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The Forum > Article Comments > The wide brown land for me? > Comments

The wide brown land for me? : Comments

By Rob Brennan, published 4/9/2015

As non-indigenous Australians, particularly if we've been here for at least two or three generations, we lack the national historical identity that comes with being a Greek or a Scot or a Russian or a Korean.

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Jesus, where do I even start with this atrocious article, could it simply be that Australians (by that I, and the author mean people of mixed European heritage) have an innate connection to the land of their birth and that since our culture contains no "appropriations" whatsoever from the pre 1788, stone age lifestyles that this whole article is only a manifestation of some old duffer's daydreams?
So much of what's described as "Aboriginal Culture" is an invention of the romantics among the Colonial Whites anyway, as Dallas Scott puts it:

"I used to dance as a kid. Most of the kids who grew up in our house did it, but I have no intention of my own children doing the same. My reluctance has nothing to do with them being of mixed heritage though, and everything to do with cultural appropriation. I said I used to ‘dance’ as a kid, because that is really all it was. I was dressed in a lap-lap and painted up, was taught the moves the rest of the kids were doing, but it was all just a show. The dances were not ones passed on to us from our Elders, performed for a specific reason or during a time of unique and special celebration that led me to understand my culture in a meaningful way, but rather a collection of dance moves put together by a choreographer who may or may not have had a distant Aboriginal ancestor she found out about in her mid-thirties."

Rob appropriation of the Aboriginal psyche by Osmosis is not a real thing and "connection to country" is a common feeling among normal, well adjusted people, we rarely give it a second thought.
I do however understand the feelings and emotions stirred up by a return to one's ancestral lands, I've been spending a lot more time in Central Victoria of late and as I said to my mother last weekend, it's amazing just how different I feel when I'm on my own country surrounded by my own people as opposed to living in a multicultural urban environment.
Posted by Jay Of Melbourne, Friday, 4 September 2015 9:08:24 AM
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Hi Rob,

Maybe we all tend to have strong feelings about whatever country or landscapes we were raised in, and played in, especially those we experienced as young children. I have those sorts of feelings, a craving really, whenever I see film or pictures of (or think of) the beautiful Royal National Park, the Blue Mountains and what used to be paper-bark scrub around Bass Hill (probably all under Housing Commission houses now). And maybe that lovely country around Wagga.

I suppose that's the point - what counts for each of us as 'lovely country' ?

I don't have any particular yearning for southern Scotland or northern England - we see enough of that on ITV to turn us off - 'rainy skies and gales', 'watching the mist roll through the dell': no thanks. Well, just a little, but more out of solidarity and sympathy for the poor buggers who have to live there.

So where's 'home' ? Where would you like some of your ashes scattered, or your body laid out for the wedgies ?

Joe
Posted by Loudmouth, Friday, 4 September 2015 10:43:22 AM
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Who cares about such silly self-examination? I'm a third generation Australian. My ancestors, not me, chose the country. It's a good place to live, but I fear it is going downhill fast, thanks to stupid people and even more stupid politicans. I am Australian first, but I am pleased that I am a Celtic/Anglo Saxon Australian. That's it. Blathering about 'spiritual feelings I leave to posers.
Posted by ttbn, Friday, 4 September 2015 10:54:04 AM
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Well Rob, nothing wrong with travelling the wide brown land for over twenty five years. Many people I know a fanatical about its allure too.

I'm not so armoured to it though, I think it is because, to me, working in rural Australia taught me to face reality, and very quickly. Flies bloody flies. Swarms upon swarms, and the heat in summer is unimaginable to most people calling Australia home.

I think the best for the outback is to leave it as it is, sparsely inhabited by tough natives who have been born into a sustainable ability to survive this harsh and unforgiving environment.

Spiritual? Guess at night it comes close!

For me, I'll take the ocean floor any day. That is spiritual silent and awesome, that is Australia to me and ninety percent of the sensible, who cling to its magical coastline!
Posted by diver dan, Friday, 4 September 2015 11:26:27 AM
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We can take pride in who we are just by once again making stuff and doing better than all the rest!

What's missing is the aforementioned national pride and doing it for ourselves, rather than relying on price gouging foreigners?

Excused by asserting we've always relied on foreign capital!

Maybe, but do we need the here today gone tomorow asset stripping foreiners that usually accompany it?

We make cars as good or better than anyone and lead the world in molded carbon fibre.

How much could we get the build cost down, by making all the component parts on the one site; and therefore adding just the one tax liability to the end price?

And rolled out as a government enabled employee cooperatives and enabling half price industrial power!?

Power rolled out as cheaper than coal, thorium connected to individual industry serving microgrids!?

Ditto ship and sub building, finally relieved of all that makes our own currently uneconomical!?

An inland shipping canal and lock gate controlled massive northern tides, would enable the creation of a new dual lane inland shipping canal, and also function as a new source of endlessly renewed reliable water.

Taken as newly cost effective desal water, and create a wide green land as it gets done!

Can't died in a cornfield over a century ago!

Won't is alive and well in the corridors of power, and likely the principal reason we're having this discussion?

I know where there's a lazy 60 billions per, or 600 billions in the next decade, that we could conscript to get most or all of these changes happening/started!
Rhrosty.
Posted by Rhrosty, Friday, 4 September 2015 11:28:25 AM
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Rob, I believe that you've experienced a reality of being, unlike many posters who seem to be moulded by the artificial imagery of possession and imitation.

I, too, have feelings of awe, wonder, and belonging to my land every time I leave the falsity of "civilisation" behind me, and go outback.

I absorbed this enormously years ago when I trekked the Canning Stock Route and sat next to my campfire at sunset enthralled by the vista of sandhills rolling into a setting sun, and when I entered a sacred Aboriginal cavern complex in the hills near Durba Springs; spirits and presence engulfed me with joy and gratitude of being a part of the land which owned me.
We are priveleged to be an offspring of this 'wide brown land'.
Posted by Ponder, Friday, 4 September 2015 2:44:42 PM
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I have mixed feelings about this subject, given that I have felt similar to Ponder when camping and living in the Kimberley and the NT. there is definitely something amazing about camping under the stars in the outback.

However, after visiting and living in Ireland and England some years ago, I felt that I somehow 'belonged' there as well. The history of the places I went to was just so ancient, I was gob-smacked that my ancestors of many thousands of years ago stood on the same land as I did.

I feel privileged that as an Australian of 4 generations, originally from Irish/English ancestry, I feel as though I have connections to so many places!
Posted by Suseonline, Friday, 4 September 2015 8:01:47 PM
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ttbn What you said. After fifteen years in QLD it was so good to return home, WA. Not the towns or the people (changed for the worse) but the landscape, red dirt, amazing hills and even the spinifex. Despite the heat, dust and a million flies, I still feel at home and wish that Everyone would appreciate it and look after it.
Posted by jodelie, Saturday, 5 September 2015 4:12:25 AM
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I don't feel that the Aborigines have a superior connection
To Australia than I do.

I love the whole place, the cities, the outback, the beaches.

I was born here and I grew up in a fairly small town(at that stage)
The bush was all around us and as kids we would roam freely around

I know the feel and love of the bush and surrounding mountains and
The creeks and rivers.
I don't think there is any difference between my love of Australia and
The Aboriginals love of the same landscapes.

The aborigines may have had some knowledge of natural remedies but without the
Scientific medical knowledge of the British their ability to treat illness would have been as limited as the knowledge of proper medicine was to the White races in the early centuries.
The whites had their folk lore and old wives tales medicines too, in early English society
So this doesn't somehow make this kind of medicine a superior ability possessed by the aborigines. Even today it is folk lore that things like camomile tea is relaxing and all the other so called holistic herbs and potions sold without much evidence in white mans chemists all over the country.

I Do think the Aborigines probably did have
Knowledge of where to find edible plant foods in the bush.

My 11year old grandson came home from school, and said " Grandma, do you know we invaded this country."
I said, "well I'm part of that British Empire" (historically speaking) and I'm proud of it.
I said , we built this country into the wonderful country it is,
I thought the teachers had no right to make an 11year old boy ashamed of his British heritage.
So the Aborigines can put that in their reconciliation pipe and smoke it.
Posted by CHERFUL, Sunday, 6 September 2015 12:31:31 AM
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I agree with you to a certain extent Cherful.
One thing I would add is that these days, so many Aboriginal people have a mixed heritage also, and I often wonder why they don't also embrace that European part of their heritage also?

I feel almost as connected to my European heritage as I do to my Aussie one since I have been studying my ancestral roots for several years now.
The stories of my ancestors are fascinating to me.
Posted by Suseonline, Sunday, 6 September 2015 11:13:19 AM
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Hi Suse,

I've been fascinated with family history for some time, but one thing I think I'm learning is that it is indeed a wise person who knows his own father, or his mother's or father's father. Fatherhood seems to be a flexible concept on Ancestry.com. I've followed a few wrong leads (I think) and 'discovered' all sorts of 'ancestors' who I have had to regretfully say goodbye to, once I realised that it may not have been so.

But the basic truth is that, if you are born and raised in a country, that is the only country you know, regardless of where your parents may have come from: they have 'other countries', you don't. Your early smells of your environment may stay with you, Cootamundra wattle, mallee, brigalow, sandstone, rain-forest, dairy farms, but after all, you can't smell what you've never been exposed to, so your senses won't leap to even your parents' early memory-smells, only your own. Or to the sounds of rosellas or lorikeets or whip-birds or crows (or those dopy chuckle-birds in Adelaide) that you may be used to. And those smells or sounds take you right back to your childhood, don't they ?

Don't get me started :)

Joe
Posted by Loudmouth, Sunday, 6 September 2015 11:58:55 AM
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Quite right Loudmouth. I too have found some naughty naval ancestors with families in different ports!
I do connect mostly with Australia of course, but I believe we are the sum total of all our ancestors....a sort of jumble of genes that affect every part of our bodies and lives.
I do love my genealogy.
Posted by Suseonline, Sunday, 6 September 2015 12:15:07 PM
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Loudmouth

'it is indeed a wise person who knows his own father, or his mother's or father's father. Fatherhood seems to be a flexible concept on Ancestry.com.'

This is because family surnames pass down through the paternal line. Tracing the maternal and grandmaternal line is much harder, as I've found out to my infinite frustration in trying to trace my own family tree. I've been able to learn a great deal about my distant paternal ancestors, but much less about my distant maternal ancestors.

suse

I agree that the European connection is strong for many Australians. I travelled to Europe many times before I finally decided to move to the west coast of Ireland, where my paternal and maternal ancestors were born and raised.

I've never looked back.

There is something about the soft landscape, the muted light, the misty weather and the strong sense of historical social connection that I found missing in Australia.

Many Australians would disagree with me. That's fine. But I have learned enough about my paternal and maternal ancestors to know that they never wanted to leave Ireland, or their family or the Irish culture they had grown up with. It was the devastating politics of British imperial rule that made life impossible for them to remain in Ireland.

I now look at the masses of migrations and refugees that are now coming from the Middle East, Africa and Afghanistan and I can't help but think of my own ancestors' situation many times over
Posted by Killarney, Monday, 7 September 2015 4:42:48 AM
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"By Killarney's lakes and fells,
Emerald Isles and winding bays,
Mountain paths and woodland dells,
Mem'ry ever fondly strays;
Bounteous nature loves all lands;
Beauty wanders everywhere,
Footprints leaves on many strands,
But her home is surely there!"

I was hoping, in my search for genuine paternal ancestors, that at least one of them might have come from Kerry, by Killarney's lakes and fells: I even had a long story in my head, ready-made, about him getting the boat in Cork after a battle with English police. But no, only a maternal ancestor from Ireland :( - and from the North, Fermanagh, into the bargain. Bloody Ancestry.com.

My point about paternal ancestry is that, despite its being easier to trace one's ancestry through a paternal line because of surnames carried down, the chances of, let's say, 'mis-identification', is much higher on the paternal than the maternal side. Or maybe that's just MY ancestors.

For all that and all that, you can only be born in one place and those years between five and twelve are probably crucial in fixing landscapes and smells and sounds in your head for life. That goes as much for Indigenous as non-Indigenous native-born Australians.

In fact, up until maybe the 1920s, many whites born IN Australia proudly called themselves 'natives' or 'Australian natives' - they formed the Australian Natives' Association in 1871, to distinguish themselves from those 'blow-ins' from the Old Country. Aboriginal people were usually called 'Aboriginal natives' or 'Black natives' to distinguish THEM from the 'Australian natives', a description that many whites had put on their death certificates. The search for privilege takes many forms.

One day, DNA tests will be so cheap and quick that we will bypass Ancestry.com, but it still is great fun to concoct ancestries. Of course, mathematically, since on the whole, wealthier people had more kids, and very poor people often had none (or couldn't even get married), the chances of being descended (the operative word) from the aristocracy, or even royalty, is very high for all of us. I'm actually the rightful Earl of Tyrone.

Joe
Posted by Loudmouth, Monday, 7 September 2015 10:09:31 AM
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Rob, you may choose to call yourself and most other Australians 'non-indigenous' but I do not like to use a word that describes me as a non-person. So I consider myself to be an exdigenous Australian, proud to have been born here and excited to look to the future more than to contemplate the past.
Posted by Bernie Masters, Monday, 7 September 2015 10:19:06 AM
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Having spent more than 30 years taking Australian & international groups into the outback & all of them attesting to its' "magnificence" and "spirit", it is clear to me how much it can differ from any pre-visit perceptions or tourism spin. How it is not boring & empty but full of colour, texture, living characters and creatures, enabling the mind to think clearly and expansively about life's reality, issues & possibilities.

Comments posted by anyone ridiculing or denying the outback or wilderness experience are invariably those of city centric deniers, still to discover their own life's inadequacies.
Yes, we are seriously disadvantaged by not knowing fully the wisdom of our First Peoples and what their connection to country represents. Our minds are too busy imposing rather than listening.

Our cities are becoming enclaves for "global citizens" who are recognising Australia simply as a place of seaboard beauty & opportunity, in whatever form, to them. So as we did to the First Peoples, are we now experiencing invasive change ourselves, slowly over time. Many social issues are now apparent to the discerning observer.

History shows our new arrivals once rolled up their sleeves and faced the challenges rather than entitlements, contributing magnificently to Australia, both in the city & the inland, as a visit to the inland will now confirm. Through their contribution they set down roots and became connected to country.

As a general observation, contemporary arrivals have split from their homeland roots and are here for the pickings, the comfort or retreat and a fast paced access to personal opportunities. This rootless generation now crowding the cities, disconnected from Australia's inland or nature, are in part now determining that Australia must change its attitudes, laws or culture to accommodate them. Strangely, reflecting on how our First Peoples might have been impacted or felt.

Arguably, until all new arrivals, welcome as they are, are assimilated to our wild country and the inland spirit of Australia; until they really experience the outback, will they truly be connected to country as this article "The wide brown land for me" is alluding to.
Posted by Have a Go, Monday, 7 September 2015 11:41:05 AM
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My first really solid memories are of hunting goats on Castle Hill, Townsville. A bunch of us 7 or 8 year olds did a lot of that, with our home made Lawyer cane bows, & straight stick arrows.

We never saw a goat, if there were any there, or much else, I guess we made so much noise the wallabies & goannas quietly avoided us. We did however absorb the wide vista offered, across the coastal plain, & out to Magnetic island.

Then as a teen in the Riverina I was used to thousands of acres of open grazing land, you could see for miles.

We do somehow absorb a feel for our place. In New Guinea, & the Islands, apart from at sea, or in a town, you could rarely see even a hundred yards. I found myself longing for an open paddock, just to look at.

I'm an Ozzie, 3Rd generation, but I doubt my forbears transmitted any sense of country to me at birth. I notice many people raised as city kids today, are often uncomfortable out here in the gentle tamed countryside, where their parents would have been quiet happy.

I also noticed many did not like the uninhabited areas of the Queensland coast. Some women particularly, would not go further ashore than a beach, they found the real bush very threatening.

I don't believe "country" gets into our DNA, but I'm sure where we are raised does get into our being, & becomes part of at least most of us.
Posted by Hasbeen, Monday, 7 September 2015 12:14:15 PM
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I went to Uluru. It's a rock. The main thing that struck me about it was that it is not more "Aboriginal" than white, or for that matter indian. It is far older than human settlement on this continent. I get that Aboriginals like to make up stories about it - the desert is mostly pretty dull. But it is in no sense theirs - the found it already here, same as did white settlement.
Posted by PaulMurrayCbr, Tuesday, 15 September 2015 3:02:15 PM
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