We offer these words in dialogue with the 2017 Uluru Statement from the Heart and in the aftermath of the constitutional referendum of 2023 – and we do so in the 50th anniversary year of the emergence of Mungo Man. Our statement is a heartfelt response to the invitation by Indigenous Australians to ‘walk together’ as we seek a more truthful and compassionate understanding of our nation’s past and future.
Over 40,000 years ago at the heart of the great southern continent that became Australia, Mungo Lady and Mungo Man lived beside abundant inland waters, and their sacred humanity was cherished. We know this because they emerged from the desert sands of Lake Mungo in 1968 and 1974, revealing that their deaths so long ago were mourned in ritual and ceremony. Mungo Man received a full skeletal burial anointed with ochre brought carefully from afar. Mungo Lady is the oldest known human cremation on Earth, a cultural milestone in the history of the world. But for Australians the re-emergence of these ancient individuals means even more. These are First Peoples, revered ancestors, the Old Ones speaking to us. They solemnly remind us of our responsibilities of inhabiting this extraordinary continent, a place where all Australians live in and with deep time.
Mungo Lady and Mungo Man challenge modern Australians to build a bridge between Indigenous philosophies of the Dreaming and the cosmologies of the West. Jim Bowler, the geomorphologist who experienced the miracle of recognising the ancient Mungo people, spoke of both the scientific significance and spiritual importance of the meeting. His friend Mutthi Mutthi Elder Alice Kelly said: ‘Mungo is for all Australians, black and white, it can embrace us all in its spirituality and draw us closer to the land.’
Australia holds secrets of the history of the planet: the oldest continental crust, evidence of the beginnings of life, ancient Gondwanan rainforests – and the most adventurous humans on Earth. The great southern land was discovered over 65,000 years ago by people who bravely voyaged over a blue horizon to make it their home. The first Australians explored and settled the whole continent, managing it with finesse; they lived through ages of ice and fire, the fall and rise of the sea. Every region of the land became inhabited and beloved, its features and ecologies woven into story and law.
In recent centuries people from Britain and Europe explored Australian shores in ships – and they came to stay. The new arrivals were part of the great colonialist expansion of European empires across the world. For most of them, nature was a commodity separate from humanity and success was measured through the personal accumulation of material things; the first Australians were the opposite.
The strangers initiated one of the most self-conscious and carefully recorded colonisations in history in a land they found both beautiful and baffling. On Australian beaches from the late eighteenth century, there took place one of the greatest ecological and cultural encounters of all time. Peoples with immensely long and intimate histories of habitation encountered the furthest-flung representatives of the world’s first industrialising nation. The circle of human migration out of Africa more than 80,000 years earlier finally closed.
War for possession of the continent began. It continued for more than a hundred years on a thousand frontiers. It was the most violent and tragic happening ever to befall Australia. So many lives were sacrificed, generations of people were traumatised, and intimate knowledge of diverse countries was lost. Australians today are still coming to terms with what happened.
In recent decades, new peoples arrived from Europe, Oceania, the Americas, Asia and Africa, and Australia again became the home of many cultures, vibrantly so, and a linguistic diversity not seen on the continent since the eighteenth century, flourished. Many languages of the first peoples persisted and were renewed. The classical culture of the continent’s discoverers endured; their Dreamings became recognised as the Iliad and Odyssey of Australia. A bold mix of new stories grew in the land.
The invaders of old Australia did not foresee that the people they had dispossessed would help them make the nation anew. The society they created together was suffused with grief, wonder and pride. Colonists slowly learned that the very people they disdained for ‘not owning’ land had a living cosmology that made their relationship to land inalienable, a concept incomprehensible to agents of capital and empire. The original owners were eventually recognised as full citizens and began to win their Countries back through parliament and the courts, believing that ‘this ancient sovereignty can shine through as a fuller expression of Australia’s nationhood.’
This is one of the most remarkable and disturbing histories that a people can inherit. It comes with profound responsibilities: to acknowledge and address original sovereignty of the continent, the trauma of invasion and continuing historical injustices. And to educate one another about the diversity and wonder of the land itself and all its creatures. For it is the mysterious and powerful connection to Country that draws Australians of many origins together, in humility and gratitude for our true common wealth, this beloved place on Earth.
Many nations define themselves in time, seeking a year, a date, or an event that distills their essence and can be commemorated with unity. Such efforts are fraught in Australia because of the rupture of 1788, the exclusive whiteness of the Commonwealth of 1901, and now the rebuff of 2023. But place – expressed in the living essence of Country and our myriad connections to it – has shown the capacity to heal and to bring diverse peoples together.
Citizens of this island continent have shown themselves to be unusual among peoples in turning to the elements, to nature, and to the land itself to portray their identity, even in constitutional formulations. The sky, the air, the earth, the space, the light, the stars, the horizon, the beach, the sun, the surf, the campfire, the birds, the marsupials, the gums, the wattle, the sheer astounding variety of the Bush! These sensibilities resonate with the reverence for the land and its sacred mysteries felt by its first peoples. Connecting with Country means knowing it to be fully alive in all respects, no less alive than people; indeed, it is family. Feeling wonder for this place, its beauty and the diversity of its natural and cultural communities, paying attention to them, respecting and loving them, keeping them strong, offers all Australians a common future.
What is the deep human and natural history of the particular earth we inhabit, the place to which we feel belonging? Answering that question truthfully, ethically and collectively can be unifying as well as confronting. It demands listening as much as talking – and a lot of walking together. It means that we celebrate one country and many Countries. It is a question that releases the power of the Dreaming into discussions of modern Australian identity and cosmology.
Our identity and sense of belonging come also from Australia’s place in planetary history and the part its peoples have played in the long, exhilarating voyage of human consciousness. With its unusually deep human history, unique ecology and modern experience of intensified colonial cataclysm, Australia offers striking parables for a world facing climate and biodiversity crises. Mungo Lady and Mungo Man speak to us from an era when the continent was enlarging as seas retreated, and the land was falling into the grip of a dusty ice age. Their descendants experienced climate change on a scale such as we now face. While undergoing extreme climatic hardship, they continued to curate their beloved country. They experienced the end of the world and survived. And they did so again when the newcomers arrived.
We come together in wonder. We acknowledge the generosity of the invitation from Indigenous peoples to draw on the strength of their deep history in this land. As newcomers, we appreciate that belonging to Country has to be earned through political recognition of the First Nation peoples of Australia, through truth-telling and deep-listening about colonial history and imperial legacies. We esteem the myriad inheritances brought to this continent from other lands in more recent times, creating a new and dynamic multiculturalism. Biodiversity, cultural diversity and linguistic diversity have always been at the heart of Australian history and identity; they remain precious and are being renewed and transformed. We are embarked upon a never-ending dialogue about our particular place on Earth, and from this conversation will grow understandings of Australia that, like the Dreaming, can be both immensely old and exhilaratingly new.
Tom Griffiths
In collaboration with the Meeting the Dreaming group