flying over an old land
art & honour
I sit on a 787 flying thru the skies heading to Australia. A Qantas flight, I am glad to see a selection of Australian films.
Included are some short docos around Aborigines.
The True Story and Making Revisions; tell the story of this land as it has been portrayed with the arrival of white man who claim to have discovered it.
The Walpiri people take colonial pictures and maps adding their art to them, layering their song lines on top.
It’s rather beautiful.
The True story goes with : Captain Cook Mapped the sky in the past; he saw the movement of the star Venus, he saw it for the first time and thought he had discovered it.
We hold the stories, and sing the songs of the stars.
We sing the song of the morning star as the first light appears.
The cluster of stars you call the Milky Way; that is our story.
And the Jukurpa for these stories is what we paint, marking out the singing of that story.
When the first Fleet arrived they thought they had discovered this land. And they thought they had discovered us.
They did not recognize that we had our own world view.
They could not comprehend that we had our own knowledge and culture.
They claimed this land as theirs.
They marked on their maps.
Yapa had their own Jukurrpa and boundaries of ownership.
Natural features that mapped the ownership of the land.
Jukurrpa belonging to many different groups.
Narratives belonging to many groups.
Jukurrpa song lines travel in directions. Many songlines mapping the lands.
They called Australia.
The maps that Kardiya made they are only recently created. Only 200 years ago!
Our stories and ownership are forever!
Jukurrpa is from the start of time. To see are the stories we paint. Jukurrpa is held forever in the icons and designs.
Everything is held and revealed.
Jukurrpa and land is formed by ancestral beings.
Tears well in my eyes as my heart is touched by the richness of connection into the land these people have.
Of the beauty of their art and art of story telling, upheld in Jukurrpa.
And the beauty to this being able to be painted or simply drawn in dirt. Not held on paper but rather held in the hearts and minds of people. Building their souls.
These tell how to interact with people, who their family.
Singing the land alive.
My heart aches for the arrogance and ignorance of the white settlers 200 years ago.
For the disregard for a stunningly beautiful culture that had so much to teach the ignorant hearts of those so entrapped in patriarchy; living in what I see as insatiable greed to take over and own at all costs.
Imagine to be able to sing a song and thereby understand where to walk to be able to navigate down past the big sand dune to the south, stop off at the water hole that exists underground and flows out amoungst the rocks; head norwest until you come to the large mound and make a left to the tree standing In a grassy plain………..
There is so much aliveness in being so connected to the land, its features and the animals that live upon it.
The flight takes us right over the middle of this “Barron” land.
Looking down I see the “dot” pictures of the aboriginals etched out in the landscape and wonder how did they know this is what it looked like from above.
My flight right now is taking me to Jakarta & Java and to the story of the endangered Rhinos of that land. Perhaps the next one is about going walk about with the Jukurrpa.
With Love,
Jay