Born in 1925 on the Kimberley coast, Mowaljarlai lived a traditional life but he also had a mission education at Kunmunya and he became an adept in both cultures. Photographed as a small bright-eyed boy by the first European anthropologists to visit the far north-west in the 1930s, he went on to distinguish himself as a young man of extraordinary intelligence. He trained as a Presbyterian lay minister and was later an ambulance driver, a lugger engineer, a painter, a social justice advocate and a land-rights activist. A handsome man and a charismatic speaker of great eloquence, he travelled all over the world in his subsequent role as storyteller, thinker and educator. He established himself as one of the greatest unsalaried ambassadors Australia ever produced. His fervent desire was to have Aboriginal children equipped to prosper in the irrevocably altered conditions of post-invasion Australia and he did whatever he could to present the ancient wisdom of his own tradition to whitefellas, who didn’t have a clue what they were missing. ‘We are really sorry for you people,’ he said in one of his many broadcasts. ‘We cry for you because you haven’t got meaning of culture in this country. We have a gift we want to give you. We keep getting blocked from giving you that gift. We get blocked by politics and politicians. We get blocked by media, by process of law. All we want to do is come out from under all this and give you this gift. And it’s the gift of pattern thinking. It’s the culture which is the blood of this country, of Aboriginal groups, of the ecology, of the land itself.’17
Mowaljarlai’s lasting influence on scientists, artists, theologians, literary scholars, anthropologists and jurists is not as well known as it should be. In his final years he threw all his energies into the project of Two-Way Thinking, a philosophy of mutual respect, mutual curiosity and cultural reciprocity. He was the inspiration behind the Bush University initiative that took many non-Aboriginal leaders and lawmakers onto Ngarinyin country in order to expose them to traditional folkways, something which has continued since his death in 1997. Having grown up in a culture still intact and vibrant he saw his clan dispossessed and then shunted from one settlement to another, and in later years his immediate family was beset by despair, alienation and addiction. Even in the midst of two decades of political and legal struggle for the restoration of lands to his countrymen, he made time to offer his knowledge to anyone who’d listen respectfully and plenty who didn’t, and he did much of this in his old age. Only since his death has it become clear what he has given to this country, and what he might have achieved had the blockages he despaired of not been so stubborn. He was an immensely talented man who could have prospered had he not taken up the burden of being a conduit between cultures. Those closest to him believe he wore himself out. There are others like him still battling to make themselves heard, though few with his imagination and authority.
Decades before ‘mutual obligation’ became a catchphrase beloved of politicians, Mowaljarlai was advancing it as a uniting principle that applied to much more than the benighted recipients of welfare. Two-way living is foundational, it springs from the earth itself. It should apply in the boardrooms of telcos and miners and bankers, be embodied in our personal and collective decision-making, for the ethic acknowledges the organic facts of life that underwrite all human endeavours.
I’m not an optimist by nature but I’m heartened by the attitudes of many young Australians I meet on forest tracks, beaches or in activist meetings. Their thinking about the natural world and the fragility of life is far more advanced than most of the politicians who represent them in parliament. They’re more widely travelled than their parents. Having backpacked through the US and Europe and Asia, they’ve been to the future and they don’t like what they see. If they’re passionate about the natural world it’s because they understand they live in a country where there are still things to be saved and treasured. They’re proud of that, they take it seriously. If they’re impatient about government inaction over climate change, for instance, it’s because they know they’ll inherit its most bitter fruits.
I think people everywhere yearn for connection, to be overwhelmed by beauty. Maybe, deep down, people need to feel proper scale. Perhaps in the face of grandeur we silently acknowledge our smallness, our bit-part in majesty. Teilhard de Chardin, a Jesuit of heretical optimism, declared that ‘terrestrial thought is becoming conscious that it constitutes an organic whole, endowed with the power of growth, and both capable of and responsible for some future’.18
Our future is organic and material. This earth is our home, our only home. And if home and family aren’t sacred, what else can be? The dirt beneath our feet is sacred. Every other consideration springs from this and you don’t need to be an archaeologist, a botanist or geologist to know it. Kakadu elder Big Bill Neidjie was none of these. He’d been a buffalo hunter, luggerman and mill worker in his younger days. He was the last surviving speaker of the Gaagudju language and in his later life he was an inspirational leader, a transitional figure like Mowaljarlai. He wasn’t just the father of Kakadu National Park; to my mind he was a mystic. Here, surely, is a voice we should attend to.
I love it tree because e love me too.
E watching me same as you
tree e working with your body, my body,
e working with us.
While you sleep e working.
Daylight, when you walking around, e work too.
That tree, grass . . . that all like our father.
Dirt, earth, I sleep with this earth.
Grass . . . just like your brother.
In my blood in my arm this grass.
This dirt for us because we’ll be dead,
we’ll be going this earth.
This the story now.19
Our story is written in the longing of a boy seeing his homeland from exile, in the slow awakening of a grieving woman consoled and stirred by strange flowers, in the dogged curiosity of a botanist returning to a scorned place to find it wasn’t what he thought it was. And it’s there in the rebellious spirit of no-hopers and heretics standing in front of bulldozers, and in the shining face of an old man looking out upon the ranges of his ancestral country with a heart full to bursting.
Notes
1. William J. Lines, False Economy, Fremantle Arts Centre Press, Fremantle, 1998, p 280.
2. Ibid., p 282.
3. Georgiana Molloy, quoted in William J. Lines, An All Consuming Passion, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1994, p 137.
4. D. H. Lawrence, Kangaroo, Penguin Books, Melbourne, 1982, p 87.
5. Peter Ferguson, ‘Anti-environmentalism and the Australian culture war’, Journal of Australian Studies, 33: 289–304. DOI: 10.1080/14443050903079680.
6. Anthony Trollope, quoted in Suzanne Falkiner, Wilderness, Simon & Schuster, Sydney, 1992.
7. Tom Griffiths, Hunters and Collectors, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1996, p 104.
8. Hannah Rachel Bell, ‘All is not as it seems’, paper presented at ‘Gwion Gwion Rock-art of the Kimberley: Past, Present and Future’, University of Western Australia, 14–15 October, 2010. Also cited in Martin Porr and Hannah Rachel Bell, ‘ “Rock-art”, “animism” and two-way thinking: towards a complementary epistemology in the understanding of material culture and “rock-art” of hunting and gathering people’, Journal of Archeological Method and Theory, 19(1): 161-205. DOI: 10.1007/s10816-011-9105-4.
9. Anthony Redmond, ‘Some initial effects of pursuing and achieving native title recognition in the northern Kimberley’, The Social Effects of Native Title: Recognition, Translation, Coexistence (eds. Benjamin R. Smith and Frances Morphy), Australian National University e-Press, 2007.
10. Lang Hancock, quoted in Michael Coyne and Leigh Edwards, The Oz Factor: Who’s Doing What in Australia, Dove, East Malvern, 1990, p 68.
11. George Sutton, quoted in William. J. Lines, Patriots: Defending Australian Natural Heritage, University of Queensland Press, Brisbane, 2006, p 12.
12. Stephen Hopper and Paul Gioia, ‘The Southwest Australian Floristic Region: evolution
and conservation of a global hot spot of biodiversity’, Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution and Systematics, 35: 623–650. DOI: 10.1146/annurev.ecolsys.35.112202.130201.
13. Jake Sturmer, ‘Great Western Woodlands: Fears over proposal to release 500,000 hectares of reserve for farming’, ABC News, 8 December 2014. At: abc.net.au/news/2014-12-08/fears-over-proposal-to-release-500000-hectares-of-wa-woodland/5950072.
14. David Mowaljarlai and Jutta Malnic, Yorro Yorro: Aboriginal Creation and the Renewal of Nature, Inner Traditions, Rochester, Vermont, 1993, p 79.
15. Nyalgodi Scotty Martin, Jadmi Junba, Rouseabout Records, 2003.
16. ‘Obituary: David Banggal Mowaljarlai’, Journal of Australian Archaeology, 1997, 45: 58.
17. David Banggal Mowaljarlai, ‘An address to the white people of Australia’, ABC Radio: The Law Report, 1995.
18. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Toward the Future, Harcourt, Brace Jovanovich, 1975, p 13.
19. Bill Neidjie, Story About Feeling, Magabala Books, Broome, 1989, p 4.
Other works referred to
Bell, Hannah Rachel, Men’s Business, Women’s Business, Inner Traditions International, Vermont, 1998.
——Storymen, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 2009.
Birch, Charles, On Purpose, New South Wales University Press, Sydney, 1990.
Cunningham, Irene, The Land of Flowers: An Australian Environment on the Brink, Otford Press, 2005.
Flannery, Tim, The Future Eaters, Reed Books, Melbourne, 1994.
Grishin, Sasha, John Wolseley: Land Marks, Craftsman House, Sydney, 1998.
Lines, William J., Taming the Great South Land, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1991.
Main, Barbara York, Between Wodjil and Tor, Jacaranda Press, Brisbane, and Landfall Press, Perth, 1967.
Nash, Roderick, Wilderness and the American Mind, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1973.
Olsen, John, Drawn from Life, Duffy & Snellgrove, Sydney, 1997.
Ryan, Simon, The Cartographic Eye, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 1996.
Serventy, Carol, and Harris, Alwen, Rolf’s Walkabout, Reed Books, Sydney, 1971.
Serventy, Vincent, Vincent Serventy: An Australian Life, Fremantle Arts Centre Press, Fremantle, 1999.
Stockton, Eugene, The Aboriginal Gift: Spirituality for a Nation, Millennium Books, Alexandria, New South Wales, 1996.
Wright, Judith, The Coral Battleground, Thomas Nelson (Australia) Ltd, Melbourne, 1977.
Acknowledgements
Island Home had its beginnings in a collaboration with the photographer Richard Woldendorp and the essay ‘Strange Passion’ that accompanied his 1999 book, Down to Earth. ‘The Island Seen and Felt’ was first given as a talk at the Royal Academy, London in 2013 and was published in Illumination: The Art of Philip Wolfhagen in 2013. A later version also appeared in The Australian in 2014. ‘Cape Range, 2009’ was published as ‘The Cave’ in The Australian Colour Magazine in 2014.
Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following for permission to quote: Meredith McKinney for Judith Wright’s ‘The Surfer’, Collected Poems, HarperCollins; ‘My Island Home’, words and music by Neil Murray, © Universal Music Publishing Pty Ltd, all rights reserved, international copyright secured, reprinted with permission; the estate of Bill Neidjie for Story About Feeling, Magabala Books.
HAMISH HAMILTON
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whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.
First published by Penguin Australia Pty Ltd, 2015
Text copyright © Tim Winton 2015
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
Design by John Canty © Penguin Australia Pty Ltd
Cover photograph: Gerson/Getty Images
Illustrations copyright © Mali Moir 2015
Colour separation by Splitting Image Colour Studio, Clayton, Victoria
ISBN: 978-1-76014-223-0
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THE BEGINNING
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Tim Winton, Island Home
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