Wakuwal (Dream)
Wakuwal (Dream)
Launch of Wakuwal, Valentine Press, 107 Redfern St, Redfern
All Souls Day, Nov 2, 2017
Peter Botsman
These were the words written for the night, some of them were said, others were lost in the wonder of the ceremonial meeting of the Yolŋu and Yuin and Gadigal.
They are here now for the balanda reference library and to ensure the appropriate thanks, tributes and condolences are properly recorded.
Embargo 7pm
Thank you and respect to the Gadigal elders, past and present, thank you to Uncle Vic Sims, Uncle Joe Brown-Macleod and the Goomootj dancers, Batumbil, Doris and Daisy Burarrwanga, the great Galpu songman Terence Gurruwiwi, the legendary dancer Mitchell Gawaitja and my grand daughters Shakira Mununngurr, Rebecca and Kihtonia Gurruwiwi. I want to pay my respects to Linda Burney, a great Wiradjuri leader and her family, who we had planned and hoped could be here. She and her family are in our hearts and minds today and always. I note these powerful words from this morning’s service ‘keep on working to make the world better’. So here we find ourselves.
Today is All Souls day. In Broome, which is such an important part of what this book Wakuwal is all about, the diaspora of Aboriginal, Japanese, Chinese, Malay, Indonesian, Filipino, Torres Strait communities will be going to the cemetry to honour and remember their ancestors. It is fitting that this book is launched today for this book is very much about ancestry and how we chose to remember the past, those who have passed away and how we go forward into the present.
Wakuwal was inspired by a great Yolŋu leader who is not with us today.
Ms. S.D. Gurruwiwi was a person who had a wonderful sense of humour. She seemed to move effortlessly between the different priorities of the yolŋu amd balanda worlds - the many layered and complicated aboriginal and non-aboriginal worlds. Both Yolŋu and balanda, Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people looked to her as an ambassador, translator, guide, philosopher, counsellor, advisor, mentor. Most of all people were lit up by her laugh, her sense of humor and her great sense of irony and fun.
It is a wild ride between worlds. There are not many who can handle it. There is often a lot of pain, a lot of death and a lot of destruction and depression. Despite all this, the thing about Ms. Gurruwiwi same for our three leaders - Batumbil, Doris and Daisy Burarrwanga who are so generously here tonight - and all of the great grass roots Aboriginal leaders of note - they bring a sense of love and joy and home. Of course there is love and joy in our world but it is qualitatively different. We have our comforts, our material wealth, our grand homes, our planes, our roads, our money, our libraries, our books, our jobs, our money, our parliaments – the yolŋu, and almost all of the Aboriginal communities that I have been lucky enough to get to know, have a greater spiritual treasure than any of this. They have this unique sense of home and love that is extended automatically to those with an open heart.
It is worth more than any thing I can express to you. There is not a person in our mainstream world from the King to the bum, from the rich to the poor, there is not a nationality on this planet, who does not have something to learn from Aboriginal Australia. More than that there is not a person among us who does not have something to be thankful for and some debt of gratifude and respect that we owe to the Aboriginal communities, nations, first peoples of Australia.
I say this not to scarify the mainstream world, but to underline the absurd situation we now face in this country. The Prime Minister will not recognise the primary request of the assembled representatives of Australias first peoples, and the patient and elegant request at the centre of the Uluru Statement of the heart, to formally support an independent indigenous body to advise our parliament and to begin the process of formally recognising, in our original founding colonial “settlers” document, the originality and prior ownership of Australia’s first peoples of this great land.
This Prime Minister’s lack of commitment adds to the great acts of vandalism that chip away at the foundations of Aboriginal society. These are not occuring 200 years ago they are occurring and continue to occur now. There is a dystopian logic within the Aboriginal community and within our own political community which embraces this great series of continuing disconnections and acts of wanton destruction. The argument is something like, in the rubble of what remains, after we destroy everything, Aboriginal people will always survive and come to the fore again. This is a grim and awful logic.
I cannot accept that logic.
I take the view that the world that is emerging here in Australia is going to be something better than what we could build if it was just our anglo saxon or other settler ancestry and spirituality that we were drawing upon. But our progress in this place has to start with a step that we the descendants of the settlers have to make. We have to recognise that our settler law, our settler religion, our settler material values cannot ever be the underlying spiritual foundation of this land where we have come to live. What makes our inability to recognise this at official governmental levels, or even as individuals, so pathetic and absurd is of course that the manikay (the song) we have just heard tonight has its echoes to a past that is twenty times older than the Old Testament. It is a culture precious in the world for its power and wisdom and timelessness. It has not only something to teach us settlers, it might have a role in making the whole world a better, more sustainable place if we could only give it greater voice and power.
Australia’s first peoples do not need us. We need them. More than this we owe not just an apology but an explanation of our actions and a request to work together and greater willingness to find ways to move forward together. We need to ask and wait and stop and listen. We need to explain what there is of worth about us and of why we might be, after all the damage and destruction, trustworthy friends and family members.
One of the things that I have tried to do in Wakuwal is to personally explain to my yapa, Ms. S.D. Gurruwiwi and to my dhuways who are here tonight: how it was that the calamity of white settlement of this land came about? How did we settlers come to invade and why? Most importantly is there anything of worth about us, are there any stories, ceremonies or things that we know how to do, that are worthy of respect?
I picked out a few things. the story of Garray (jesus), the tales of Homer and Dante and our Graeco-Roman past but I also realised that my great great great great grandmother Honor Hughes of my fathers mother’s family line, a victim of the Irish genocide, who came to live alongside Truganeen on Bruny Island in her last years of life, was part of the key that Aboriginal people needed to know about us. For Honor was also a victim of the great modernist industrial curse that rained down on this continent like deadly rays from Mars in H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds. As millions starved on the Irish countryside, the great cathedrals, the Red Cedars of the Gadigal and Yuin and Bandjalung were destroyed within 40 years of the first settlement at Sydney cove, the ancient pastures, farmlands and waterways were not even recognised by the settlers and were also set to waste. And in their place we gradually erected this great mess of monocultural water hungry crops and animals and these great cities of concrete, asphalt and glass which must be fed like a ravenous beast.
I think what happened in our white settler modernist progress was that we stripped the land of its original spirituality or what I think Batumbil would describe as her family gurrutu link to the stars in the sky and the mosquitoes in the mangroves.
My Wakuwal (Dream) can only be told from the perspective of now from a period of enlightenment it does not pretend to be a correct history and that is why you will find a montage of 1000 childrens fairy stories, odometer readings, the iterations from the split tongue of the most horrific balanda pronounciations and the most grevious spelling mistakes and phonetic interpretations of Yolŋu words - all things denoting our great stumble along the path together. Like Leopold Bloom stumbling around Dublin or Jimmy Gurruwiwi on his walks around Biritjimi and Nhulunbuy we wander through the mist as best we can.
There is an other worldliness about the story that for us modernists and post modern dystopians is naive, strange and exotic but for all of the Aboriginal communities I have come to know this other worldiness is normal. The sad thing about us moderns and progressives is our lack of heart and soul. In our modern world reason, rationality, science, measurement, written words have replaced a thing we used to call magic. We have forgotten how to communicate through dreams and feelings and no words at all. As yapa used to say “too much talking”..
Despite it all there is a lot of hope everywhere. Whatever our annoying politicians, bureaucrats and corporate leaders chose to do, we individuals, can chose our own ways to join in friendship and support with Aboriginal communities in the cities, in the regions and in the sacred places and homelands. One thing that is very important to me is helping Butambil and her family, and so many others like them, across Northern Australia, to withstand the latest invasions of miners, land developers, un-informed tourists and stumbling opportunists.
I want to specially thank my dhuway for all her guidance and for allowing her design and her husbands design to open and seal the book in an appropriate way Yirritja fire and Dhuwa maggots. But more than this Batumbil like yapa is at the heart of everything that I have written about. Batumbil is the strongest leader I have ever met. You will see this from Emma Hudsons film later tonight. Please stay to watch this because it is a little miracle of a story, and Emma is kind enough to give us an editing suite preview of what will be released to the rest of the world next year, as a special tribute to Batumbil and her extraordinary sisters Doris and Daisy. But Batumbil and her family needs our support. Our tax dollars cannot and do not reach her. Corporate donations find all the wrong things around her. The only way we can protect the NT homelands is to place resources directly into the hands of a bunguwa – an annointed and strong leader - like Batumbil. But it is not just a matter of making a money donation or even coming up to work in the community. There is a whole pathway to follow, and along the way, you have to be prepared for everything you know to be turned upside down.
When my great, great, great, great grandmother Honor Hughes was transported to Van Diemens Land, what came with her was all the modern values, which over 200 years, could not comprehend the spiritual qualities of this land and its first peoples. Every time I go to Mata Mata or Gi’kal or Baniyala or sometimes to Paul Mc Leods house at Wreck Bay – there is this overwhelming relief from our post modern dystopia. My book is a love story and a romance about being allowed to find this spiritual home so precious in this world. I believe it is still not to late for great and meaningful partnerships to form and discussions to take place. I hope that Wakuwal contributes to that possibility.
There are a lot of thanks you to make. Too many thank yous and I am sure to forget some. Thank you to the great Lyn Gain and April Pressler and Valentine Press for being the voice for so much important writing. I could not have chosen a better and more honourable publisher in Australia or the world. Thank you to my Kangaroo Valley neighbours, particularly Andrew Smee and Kangaroo Valley Primary School for taking Yolngu students on exchanges from the remote homelands, thank you to Danny Gilbert for being such an amazing supporter of the small things that really matter, thank you to my great friend Sandy Dann for our weekly talks on Goolarri Radio, thank you to Mike and Cathy Gorman and the amazing Bob Beasley for your dedication to supporting homelands in the NT not just through words but with loving actions and deeds of amazing valour and dedication. Thank you to all those who have made the journey to Mata Mata and Gi’kal and worked so hard with us and purchased Batumbil and her families art works. I want to thank so many Aboriginal families that have taken me in over the years the Briggs, the Walkers, the Fongs, the Pigrams, the Macleod/Browns, the Gurruwiwis, the Burarrwangas, the Marikas, the Marawilis, the Taylors... thanks to my three sons Chenier, Dash and Declan who have always been behind their wayward Dad on his journeys and departures with 100 per cent support. Lastly thank you all for coming. And though she asked me not to do this I have to also mention the extraordinary magic that djiliwarr brings to everyone she meets and everything she does. She is also with us tonight. Please stay on, after we get the books signed, because there is a story that you will never forget about to be screened in the room opposite.
More details about Wakuwal at this link.
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