Brian and Aneta landed in Canberra yesterday from a long flight. This is their fifth visit for a week of coaching, sharing and learning.
It’s a long way from Austria and Poland.
Our first day after flight recovery was for walking, semiotics, catch up, reset and sharing vision. So, we went for a drive and visited the National Film and Sound Archives, Shine Dome, National Archives and the Aboriginal Embassy. Each location unique and new. You could take semiotic walks in Canberra for 20 days and still not see anything the same. There is so much in this small city that one can see, feel and experience.
Every time Brian visits, he asks to visit the Aboriginal Tent Embassy (https://www.nma.gov.au/defining-moments/resources/aboriginal-tent-embassy; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aboriginal_Tent_Embassy).
The visit this time was the highlight of our day. We experienced once again a unique moment of synchronicity (Jung).
Our signal to stop, park and approach was the sight of a woman stoking the fire alone. We walked to her and said hello, introduced ourselves and asked her to tell us her story. Amazingly, she trusted us and opened up about why she was there, where she had been and who she was.
She invited us to sit by the fire and as we sat she gave Brian some feathers tied together and spoke about what they symbolised for her. She gave Aneta a knotted and twisted dried vine wrapped in red cloth and told us this was the rainbow serpent. She gave me a knotted stick nested into another curved piece of wood. This was a Palm Island egg she said.
So, we sat and listened as she talked about these three symbols and how each told a story for her. Nearby was a tin that she said contained the ashes of her child who died 9 months ago. There was silence. The fire crackled and a young fresh eucalypt branch began to push water from where it had been cut. ‘They are the tears of my mother’ she said. Her language was rhythmic like a song. Her rich poetic symbolic speech was captivating.
We didn’t learn her name at first but she said we had been sent to hear her story. There was a dead cockatoo by the fire. It looked like it had died recently. She told us how important the cockatoo was for the Dreamtime. Everything she spoke was lyrical and poetic. Every sentence was punctuated by rich symbols and myth. She danced about the fire and told us she had medicine for us. She was a medicine woman and then off she walked. She walked some way away from us and we could see her stripping branches of assorted eucalypts and wattles.
We waited for some time and she seemed to be in a trance for some time so we stood up not knowing whether to wait or leave. She saw as leaving and called for us to stay. She said ‘that’s right leave, you’re always too busy for time’ and more ‘that’s how it always is for you and your law but I don’t care about your law, I have my lore’.
So, we sat back down and she spoke to us about how the fresh branches would smoke and that we should bath in it. She pushed the branches into the fire and we were quickly soaked in smoke. She invited us to stand and follow the smoke as the gentle breeze moved it away from us.
She said, ‘this is your medicine’, this is your message for life’. She said ‘there’s no ruption, no heaven, just the now.’
She said, ‘there is no living in your law, but life in my lore’.
She stood in a dancing pose with these three strange white people, confronted by our preoccupation with time, schedules and watches. She said, ‘life is time, don’t you know that?’ ‘You fellas have never listened’ she said, ‘you are so full of things, chasing things and no time to sit and listen’.
She spoke poetically, semiotically and mythically about her years in the Northern Territory and about her tribe, people she missed and places she had travelled. She spoke about some of her suffering and about her greatest risk, interference, dispossession and white law. She told us about how her father and mother had been locked up for stealing but had just wanted food to eat. She herself had been abused and harmed many times. Unless you can think mythically, semiotically and poetically you would have struggled to understand what she was saying about her story and the Dreamtime.
By this time, we had lost all track of time but she told us that we had received the message we came looking for. She stood in a pose as if to say we had her permission to leave. So, I asked if I could take a selfie of us all and thankfully, She said yes.
Such a remarkable experience on a Sunday afternoon in Canberra. I have experienced nothing like this before. We felt enlivened and troubled by her words and message. We knew that we, the white guys, were her greatest existential risk but she welcomed us and shared with us her every anxiety, her every fear. As we walked to the car, she wished us well.
You can see by the pictures where we were. The Aboriginal Tent Embassy is in front of Old Parliament House right in front of the statue of King George the 5th – the symbol of English invasion, colonisation, imperialism and oppression.
You can also see the word in large letters; ‘sovereignty’ that we sat in front. In the background you can see in the distance the Australian War Memorial where there is no acknowledgement of the Great Frontier Wars (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_frontier_wars) (https://unsw.press/books/australian-frontier-wars-1788-1838/) that occurred in Australia when our First nations people were slaughtered.
Isn’t it fascinating what risks we worry about when confronted by someone whose very culture is threatened by what we have done. Not us personally but archetypically, we have been the aggressors to the longest continuous culture on the planet!
The greatest risk to her and her culture, was the culture we had brought 250 years ago to destroy her culture. If you want top know about culture, you need to sit with a First nations person for a few hours ‘’on country’ and listen. And you will quickly learn that culture is NOT ‘what we do around here’. If you don’t know about mythology and can’t think semiotically and poetically, you’re not likely to know or experience what culture is.
Yet, in spite of all of this History of dispossession and harm, she shared her story with us, offered her wisdom and stated her myths. It was up to us what we took away it was up to us to listen. AS we walked away, she even told us to reflect and value the moment because it was meant to be. We didn’t approach her by accident.
What a privilege to meet the Medicine Woman of Wisdom who gave us her name as we walked away – Imyradi.
Dr Rob Long
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Brian says
Rob, what a day, when deciding to stop and approach the “The Medicine Lady with Knowledge”. As you know we had been there before a couple of times, however this time we did not expect what was about to happen. Sitting around the fire, holding the symbols that she handed to us was magical, the dance that she continuously performed, her rituals, and her words were something else. On top of everything, we felt welcomed to join her around her sacred place, her fire, to listen to her story. The embodied feeling that we felt sitting at the fire, then walking around engulfing ourselves in the smoke cannot be explained in words. One has to be there to experience it, and we will probably never experience it again. We were destined to drive past, stop, and be present in the moment, joining her totally in Kairos time. To sum it all up in one word AWESOME !
Rob Long says
Yes Brian. There are no words for culture, when an experience like that is lived in such an encounter. and, it was only by accepting and respecting her myths, rituals, gestures, poetics and symbols that we could enter into her world for that brief moment. When we drop the nonsense definition of ‘what we do around here’ and learn that everything that she believed could not be seen or performed, then we begin to know what culture is about. So glad we shared that together.
Steve John Nevin says
Thanks for sharing Rob, really enjoyed – but could ‘feel’ those uncomfortable moments – definitely provoked reflection for me on ‘being’
Rob Long says
Steve, everything that she offered to tell us was freely given. She felt a spiritual connection and told us so. Indeed, we felt that she and us were meant to ‘meet’. It all came about simply by being prepared to listen, be humble and be a servant to what the other wanted. In many ways she directed us. It was quite an amazing experience, well beyond any words I could write. When we are prepared to ‘feel’ culture rather than control culture, then we enter into the story of the other where their poetics, rhythms, symbols, language and gestures connect to us in an embodied way. This was certainly a once in a lifetime experience for us.