Them and us and NAIDOC

We recently experienced National Aborigines and Islanders Day Observance Committee Week, so I'm moved to write this opinion piece.

My feeling is of shame that we need to promote this recognition event at all.

Many public commemorations risk becoming ritualistic or token in the belief that simply going through the motions affects the essence of what is being appraised.

Relationship with our first-dwellers should be a normal aspect of our daily pattern, not something observed once a year.

However, holding NAIDOC Week perhaps could serve to remind many folk that they share the land with its original residents who founded it some forty to sixty thousand years ago.

Theirs is the longest-existing civilisation in history. Yet many modern Australian residents have no concept of the incredible cultural depth of our first nationals.

The name "Aboriginal" is derived from two Latin words – "ab" meaning "from" and "origine", meaning beginning.

(For you keen followers of Latin, this word is the singular ablative case of the third declension noun, "origo", meaning "beginning").

We live alongside the world's oldest continuous culture, yet too many of us expect our indigenes to assimilate into our particular way of life, without realising that they have a connection to their own unique style.

Over the last four hundred years, Europeans made the transition from an agrarian to industrial/technological way of life, but our original people retain over forty thousand years of intensive cultural knowledge about their land - its ability to provide food, medicine, shelter, and deep spiritual connection. Their history has not been modified by modernity;

After colonisation, some of us made close contact with our first people to make use of their highly-developed skills such as foraging, hunting, and tracking, but many have regarded these folk as an unequal component of the society which we know and in which we function.

For example, the government's recent rejection of the proposal for some form of constitutional advisory group of aborigines to give advice on innate cultural aspects during the forming of policy and legislation was based on the presumption of a potential 'racial inequality' for whites.

Yet we expect them to adopt our culture and become a black white-fella, without any effort on our part to reciprocate by becoming a white black-fella.

It is a perfectly normal thing to be aware of differences between individual beings. None of us, not even twins, are exactly the same as each other.

Similarly, it is just as natural for national groups to behave as tribally as they have since the beginnings of mankind, and to be highly suspicious of strangers. In many instances, it was a normal behavior to invade other lands and vanquish the residents..

Many Aussies are descended from English forbears whose cultural feelings of superiority applied to any race of non-British descent.

This outlook of presumed racial superiority was exampled in the 2006 book, "Lesser Breeds", which focused on racism as displayed in the popular culture of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain.

Its propositions were accepted widely by a populace conditioned to believe that all things British, including its people, were best, and its manifesto was exemplified by attitudes towards the Chinese, Arabs, Blacks and Jews. It compared how popular racism was naturalised, what issues it raised and fed off, and what this said about British people at the time, much of which still exists.

It has taken all those years since our land was first gained by Britain to develop today's multi-cultural society, said to be one of the foremost in the modern world.

Yet our fairly recent history has been sullied by deliberate attempts to wipe out our original inhabitants. The aftermath of these genocidal forays left a nation reluctant to accept a society blended with our originals..

I've had the personal joy of close visual and verbal contact with some of our first people.

During a filming expedition along the Canning Stock Route which runs from West Australia to the Northern Territory, I was struck with the resplendent visual messages of ancestral paintings in a massive cave complex a few kilometers short of Durba Springs. This sacred site was cathedral-like in size, tranquility, and the rich historic paintings going back countless centuries.

The drawings spoke to me – they recounted a vast history of the lives of these desert dwellers, and it needed no special understanding of aboriginal art to pick up the subtlety, the meaning, and the nuance of every precious image in this hallowed site.

In the Sydney region we are lucky to have sandstone geology as a display 'canvas' for huge amounts of Aboriginal carved art. Our northern beach regions have sites where images were cut into the yielding stone, and a bit further inland, in the magnificent Blue Mountains, you can come across caves painted with ochre outlines as well as regular paintings of hands. Many of these are now accompanied by simple explanatory signage, courtesy of National Parks and Wildlife Service, interpreting what the creators are communicating.

Later in my film career I was designing the story outline of an informational programme for the Paroo Shire in Queensland which administers the Cunnamulla area. During this time I had frequent phone conversations with a couple of aboriginal elders of the district's tribes. A significant fact to come out of these research chats was the matter of ownership and possession of Country.

The vast difference between the indigenous and later European cultures is that they do not own the land – the land owns them!

This is a critical major difference which needs to be understood clearly, and goes to the heart of their habit of sharing and mutuality, a thing not as commonplace amongst many whites.

As a saving gesture, possibly driven by tokenism, we do have a history of using aboriginal place names for our towns, streets, waterways and districts.. This normalises the blend of discrete cultures, as does the more recent trend to assign Asian and Middle Eastern names to zones with a high number of new residents from those backgrounds.

An important issue to come out of NAIDOC awareness, therefore, is the need for our first people to be able to live, to blend, to function, and to enjoy, the benefits of our modern societal style without relinquishing their own deep heritage.

Your mob, my mob - should both become our mob.