If You Don’t Preserve It – You Don’t Deserve It.

The creation myth of the aboriginal people is a charming and seductive story.

In the Dreamtime, everything was already there under the surface of the earth and came into being because the ancestors broke through and made things real by describing and singing about them. Everything – rocks, plants, rivers, insects – came into being through song and will return from view if we do not continue to revere and sing about them. If we don’t preserve it, we don’t deserve it.

This is complete nonsense, or course, but so is the basis for every religion. The idea of God creating heaven and earth and resting on the sabbath, or that God spoke through a shepherd in Mecca or Joseph Smith in New York, or that Gaea and Chaos procreated to create darkness and light. And don’t get me started on Brahma and Vishnu and Shiva. Too many gods; they cannot all be right.

When the Christian British arrived here they obviously thought that the “natives” were worthless lazy hunter-gatherers with no culture and no religion and no law. But the real Australians had been managing this land and practicing according to a consistent law for 60,000 years before white people were even white. Myth and law and tradition here have been combined for millennia.

Aboriginal clans have obviously fought over things but they also exchange important tokens to cement a common understanding of how interdependent we all are. There were territories but no fences. There is the idea of “tenderrum” which welcomes others when needed on the assumption that they would leave afterwards.  Land wasn’t something controlled and traded with deeds but a common resource that everyone has a responsibility to maintain and share. Just because aboriginals were wanderers does not mean they had no idea of responsibility; all the country was linked by songlines and “ways through” that had to be maintained and respected.

There’s a lot to learn from this as we look at climate change, and population growth, and water shortage and all their consequences.

Oh, and every other religion has produced terrorists in its name – but not here.

The photos are  of Uluru in a rainstorm including the astonishing sight of a standing lenticular wave over the rock. Also the petroglyphs near the head of the Kuniya trail when you can see the image of the sand python who created Uluru high on the wall of this canyon.