SPIRITUALITY
Mabo Day/Reconciliation Week, June 3
G20 Mural Project Brisbane
Artist: Guido van Helten
PROJECT MANAGEMENT: Jugglers Art Space Inc, Visible Ink, Queensland Rail.
Each year on June 3 since the The High Court of Australia ruled in favour of Eddi Koiki Mabo’s victory in overturning the spurious British law terra nullius, people remember the new day that was brought about by Eddie’s campaign. In the light of this ruling, native title was established in Australia and is known as The Native Title Act, 1993. A national holiday is yet to be legislated in his memory.
Spirituality is not locked up only in the rigorous disciplines of a Thomas Merton in a Gethsemane Monastery, Kentucky, hermitage or in a group retreat at Woodford Folk Festival. First nations’ people in Australia have always listened to country for where the voice’s life is. They have done this for thousands of years circled about and founded on their own mythologies and customs.
Their stories have not been given room and space in the dominant white colonial culture in Australia since the invasion in 1788 but there is a growing evolution of interest and story telling around the nation that is giving these stories and rights room. Devastatingly, racial blindness and deeper racism persists and has gained some ground as the failed 2023 Voice Referendum attests to. A recent decision by the CEO of NRL Melbourne team Storm to not to allow Welcome to Country at an Anzac day game in Melbourne – later reversed after massive public outcry – and the attrocious outspoken neo-nazi attack on an aboriginal elder during the Melbourne Shrine of Remembrance Dawn service on ANZAC Day is indicative of a push back post The Voice failure by the white male majority who will not leave their narrow violent racist world views and embrace a better way of being in community in a world that is hungry for justice, grace and kindness. Major health concerns, incarceration and lack of mental fitness persist at an alarming rate in aboriginal communtiies and these have been added to by the failure of The Voice. But theirs is a long and determined walk to see rights and reconciliation alive, maturing and celebrated deeply and widely. Ours – I speak as a white Australian male – is at times only turning on click bait time frames and convenience. I am not, however, either nihilistic or overly optimistic of a better Australia in regards to this in my lifetime.
This poem is my tribute to the paths being forged by aboriginal people particularly in the light of the the decision that Eddie Koiki Mabo campaigned so successfuly for.
Land Rights
He walks
A loud quietness
beginning
another 60,000 floating lifetimes
around the sun
or moon
anchored in country
voices mix
a call with guileless intent
no retribution
just
as
a
thin light on the hill flickers
into thousands of a thousand
sparks aloft
against the winds of resistance
blasted to extinguish.
“We can wait”
echoes down the centuries.
Voices hidden.
Art marks scratched to a possible new obscurity
But we will mark again.
He played it forward with love and determined granite persaverance.
Listening hearts can read the voices
unlocked to heal again, again, again.
He walks a story
as ancient as a new old mountain birthed on country
while welcome warms with cautious glances.
Peter Breen
Peteskibreen's Blog 