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December 26, 2006
One of our Xmas guests at Victor Harbor--Suzanne's sister--- received an Xmas present in the form of a book entitled Earthwalking Sky Dancers edited by Leslie Castle. The text is about women's pilgrimages to sacred places. It has a chapter by Lynne Wood entitled 'A Gailleach in the Antipodes'. Wood says that she writes as a fourth generation Australian who is strongly aware of her Celtic origins and who feels a sense of isolation within the Australian landscape. She says:
My own unease at writing this piece comes from feeling Celtic and living in a land with which I have no ancestral bonds. Australian Aboriginal people have taught me much about their relationship with this country, and I feel an understanding of their bond in terms of my own connection with lands of my ancestral culture in Britain. My experiences of sacred sites in Australia is as a Celt with ancestral memories of my own traditional country. What I speak of experiencing the land in Australia is an an outsider with a parallel experience, which can never adequately express the personal experience that an Aboriginal woman has in this land. However, I was born here, as were my parents and their parents. When I am in Britain, I still feel connected to Australia, while in Australia I have a powerful sense of not belonging, a yearning for my ancestral home, that sense of longing embodied in the Welsh word Hiraeth, a chronic Celtic condition.
I choked on 'not belonging' and 'experiencing the land as an outsider'. This struck me as mythmaking in a postcolonial society.
I do not have this experience of being alienated from the Australian landscape --eg., the Coorong or Flinders Ranges---even though I immigrated here from New Zealand. Nor do I try to identify with the country in the same way as the indigenous people as Wood endeavoured to do ---in order to find my ancestral cultural roots. Isn't belonging to a place different from one's ancestral roots?
Nor do I have a sense of belonging to two places and being torn between them. I was born elsewhere but Australia is my home and I have a sense of being a part of the landscape in the river country around the Fleurieu Peninsula. Moreover, I can, as a white person have my own sacred places--eg., the headwater or mouth of the Murray river---and so I do not need to try to find my roots in my Anglo-Saxon origins in England (father) or in the black forest of Germany (mother).
This is the old white settler Austrlaia is a dead heart' meme transformed into sacred places. There are no sacred places for whites in Australia as it has no history.
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Coming from Scotland, but having lived and travelled in many countries, for more than 20 years, I now feel very at home in South Australia. There are strong cultural links with my upbringing and my wife, from Adelaide and young kids are completely at home here. Certainly when I go back to Scotland (very infrequently), I am instantly at ease, but for my family, they would be the aliens. As you mention white mans history in Australia is extremely short.