Dreamtime

[doklikit]

Last Saturday we were privileged to have an aboriginal elder come to our house and speak to ten of us whities about the aboriginal dreamtime.She was a wonderful person with heart and soul.She had grown up in the Spinifex country of South Australia ,not seeing a white person until she was about seven.

The day was supposed to begin at 10am so at 8.45am I am frantically cleaning up outside in case she wanted to speak to us there. My daughter softly says from the kitchen "the ladies are here"

"what"

"the ladies are here"

"I fucking hope not"

But of course on going inside there they are ,both with a cup of tea and looks that were less than friendly.

So I sit on the floor beside 'auntie', as she is addressed ,and am lucky enough to have an hour with her and Helen ,neither of whom I had met before.Almost immediately auntie said

" the world is coming to an end "

which if I hadn't been already on the floor would have put me there as I have been recently looking at the McKenna/Mayan 2012 end of the world as we know it scenario.

Now I don't know how many of you have had any experience with aboriginals (I hadn't)but it was in this case pretty difficult to get a deeper explanation of most things. It seems simply that things just are.Whenever pressed and when auntie wasn't sure of an answer she just said in an almost childlike way that she didn't know .

Her stories of those first encounters with white people were hilarious ..right down to eating the cakes of soap they were given,and even she saw the funny side and giggled like a little budda as she told the stories.But her pain of the loss of some of their sacred sites really was the most memorable part of meeting her.We are not talking of the shifting sacred sites of those part aboriginals with vested interests but real sacreed sites .Her people used to walk there from Albany to Kalgoolie( a seriously long walk).They made this effort as this place held some magic for her people and she spoke of visiting there recently by plane and crying as she flew home.The removal of millions of tonnes of her sacred land leaving nothing but a gaping hole was genuinely as if part of her and her people had been destroyed in the process, and her genuine pain and emotion left few dry eyes amongst us.

The dreamtime information though was hard to access and again maybe it's not something than can be peddled and sold . Dreamtime stories like how wily wagtails came about were easy enough but finding out how we might possibly access the dreaming just wasn't going to happen.Breathing, dance, the didgeridoo,rhythmic motion,hypnotic suggestion and possibly some plant substances are all involved in their accessing but for the most part it's simply secret.White men have lost their dreaming and I for one would like to regain it.