Sydney Independent Media Centre Report from David Errey, who has been walking the land with respect, helping to carry the sacred fire for peace to the Sydney Olympics. ***recommended reading*** Date: Thu, 10 Aug 2000 18:10:41 +1000 -----Original Message----- From: David Errey Subject: Walk for Peace arriving in Canberra before August 22 Dear All, This is a message about the Walk for Peace from Lake Eyre to Sydney, sent from Orange NSW. We are approaching our destination! The Walk continues to astonish us all each day, and is likely to offer new excitements as we approach Sydney. We proceed by 'relay' or 'leap-frog', each doing 5 to 10 (or even 20 km. for some!) daily. The time was too short for us all to cover the entire distance. This way the whole road is walked by someone's feet. We will arrive in Canberra around August 20, where we will camp at the Aboriginal Tent Embassy opposite the old parliament house. We look forward to meeting others arriving to gather there, for the last walk into Sydney. We hope very much that some older people will join us too; as most of the Walkers are young, and would be very happy to receive the recognition of their elders for what they are doing for the future. We invite visitors to come and stay, and hear about the journey and its message, and enjoy the fire. And if you can continue with us to Sydney - bring a swag and a little tent if you can (we do have large tarps too), some good walking shoes, a car if you wish. Food is prepared for walkers, so we contribute a weekly sum of money. In Sydney we will arrive at the Aboriginal Tent Embassy also, established in Victoria Park next to Sydney Uni, where there is already an encampment and lots of enthusiastic daily visitors. We will also visit other Aboriginal sites in Sydney. THIS IS NOT A PROTEST MARCH, IT IS A WELCOMING WALK FOR PEACE AND A HAPPIER FUTURE. We do not travel under aggressive banners. All comers are welcome. Please circulate this message to your other friends on email and by other communications. Thankyou. (Honey Nelson) * I think we Walkers are all in transit inwardly as well as outwardly. The passage over our lovely Land has given every one of us a sense of belonging and filial care. We have come much closer to that ancestral love of Land which the Aboriginal people entreat us to give. We have also come much closer to some Aboriginal people themselves, through our visits to their town communities; and confronted a view of our history and culture which demands recognition, debate, and re-creation for future shared living. There are some dark blind alleys which our euro-culture entered long ago; and if we acknowledge their shame and wrongfulness, we can at last withdraw from these dark places in order to follow clear and good paths. If Aboriginal people behaved in accordance with long-time european culture, they would barely speak to us, their attackers. Plots for reprisal and vendetta would occupy their lives. But mercifully they are not european. They are far more ancient, the oldest human culture on Earth, and they behave as very old and experienced wise people do: they observe and understand the causes of gross behaviour in others, they grieve for ignorance and violence, they roll with the blows, and they do not dedicate their injured lives to retaliation and revenge. They are, by necessity and learning, profoundly pacific. And they seek to change people's excesses by education. We have been honoured with an unearned hospitality, kindness, and conversational freedom. We travel with an Aboriginal elder of great distinction, which gives our group a passage into the communities. But we are a crowd of 30 or 40 whitefellas nonetheless, every one of us from lineage of takeover and racial arrogance and institutionalised colonialism. Yet we are met in every town with willing, intelligent and exciting discussion, a desire to talk history, to exchange stories of sorrow, apology, pain, reconstruction. We have been told big stories, taken to special places, given fine food from the Land, offered big ideas for how to heal the damage. For this Land, and thereby the people, are grossly damaged. We don't realise, we europeans, what we are doing when we plough and trample and excavate and deep-mine a very old continent. Our families have traditionally and enthusiastically mass-farmed the younger lands of europe and asia and the americas, as though at a dance-party, pounding their soils and waters day and night. (Though even now even these lands are feeling the exhaustion and the chemical intoxicants, their dead river circulations and sickened inland seas and frightened retreated creatures.) But we can't treat an Old Land like a rave party. This old Land, and its old human culture, is an old grandmother, with papery-thin skin and spare circulation and fragile bones. Good culture treats its old people with the greatest respect for their delicacy and for their long experience. Ignorant and juvenile subculture (as we well know) can abuse and insult old age, with smashing action and foolish contempt. It seems to me we are a foolish juvenile culture, drunk and vain and aggressive with our insecurities. And we cannot see the grace and propriety and decency of the old culture we have attacked - smashed their house windows and stolen their simple necessities and then (unbelievably) assaulted and raped the old woman. Violent assault upon the old, along with assault and abuse of children and animals and all those defenceless, we know well to be the most base and venal of crimes. We all have a terrible case to answer. * Our Walk has taken us from the inland salt lakes, across the Flinders Ranges formed by the upheaval of ancient sea-bed, through the southern Strzlecki desert and its vast pastoral leases, past the gates of uranium and coal and copper and magnesium mining explorations, and into the great eastern region of the Darling River and its tributaries, farmed for wheat and sheep and (more recently) cotton. We have paused in many towns along the way, Marree and Copley, Nepabunna community, Broken Hill and Wilcannia, northwards to Bourke, Brewarrina, Walgett, Moree, then south through Coonabarabran, the beautiful Warrumbungle range, Gilgandra, Dubbo, Wellington, Molong, Orange, now Bathurst. Beyond here we head through Cowra to Yass and Canberra on about August 20, where we will stop over at the Aboriginal Tent Embassy before leaving for Sydney on August 26, to arrive by September 1st. In most of these communities the elders have gathered to welcome us, and from Moree onwards we have also been welcomed by some town councils, and were even escorted by police as we walked through the main street of Moree. There is both rising hope and deepening sorrow in these Aboriginal communities. Many of the younger people are falling away into hard drugs, aggression, vandalism and hopelessness. But there are also many both young and old who are vitalising their people with strong community projects, arts and building and sport and travelling to other places. We have been received by some of the very finest people, speakers and leaders for change and care and repair of shattered families. It is a privilege to see, even a little, into the passionate lives and ardent work of people who are barely noticed by white australia, not in fact nor in fiction, not in magazines or TV shows or in daily conversation. Their deepest source of pain, and the interior cause of family loss and destruction, keeps returning to the same deprivation: the loss of their Land. And this is not a dis-possession as we would see it: it is felt more as a love and high duty of care torn from them. Their obligation to the Land is like to an ageing beloved parent; whose gift in rearing and providing for us is answered by our own constant care. The wholesale annexation of Aboriginal land in a few generations, the immobilisation of people who live within land as migratory birds move rhythmically between continents, and the subsequent large-scale harm to the impounded land, is akin to our own recent historic experiences: when our war-torn families have been rounded up, our mother arrested, ourselves locked in compounds, from where we are forced to see her beaten, stripped and crying. This does not exaggerate or romanticise the grief of modern Aboriginal people, urban or rural, landed or dispossessed. Everywhere they speak of the same primary anguish and powerlessness: the captive land scraped and drilled and exhausted, and the captive people overpowered, unable to deliver their primary duty of care. They see their own sickness and pain as an extension of that of their mother Land. In the desert and ancient salt lakes, it is uranium mining, water stripping, the high-risk and actual poisoning of deep water reservoirs, and the excoriating feet of cattle across the paper-thin surface. In the sea-bed rock ranges, it is more mining, blasting, and focal injury to sacred places - many of which are mineral localities, well-known in lore and law, visited for special ceremony because of their powerful and concentrated character. (The stories about such places are telling: the old people know that metals and minerals can drive people to excess - gold, diamonds, magnesium, iron, uranium, copper etc. - can cause greed and cruelty and violence, must be deeply respected for their special powers.) In the dry hinterland, it is mass lock-up of immense reaches of crown land, pastoral leases hundreds of thousands of square kilometres, whose numerous roads are literally forbidden to those who own them - we the public of Australia. Sparse straggles of cattle range in huge unfenced territories, and in some leases the closed roads protect uranium mines from public access and attention. In the broad rich river country, the fences confine the roads, and the Land is entirely sold over to mass-monoculture farming, wheat and sheep and now the internationally-owned cotton agribusiness, which mines water and soil much as coal or iron is mined - short-term industries set up for a couple of decades until the soil is exhausted, lake-sized dams multiplying throughout the region, the herbicidal insecticidal tailings draining off into struggling water-courses. (A couple of years ago all the fish went belly-up at Moree. It was too cold for them, said one farmer earnestly.) There is a kind of ridiculous, tragic cowboy recklessness in these industries. It is well recognised that industries such as cotton and uranium will be expended in perhaps ten to fifteen years, that the water provision for agribusiness is grossly and critically depleted, that salinity is an awful and inevitable price paid, that the water strata serving uranium mining are not definitively mapped, that these processes are manifestly threatening, that a spill or geological disruption would have unpredictable and unmanageable consequences, that radioactive wastes cannot yet (or perhaps ever) be safely contained or detoxified, and that they remain deadly to life for thousands of human generations. How can we embrace such aggressive, uncaring, hungry industries? How can we, the present powerful middle-aged generation, dice with and sacrifice the future of our descendants with such gay abandon, for a few dollars to spend on ourselves? How can we look our children in the face as we endorse governments, and invest in industries, which brazenly risk the continent's entire water reservoir and channels with absolutely deadly chemistry, and reportedly plan to FLY their poisonous products out of remote places if roads are unnavigable? People in Europe lie down on their roads to blockade against transport of nuclear materials. What are Australians going to do? Are we going to wave cheerfully to the uranium trucks, as they drive several hundred kilometres from Beverley and Honeymoon and Yaramba and Goulds Dam via the Flinders Ranges and the Barrier Highway south to Adelaide? Will our grandchildren be around to smile and wave to them too? * The recurring theme of sorrow we meet amongst Aboriginal parents is about their children. About all children. About the future. About white people around them who do not seem to care about the children of others, nor even - incredibly - about their own children. They are at a loss to understand us, our deliberate abandonment of parental duty of care. If some of their people are seen to be vagrant parents, lost to alcohol or family collapse - our own collective abandonment of child care is monumental in scale; as we toss their future to the wayward winds of an overheated, sickened planet. * This Walk with Aboriginal people, and with Kevin Buzzacott, is teaching a straggling group of white people about the meaning of things Sacred. These are not just breathless moments beside pretty waterfalls. We carry simple smoking sticks lighted in a sacred fire which has been smoking perpetually for several years now. Fire has an ancestral sacred meaning and purpose: to draw people near, draw them together, warm their feet and hands, warm their hearts, illuminate their surroundings. When seen as a sacred element, Fire becomes a moral metaphor for good living, and thereby is a source of communal healing. Uncle Kevin brings an old fire to Sydney, and asks people to draw together, get warm, and start again: start talks for peace, start talks to end the suffering, to start again a new and considerate way, do it better this time. Start again. For this old country was visited by suffering two centuries ago, settled by wretched and brutalised people, herded by their equally miserable jailers. If we look at where we've come from, we can see a chain of harsh suffering and even sadism, amongst our own people and against others; and ultimately, against the very Land itself. For eight or ten generations we have, as it were, been putting the boot in: and we inherit this chain of abuse, of the indigenous people, of the assaulted Land, and of each other. We can choose to perpetuate it; or to heal it and bring it to an end. We now know that abused people can be healed. We do it for each other often now, and tenderly. We do it to relieve their own suffering, and to stop the chain of cruelty that is perpetuated through their children. * Kevin Buzzacott asks that we do this simple thing now. Come together around a Fire in Sydney, where the first settlers came; and recognise the terrors of our history, witness the effects, and talk of Peace. "It's like having a splinter in your foot: you have to go to that place, to get it out. It's the stumbling block, that foot - the same foot that came from over the sea, and went to all those other countries too, that caused all the destructions.... "These old lands and rivers were created not only for hunting and swimming and fishing, they also come with a lot of spirit and a lot of messages. They were not made for poisoning and destruction. When that foot came, it did a lot of devastating things. They didn't come the right way.... "It hit a nerve with me a few years ago - all that scratching and digging and taking the lake water. These people didn't know what they're doing. This country is delicate; you got to tiptoe on this old country. Sit down with respect, for them old hills and old places. Then you'll get the fruit, the reward from that place.... "This country got so much power. If it released even a little bit, old human beings would be nothing.... "Since human beings were put on Earth, they have forgotten their responsibilities. We have to remind them. To break through for Peace. A bit like crying time, a big sorry time, sorry camp... "Lay your guns down, lay down your batons, and come to the Fire and talk." Orange NSW, August 9, 2000 www.come.to/lakeeyre ------------------------------------------------------ RecOzNet2 has a page @ http://www.green.net.au/recoznet2 and is archived at http://www.mail-archive.com/ To unsubscribe from this list, mail [EMAIL PROTECTED], and in the body of the message, include the words: unsubscribe announce or click here mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]?Body=unsubscribe%20announce This posting is provided to the individual members of this group without permission from the copyright owner for purposes of criticism, comment, scholarship and research under the "fair use" provisions of the Federal copyright laws and it may not be distributed further without permission of the copyright owner, except for "fair use." RecOzNet2 is archived for members @ http://www.mail-archive.com/recoznet2%40paradigm4.com.au/
