a story of cosmic proportions. We may identify a few of direct relevance to Australia:
- First rocks of planet Earth, occur in the Pilbara, dated at 4.6 billion years.
- Earliest signs of life, once again in the Pilbara, dated at 3.5 billion,
- Continuity of first life signs, encrustations on stone tools of Mungo Man!
- Gondwana legacy, inheritance 100 million-year landscape, plants and animals
- Paradoxical climatic connection with sister continent, Antarctica via ice and climate
- Climatic story in Murray Basin evolution, Mungo people as final chapter.
Finally, perhaps one of least understood elements of our own place in the Land-People story involves the arrival of a new environment, global aridity 1 million years ago. Its expression in our dunefields and salt lakes occurred simultaneously with rapid increase in rates of our human ancestral environments in Africa culminating in the 300,000-year arrival of modern humans. This historical cause and effect relationship has parallel expression in episodic sea-level signals on coastal South Australia. We may stand on that shore and mark there those African events, the explosive arrival of reflective consciousness, the substantive origins of the many Land-People stories we explore today.
In summary, when placed in context of the cosmic Big Bang to the last-minute arrival of consciousness, each of these and other stories combine to place our humanity in that grand epic of cosmic evolution. It is the key to our understanding of who we are. It is time now to ensure that story is placed before the Australian people.
On a personal note, within my Christian conviction, these stories define elements of the sacred. They constitute an expression of reality available to all Australians, religious and non-religious alike. From the rational scientific analysis of the Enlightenment, we enter that world of wonder, a world in which much that is sacred awaits discovery in Nature. Our indigenous colleagues have set the example.
While we stand in Nature’s debt as products, by possession of that unique evolutionary gift of reflective consciousness, we remain responsible agents for the future. Regardless of the referendum outcome, the occasion of the Voice marks an historical event in our changing status. The moment is opportune to seek the glue that helps define our national identity. Many stories await to be told.