Pearls and Irritations

‘I think the natives held privately that in taking such pains to make things grow where already things grew of their own accord I was maybe a little mad…. As for myself, there were times when…. it came to me with considerable force that perhaps in this private opinion there was a deal of truth…’ – Jack McLaren, ‘My Crowded Solitude’, 1926.

Visiting the Bungle Bungles (in Purnululu National Park) on a recent camping and hiking tour in the Kimberley, an Aboriginal guide, Bec, took our group up a branch of Cathedral Gorge to what she called a birthing pool. It was a rock pool in a large, open cave at the head of the gully.

She explained that the young women came here when they were close to giving birth. They didn’t have water births. It was to allow them to relax in and by the pool and prepare for the birth. Men were not allowed. (The pool was no longer used, Bec explained. These days the women go to hospital.)

Then Bec led us up Cathedral Gorge to a vast cavern at the top, also with a pool. She said this is where her tribe used to have ceremonies, including meetings with tribes from neighbouring territories. She took out two clapping sticks and sang several songs – haunting, clear, amplified in the huge space.

It was a transcendent moment. I was carried back to their times and a way of life largely unchanged for millennia, intricately explained by their creation stories and myths, governed by clear rules, where everyone had their place. A way of living so self-contained, set in the stunning landscapes of the Kimberley, largely isolated from the wider world beyond.

I found it deeply moving but am not sure how to describe my emotions.  Perhaps an evolutionary yearning or longing for the existence we humans lived for almost all our time on Earth?

On another occasion, a camping trip near Alice Springs, our group had lunch on a property held under native title. The owner joined us to talk about the Aboriginal view of life. On a dry creek bed, he cleared a square metre of red sand and drew a picture that combined a creation story, a family history, and a geographic map. It answered the fundamental questions of existence: Who am I? Where have I come from? Why am I here? (He then went home to watch the AFL on TV.)

These questions are not so easy to answer for us living in modern times. Our life now is so open-ended, fluid, globalised, uncertain; so varied and fragmented. The contrast is profound. On a third occasion – a conference in Darwin – a young Aboriginal leader told me how much energy he had to put into ‘maintaining the elasticity’ between their worldview and the mainstream Western worldview (which I took to mean being flexible in administering government policies and programs).

It is not the details of indigenous cultures that matter so much as the fact of their existence. I am interested in what we can learn from them in addressing our challenges. This is not to romanticise the indigenous way of life, or to seek to return to it. It is about taking lessons from it in forging a different path for our societies. Seeing our culture through the eyes of another helps us to see its qualities – including its flaws.

I wrote in a recent essay on culture about what anthropologists have said about this question, with a shorter version published in P&I. The modern myth of material progress implies, even insists, that past life was wretched, as expressed in the oft-quoted words of 17^th Century philosopher Thomas Hobbes that the life of man in his natural state was ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short’.

It is true that people were materially poorer and their life expectancy lower in the past, but they often led rich social and spiritual lives, as accounts of the quality of life among indigenous Australians show. Traditional indigenous ways of living were devastated by the arrival of Europeans, but early accounts suggest a life of relative abundance and ease. Except during extreme drought, life was not hard.

Anthropologist Wade Davis urges us to heed the voices of other cultures because these remind us that there are alternatives, ‘other ways of orienting human beings in social, spiritual, and ecological space’. They allow us ‘to draw inspiration and comfort from the fact that the path we have taken is not the only one available, that our destiny is therefore not indelibly written in a set of choices that demonstrably and scientifically have proven not to be wise’. By their very existence, he says, the diverse cultures of the world show we can change, as we know we must, the fundamental way we inhabit this planet.

This perspective is also reflected in Jack McLaren’s classic 1926 book, My Crowded Solitude.

The book is his account of establishing a coconut plantation on Cape York in 1911, employing local Aborigines to help him. Here are several passages from the book which – for all the racism of his time, some 100 years ago – offer some revealing insights into indigenous and Western ways of thinking and being (they are taken from the 7^th edition. Quality Press, London, 1946).

P45: ‘And added to all this there was the thought that while it would be a fine thing indeed if I succeeded in making of this black man’s jungle a white man’s garden, it would be a finer thing still if I succeeded in turning a whole people from wandering idleness to habits of industry. With my taking of heart, it seemed to me that it might possibly be done after all. It did not occur to me that the natives were happier as they were. It did not occur to me that the creating in them of needs and desires hitherto utterly foreign would also create in them the necessity for satisfying those needs and desires, to the consequent destruction of the more or less complacent ease of their existence.’

P73: ‘In view of this spontaneous abundance, I think the natives held privately that in taking such pains to make things grow where already things grew of their own accord I was maybe a little mad. As for myself, there were times when, viewing the slow progress of the work, it came to me with considerable force that perhaps in this private opinion there was a deal of truth, that, after all, simplicity of outlook was saner than complex philosophies, that in asmuchas his mode of thinking was perfectly direct, primeval man derived fuller satisfaction from life than civilised man. The trouble was that my civilised heredity had driven me too far along the road to allow me to turn back without getting lost.’

P214-125: ‘…another remarked that it was strange that I, actually having these coveted things in abundance, should be content to remain so long in one place. All of which caused me to speculate whether, in being responsible for the implanting of those desires and needs, I was not guilty of a social wrong. There may have been something altruistic in raising a people a little from the depths of a great primitiveness. There was something definitely immoral in destroying their peace of mind.’

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