Country: a place that gives and receives life (Rose, 2001, 7)
It’s dry season in the Maningrida region and a young Djinang girl listens to her aunty as they hunt for long-necked turtles at the swamp’s edge. She looks down as aunty explains how the angle of the sun and a tell tale mark in the mud reveals the turtle’s breathing hole. “All the while her aunty sang softly. I later learned she was teaching the girl a song-line for the area” (Fogarty, 2012, 89). Rock paintings and ceremonial stories indicate that Aboriginal people in the Maningrida region have been harvesting northern long-necked turtles for many generations. The young girl is developing her personal geography as she ‘learns through country’
Long-necked turtle source Wikimedia commons http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/51/Chelodina_longicollis.JPG
Long-necked turtle source Wikimedia commons http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/51/Chelodina_longicollis.JPG
John Bradley went to Borroloola on the Gulf of Carpentaria in 1980 as a schoolteacher, and established a strong connection with the Yanyuwa people. He learned about the kujika, the stories that the Yanyuwa tell of the ancestors, the country, and the relationships that exist among them. One story tells of a blind serpent that crossed the path of the long-necked turtles. Unravelling the stories reveal something of the personal geographies of the people, their physical experience of country and the social connections that bind people to country. One elder informed Bradley about a kujika that follows songs of Tiger Shark, Hammerhead Shark, a whale that is also a Rainbow Serpent, Manta Ray, Cat Shark and Wobbegong Shark. The songs were likened to a video in your head. No matter where you are located you see the country when you can sing it properly. This would take as long as ten years of practice (Bradley, 2010, 79).
Bill Gammage explained that country was alive. “It could talk, listen, suffer, be refreshed, rejoice” (Gammage, 2012, 142). Deborah Bird Rose wrote of a sacred geography, “The Australian continent is crisscrossed with the tracks of the Dreamings: walking, slithering, crawling, flying, chasing, hunting, weeping, dying, giving birth. Performing rituals, distributing the plants, making the landforms and water, establishing things in their own places, making the relationships between one place and another” (Rose, 2001, 35). According to Philip Clarke Dreaming stories account for the creation Aboriginal custom as well as the formation of the landscape. They humanise the land both culturally and physically; they result in the formal rights and responsibilities of Indigenous people over country (Clarke, 2003, 220).
Sketch derived from a painting by Johnny Bulunbulun, a Ganallingu artist working in Maningrida. Source Wikimedia commons http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Indigenous_Australian_Arnhem_Land_cosmogony.JPG
Sketch derived from a painting by Johnny Bulunbulun, a Ganallingu artist working in Maningrida. Source Wikimedia commons http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Indigenous_Australian_Arnhem_Land_cosmogony.JPG
People from northeast Arnhem Land could produce an accurate inventory of food resources, wood for spears, resins and fibres in relation to each distinctive vegetation association and any season of the year (Thomson, 1949,7). This inventory, this local ecological knowledge was taught while children were hunting and gathering, at camp and during play. Pinejunga people, the original inhabitants of Penola, South Australia taught their young people about a particular tree: when it blooms, the insects that feed on the tree, the animals that use the tree for food and shelter and the various parts of the tree that can be used as food or medicine. This knowledge is aggregated into an understanding of the wider ecosystem, a personal geography comprising all aspects of the biophysical environment, a Dreaming that required every part of country to be cared for, an intricate weaving of country and soul, Law and obligation. Gammage explains, the Dreaming has two rules: obey the Law and leave the world as you found it (Gammage, 2011, 124).
Early X-ray bird and human figure West Arnhem Land. Source Wikimedia commons http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Early_X-ray_bird_and_human_figure_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg