I saw around us the fires of the Yolngu people who had made their own camps. Suddenly two older women approached from the fires, curious about the great wordless wave of people walking past their camp. “What is happening? Where are you going?” the first lady asked. I told them quickly and then offered my hand. “Come with us?” I asked.
The first lady came closer and grabbed my arm, clinging tightly for support in the dark. The other woman followed close behind, sending little nudges now and then and touching my shoulder. I had been gently enfolded into the circle of their arms as we headed towards what they instinctively knew to be an important ceremony.
I assumed some further explanation about our destination was needed, and after a rambling line or two my companion proclaimed aloud, but with kindly bemusement, “Well, this one sure can talk!”
As we approached the clearing my elder reminded me to be quiet and huddled in more closely as if apprehensive of what we were to witness. My other companion bopped me on the crown of my head, perhaps another reminder of my rightful place in the midst of things. We entered the sandy clearing and sat amid the growing circle, at its centre the singing women of the Gumatj clan. My elder bowed her head to my arm and rested it there, and we sat as if waiting together for a great storm.
We listened to songs of mourning for one lost to us all. The yidaki moaned. Singers drew breath as the wind made its own sound. My eyes closed, I could have been anywhere in time, hundreds of years past or hence. And in that dark place all our outward identities were made irrelevant. We had been welcomed into the great gift of timelessness.
When the songs sputtered out, she whispered at my elbow, “They are crying for the big boss musician. That must be his mob.” And again she observed, “Oh, she cries. She is sad.” I nodded, agreeing that it was indeed the women of his family who sang for us. The Aunties of Dr G.
Floodlights pushed back the darkness and people began to rise from the dust to view the works of art that were hung on the trees. It was soon clear my companions had no interest in this hubbub. Even with the prime minister himself barely five feet away, they had come to see what needed to be seen. They were ready to go. The older lady behind me motioned for me to take up my companion’s arm and bear her weight, as she deftly cleared a path through the crowd with a wave of her hand.
As we walked, my companion asked me where I was from. “America,” I replied. She laughed at this with wonderment. How strange for someone to be so far off country. What kind of world had it become? I told her, “Now, though, I live in Sydney.” “I flew there on an aeroplane,” she told me. “And crossed the ’Arbour Bridge on a bus. It was scary,” she confided. I agreed the bridge was a scary bridge, and we giggled.
I helped them both back to their fires and asked if there was anything else I might help with. They patted my shoulders and called me a word I did not know, and sent me away as they disappeared from the path.
Of the many transformative experiences at Garma, this one stays with me. Despite vast differences, we had found each other in the dark. What will also stay with me is the sense of being with a people who were at home, on the land and in a greater spiritual sense. I, too, had been made to feel at home.
A further feeling – of urgency, that such a thing should be in danger of being lost to us.
A wise man named John Donahue once wrote, “Spirituality is the art of homecoming”, and in the Statement of the Heart, given to us by the Referendum Council from the First Nations National Constitutional Convention, we are reminded: “Our Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander tribes were the first sovereign nations of the Australian continent … This sovereignty is a spiritual notion: the ancestral tie between the land, or ‘mother earth’, and the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples who were born therefrom, remain attached thereto, and must one day return hither to be united to our ancestors. This link is the basis of the ownership, or better, of sovereignty.”
The Statement of the Heart calls for “constitutional reforms to empower our people and take a rightful place in our own country”, for “a process of agreement-making between governments and First Nations and truth-telling about our history”. And it concludes with an invitation “to walk with us in a movement of the Australian people for a better future”.
