"Come and see my Land" - A Journey back to the Mythic Age
" They say we have been here for 60,000 years, but it is much longer. We have come directly from the Great Creative Ancestors. We have lived and kept the Earth as it was on the First Day." Aboriginal Elder, "Voices of the First Day"
Something very special happens to you when you enter a landscape that remains as it was over 200 million years ago, carved only by wind and water. A place where no man has tilled or raised animals in all that time. The feeling goes to another dimension altogether when you are inducted into the Creation Story of that landscape by the very people who have kept that same land holy for at least 40,000 years, but in all probability much longer.
Such a people are the Aboriginal tribes of Australia, those of them who have remained or returned to their ancestral lands. They are the most vigorous expression of an unbroken oral and esoteric tradition that exists on earth today; they have never lost their connection with the earth that sustains them.
Among the few native peoples of the world that have been able to retain this direct connection, there seems to be a common desire to share with us, those of us who will listen, the essence of their wisdom and veneration for the earth our Mother. There also seems to be a poignant urgency in their wish to make this connection as they grow old and see their world being lost forever. In Australia, certain of the Elders now see the songlines extending beyond Australia connecting to the powerlines of the rest of the world and they are projecting the message outward,"come and see my land".
Generous though this offer is, it should not be misunderstood as an invitation for tourists to come and gawp and take pictures of them. Nor is it a welcome for anthropologists, social workers or other academics to come and study them. Indeed it is extremely hard for travellers of this kind to enter tribal territories or make any meaningful contact with Aboriginal tribal culture. No, it is an invitation to all those people who recognise, at whatever level, that this is important to them and see that in the Australian Aborigines we possess a direct link to the Magical and the Mystical Ages in a way that is but a dim remembrance for us. It is the opportunity to share in this ancient wisdom, not because we must return to it, but so we may carry forward the essential and eternal wisdom it contains into the age that is to come. Our becoming 'neo-hunter gatherers' permanently or temporarily is not what it's about. It is the spirit of this connection that we have to rediscover in ourselves. Not the replication in our lives of their ritual or the attachment to any one particular piece of land.
That is a concretisation that cannot work any more. And, as the young aboriginal man remarked to an American journalist who had travelled far "Go and find your own Dreamtime, don't take mine". It wasn't said nastily, it was just good advise.
Doing the Shaman thing may be fun even helpful but to become a man or woman 'of high degree' can take 40 years of initiation and in the case of the Aborigines and most North American Indians, it involves quite a bit of pain, as opposed to psychotropics, understandably a more popular approach with most Westerners. For young Aboriginal men in Australia who are on this path it involves sub-incision, (which I'll not go into in a family organ such as this) and for women there are equivalent hurdles along the way. It sure sorts the men from the boys and the gals from the women. That's why there are increasingly fewer takers. If you really want to be a shaman are you on for that? No, that's not where things are headed and most native shamans themselves recognise that a more universal approach is needed.
A few years ago now my partner and I heard this call and through a series of seemingly fortuitous meetings developed connections with Aboriginal communities in the Red Centre and Arnhem Land and since 1997 have led small groups of people there a couple of times every year. Of all the work we do this is the best to me. It lifts my soul in a way that nothing else does. It is also is a wonderful contrast to my life in Bali.
The Red Centre is a desert, first chakra experience, taking us back to fundamental aspects of creation and survival. In Arnhem Land we visit an equally primeval but very different landscape. Water, birds and wildlife abound with a staggering proliferation of art and rock paintings, some of it predating Lascaux. This addresses the second chakra, dealing with origins of the creative impulse.
In our first journey to the desert in 1996 there were a dozen or so of us, coming from all continents of the earth, save Africa. All felt called in some way to make the trip. For some it was a long-held dream, for others it was an idea that had come from out the blue but was somehow compelling. One American woman had had a dream in which an old Aboriginal woman had spoken to her saying "come and see my land". Many of us shared the big collective dreams we'd been having involving the reptilian archetypes, serpents and dragons - in seeming preparation of what was to come, for on this trip we were destined to be walking the Ngingtaka Dreamtrack, the dreamtrack of the Lizard Man.
Flying from Bali to Darwin and on to Uluru (Ayer's Rock), spending two days at that unbelievable monolith and the Kata Tjuta (the Olgas) - so very different geophysically but just as magnificent and both holy sites of great significance in Aboriginal Law, the Tjukurpa. At dawn the following day we drove 350 km south by special permit into the desert, deep into the vast Pitjanjatjara tribal lands. We arrived at dusk to be welcomed by the Elders, pitching our camp not far from theirs.
The American woman who had dreamed of the old Aboriginal woman calling her was totally blown away on meeting the Elder, who was the keeper of this land and who had been so instrumental in leading her people back onto it. "That's her! That's the woman who told me to come!", she exclaimed before falling silent, awed by her experience.
The next morning we awoke to the stark beauty of our situation, encamped beneath a rocky hill turning golden with the rising sun. We were surrounded by an endless sea of red earth, filled with clumps of spinifex grass, red bushes and yellow blooms, with a deep, deep blue sky above. In the distance there were golden mountain ranges that turned purple as the day wore on. At night we nestled against the cold in our swags below the dark silhouette of our hill, staring up at the brilliant firmament above us, the like of which I had never seen, even out on the open ocean.
The first day began our induction into the Ngingtaka Dramtrack, the ancient story of the Lizard Man, which so many of us had seen in our dreams. Ngingtaka stole a priceless grinding stone and during the flight from his pursuers had created this land. Our hosts were the keepers of this particular section of the Dreamtrack. The Dreamtime tells the Creation Story of the world and how the Creative Ancestors, the Rainbow Serpent, the Seven Sisters and many others, had passed through the land moulding its shape as their stories unfolded. As we travelled we began to understand at some visceral level how the Dreamtime collapsed time and space; how for our hosts these stories were the past, present and future. The land was all things to them, sustaining mother, atlas, almanac and church. They sang it and danced it, celebrating it in all they did and in so doing sustained both themselves and the land. We followed the Ngingtaka Dreamtrack across the land for the better part of each day, stopping at the caves, crags and waterholes as the elders recounted their creation.
We also went hunting and gathering, learning how to dig for honey ants and find witchetty grubs. The men were taught how to make and use spears and how to fashion woomeras to project them, before going out to track wallaby (not in much danger from us!). The women learned bushcraft skills, including how to gather and grind spinifex into a strong glue. We visited other holy places, were taught about Men's Business and Women's Business and the highly evolved structure of 'skin' or relationships that governed social interaction amongst themselves and their neighbours. Highly evolved or not, it was interesting to note that one strong tabu was that a young married man would never talk or hang out with his mother-in-law. But, on returning from the hunt he would have to honour her and she was the person he had to serve first with the choicest part.
By night we sat around the campfires beneath the stars. Inma! Inma! Sacred Dance! The cry would go up from our hosts summoning us, and we would rush over to their campsite. There they would begin to sing the eerily beautiful chants accompanied only by their click sticks. By turn the men and the women of the tribe would dance their age-old stories, looming mysteriously out of the darkness and bushes into the firelight, their bodies wonderfully painted. Some nights it was our turn and with our own bodies painted we performed the dances we had learned.
Each night we would sit before the fires on the oldest land on Earth beneath the brilliant, starry heavens of the Southern hemisphere, dropping into our own mythical past as we re-enacted our own forgotten story. We became one with the spiritual essence of our home, the Earth.
Leaving the desert is a wrench and a real sadness. We had received a gift and a learning from these people we would never be able to repay in any other way than to honour the Earth, just as they do. Nothing more was asked than to discover for ourselves the way to carry this knowledge into our own lives. As we travelled back, out of the desert and as we washed the red earth from our bodies and clothes over the days to come, each one of us had been touched in a manner that would remain with us. We had learned in a fundamental way what it is to entrust ourselves and be supported by the Earth and as we each resumed our lives with it's fears and challenges, that knowledge would give us a deep and abiding reserve of inner strength.
The American writer Terry Tempest Williams has a large part of it when she says, "If the desert is holy, it is because it is a forgotten place that allows us to remember the sacred. Perhaps that is why every pilgrimage to the desert is a pilgrimage to the Self. There is no place to hide, and so we are found."
Nirmala Journeys Ltd leads two journeys to Aboriginal Australia every year, to the 'Top End' in June and the 'Red Centre' in September, 2002. For further information call : 0361 270 502.
" Go and find your own Dreamtime, don't take mine", the young Aborigine man said to the journalist. It wasn't said nastily. It was just good advise.
