Fascinating. I loved everything about it - the differences, the othering, the learning, the landscape, the realization, the oneness...it feels like Part 1 of a longer story that I very much want to read in full.
This was my life for many years, in Lajamanu then travelling and working across many wonderful communities. All my desert poetry is from this time, and some pieces are from this same specific place - Lajamanu Morning; Junga Yimi; Japanangka's Dog. The tragedies, issues and problems of a colonial society are without end... but the generosity and warmth of the people I lived and worked with go deeper still, to the roots of their immeasurably rich and long relationship to the land....
I don't know where to begin, David. This is heartbreakingly beautiful, moving, wonderful, raw. How you express that shift is quite incredible. I could quote you for ever!
'Sorry business, and some days it seems a sorry business, this trying to understand another country while missing your own. Missing the mist on the lake in the morning. Missing the gut deep pull of a fish hooked at dawn, your Father beside you laughing at your surprise. This is a place where the language has no word for mist, where lakes are dry salt sheets and fish fall dead from the sky.'
It rings so true for me growing up and living in Africa. I love how it doesn't wag a finger. Says it as it is. Thank you.
Thankyou for such a generous and moving compliment, Richard. This is one of my archive pieces, but it describes a time and events which are deeply deeply embedded in who I am now.
Pleasure, Dave. I can absolutely believe the story of the fish. It was a delicious moment when you asked the guy about loaves!
I will have a proper read of the article.
Yes, I have written quite a lot about Africa. It comes at me from nowhere. I am busy with a piece at the moment that points to my awareness of injustice and my part in it. Hard work!
Well, Richard, I just restacked it. Strong and evocative....
Have also just read "A Light From An Opening Door." I'm thinking definitely references to Rhodesia, Ian smith... and very troubled times.
Non-Aboriginal Australians also have to grapple with a history which is confronting. In many ways we are still a Colonial society, and it creates a tension that is hard to resolve. I think they are doing that better in New Zealand. There are definitely ways forward, but I think in your writing you are describing the difficulty some people have of coming to terms with the past, and moving from what they thought they "knew" to a wider understanding.
The past cannot be undone - but the future can be shaped in better ways.
The difficulty with facing another future from what is expected traumatises undoubtedly. If it is a future where there is blind belief that someone will come to the rescue, I find it hard to feel sympathy. Perhaps, I am lucky that something happened in my life to see through it, to know that it was all BS anyway. I suppose I should be more graceful but find the ugly racism that underpinned that hoped for future impossible to accept.
It is over 40 years ago so I am not sure why I return to it all. I am in the middle of some sort of 'explanation', a reveal or whatever! The whole experience still tracks along ...
Dave this is an incredible piece of writing. The immersion in place, othering, curiosity, confusion...truly breathtaking work. And your description of the missionaries - delectable!
I was thinking of you today! It's been raining and stormy here - an unseasonal mid-Summer atmospheric and oceanic stomp - so I took myself off to my favourite rocky headland to see the waves rage and the wind blow, and I wandered the cliffs and the rocks taking photos and avoiding getting washed away and composing in my head something which may become a Substack Post "in the style of @Rebecca Hooper."
Only it won't be as good :)
But I am profoundly happy that you like my recounting of my early days in the desert. That truly brings me great happiness. Part of my heart went into that. I'm glad it beats for others too.
Best Wishes - Dave :)
Oh - and the missionaries? Well. They sure were quite something. I have a little bonus missionary poem which I should probably post as an add on to "Waves." Maybe tomorrow... Love from Meg and I.
Good morning Rebecca. Yesterday's coastal wandering may become my next post. I have to look at the photos I took, and see what I have to say about the sea. It would be a good contrast with my run of recent Summer beach poetry. Also, I enjoy writing prose and I need to give the old material from the desert a break for a while. I did post the missionary poem last night - perhaps a mistake, because I'm probably overloading readers with all the "look what I saw in the desert" material.
I love Substack, but the lack of any pre-publication external vetting means that it does come with the risk of falling into self-indulgence....
Incredible writings and observations, you took me there to a place I will likely never get to visit, so grateful for your perceptive and beautiful storytelling, says so much on very many levels
God, what a tale, Dave! Classic. And to think you witnessed it true and raw. The NZ word for white people is pakeha. In Africa we were just the whites. Thank you for sharing, and my hat off to you for this immersive, deeply felt writing.
Hi friend Ronnie. Thankyou! This piece is of course specific to my life in a particular Warlpiri community - Lajamanu - the same place as my "Lajamanu Morning" poem, and "Junga Yimi" - and with a focus on my initial experience there, from my perspective as a visitor, a guest, and also employee. English was/is a second or third language for my friends there, and I have reproduced snippets of conversation as it is spoken, with Warlpriri words mixed in with English. One complexity compared to NZ is the huge number of languages - around 300 originally, although some have been lost, so the words and details of culture change from place to place. I had the later good fortune to work in very many Aboriginal communities and regions, from the central deserts to Arnhem Land. The cultural differences and variety are enormous, but there are many common themes and threads - unified around shared bonds with the land and environment developed over staggeringly immense depths of time, and a remarkable generosity off spirit. Sadly, the racism and wilful ignorance of some non-Aboriginal workers is also a common theme across the remote communities - and the major towns. I have portrayed that in my writing, because that was also part of my experience. The negative comments recorded in this story are a selection of things that were genuinely said to me at the time - and far from the worst. I wasn't just learning about Warlpiri society and culture; I was learning some deeply disturbing facts about my own, and I have tried from that time onwards to be a better voice. I can't speak for my Aboriginal friends and I don't want to try - they have their own voices - but I can speak to the wider society about the things I have seen.
Far from the worst… unimaginable! And I loved hearing their voices using English words just as you wrote them. When my son was born and I took care of him, feeding, cooking, housecleaning, and still teaching piano at home (while my husband built the first internet provider in the country and was away 24/7), a woman knocked on my door and asked if I needed help. She was looking for a job, and I thought God had send her my way. Years later, I was looked at with envy, Yeah, but you had a maid. We both wouldn’t have survived without each other…
DK this is a fascinating/sad recollection of what I know was a very special time in your life. I remember how much you were missing it when you first joined us in TAFE. I hope your have more excerpts from this time to share with us. 🥰
Hey CB. Well.... I have my notebooks from the time - and there are many things I could write about if I choose to do that.... but at present the only desert writings I'm publishing are material I wrote at the time, or shortly after.
I'm interspersing those with some of the things I wrote in my "silent period," when I stopped publishing. Pressures of work and family commitments did reduce my output rate, but I was still writing.
The third category is the work I'm writing now - things written in the last 6 months - some of which have gone onto Substack the day they were written. The beach poems for example.
In a sense, I'm stitching together a quilt with fabric from three phases of my life. Revisiting the old work keeps me in touch with some things that - yes - are very special for me. The things I'm writing now are very much about how I see the world now - and there will be more to come. Hopefully many more. The "silent period" works include some things which (personal biased opinion) are some of my best. The best of those won't go on Substack for a while, if ever, because I have them submitted for poetry award/competitions - and you can't enter them in an award if they have been published elsewhere. That "middle period" work is the link between Desert Dave and current Dave, so they kind of fit in the middle and glue the other two pieces of my life together.
Which makes me sort of a poetic Trilobite.
Only (not yet) extinct.
None of that will matter to my readers here, I would think. They will like - or dislike - what I publish based on the merits of each piece, although there is definitely a sense in which the desert poems and stories do, collectively, tell a much wider and more coherent story if viewed and read as a collection. (Back in 2001, most of them were indeed published as a collection, by Five Islands Press, in my little book "Spinifex" - but copies of that are now very hard to find).
So the order in which I'm publishing everything is more about my own dialogue with myself. It helps me get a new perspective on my own work, and that in turn helps me be creative in new ways. I don't want to repeat myself. It's also interesting for me to see what reactions I get to my work. I had a reasonable amount of "success" in the period 1996 - 2002, (in the very small world of Australian Poetry), and odd though I am I'm normal enough that I found the success reassuring. People did like what I wrote...
Then, effectively, I just disappeared from that scene.
Now I'm back after a 22 year absence and I feel like the Rip van Winkle of Australian poetry. Does anyone remember me? Will anyone still like my old work? Will anyone like my new work?
I will find that out over time, but the first thing I have found out is that I missed the dialogue with readers and with other poets and writers. I have met some excellent people here on Substack, and the dialogue with people here is certainly helping expand my creativity, and making the creative process more enjoyable.
Love from us!
D (and M)
xxx
PS Apologies for the extended self analysis. I feel much better now, Doctor.
The woman hitting her head with the rock. Perhaps we, who feel things so sincerely, ought to hit ourselves in our heads with rocks. Goodness, so hard to believe the prejudices you and I have witnessed in our lifetimes, and we not old. Just older. I cannot understand the heart with that much stone in it. I never have been able to. Growing up here, in the US Southeast with all our old and current hatreds....sometimes it's too much to bear. This is why we must write it. Thank you.
The missionaries as an extinct dinosaur species. Not exactly extinct, of course, they still seem to exist, but somehow domesticated? I was a Mormon missionary when I was 20. In Japan. Fortunately, the Japanese were much more well defended against our well-meaning incursion than the people in this poem, who seemed to have no means or wherewithal to stand in the face of the tools of the church and the grocery store. It is genuinely weird when cultures collide. And now it is also genuinely weird to acknowledge that there are no more indigenous people to convert really, and no more wilderness. It's all a little bit overwhelming to consider. Thank you, i think, for writing an overwhelming piece.
Parenthetically, if I am reading this right, I had my own version of your experience when I was in Japan. It became immediately apparent that I could not find it in me to preach to these people that I neither new nor understood. So I quit, and while I was waiting to be flown home in ignominy, I spent my time wandering around the parks and Shinto and Buddhist shrines, feeding koi, and just tripping. That was my first exposure to Shintoism and the Buddha.
Oooh... that would have been an extremely complex experience, Jed. It must have taken a vast struggle - and inner strength - to say "I quit." I would love to hear more, over that beer, when we eventually meet up.
The Warlpiri had - and still have - a rich, vibrant and exceedingly complex set of spiritual beliefs and ceremonial knowledge and practice. My poem "Junga Yimi" gives a slim glimpse of that.
The missionaries were trying their best to turn a polygamous, animist, acephalous society into something that looked like 1950's style rural Baptists with brown skin. I'm pleased to say, their success was extremely limited. A modest number of people attended the church - I think largely because there were some side benefits like access to the Church bus for trips away - and they enjoyed singing - but everyone still went to traditional ceremony, took off their clothes, got painted up and connected with the land and the ancestral spirits.
The missionaries had chosen one of the Warlpiri to be a "Lay Preacher" - and I got to know him quite well. His English was excellent, and I think at some level he did absorb a belief in some version of the Baptist God, and he could quote the scriptures. One of the missionaries assured me that Jangala was "a true Christian" and had "renounced all that false spirit worship" and no longer attended the ceremonies.
A few weeks after that conversation I was invited to the initiation ceremonies myself and there was Jangala - painted up and taking a major part in the proceedings. I was sitting in the sand next to him at one point, and I quietly leaned over and said - "Hey, Jangala. The missionary woman told me you don't go to ceremony."
Jangala laughed, gave me a beaming smile, and said "I see two ways, Japangardi. We just don't talk about it, is all."
What we learn from this exchange, my friend, is that the best aspects of church are access to the bus for field trips, and singing. No problemo there. I could feel the punchline coming about Jangala. Lisa and her book group just read some historical representation of the Dutch and Manhattan Island, and much is made of the Dutch buying the island for 24 bucks. What apparently isn't said, is that the natives didn't view property ownership like the Dutch. The 24 bucks and blankets and beads wasn't a land deed, it was a quid pro quo understanding of who was gonna live where in a hopefully cooperative way. All this to say, I find it telling that the native way was inclusive as opposed to mutually exclusive. To the missionaries the belief is this or that, whereas to the natives, it was more this and that, or at least the best aspects of each. Makes sense to me. But then I don't own land.
I am so glad that you liked my story - really just the truest account I could give of some of my experiences when I first went to live in the deserts of Central Australia, and fell in love with both the landscape, and the real owners of the land.
It is difficult - impossible really - to convey the complexity in a few words. The related poems on my Substack - Lajamanu Morning; Junga Yimi and Japanangka's Dog - fill some of the gaps.
My Warlpiri friends live - still - with a level of material and economic disadvantage, and related ill health, which is deeply shocking and shameful in a wealthy country like Australia. At the same time, they have a wealth of spirit and culture and generosity which left me speechless. I learned so much. And yes - one of those things was the perfect, natural acceptance of nurturing and feeding a child. It should be so natural and normal to us that it barely needs a mention - but western culture (in general) has lost that easy acceptance, which is why I did include it as part of my story. I am deeply relieved and glad that you understand the spirit in which it was portrayed.
Hi Angel. Yes - you are totally correct. Diseases of diet, dispossession and despair - so common in colonial societies. There are strong and resilient people who are pushing back, and working towards a more sustainable future, and in this country - and I am sure your own - the indigenous peoples can teach us a great deal about that. Living and working with them was a fascinating privilege. It is the irony - I was employed to teach certain skills, but I learned more than I taught, and that changed what I taught, and how I approached it. The best learning is always a collaboration and a mutual sharing, don't you think? Your work in New Jersey - it sounds as though you are the right person in the right place.
I should add - although we (Meg and I) have visited your nation several times, and greatly enjoyed the experience - I claim no deep knowledge of your country, but the colonial origins, and the incredibly the diverse migrant contribution, seem very similar.
Fascinating. I loved everything about it - the differences, the othering, the learning, the landscape, the realization, the oneness...it feels like Part 1 of a longer story that I very much want to read in full.
Thankyou Rajani....
This was my life for many years, in Lajamanu then travelling and working across many wonderful communities. All my desert poetry is from this time, and some pieces are from this same specific place - Lajamanu Morning; Junga Yimi; Japanangka's Dog. The tragedies, issues and problems of a colonial society are without end... but the generosity and warmth of the people I lived and worked with go deeper still, to the roots of their immeasurably rich and long relationship to the land....
Best Wishes - Dave
I don't know where to begin, David. This is heartbreakingly beautiful, moving, wonderful, raw. How you express that shift is quite incredible. I could quote you for ever!
'Sorry business, and some days it seems a sorry business, this trying to understand another country while missing your own. Missing the mist on the lake in the morning. Missing the gut deep pull of a fish hooked at dawn, your Father beside you laughing at your surprise. This is a place where the language has no word for mist, where lakes are dry salt sheets and fish fall dead from the sky.'
It rings so true for me growing up and living in Africa. I love how it doesn't wag a finger. Says it as it is. Thank you.
Thankyou for such a generous and moving compliment, Richard. This is one of my archive pieces, but it describes a time and events which are deeply deeply embedded in who I am now.
Anything can happen in the desert. Weirdly - the events I describe have happened there several times since - most recently just two years ago: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-02-21/outback-community-fish-rain-sky-weather-event/102002588
Have you written about Africa?
Best Wishes - Dave :)
Pleasure, Dave. I can absolutely believe the story of the fish. It was a delicious moment when you asked the guy about loaves!
I will have a proper read of the article.
Yes, I have written quite a lot about Africa. It comes at me from nowhere. I am busy with a piece at the moment that points to my awareness of injustice and my part in it. Hard work!
https://open.substack.com/pub/schoolofblue/p/dawn-patrols-of-rising-suns?r=249awu&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false
Well, Richard, I just restacked it. Strong and evocative....
Have also just read "A Light From An Opening Door." I'm thinking definitely references to Rhodesia, Ian smith... and very troubled times.
Non-Aboriginal Australians also have to grapple with a history which is confronting. In many ways we are still a Colonial society, and it creates a tension that is hard to resolve. I think they are doing that better in New Zealand. There are definitely ways forward, but I think in your writing you are describing the difficulty some people have of coming to terms with the past, and moving from what they thought they "knew" to a wider understanding.
The past cannot be undone - but the future can be shaped in better ways.
Best Wishes - Dave
Again, thank you Dave for restacking.
The difficulty with facing another future from what is expected traumatises undoubtedly. If it is a future where there is blind belief that someone will come to the rescue, I find it hard to feel sympathy. Perhaps, I am lucky that something happened in my life to see through it, to know that it was all BS anyway. I suppose I should be more graceful but find the ugly racism that underpinned that hoped for future impossible to accept.
It is over 40 years ago so I am not sure why I return to it all. I am in the middle of some sort of 'explanation', a reveal or whatever! The whole experience still tracks along ...
Dave this is an incredible piece of writing. The immersion in place, othering, curiosity, confusion...truly breathtaking work. And your description of the missionaries - delectable!
Oh! Friend Rebecca!!
Far away in the Orkneys....
I was thinking of you today! It's been raining and stormy here - an unseasonal mid-Summer atmospheric and oceanic stomp - so I took myself off to my favourite rocky headland to see the waves rage and the wind blow, and I wandered the cliffs and the rocks taking photos and avoiding getting washed away and composing in my head something which may become a Substack Post "in the style of @Rebecca Hooper."
Only it won't be as good :)
But I am profoundly happy that you like my recounting of my early days in the desert. That truly brings me great happiness. Part of my heart went into that. I'm glad it beats for others too.
Best Wishes - Dave :)
Oh - and the missionaries? Well. They sure were quite something. I have a little bonus missionary poem which I should probably post as an add on to "Waves." Maybe tomorrow... Love from Meg and I.
Oh I so look forward to (hopefully) reading about your oceanic wanderings! It sounds like some exciting (and inspirational) weather.
A bonus poem on the missionaries?! I'll wait with baited breath! Your description of them made me laugh out loud.
Good morning Rebecca. Yesterday's coastal wandering may become my next post. I have to look at the photos I took, and see what I have to say about the sea. It would be a good contrast with my run of recent Summer beach poetry. Also, I enjoy writing prose and I need to give the old material from the desert a break for a while. I did post the missionary poem last night - perhaps a mistake, because I'm probably overloading readers with all the "look what I saw in the desert" material.
I love Substack, but the lack of any pre-publication external vetting means that it does come with the risk of falling into self-indulgence....
How do you decide what to write?
Best Wishes - Dave :)
I thought the missionaries quite something too! Can't wait for the bonus. How delicious!
Incredible writings and observations, you took me there to a place I will likely never get to visit, so grateful for your perceptive and beautiful storytelling, says so much on very many levels
Thankyou Sally. I'm so glad it was meaningful for you. That makes my day!
Best Wishes - Dave :)
God, what a tale, Dave! Classic. And to think you witnessed it true and raw. The NZ word for white people is pakeha. In Africa we were just the whites. Thank you for sharing, and my hat off to you for this immersive, deeply felt writing.
Hi friend Ronnie. Thankyou! This piece is of course specific to my life in a particular Warlpiri community - Lajamanu - the same place as my "Lajamanu Morning" poem, and "Junga Yimi" - and with a focus on my initial experience there, from my perspective as a visitor, a guest, and also employee. English was/is a second or third language for my friends there, and I have reproduced snippets of conversation as it is spoken, with Warlpriri words mixed in with English. One complexity compared to NZ is the huge number of languages - around 300 originally, although some have been lost, so the words and details of culture change from place to place. I had the later good fortune to work in very many Aboriginal communities and regions, from the central deserts to Arnhem Land. The cultural differences and variety are enormous, but there are many common themes and threads - unified around shared bonds with the land and environment developed over staggeringly immense depths of time, and a remarkable generosity off spirit. Sadly, the racism and wilful ignorance of some non-Aboriginal workers is also a common theme across the remote communities - and the major towns. I have portrayed that in my writing, because that was also part of my experience. The negative comments recorded in this story are a selection of things that were genuinely said to me at the time - and far from the worst. I wasn't just learning about Warlpiri society and culture; I was learning some deeply disturbing facts about my own, and I have tried from that time onwards to be a better voice. I can't speak for my Aboriginal friends and I don't want to try - they have their own voices - but I can speak to the wider society about the things I have seen.
Best Wishes - Dave
Far from the worst… unimaginable! And I loved hearing their voices using English words just as you wrote them. When my son was born and I took care of him, feeding, cooking, housecleaning, and still teaching piano at home (while my husband built the first internet provider in the country and was away 24/7), a woman knocked on my door and asked if I needed help. She was looking for a job, and I thought God had send her my way. Years later, I was looked at with envy, Yeah, but you had a maid. We both wouldn’t have survived without each other…
DK this is a fascinating/sad recollection of what I know was a very special time in your life. I remember how much you were missing it when you first joined us in TAFE. I hope your have more excerpts from this time to share with us. 🥰
Hey CB. Well.... I have my notebooks from the time - and there are many things I could write about if I choose to do that.... but at present the only desert writings I'm publishing are material I wrote at the time, or shortly after.
I'm interspersing those with some of the things I wrote in my "silent period," when I stopped publishing. Pressures of work and family commitments did reduce my output rate, but I was still writing.
The third category is the work I'm writing now - things written in the last 6 months - some of which have gone onto Substack the day they were written. The beach poems for example.
In a sense, I'm stitching together a quilt with fabric from three phases of my life. Revisiting the old work keeps me in touch with some things that - yes - are very special for me. The things I'm writing now are very much about how I see the world now - and there will be more to come. Hopefully many more. The "silent period" works include some things which (personal biased opinion) are some of my best. The best of those won't go on Substack for a while, if ever, because I have them submitted for poetry award/competitions - and you can't enter them in an award if they have been published elsewhere. That "middle period" work is the link between Desert Dave and current Dave, so they kind of fit in the middle and glue the other two pieces of my life together.
Which makes me sort of a poetic Trilobite.
Only (not yet) extinct.
None of that will matter to my readers here, I would think. They will like - or dislike - what I publish based on the merits of each piece, although there is definitely a sense in which the desert poems and stories do, collectively, tell a much wider and more coherent story if viewed and read as a collection. (Back in 2001, most of them were indeed published as a collection, by Five Islands Press, in my little book "Spinifex" - but copies of that are now very hard to find).
So the order in which I'm publishing everything is more about my own dialogue with myself. It helps me get a new perspective on my own work, and that in turn helps me be creative in new ways. I don't want to repeat myself. It's also interesting for me to see what reactions I get to my work. I had a reasonable amount of "success" in the period 1996 - 2002, (in the very small world of Australian Poetry), and odd though I am I'm normal enough that I found the success reassuring. People did like what I wrote...
Then, effectively, I just disappeared from that scene.
Now I'm back after a 22 year absence and I feel like the Rip van Winkle of Australian poetry. Does anyone remember me? Will anyone still like my old work? Will anyone like my new work?
I will find that out over time, but the first thing I have found out is that I missed the dialogue with readers and with other poets and writers. I have met some excellent people here on Substack, and the dialogue with people here is certainly helping expand my creativity, and making the creative process more enjoyable.
Love from us!
D (and M)
xxx
PS Apologies for the extended self analysis. I feel much better now, Doctor.
Very well written, good work!
Thankyou Cade!
Best Wishes - Dave :)
Such evocative writing. Wonderful. I felt all sorts of things but mostly I could feel desert and wonder. Thank you. 🙏
Thankyou, dear Bernadette.... I'm loved your latest message from Kyoto!
Love to you both - Dave :)
I really hope we can meet again soon. Love to both you and Meg:)
What a wonderful story David.
Hey, mate. Thankyou! It's one from the archive, but still very fresh in my mind....
Fun fact: It happened there again 2 years ago! You can read about it here, with references to earlier events as well, and even a photo of an old friend of mine: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-02-21/outback-community-fish-rain-sky-weather-event/102002588
The woman hitting her head with the rock. Perhaps we, who feel things so sincerely, ought to hit ourselves in our heads with rocks. Goodness, so hard to believe the prejudices you and I have witnessed in our lifetimes, and we not old. Just older. I cannot understand the heart with that much stone in it. I never have been able to. Growing up here, in the US Southeast with all our old and current hatreds....sometimes it's too much to bear. This is why we must write it. Thank you.
The missionaries as an extinct dinosaur species. Not exactly extinct, of course, they still seem to exist, but somehow domesticated? I was a Mormon missionary when I was 20. In Japan. Fortunately, the Japanese were much more well defended against our well-meaning incursion than the people in this poem, who seemed to have no means or wherewithal to stand in the face of the tools of the church and the grocery store. It is genuinely weird when cultures collide. And now it is also genuinely weird to acknowledge that there are no more indigenous people to convert really, and no more wilderness. It's all a little bit overwhelming to consider. Thank you, i think, for writing an overwhelming piece.
Parenthetically, if I am reading this right, I had my own version of your experience when I was in Japan. It became immediately apparent that I could not find it in me to preach to these people that I neither new nor understood. So I quit, and while I was waiting to be flown home in ignominy, I spent my time wandering around the parks and Shinto and Buddhist shrines, feeding koi, and just tripping. That was my first exposure to Shintoism and the Buddha.
Oooh... that would have been an extremely complex experience, Jed. It must have taken a vast struggle - and inner strength - to say "I quit." I would love to hear more, over that beer, when we eventually meet up.
The Warlpiri had - and still have - a rich, vibrant and exceedingly complex set of spiritual beliefs and ceremonial knowledge and practice. My poem "Junga Yimi" gives a slim glimpse of that.
The missionaries were trying their best to turn a polygamous, animist, acephalous society into something that looked like 1950's style rural Baptists with brown skin. I'm pleased to say, their success was extremely limited. A modest number of people attended the church - I think largely because there were some side benefits like access to the Church bus for trips away - and they enjoyed singing - but everyone still went to traditional ceremony, took off their clothes, got painted up and connected with the land and the ancestral spirits.
The missionaries had chosen one of the Warlpiri to be a "Lay Preacher" - and I got to know him quite well. His English was excellent, and I think at some level he did absorb a belief in some version of the Baptist God, and he could quote the scriptures. One of the missionaries assured me that Jangala was "a true Christian" and had "renounced all that false spirit worship" and no longer attended the ceremonies.
A few weeks after that conversation I was invited to the initiation ceremonies myself and there was Jangala - painted up and taking a major part in the proceedings. I was sitting in the sand next to him at one point, and I quietly leaned over and said - "Hey, Jangala. The missionary woman told me you don't go to ceremony."
Jangala laughed, gave me a beaming smile, and said "I see two ways, Japangardi. We just don't talk about it, is all."
What we learn from this exchange, my friend, is that the best aspects of church are access to the bus for field trips, and singing. No problemo there. I could feel the punchline coming about Jangala. Lisa and her book group just read some historical representation of the Dutch and Manhattan Island, and much is made of the Dutch buying the island for 24 bucks. What apparently isn't said, is that the natives didn't view property ownership like the Dutch. The 24 bucks and blankets and beads wasn't a land deed, it was a quid pro quo understanding of who was gonna live where in a hopefully cooperative way. All this to say, I find it telling that the native way was inclusive as opposed to mutually exclusive. To the missionaries the belief is this or that, whereas to the natives, it was more this and that, or at least the best aspects of each. Makes sense to me. But then I don't own land.
Hi Angel
I am so glad that you liked my story - really just the truest account I could give of some of my experiences when I first went to live in the deserts of Central Australia, and fell in love with both the landscape, and the real owners of the land.
It is difficult - impossible really - to convey the complexity in a few words. The related poems on my Substack - Lajamanu Morning; Junga Yimi and Japanangka's Dog - fill some of the gaps.
My Warlpiri friends live - still - with a level of material and economic disadvantage, and related ill health, which is deeply shocking and shameful in a wealthy country like Australia. At the same time, they have a wealth of spirit and culture and generosity which left me speechless. I learned so much. And yes - one of those things was the perfect, natural acceptance of nurturing and feeding a child. It should be so natural and normal to us that it barely needs a mention - but western culture (in general) has lost that easy acceptance, which is why I did include it as part of my story. I am deeply relieved and glad that you understand the spirit in which it was portrayed.
Very Best Wishes - Dave
Hi Angel. Yes - you are totally correct. Diseases of diet, dispossession and despair - so common in colonial societies. There are strong and resilient people who are pushing back, and working towards a more sustainable future, and in this country - and I am sure your own - the indigenous peoples can teach us a great deal about that. Living and working with them was a fascinating privilege. It is the irony - I was employed to teach certain skills, but I learned more than I taught, and that changed what I taught, and how I approached it. The best learning is always a collaboration and a mutual sharing, don't you think? Your work in New Jersey - it sounds as though you are the right person in the right place.
I should add - although we (Meg and I) have visited your nation several times, and greatly enjoyed the experience - I claim no deep knowledge of your country, but the colonial origins, and the incredibly the diverse migrant contribution, seem very similar.
Dave