Aboriginal Healing,
Sharing Culture |
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"People talk about country in the same way as they talk about a person; they speak to country, sing to country, visit country, worry about country, feel sorry for country, and long for country.” Deborah Rose
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MY COUNTRY“Country is multi-dimensional - it consists of people, animal, plants, Dreamings; underground, earth, soils, minerals, and waters, air… People talk about country in the same way as they talk about a person; they speak to country, sing to country, visit country, worry about country, feel sorry for country, and long for country.” Deborah Rose
“It’s only been in the last twelve years that I can say that I’m a Yankunytjatjara/Antakarinya woman. I was quite sad when I recognised that, as a child, I had actually been at times in my traditional area and didn’t even know it. But when I found out where I came from I was actually standing there, on my country. When I was told, ‘You’re from here’, it was an amazing moment.” Jane Lester “Connection to land is achieved through very specific localised knowledge of a region’s natural history that is coupled with complex layers of past personal and family experience, and deeper connections to the past and therefore to Aboriginal identity via traditional stories and beliefs. The nexus between land and people is ongoing through hunting and gathering and simply being on ‘country’” quoted by Deborah Rose |
BEING AT ONE“The clan tie with locality expressed an intimacy that can hardly be over-stated. Every natural species was identified and named through its varieties; all plants and animals of use to man were known and their properties and habits well understood, the whereabouts, constancy and inconstancy of all water-supplies were imprinted on the memory; the relative bearing of any physical feature to any other was so much part of common knowledge that, in family territory, orientation by night was almost as absolute as by day…
… The domain of any group of families was latticed by paths taking the shortest and most practical routes between important food and water sources. Their placement articulated an immense stock of practical knowledge of what could befall that particular domain in short and long term climactic conditions, and they served like a venous system by which the band nourished itself on the natural yield of the terrain. Life could thus proceed in high confidence, catastrophe apart. No Aboriginal questioned his ability to survive in the places, and by the methods, of his ancestors. He was at one with his environment, neither its slave not its master…” W.E.H. Stanner > Land & Healing |