Treasured Possessions

By Frances Goold

1

Treasured Possessions

There is some big love inside countless Australians for places on this continent where they grew up, or spent precious, formative, or unique moments in time. New migrants are starting to form attachments to the places where they settle. Others not so lucky are left floundering in limbo having fled their countries of origin for Australia, and still awaiting processing and resettlement.

Attachment to birthplace begins with a toddler’s first step into the familiar world that surrounds them. First settlers and migrants recreated nostalgic bits of the old countries in their backyards, for better or for worse. Most of us are familiar with the feeling of being attached to a place, and acutely so when it is gone, or lost. A bush dream relinquished to climate change after decades of conservation and regeneration, a self-built house burned down in the Black Summer bushfires, the grief of so many people as they watched the Wollemi National Park and its precious wildlife destroyed by fire, the destruction of Kangaroo Island, the wilful destruction of Juukun Gorge, a dying Great Barrier Reef, the list goes on. These fragile places are our places of escape and peace, sentimental retreats we can still conjure up in imagination when we cannot return to them in real life. To lose them to dereliction, greed and galloping climate change is shocking and deracinating.

* * * * *

‘Participants expressed disgust about a statue of John McDouall Stuart being erected in Alice Springs following the 150th anniversary of his successful attempt to reach the top end. This expedition led to the opening up of the “South Australian frontier” which led to massacres as the telegraph line was established and white settlers moved into the region. People feel sad whenever they see the statue; its presence and the fact that Stuart is holding a gun is disrespectful to the Aboriginal community who are descendants of the families slaughtered during the massacres throughout central Australia.’[1]

A recent email communication between a friend of mine and an Aboriginal friend produced the following account of settlement:

‘… In relation to land clearing he said that there was government policy that settlers who were given land or allowed to take up land had to clear it and keep it cleared, or they would lose the land. So they did it themselves, and they also used local Aboriginal labour to clear the land. So, in some situations the Aboriginal people would’ve been cutting down their own birthing trees and other sacred places. And he said that an elder he knew thirty years ago talked about it being very hard work.’

‘He also spoke generally about the practice of Aboriginal labour being paid out not to the Aboriginal people but to the police, with the money ending up in government coffers. I asked him what they lived on and he said very little, that in the Northern Territory they were paid with food but in other places they may have received very small amounts of money, enough just to survive for bread, tea, and sugar etcetera, but not paid wages, and he said that sort of treatment and humiliation also caused great trauma.’

‘He also said that although Indigenous people were removed from their country, they didn’t actually feel it had been taken from them because it was still there even though they don’t own it, but the pain was more about the fact that the country was being abused. He described taking some old Aboriginal women to places that were sacred to them (at their request because they needed a neutral escort) – including birthing trees – and that when they were there they got very excited, but when they left it seemed like it wasn’t that they needed to be there all the time because the land and the places we’re still there, and they could come back again some other time. He seemed to be talking about a thing of not having to actually own the land to feel deeply connected to it.’

I recall the depth of my own attachment to a bush block and its astonishing beauty as it responded to decades of regeneration and conservation, and how I grew to love its wildlife, its sounds and fragrances. I still grieve over having to surrender its pristine integrity to the unpredictable and destructive ravages of climate change, and still miss it and the dream of paradise – of stability, certainty, and meaning – it gave to me.

So I cannot begin to imagine how it might feel for Indigenous people to be violently driven off their lands, to lose not just a place but a spiritual existence of profound respect, depth, continuity and meaning, to be dispossessed and displaced from tribal lore in fragile relationship to country, to suffer enforced rupture and deracination from whatever dreamtime country that is embedded deep in their hearts and souls.

I therefore envision the constitutional Voice as proposed by Indigenous people as a pathway to replacing trauma with healing, of reconnecting to ‘country’ through our shared humanity and mutual love of the continent that nurtures us, and as a promissory note for collaboration on environmental protection and advocacy.

I also view the Voice referendum as a last opportunity for mutual ennoblement.

[1] Megan Davis, https://monumentaustralia.org.au/themes/people/exploration/display/103326-john-mcdouall-stuart

 

2

The voice as healing

 

Judy Atkinson’s 2002 treatise, Trauma Trails,[1] is a deeply moving account of the psychological trauma suffered by Aboriginal people, some of whom retain collective memories of events from the time of settlement.

She cites harrowing accounts of frontier violence, which “continued at different levels across the continent into the early twentieth century. At the end of the nineteenth century, Archibald Meston provides some insight into the trauma of people seeking shelter from the violence in the Cooktown region when he wrote to the Home Secretary:

“They come in here like hunted wild beasts, having lived for years in a state of absolute terrorism. Their manifest joy at assurances of safety and protection is pathetic beyond expression”(p 61).

Atkinson’s work is of immeasurable importance for her people and for us all in the depth of her understand of what is required for individual trauma healing and – it follows – for addressing transgenerational trauma. At its healing heart is dadirri,[2] an almost sacred process of listening and exchanging stories in a mutually respectful, confidential and safe setting. Every aspect and dimension of the trauma processing work she engages in and writes about appear to correspond precisely with the findings of Western trauma counselling and therapy research, an as yet unresearched correlation that augurs well for the design of grassroots interventions based on the pioneering work of extraordinarily dedicated Indigenous professionals such as Atkinson.

On the back cover of Atkinson’s book is a description of a workshop she gave in the Kimberleys:

‘In the circle a woman began to speak from a place of deep pain and despair. She described herself as bad, dirty, ugly, words she had taken into herself from childhood experiences of abuse. I lent forward and sang her a song. “How could anyone ever tell you you are anything less than beautiful…”. While sitting with her, as the words settled into her soul, another woman said to the circle: … “you are creating song lines – from trauma trails.” I was honoured by this description of my work.’

‘The traumatic experiences of introduced diseases, physical violence, rapes, starvations, torture, and death are not those of individuals alone. Rather, these traumas were both individual and collective. Furthermore, any one of these disasters as a traumatic event could be passed though the adult and child survivors to their children and grandchildren. The multiple layers compounded the trauma. Today the trauma remains in the hearts, minds and souls of Aboriginal families whose ancestors survived these times. Listen to Alice Kelly and hear the pain explicit in her words:

“The violence, where our people were massacred and slaughtered. They rounded them up like kangaroos, my people. Women and children too. They drove them on foot from horseback, with whips cracking over their heads. They shot them and the sands covered them over. Still there today. I weep as I walk through the massacre sites today. Barbarians. Saxon barbarians. They showed us no mercy”.’ [3]

Atkinson also quotes Pat O’Shane:

‘The psychological impact of the experiences of dispossession, denigration and degradation are beyond description, they strike at the very core of our sense of being and identity…Throughout Aboriginal society in this country are seen what can only be described by anyone’s measure as dysfunctional families and communities, whose relationships with each other are very often marked by anger, depression and despair, dissension, and divisiveness. The effects are generational…I recognised all the things that happened to me through my grandparents, and their parents; their brothers and sisters whom I had known as a child; through my mother and her siblings; though my cousins and my siblings. I recognised the things that happened to the thousands of other Aboriginal families like our family, and I marvelled that we weren’t all stark, raving mad.’ [4]

My friend recalled her experiences on a visit to the Northern Territory in the late 90s:

‘We travelled way out with a bunch of older Indigenous women (none spoke English) to a closed station (ex-mission), which was dry.[5] We visited an ochre cave among other amazing country, and there was another friend (white) there from Tasmania who was working in child protection, and she told me horrific stories of kids as young as two years being raped, and her unbearable role of having to take them away from families to save their lives, yet totally understanding the Stolen Generation… and abused women really wanting the intervention, and begging for help…and after that I went to Uluṟu …and I stayed in a caravan in a fenced maintenance yard at back of Mutujulu (not a dry community), and all night there was yelling and fighting, and at one stage terrible screaming and next day the ranger told me a 16 year-old girl had been beaten to death by her drunken partner. The next couple of nights the Ranger locked me in the yard for my protection, though the village was much quieter anyway. It was very sad and shocking.’

As Atkinson corroborates here, psychological trauma can be so severe among Aboriginal people as to border on psychosis, yet she is convinced that within Aboriginal communities lie the resources for healing which properly funded Indigenous services can deliver.

Atkinson has first-hand experience of the dynamics of healing and is hopeful about the transformative power of similar dadirri circle–based therapeutic initiatives in breaking the cycles of trauma-related violence in Aboriginal communities. Given the beginnings of trauma healing in Indigenous communities by Atkinson in her ground-breaking work, the implications are encouraging for reducing the transgenerational cycles of trauma as an artefact of the therapeutic initiatives.

Enlightened by the workshops she began conducting over two decades ago, Atkinson has concluded that:

‘Healing required experiencing feelings of safety in what had previously been experienced as an unsafe world. When people work together to create safety for each other they rebuild community, and what emerges is a deepening self-knowledge not just of the individual but of the group – community is made in this activity. The ability to begin to rebuild the essence and experience of family and community, therefore, is an essence of healing processes. The group who was involved with We-Ali (the name of the group therapy programme) used principles of ceremony to aid the healing processes, which strengthened aspects of the cultural and spiritual identity. Because the groups were mixed, often a sharing of cultures occurred as well. The transformational processes of healing were integrated as people settled into the knowledge that healing never ends, that the journey is long and hard, but that in transcendence the changes that occur strengthen and empower the person and the group for ongoing change and growth’.

If it can be more widely understood that the psychodynamic nature of psychological trauma is transgenerational, and that its insidious compounding, irradiating trajectory can only be moderated and resolved through a deeply worked through, non-hierarchical healing process, then it may be understood that enshrining an Indigenous Voice in the Australian Constitution in all its sacred, symbolic and structural dimensions is a vital part of the healing process for traumatised Indigenous people.

The necessary structural, social, and therapeutic conditions for trauma healing – as with countless other issues requiring urgent attention and resolution – will be given a greater and more direct representation via the same democratic processes of consultation begun so many years ago that led to the Uluru Statement from the Heart and now, the Voice Referendum.

That a majority of Australians might vote no to something so graciously proposed by a majority of Indigenous people is a depressing prospect. That such an opportunity for healing through a constitutional enshrinement of the voices of Aboriginal people (so that those voices will no longer be subject to the political whims and agendas of successive governments) could possibly be rejected by the rest of us who are so enshrined, or that we might simply slam the door on such an extraordinary gesture of peace and reconciliation, hardly bears thinking about.

Last Wednesday night, the Indigenous lawyer and activist Noel Pearson was interviewed by Sarah Ferguson on Possession Island (claimed for Britain by Captain Cook in 1770), which he described as ‘Ground Zero” for Native Title rights granted in 2001 to the Kaurareg people. At the end of the interview on the Voice Ferguson asked Pearson how he would feel if the Voice referendum failed:

‘My concern is not for me myself personally, my concern is for having led my people to trust in the Australian people. And if that trust is not repaid, then I’m accountable, I feel I am accountable for that – I’m going to have to account for that to my people, because I’ve asked them to trust in the system, to trust in this process, to put the work into this process, to put their faith in the Australian people, and if that doesn’t pay out, I’m going to have to front up and…I’ll have to have some kind of words for people who have been so stalwart, so faithful, and who have invested so much hope into this possibility that it’s almost impossible for me to work out what I can say to them’.

One can only hope that if Noel Pearson and his hardworking mob are at a loss for words after Saturday October 14, it is because they are too overjoyed to speak.

[1] Judy Atkinson, Trauma Trails, Recreating Song Lines: The Transgenerational Effects of Trauma in Indigenous Australia, Spinifex Press, 2002.

[2] Op cit, p15.

[3] Taped interview with Alice Kelly by the author, cited p 64.

[4] O’Shane, P. (1995) ‘The Psychological Impact of White Colonialism on Aboriginal People’, Australasian Psychiatry, vol 3, no 3,pp 149-53. (pp 151-3).

[5] Alcohol-free.

 

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