In my previous article describing my experiences with Paganism in Australia, particularly in the state of Victoria, I mentioned that the local Pagans, who I have talked to, are interested in exploring Aboriginal culture and spirituality. American readers also seemed interested in hearing more about this subject as well. As I have mentioned, this subject presents some special challenges. Today, I explore some of those challenges.
![didgeridoo [Photo Credit: betta design via Compfight CC BY-NC 2.0]](https://wildhunt.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/didgeridoo-500x333.jpg)
didgeridoo [Photo Credit: betta design via Compfight CC BY-NC 2.0]
While we use the term ‘Aboriginal’ to refer to the original inhabitants of the Australian continent and nearby islands, we ought to remember that there has never been a single, homogeneous Aboriginal society. The broad term includes 900 regional groups with distinct languages, beliefs, and practices.
British colonisation of Australia began with the arrival of the First Fleet in Botany Bay in 1788. We don’t know with certainty how large the Aboriginal population was at that time. Some ecologists estimate it may have been 750,000 to a million (1). What followed is the familiar story of colonialism and colonisation: the spread of virulent diseases, the appropriation of land and water resources, the introduction of alcohol, opium, and tobacco, violence, exploitation, dispossession, the spread of European settlements, forced religious conversion, the establishment of racist institutions, and the general obliteration of the languages, literature and culture of native peoples.
According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, by 1900 the recorded Indigenous population of Australia had declined to approximately 93,000 and the belief that the Indigenous Australians would soon die out was widely held. While Australians are well aware of what happened next, most Americans know little about the Stolen Generation.
Up until as recently as the 1970s, the Australian Federal and State government agencies and church missions, under acts of their respective parliaments removed Indigenous children from their families. Newspaper articles, reports, and other documents suggest that motivations included child protection and fear over the mixing of racial groups. Aboriginals were referred to as blacks (they still are) and the government wanted to “breed out the colour by elevating female half-castes to white standard with a view to their absorption by mating into the white population” (2).
In Australia: A Biography of a Nation, Phillip Knightley wrote:
This cannot be over-emphasized—the Australian government literally kidnapped these children from their parents as a matter of policy. White welfare officers, often supported by police, would descend on Aboriginal camps, round up all the children, separate the ones with light-coloured skin, bundle them into trucks and take them away. If their parents protested they were held at bay by police.
The exact number of children removed is unknown, but the Bringing Them Home Report stated that “not one family has escaped the effects of forcible removal”.
On 13 February 2007, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd issued an apology to Indigenous Australians.
![Kevin Rudd on screen in Federation Square, Melbourne [Photo Credit: virginiam via Flickr CC BY-SA 2.0]](https://wildhunt.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Rudd-500x334.jpg)
Kevin Rudd on screen in Federation Square, Melbourne [Photo Credit: virginiam via Flickr CC BY-SA 2.0]
It’s a bleak picture, but it’s not a hopeless one. A great number of Australians care very much about the state of Aboriginal people and there are many private and public efforts to improve Aboriginal health and well-being as well as promote reconciliation.
Wurundjeri: Traditional Owner Acknowledgement Plaques by ANTaR Vic
As I mentioned above, there is no single, homogeneous Aboriginal society. I use the term “Aboriginal spirituality” only for convenience. How to pin-point it? We can talk about the creation, ancestral, and totemic beings, but that misses the point. There is next to nothing I can tell you about what’s left of Aboriginal ceremonies because I am not privy to them. It is “secret business” as one reader commented in my last piece. What we’re really talking about is culture and one that is inextricably tied to the land.
Aboriginal Australian groups had a deep spiritual and cultural connection to the land. Their forcible removal by European settlers severed them from the cultural and spiritual practices necessary to maintain the cohesion and well-being of the group. All the Dreaming stories, the tales of timeless time, tell significant truths within each Aboriginal group’s local landscape and these establish the structure of their societies, the rules of behaviour, and the ceremonies performed to ensure continuity of life and land.
Many Aussie Pagans would love to have greater access to Aboriginal wisdom. I’ve met one Pagan man that traveled to remote areas of Australia and spent time with some Aboriginals and learned a great deal. There are opportunities to visit cultural centres, public events, and there’s volunteering. It’s not impossible, but it is difficult and there is an invisible line in the sand. Aborigines are distrustful, and who can blame them. Australians are sensitive to the plight of Aborigines and often paralyzed by a sense of helplessness. I rarely hear Pagans here talk of cultural appropriation, but they all know what it means and they know Aboriginal spirituality is mostly off limits.
In Australia, we’re often working with inherited materials from the Northern Hemisphere that don’t always apply well. That’s why I love the science and technology publications from CSIRO and why one of my favourite Pagan bloggers down under is Inga Leonora at Australis Incognita who studies native Australian Flora and Fauna in her Craft. I’ve taken up bird-watching, which gets me out in nature and has helped me learn more about the native wildlife and the seasonal shifts through their migration and breeding patterns.
In the U.S., Pagans balance the myths and rites of a foreign Pagan religion with those of the land we inhabit. It’s no different here in Australia. The best way to learn about native spirituality is to learn about native land.
Sources
- Neil Thomson, pp153, “Indigenous Australia: Indigenous Health” in James Jupp (ed), The Australian people: an encyclopedia of the nation, its people and their Origins, Cambridge University Press, 2001.
- C. E. Cook to Administrator of the Northern Territory, 7 February 1933, National Archives of Australia, Commonwealth Records Series, Department of the Interior file A659/1; 1940/1/408
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Thanks for this interesting article ! It’s timely that it comes just after the piece about cultural appropriation.
I actually learnt several interesting things: I didn’t knew that the Colonization of Australia came as late as 1788!
Hope to hear more about what it’s like for yer Aussies down under!
Thank you for this well-written post. The connection to the land of Aboriginal spirituality and culture has always attracted me.
“In the U.S., Pagans balance the myths and rites of a foreign Pagan religion with those of the land we inhabit. It’s no different here in Australia.”
I have to disagree. The religions that are predominantly practiced by Pagans in Australia are those from agricultural societies. Australia only saw agriculture (with small exceptions) with the invasion by Europeans, the physical and spiritual landscape is best suited to hunter/gatherers. For a start most of the country doesn’t have the classic 4 seasons and Samhain is meaningless on the equator.
It gets that ridiculous here we have a Pagan author claiming Sagittarius is a fire sign because its in Summer in Australia, ignoring the fact it’s in Winter in Europe, where it was invented.
It’s great to see this topic and more articles about Australia on the Wild Hunt, would be even more awesome to see more from indigenous writers themselves, in general.
It was more than colonization, it was INVASION, GENOSIDE, RAPE AND MURDER, for which NO-ONE has been held accountable. Indigenous people of Australia are still not mentioned in the constatution.
Thank you for your shout out and compliment, Cosette!
It is very interesting to read about our community and practices from someone who comes for the larger U.S. pagan scene, in your two articles here. You’ve really highlighted the issues many pagans in Aus face in terms of community, and when approaching Indigenous myths and practices, and why it’s off limits. Unfortunately, unlike in the U.S. that is because of continued racist and genocidal policies being practices by our government, and no treaty with these nations. Our existence rests legally on there being no people here, and though Mabo and various Land Rights precedents are a step towards rectification, we’re a long way off actual treaty and dealing with the legal ramifications of that.
Currently, we have a larger percentage of Indigenous men in prisons here now than they there were black men in prison in South Africa at the height of Apartheid. Just last week it was announced 100 remote Indigenous communities (people living on their ancestral lands) in Western Australia will be shut down, that is, the WA govt. just decided it’s too expensive to provide services. Unfortunately there’s no actual plan other than, once again, forcibly remove people from their lands. And watch the mining interests pop up all over where they once were after they are removed. Until recently, whole communities have had no water, because their bore pump broke, and, unlike say, a burst water main in white suburbia central fixed in a day, no-one fixed it. Govt. own infrastructure, people were left without water in the middle of the dessert for months. Disease and etc. broke out, and no-one did anything. Nothing has changed in over 200 years, and still as many children are being removed from Indigenous families as ever there were in the Stolen Generation as described in the Bringing Them Home Report, and we still blame Indigenous families, they’re simply not white enough, they’ve not assimilated (we do love that word in Australia) and they refuse just to forget what they had and get on with doing what we want, they simply seem to have all the issues, metal, emotional and in terms of abuse, and though we are the ones who gifted them with it, we’re not interested in helping them with it.
To engage with Indigenous teaching, you have to consider Indigenous teachings/myths on par with your own. And unfortunately there are few in the pagan community, no more or less than there are in the community writ large. Here in Tasmania where there are no full blooded Indigenous people because the British were really efficient at their genocide, I have heard pagans, witches, noted leaders and authors say a) the spirits here are now white; b) bloody mainland aborigines, thankfully we don’t have those problems; c) why don’t they just move and get jobs (because the philosophical ramifications of their animistic beliefs are completely misunderstood even in terms of their own European myths); d) no, really, I’ve met those mainland Aboriginals, and really, racists, angry, abusive, alcoholic pigs. They deserve what they get.
It’s really rather horrific. And this is perfectly acceptable, our Prime Minister addressed the G20 this very week and said:
“As we look around this glorious city [Brisbane, QLD], as we see the extraordinary development, it’s hard to think that back in 1788 it was nothing but bush and that the Marines, and the convicts and the sailors that struggled off those 12 ships just a few hundred yards from where we are… must have thought they’d come almost to the Moon. Everything would have been so strange. Everything would have seemed so extraordinarily basic and raw and now a city which is one of the most spectacular cities on our globe, and in a country which is as free and as fair and as prosperous as any.”
Suddenly, Mel Gibson’s ‘Apocalytpo’ and its message of the savage being saved by Europe makes perfect sense in light of his being Australian. It’s what we do.
And it does mean for those of us who do engage with the myths in order to enter into a deeper understanding of our environments, it’s a bit of a lonely space. Lol! We can cop it from inside the community as well. But, I hold out hope and there are good people slowly looking to the Indigenous nations and their laws and wisdom and stories to make sense of our land and enter into a deeper communion with it. But it’s not just about Aboriginals distrusting White Australia, still the onus is on White Australia who is as racist as it ever was, and we’re the ones with the power structures and privilege. So it really has to start with us.