Winnowing questions can be a challenge for a journalist. But doing just that, sitting back with my eyes open and my two ears cocked, resulted in one of the most intense experiences of my life, a shift and shake of the kaleidoscope. It was an enormous privilege to be briefly immersed in this ancient, calm, respectful tradition, during the country’s largest gathering of Indigenous elders, and recognise the lived, enduring shame of the treatment of Indigenous Australians as well as the depth of their spiritual and cultural traditions. These myriad, dynamic and compelling traditions should be a source of immense pride to us, just as the Maori culture is to New Zealanders; the atavistic wisdom contained in these cultures connects us to our land in ways we still barely fathom, and has done for more than 65,000 years.
Aboriginal people have been telling us for decades to listen to country. At a time when we are addicted to screens, filter our own faces in selfies, exercise on machines and talk to robots, wondering why there is so much anxiety and depression, can there be any more potent call than to slow, forget ourselves, sit under trees and stars and listen to country and to those who inherited it from their ancestors?
On our last morning at Garma we went to a sacred women’s crying ceremony held at 5.30 am as the sky lightened from black. Female Aboriginal elders — the matriarchs — cried for their land and their people, mourned, and comforted and called to each other. We sat in silence, ringed by smouldering fires and eucalypts on a ridge with views of the far-off sea, transfixed. It was suffering and solace in song, a lament of love, a raw paean to life. It was unlike anything I have ever heard. And, at the end, the women paused and one elder said: ‘And now we wait for the bird to sing.’ One minute later, it did.
Now, said the elder, ‘You have been welcomed by the old ladies’ — the greatest of honours. The Garma protocols say: ‘Treat old people with the greatest of respect — they hold the knowledge and the power.’ It was understood that we would respect the wisdom of these women, who create and sustain life. I went home and told my kids — to their mirth — that being welcomed by the ‘old ladies’ really meant ‘bow down to your queens’.
One of those old ladies is the remarkable Miriam-Rose Ungunmerr-Baumann, an elder from the Nauiyu community of the Daly River in the Northern Territory, who believes that the greatest gift her people can give to fellow Australians is a respect for silence, and alert, calm contemplation. This is called many different names in different Indigenous languages across Australia, but in her Ngangikurungkurr language it is known as dadirri and means, specifically, ‘inner, deep listening and quiet, still awareness’.
‘Everyone’s got it,’ she says. ‘It’s just that they haven’t [all] found it.’
It’s a reminder of how daft and ignorant white Australians have been in — at best — riding roughshod over Aboriginal traditions, and in forgetting how much we have to learn from the ancient inhabitants of this land, who have a sacred, unique understanding of it, and a strong sense of community, of family.
In a reflection, Miriam Rose, a Christian Indigenous elder, explains:
Dadirri recognises the deep spring that is inside us. We call on it and it calls to us. This is the gift that Australia is thirsting for. It is something like what you call ‘contemplation’.
When I experience dadirri, I am made whole again. I can sit on the riverbank or walk through the trees; even if someone close to me has passed away, I can find my peace in this silent awareness. There is no need of words. A big part of dadirri is listening. Through the years, we have listened to our stories. They are told and sung, over and over, as the seasons go by. Today we still gather around the campfires and together we hear the sacred stories.
The contemplative way of dadirri spreads over our whole life. It renews us and brings us peace. It makes us feel whole again . . .
In our Aboriginal way, we learnt to listen from our earliest days. We learnt by watching and listening, waiting and then acting . . . There is no need to reflect too much and to do a lot of thinking. It is just being aware.
My people are not threatened by silence. They are completely at home in it. They have lived for thousands of years with Nature’s quietness. My people today recognise and experience in this quietness the great Life-giving Spirit, the Father of us all. It is easy for me to experience God’s presence. When I am out hunting, when I am in the bush, among the trees, on a hill or by a billabong; these are the times when I can simply be in God’s presence . . .
Our Aboriginal culture has taught us to be still and to wait. We do not try to hurry things up. We let them follow their natural course — like the seasons. We watch the moon in each of its phases. We wait for the rain to fill our rivers and water the thirsty earth . . . When twilight comes, we prepare for the night. At dawn we rise with the sun.
We don’t like to hurry. There is nothing more important than what we are attending to. There is nothing more urgent that we must hurry away for.
We wait on God, too. His time is the right time . . .
To be still brings peace — and it brings understanding. When we are really still in the bush, we concentrate. We are aware of the anthills and the turtles and the water lilies. Our culture is different. We are asking our fellow Australians to take time to know us, to be still and to listen to us . . .
In greeting each morning, remind yourself of dadirri by blessing yourself with the following: Let tiny drops of stillness fall gently through my day.’
PEOPLE LIKE SARA MAITLAND thrive on gulps and ponds of stillness, large bodies of silent water. She still lives with her dog on the high moorland of Galloway in southwestern Scotland, with no phone. But what of those of us who aren’t hermits?
Sometimes, in the midst of bleeping screens, tiny hands tugging at us with infinite needs, stories to craft, reports to write, emails to hammer out, stomachs to fill, we need to reach for those tiny drops of stillness. And they can fall throughout our day, in snatched or carved-out moments, even in the midst of working, commuting, loving. I often find them when I dive into water, when I walk the dog, when I stop to sit on a bench and look at the sky, when I sink into my mat at the end of a yoga class, when I curl up with a cup of tea on my porch. I also find them when I sit on top of the ferry that takes me to the city, eyes stinging in the wind, staring at harbour cliffs, tilting sailboats, seagulls gliding in the slipstream. Or just when I lie in bed at night, curling on my side, waiting for dream shutters to fall, and wondering.
Chapter 5
The Overview Effect
SURELY THE BEST WITNESSES to the fact that the key to awe and wonder is feeling small are astronauts. Like Captain Jim Lovell, who, when on board the Apollo 8 on Christmas Eve 1968, raised his hand against the window, and watched the entire planet disappear. ‘I realized how insignificant we all are if everything I’d ever known is behind my thumb,’ he said. The first person to ever step onto the moon, Neil Armstrong, did exactly the same thing. He recalled later: ‘It suddenly struck me that tiny pea, pretty and blue, was the Earth. I put up my thumb and shut one eye, and my thumb blotted out the planet Earth. I didn’t feel like a giant. I felt very, very small.’
We have shot hundreds of human beings into space over the past few decades, most with a background in engineering, science, medicine or the military, and almost all of them seem to return with permanently widened eyes. Former soldiers suddenly speak of elation, mathematicians of bliss, biologists of transcendence. The term for the psychological impact of flying into space and viewing the Earth as a simple dot is called the ‘Overview Effect’, and it was coined by author Frank White in his book of the same name in 1987. White defined it as ‘a profound reaction to viewing the Earth from outside its atmosphere’.