Living In Aboriginal Australia

Abstract

Land, people, religion and culture are more closely integrated in the societies of Aboriginal Australians than in white societies. The distinctions commonly made by whites between owners of land and the land itself, the secular and the spiritual, the individual author and the text he or she has created, are alien to Aboriginal society. Invading Europeans displacing indigenous people may, however, aspire to be part of the land in a spiritual sense. In his poem ‘The land was ours before we were the land’s’ the United States poet Robert Frost admitted that the European notion of possessing the land preceded any sense of belonging to the land. In Austra­lia the Jindyworobaks had a dream by which whites might appropriate both the land and its Aboriginal spirituality. But such white hopes and dreams are unlikely to be as powerful as the Aboriginal assurance, express­ed in the poem ‘We are going’ by Oodgeroo Noonuccal [Kath Walker], that ‘We are the corroboree and the bora ground ...We are nature and the past.’