Dumbo Feather – July 2019

So I love being in relationship with you because not only do you carry
the wisdom of your Ancestors, you keep reaching back to find more,
to be in contact with that ancient wisdom. And you’re also present
right here, right now. And you lean lovingly forward into the future.
That is the abundant conversation I want to have—right now at this
crazy, crazy moment of climate emergency and cultural breakdown—
to hear ancient wisdom and try to weave it into our consciousness
and let that be some medicine for our very fractured paradigm.

What I love about it, because I feel the same: activism, pure

activism not only steers you in the direction of identity politics,

which is dangerous and divisive, it also steers the individual

person and the collective activist group into depletion.

Karuah just north of Newcastle. But because of how things were at that particular time,

a lot of the way our communities could survive was doing work like hawking, running

the market gardens and laying the railway up and down the east coast. So at the point of

my grandma’s birth there was a big separation between my family and our homelands

because they moved every two weeks. My grandma literally grew up in a tent. And every

week or two they were at a new site and the whole family worked laying the railway line

that runs up and down the east coast. So there was a generation or two of disconnect

and I’m very grateful to my mum and uncle who just felt called home, I guess. And

retraced and connected and brought us home to our homelands and our culture. I live

today on the Kulin Nations and tomorrow I will be living on Gubbi Gubbi country! So it’s

interesting to actually be talking on this day. ’Cause it’s such an end of a chapter of my

life. I feel like it’s one of those seven-year cycles. We literally are leaving tomorrow.

I think that’s the daily challenge

for me: how to navigate issues that

are very real and present and, you

know, there’s clearly a layer for us

where there are still people in our

community living in third world

conditions in a very resource-rich

country. That’s very little-known

as well. But how do you wrangle all

of that and reconcile all of that as well as start to sit in a place where you’re really thinking

and dropping in to how our Old People and our Lore would have dealt with these issues—as

well as combining that with futures thinking? So it’s this weird little concoction that takes

me on so many amazing journeys into so many beautiful conversations. And there’s been

times in my life where I’ve been a staunch activist. I really honour and value that pathway

and I certainly understand why people still are on that path. But I think for me now there’s a

different world opening up in terms of how we start to move through those struggles. How we

really start to tend to our spiritual wellbeing.

And within that landscape there is a Lore. And it is Lore that is just as powerful and intact as

it ever was. Sometimes it’s just about awakening that. So I feel like if what we had been doing

in terms of our activism had been very successful, I probably would have stayed on that path.

But in some ways it hasn’t really paid off! [Laughs]. In the way that we would like. So I feel

like all that is left is to go back to the voices of our Old People and our Ancestors and try to

speak from that place.

Absolutely. I know so many people who

are doing such good work in that space but

their own spirits and their own bodies and

their own families are burning out. Because

I really believe that even in a city like Melbourne

there is a spiritual landscape that overlays the five

million people and the hundreds of skyscrapers

and commerce and economic activity.

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SPIRITUAL

CONVERSATIONS