Dreamkeepers, by Harvey Arden: A Review

"Years ago I began to recognise my kinship with all living beings, and I made up my mind that I was not one whit better than the meanest on earth. I said then, and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it; while there is a criminal element, I am of it; while there is a soul in prision I am not free." -Eugene V. Debs

Dreamkeepers, A Spirit-Journey into Aboriginal Australia is well worth reading though not for the reasons I might have hoped. It doesn't really measure up as a 'spirit-journey' at all, at least not through the author whose experience is shot through with Modernist-seeming, academic meloncholy. Speaking to about half a dozen Aboriginal people in the Kimbleys only does not seem to me to paint a broad enough picture of 'Aboriginal Australia.' That being said the authors (sometimes painful) sincerity carries the day and makes this worth reading. It is worth reading because most of the time he manages to put asside the fact that he is obviously there seeking something, some kind of vision of their spirituality to wet his poor parched Western soul; long enough to let the people speak for themselves.

It was of course the moments where older Aboriginal Australians spoke for themselves about what they remembered that were most worthwhile to hear. I would go as far as to say that every Australian should have to read it, or something very like it, just for the fact that most of us don't really know or understand how things came to be the way they are today. I am probably more educated on the topic than most, but the Aboriginal people I have myself had contact with are all from the New South Wales region and my knowledge of things tends to be centred there. Some shocking facts that I feel should be shared with people regardless of where in the world they are will follow.

"When I was a boy," tells one man, "in the 1950's the coppers (Police)around Wyndham here used to shoot black-fellas for ten bob a head." p.7

In the 1950's! Don't get me wrong I knew appalling things were going on up until very recently but open season on Aboriginal people within my parents life-time? This shocked me. And I have to admit, that it was not the only thing, despite having lived in this country for nearly all of my life.

Previously I understood that Aboriginal people were sent to missions and force-fed Christianity, I had no idea how violent the 'force' had been. I had no idea that people were hunted and chained up to be dragged there by force and shot if they refused to comply. And that when they couldn't catch them they forced other Aboriginal trackers to hunt down their own people. And among those that the author spoke with there was more than one that still believed either that the 'whiteman's god' (and might I add how this equation makes me shudder)is better than their old ways or is 'one and the same thing.' Then our would-be Romantic author goes into town on pension day and witnesses the following scene:

"We parked our car and walked into a scene that mighth have been the stage set for an expressionistic ballet - a tableu of despair with dozens of Aboriginal men and women lurching, staggering, some sprawling, some prone, some slumped in doorways, some on their knees or haunches with arms outstretched in perpetual supplication to the few passersby. Small children played lethargically among them, eyes crawling with flies, noses crusted with snot. Literally thousands of empty beer cans lay strewn about the street and sidewalks. The stink of alcohol, vomit and piss was unmistakable and utterly sickening. It seemed hard to believe such a place could exist." p.47

Alas to me, and I imagine to many Australians, this is not an image that comes as a shock. This is the image many of our elders have bequeathed to us, along with a good heap of judgementalism. It is actually like they were given a script to read. It goes something like this: 'if you went out there you'd feel differently, it's disgusting. They hang around waiting for their 'sit down money' so they can get drunk again and sniff petrol. And the government pours all this money (!) into helping them and all they do is get a nice new house and tear it up to make firewood.' Yes, our grandparents and sometimes parents generation have been well trained to not see us as implicated in this image of human degradation. It is, of course their own inherent inferiority as a race that makes them behave like that. But what else could be expected of a people raised like our people have been raised? Orphaned so long ago of our gods we can't even empathise anymore with the pain of a people dispossessed of their dreaming sites, and therefore their identity?

And inherent in this fact is what makes this book worthwhile. It illustrates, though maybe quite unconsciously how the poison spread. 'White people' are no more inherently evil and greedy than Aboriginals are inherently lazy alcoholics; we are simply two people in different stages of ruination. Our ruin, so ancient and so pervading it became the causal element in theres; an enduring tragedy. Reading through this story it is easy for me to see the root of the despair of many of these people. And one must make the most enormous effort of imagination to do so. We have to imagine that our people were untouched in our primordial ways and practices for somewhere between 40 000 and 70 000 years. Yes, that's right, the Aboriginal peoples of the Kimbleys are the 'owners' of the oldest continual religious symbol. There are cave paintings of the Rainbow Serpent that are tens of thousands of years old and many can still point to those paintings and tell those stories. Stories passed to them that connected them with their dreaming sites. When dispossessed of those sites they are only 'half men' as the place itself is part of the ritual that gives them full manhood initiation. We must imagine that our name, and therefore our identity linked us to a place like that for that depth of time and then imagine that place after open-cut mining. We would know then that in that site of desolated, torn up ground we were gazing at our own inner-world.

It is a universal truth that old scars become more numb than fresh skin, and that if one lives with a lingering pain or disease for long enough it bothers us less than one who is new to such suffering. Such it is for our Aboriginal brothers and sisters, our dispossession, our loss and the descration of our sacred land is an old scar for us, but a fresh wound for them. Few of us even realise anything is wrong. We assume all societies had depression, alcoholism,boredom, suicide and the general existential uneasiness we are heir to in the West. It must be so, we are, after all, the very evolutionary pinnacle of human existence. No one has ever been smarter and lived better than we do, right? Because easy is good, right? Accumulating stuff is happiness, right?

For those who think in this manner it is education to witness the hunger of this author, as he sniffs desperately around the damaged edifice of Aboriginal spirituality, hoping to glean some fragment to put him back in touch with the 'Aboriginal in all of us.' I was constantly struck in the reading how locked out, how utterly foriegn and spiritually void he imagined himself and perhaps all Westerners to be. An amazing, unspoken racism, a belief that white people are fundamentally 'different' somehow. It was not that I didn't want to learn more myself, out of respect, for the first peoples of Terra Australis, but when one of the Aboriginal chaps he interviewed told him 'get your own dreamtime!', I felt he spoke quite wisely.

In one sense, in the deepest spiritual sense, I don't think there is more than one 'dreamtime'; the dreaming is an eternally present spiritual reality, and call it what you will it has existed for all people's. But in another sense this man is right, white people can't take away, buy, or steal Aboriginal culture, we can only look to them for some idea of the things we've lost contact with to our detriment.

As well intentioned as Mr Arden appears to have been it is inevitable and sad that this spiritual hunger that he approaches Aboriginals and Native American people with will inevitably lead to an ongoing cycle of stealing. And guilt alone is not enough to remove this pernicious element, because the author has guilt in plenty for someone who isn't even Australian. Many will say 'but we should feel guilty!' and this is true. But moving from guilt to understanding and recognising the wound in us that caused all those tides of history that swept up indigenous cultures around the world in a tide of destruction, is the next productive stage after guilt. The very fact that we use this differential 'indigenous', brandishes our wound for all to see. 'Indigenous', 'from somewhere, of a land, the first people there', is something that other people are. Not us. Our dispossession from our indigenousness was so ancient we have forgotten and dispossessed others of theirs in turn.

The great virtue of reading this book is that one is able to consider both these points. Able to see the great and ancient things that contributed to human happiness in the old way of doing things for Aboriginals, so conspicuous when the elements of it have been partially removed. When one element is disturbed everything is disturbed. The 'Law Men'roam the streets ready to beat up errant women who cross their paths and spear young men who contravene the old laws, whether the person follows the ways or not. They come across more like old ways vigilantes than shamans and law-keepers, as depicted in the classic 'Aboriginal Men of High Degree'; and who can be surprised? They are an institution on the defensive, wanting to force things back to how they were and show that a spearing is better than time in the white-man's prison. It makes one wonder if the difference between law and abuse is not simply the element of shared story. When the two people involved don't share the same laws, the same foundation stories anymore, then people are want to ask the white man to arrest them rather than go to the Law Men! And one imagines that being so deeply part of a tradition as they once were that the idea of breaking a taboo would have been all but unthinkable, literally, and spearings much more rare.

All in all, I think it's thought provoking and sad, worth a read, if only to expose the two way tragedy that Westerners are locked in with the indigenous people we've occupied.