Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
that Western Australia has experienced through its systematic exploitation of iron
ore, gold, nickel, oil, gas and petroleum deposits invariably located on aboriginal
ancestral lands. Pilger (2013) writes:
Barely a fraction of mining, oil and gas revenue has benefited Aboriginal
communities, whose poverty is an enduring shock. In Roebourne, in the mineral-
rich Pilbara, 80% of the children suffer from an ear infection called otitis media,
which can cause partial deafness. Or they go blind from preventable trachoma.
Or they die from Dickensian infections. That is their story.
Apart from crude economics and political oppression, the loss of a connecting
culture and belief has something to do with this. Aboriginal peoples are not the only
ones out of joint with their times. From their perspective we all are. Bob Randall,
a mixed-race Aboriginal elder and member of the 'stolen generation' who in the
1930s were taken from their families to be educated and raised as white people, has
spent many years retrieving his lost culture, belief and heritage. With his remarkable
book
Songman
(Randall, 2001) and documentary film
Kanyini
, he has become an
educator of immense importance - a significant contributor to the dialogue on
sustainable development. Through songs, paintings, dances, ceremony and stories,
Randall has shown how Australian Aboriginal culture sees everything as being
essentially connected, with no distinction between inner and outer worlds, material
and creative forces, mind and body.
Tjukurrpa
, 'the Dreaming', is the Aboriginal
knowledge of creation, of past, present and future. Sand paintings communicate this
dreaming within ceremonies performed to pass on the deepest of knowledge. After
the ceremonies, the paintings are dispersed, but the knowledge remains within the
people, continuing to inform their ideas and ways of living and connecting. The
Earth is the progenitor of everyone and everything, and as such all living creatures
are part of one family. There is no 'I', just a multiplicity of 'we's. Unlike the white
man and his notion of property and property rights, says Randall, the Aborigine
cannot own the land, cannot own the Earth, for we all belong to the land. Everything
in nature is part of the family. No one is, or can be, a stranger, for
kanyini
(connectedness) keeps the spirit alive through an unconditional love and sense of
responsibility for all things.
Aboriginal people practise
kanyini
by learning to restrict 'mine-ness' and by
developing 'our-ness'. Bill Neidjie (1986), another Aboriginal elder, like Bob Randall,
whose poetry and wisdom have helped recover this cultural heritage, offers everyone
the opportunity to share and embrace this alternative, indigenous worldview. He
writes of the land, of life (Neidjie,1986: 51):
All my uncle gone,
But this story I got him.
They told me . . .
They taught me . . .
And I can feel it.
I feel it with my body,
With my blood.
Feeling all these trees,
