I had hopes that this documentary would be a pure focus on the nature of the First Australians' relationship with the earth without the politics, but I concede it is all part of the life Indigenous Australians deal with now. I'll still get a look at it anyway.
http://www.sbs.com.au/nitv/article/...nts-show-what-connection-country-really-means . Here is the link to the re-view option, but it may not be available outside Oz. Sorry for that. I'll keep an eye out for an upload somewhere else for those of you abroad if that is the case.
https://www.sbs.com.au/ondemand/program/you-are-here
Many years ago in the last century, David Maybury-Lewis produced a TV series called Millenium: tribal wisdom and the modern world. I video recorded it and watched it many times. In one episode, a Dutchman felt a call to Australia and skipped the cities on his way in, flying directly into Broome and walking from there to the sacred lands of the Luritjarri people in NW Australia, where he resides to this day as far as I know.
He was tutored under Elder Paddy Rowe (RIP) and learned the Luritjarri philosophy, which he explained thus:
We (westerners) know that all of matter is made up of particles that hold a form for a time and then destruct to reform in another way. In the Indigenous way of looking, the thing that holds it together is the Song. The song creates the vibration and the vibration keeps that form strong through the ages. Although matter is ever changing and altering, the pure form still exists in the Song.
I thought about how that relates to Plato's ideology of the pure form, not as it is in nature but as it pertains to an ideal form. And here it was 10,000 miles away and a few thousand years prior, and this idea was there for such a long long time.
The Dutch guy then went on to say that hard science shunts notions of a hidden or subeternal reality into the supernatural, and also designates the term quantum to behaviour it can't yet explain, yet the Aborigines understand their experience of life without all that. They have a perspective and a lifestyle which enables the non-material experiences of life to be incorporated seamlessly into the mundane "eyes open" world of the senses. Whole people, fully alive.
I found that strongly attractive, and it was part of what I attempted to build into a thesis when I was at uni. Connection to country transcends material ownership. The Song, the ancient tribal voice is what continues to sustain the environment, but when the Song breaks, the people breaks. I suspect, tentatively, that the whites knew this to be the case when they stole thousands of Aboriginal kids away from their parents, their land, their lore, their language and their Songs, never to experience any of them again, in an Act of genocidal violence enshrined in white law.
