Encountering Australian Aboriginal people's traditional culture. (A sketchbook).
Created | Updated Apr 27, 2012
I started working on this 23/4/2012. I may eventually submit it for Peer Review to become an Edited Guide Entry but I don't know if it will be possible to make it fit that format. and structure In the meantime I'm starting on it like a 'sketchbook' working up ideas as I would my art...not being fixed. The 'sketchbook' is part of it..but will probably mostly disappear at the end...I'm not sure.. It may take sometime to be finished. I haven't even read the guidelines yet. I'll maybe take that a bit slowly to read them and absorb them.
I now think it wouldn't fit the Edited Guide structure..25/4/2012
I'll update it periodically.
I'm aware it's a bit fixed already in style..3rd person and all that.
It might have to fall apart a bit, before I can put it back together a bit.
26/4/2012
Okay..I'm thinking it might be in two parts..The third person and first..or even mix them up or both?
***
First person stuff.
27/4/2012
I saw a lot of old black and white photographs in books and some in museums of people in traditional dress and painted with tradional body paint designs. They are very poignant..and brings home that really that so much has gone...also the map of Australia that shows the territories of the many tribes that existed once.
I'm struggling to write about my personal experiences because they were fleeting and ephemoral..and I wonder whether I was really getting it at all.
The landscape is literally covered with places that have significance, and it is requested that tourists do not even go and look at certain features. I remember once when we were taken to a narrow river valley, boulder strewn..mostly dried up..steep rocks either side. The guy leading our tour, who was well informed about these things, said we shouldn't follow the ravine all the way down because of the importance of the pool at the end. None of us did.
I saw a place in the desert also surrounded by rocks, a big depression in the ground which was the 'quarry' where the many coloured ochres were collected for paintings and body paint.
I saw the rock paintings in the Kakdu national park in the far north...many hundreds of years old; they are periodically re-painted. We had a guide; I don't think he was a full Aboriginal..but we didn't question him on that. He had a lot of knowledge..but really it was like visiting a museum in the landscape. There were the remarkable rock paintings of animal and plant Dreamings..the streams, (the rainy season had just ended), where certain plants were put in pools to paralyse fish to bring them to the surface and be easily caught...the flight at evening of a flock of black cockatoos, echoing around the rocks eerrily which stays with me..as a kind of personal dreaming..but what did it mean?
It was all empty of the original people..
It was all empty of the original people..(actually I just dug out the booklet I have on Kakadu..it says the Bininj/Munggy tribe still live there. Most of the booklet is aimed at tourists to do with hiking and camping) I can only give my experience..and the booklet admits that most have died out or 'moved'.
Kakadu. Rock paintings. Aboriginal guide - streams, ponds...rainy season.
Alice Springs..My leaving the 'restaurant' experience...constant feeling of never being able to really understand and make connection. Aboriginal tradition of never looking someone in the eye when talking. Women's business. Men's business.
***
Third person encounter including knowledge gained by my encounter with museums and books, the western way of storing cultural knowledge.
BEGINNING.
Where to start for the white English person's encounter with something so different?
Is it even possible? It is easy to project our way of thinking onto different cultural traditions. The first tribes arrived around 60, 000 years..possibly before Homo sapiens had reached much of Europe.
It could be said that the gulf in understanding and thinking is too large to be bridged at all between humans coming from such radically different traditions, without an unacceptable corruption of the thing trying to be understood. But there can be a connection so long as the gulf is always borne in mind and *respected*.
The one term Aboriginal is usually used to describe the indigenous peoples of the continent of Australia. But there were huge numbers of tribes across the whole continent by the time Europeans arrived..most are extinct now, and vast numbers of different languages were spoken.
http://mappery.com/map-of/Australia-Aboriginal-Tribes-Map
Using modern English as a way of thinking is problematic. Language informs thinking.
Land or 'country' as many Aboriginal people's refer to it in English is the concept around which culture revolves.
A white European is unlikely to be able to grasp the full significance of 'country'. Thinking is founded on country...and this is connected to the Dreaming.
How to understand the Dreaming? It's to do with inner and outer reality and it's to do with the past and how country was created..but country is being created all the time..like a kind of timelessness...so is also always present.
And a Dreaming can be a Quantas Dreaming flying overhead.
Paintings were to do with making country. The point is country is as much inside a person as in the landscape. Paintings are maps.
It is a very sophisticated conceptualisation of the connection between psychic reality and the world in which one lives. The outer world informs the inner.
A mistake is made if it is supposed this has any relavence to the western Abrahmic conceptualisation of 'spirit' being something above and disconnected from land and the earth. If one went back far enough in western history though we were all once part of hunter gatherer communities without ownership of land..although territory would have been important.
But again it's all too easy to suppose a kind of universalism to cultural traditions.
The pragmatic business of hunting and gathering and the whole business of staying alive will be primary though for any culture.
***
Other aspects. ***
South Australia Museum***
http://www.samuseum.sa.gov.au/whatson/whattosee/permanent/aacg
Best collection of paintings from various tribes and attempt to understand the paintings on their own terms rather than impose a certain interpretation divorced from their cultural context. But in terms of aesthetics and the effect on one's mind, at what ever level they are quite overwhelming.
**
'To understand our law, our culture and our relationship to the physical and spiritual world, you must begin with land. Everything about aboriginal society is inextricably woven with, and connected to, land. Culture is the land, the land and spirituality of aboriginal people, our cultural beliefs or reason for existence is the land. You take that away and you take away our reason for existence. We have grown that land up. We are dancing, singing, and painting for the land. We are celebrating the land. Removed from our lands, we are literally removed from ourselves.
..'
Mick Dodson (former Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Justice Commissioner)
http://www.aboriginalartonline.com/culture/land.php
Although this site is about selling paintings essentially..at least an attempt is made to explain cultural ideas to a westerner..and Aboriginal peoples themselves now choose to sell work.
They still choose to be secretive and not talk about the most important knowledge in the works.
Dreamings from Arnhem land region traditionally done on bark.
http://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/collection/search/?q=aboriginal+bark+paintings
Also on rocks. Such places would be highly sacred.
People are asked to not visit certain features in the landscape..certainly not to climb Uluru (Ayres rock) as vast numbers of tourists still do everyday.
***
MORE NEEDED ON THE PRAGMATIC/OBJECTIVE ASPECTS OF SURVIVAL eg the burning of small areas of bush to prevent large scale fires.
Adding the leaves of certain plants to pools in streams in the Kakado region in the rainy season to paralyse fish and bring them to the surface to be collected.
I now think it wouldn't fit the Edited Guide structure..25/4/2012
I'll update it periodically.
I'm aware it's a bit fixed already in style..3rd person and all that.
It might have to fall apart a bit, before I can put it back together a bit.
26/4/2012
Okay..I'm thinking it might be in two parts..The third person and first..or even mix them up or both?
***
First person stuff.
27/4/2012
I saw a lot of old black and white photographs in books and some in museums of people in traditional dress and painted with tradional body paint designs. They are very poignant..and brings home that really that so much has gone...also the map of Australia that shows the territories of the many tribes that existed once.
I'm struggling to write about my personal experiences because they were fleeting and ephemoral..and I wonder whether I was really getting it at all.
The landscape is literally covered with places that have significance, and it is requested that tourists do not even go and look at certain features. I remember once when we were taken to a narrow river valley, boulder strewn..mostly dried up..steep rocks either side. The guy leading our tour, who was well informed about these things, said we shouldn't follow the ravine all the way down because of the importance of the pool at the end. None of us did.
I saw a place in the desert also surrounded by rocks, a big depression in the ground which was the 'quarry' where the many coloured ochres were collected for paintings and body paint.
I saw the rock paintings in the Kakdu national park in the far north...many hundreds of years old; they are periodically re-painted. We had a guide; I don't think he was a full Aboriginal..but we didn't question him on that. He had a lot of knowledge..but really it was like visiting a museum in the landscape. There were the remarkable rock paintings of animal and plant Dreamings..the streams, (the rainy season had just ended), where certain plants were put in pools to paralyse fish to bring them to the surface and be easily caught...the flight at evening of a flock of black cockatoos, echoing around the rocks eerrily which stays with me..as a kind of personal dreaming..but what did it mean?
It was all empty of the original people..
It was all empty of the original people..(actually I just dug out the booklet I have on Kakadu..it says the Bininj/Munggy tribe still live there. Most of the booklet is aimed at tourists to do with hiking and camping) I can only give my experience..and the booklet admits that most have died out or 'moved'.
Kakadu. Rock paintings. Aboriginal guide - streams, ponds...rainy season.
Alice Springs..My leaving the 'restaurant' experience...constant feeling of never being able to really understand and make connection. Aboriginal tradition of never looking someone in the eye when talking. Women's business. Men's business.
***
Third person encounter including knowledge gained by my encounter with museums and books, the western way of storing cultural knowledge.
BEGINNING.
Where to start for the white English person's encounter with something so different?
Is it even possible? It is easy to project our way of thinking onto different cultural traditions. The first tribes arrived around 60, 000 years..possibly before Homo sapiens had reached much of Europe.
It could be said that the gulf in understanding and thinking is too large to be bridged at all between humans coming from such radically different traditions, without an unacceptable corruption of the thing trying to be understood. But there can be a connection so long as the gulf is always borne in mind and *respected*.
The one term Aboriginal is usually used to describe the indigenous peoples of the continent of Australia. But there were huge numbers of tribes across the whole continent by the time Europeans arrived..most are extinct now, and vast numbers of different languages were spoken.
http://mappery.com/map-of/Australia-Aboriginal-Tribes-Map
Using modern English as a way of thinking is problematic. Language informs thinking.
Land or 'country' as many Aboriginal people's refer to it in English is the concept around which culture revolves.
A white European is unlikely to be able to grasp the full significance of 'country'. Thinking is founded on country...and this is connected to the Dreaming.
How to understand the Dreaming? It's to do with inner and outer reality and it's to do with the past and how country was created..but country is being created all the time..like a kind of timelessness...so is also always present.
And a Dreaming can be a Quantas Dreaming flying overhead.
Paintings were to do with making country. The point is country is as much inside a person as in the landscape. Paintings are maps.
It is a very sophisticated conceptualisation of the connection between psychic reality and the world in which one lives. The outer world informs the inner.
A mistake is made if it is supposed this has any relavence to the western Abrahmic conceptualisation of 'spirit' being something above and disconnected from land and the earth. If one went back far enough in western history though we were all once part of hunter gatherer communities without ownership of land..although territory would have been important.
But again it's all too easy to suppose a kind of universalism to cultural traditions.
The pragmatic business of hunting and gathering and the whole business of staying alive will be primary though for any culture.
***
Other aspects. ***
South Australia Museum***
http://www.samuseum.sa.gov.au/whatson/whattosee/permanent/aacg
Best collection of paintings from various tribes and attempt to understand the paintings on their own terms rather than impose a certain interpretation divorced from their cultural context. But in terms of aesthetics and the effect on one's mind, at what ever level they are quite overwhelming.
**
'To understand our law, our culture and our relationship to the physical and spiritual world, you must begin with land. Everything about aboriginal society is inextricably woven with, and connected to, land. Culture is the land, the land and spirituality of aboriginal people, our cultural beliefs or reason for existence is the land. You take that away and you take away our reason for existence. We have grown that land up. We are dancing, singing, and painting for the land. We are celebrating the land. Removed from our lands, we are literally removed from ourselves.
..'
Mick Dodson (former Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Justice Commissioner)
http://www.aboriginalartonline.com/culture/land.php
Although this site is about selling paintings essentially..at least an attempt is made to explain cultural ideas to a westerner..and Aboriginal peoples themselves now choose to sell work.
They still choose to be secretive and not talk about the most important knowledge in the works.
Dreamings from Arnhem land region traditionally done on bark.
http://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/collection/search/?q=aboriginal+bark+paintings
Also on rocks. Such places would be highly sacred.
People are asked to not visit certain features in the landscape..certainly not to climb Uluru (Ayres rock) as vast numbers of tourists still do everyday.
***
MORE NEEDED ON THE PRAGMATIC/OBJECTIVE ASPECTS OF SURVIVAL eg the burning of small areas of bush to prevent large scale fires.
Adding the leaves of certain plants to pools in streams in the Kakado region in the rainy season to paralyse fish and bring them to the surface to be collected.
