Sad and ashamed

Jasper and I just had a beautiful windswept walk by the lake and the surface of the water was glistening with sunlight, we got back to the car and sat in silence for a while listening to the wind, I love seeing my dog so relaxed after a walk like this and treasure the quiet moments of togetherness, however I am also listening to Stan Grant reading his book Australia Day and it makes such shameful reading, to hear what happened to his people and how people often try to imply he is ungrateful to the so called ‘Australian dream’ or ‘lucky country’. Once you know of the massacres that aboriginal people endured, how their heads were called for, how they were chased off their own land and their humble dwellings burnt down and of how his own grandmother was refused treatment when it was known she was carrying the child of a ‘black” man (for those who don’t know Stan Grant, an Australian journalist is part aboriginal, part of Irish descent) it actually makes perfect sense he should try to bring attention to the situation here. Hearing some of these dreadful things that happened brings me close to tears.

According to the white people, this land was ‘Terra Nullis’ that is known as ’empty land’ and the aboriginal people where considered like fauna to be hunted down, their languages eradicated, their children stolen and then forced like the Native American original people onto missions or reserves. I think of how my own father came here from Holland seeing it as a ‘land of opportunity’ and how I always felt a great unease on returning to Australia after a time abroad as safe as this land is now I always felt a kind of darkness here and was not always comfortable with the brash hardline ‘ocker’ mentality.

I was also told when living at the coast house my father built in that time after my separation when I was almost going half mad with my history that a massacre occurred on the large headland very close to where Dad and my brother built the place. I often felt a darkness there too and it was explained to me by a spiritually attuned person that they sensed the spirits of some of the deceased victims where there and I was picking up that energy. I used to get a lot strange symptoms living there alone, following my head injury and it does make sense to me that I am often psychic too in this way.

Anyway I have volunteered at the Canberra Writer’s Festival today and tomorrow and I need to leave shortly in order to find my way to the venue which is in a part of town I am not all that familiar with, but as usual when I get triggered by something I like to share about it. People may say that as an empath its not good to listen to these kind of things but I like to know what is hidden and so often underlies things. As Grant points out a lot of what white people have profited from in this land has come at the expense of the original inhabitants and we know the Western imperialist, mechanistic, split off forces that drove it better these days. It seems to me that the first Australians lived closer to the totality of things and were not split apart from the spiritual and emotional worlds as so many white people are. I read once that addicts and recovering addicts being intuitive and sensitive and not really fitting in well to the dominant white culture cannot survive in that split off place and that we live attuned to, to deeper realities which we may seek through ‘spirits’ as part of a spiritually empty ethos. It is making great sense to me right now as did my early dream in sobriety where a circle of aboriginal women took me into their midst. I cannot help but feel so sad for what our First Nations people endured, I wont let it spoil my day but I did feel the need to share about it here. I hope in years to come things in Australia heal and we become more aware that this was never ’empty land’ what was empty was the imperialist way of regarding it and First Nations people.