An Australian soul
by
Marianne Broug
'My soul is a strange country'.
In Australia I find the relationship that people have to this land fascinating. It is akin in many ways to the relationship that most people have to their soul. And behind it all is of course the reality that for the Indigenous people of this country, their Land is not separate in any way from who they are. If you take an Aboriginal person away from their Land, you take away their soul. But I am getting ahead of myself. Most people in Australia live on the coast, give or take a couple of hundred kilometres. It is inviting and comfortable to live on the edges. It is exciting. Everything seems to happen here. The big cities are here. Transport. Facilities. And it is easy to sit and look out to sea. It is as if the whole wide world is at our feet. Paris. New York. London. It’s all out there.
But behind our backs there is a vast continent. You only have to look at a map of Australia, or decide to jump in a car and travel across it, to realise that the distances are massive. As George Johnston wrote, 'nothing human has yet happened in Australia which stands out above the continent itself'. In literature and the arts, the centre of Australia has been both demonised and glorified, but this has only served to remove us from it. Even in our present day world the pulsing power of the place is such that most find it easier to pretend it simply isn’t there.
I first travelled to the centre of this country about ten years ago. And I thought I was merely 'going on a holiday'. That was all. Have a look around. Do a bit of bushwalking. Have some fun. But as we started to travel that string-of-a-road north, something happened. It became a journey. There was simply mile upon mile of nothingness. Only earth and sky (and saltbush). And as the trappings of our modern world slipped away it was as though in that nothingness a fullness was born that I could never have contemplated. I was going inland. I was going to my interior. I was going to the centre.
I had never understood why it was called The Red Centre, but when I got there I realised that almost the entire centre of Australia (apart from a few dry creek beds and a bit of ochre) is red-brown. It is red-brown earth and red-brown rock. Red-brown Uluru. Vivid, intense and vital colour. And the effect it had on me was astonishing. I was utterly fascinated with the stuff. It became necessary to walk in it and sit in it. Take photos of it. Feel it on my body. There was such a sense of being immersed in something that was so much bigger than I was. I was drawn into it. Pulled down into it. And at the same time without knowing it, I was pulled further and further down into myself.
This may sound like mumbo-jumbo or some white person’s primitivist fantasies but it is not. The place is alive with spirits and you feel them there. They are not separate from the landscape. I remember sitting on that red earth in a remote Aboriginal community with elderly women as they cooked bullock on a large fire and it was as though I was pulled into something that I had never anticipated. And frankly I could not have anticipated it, for I had never known that it was missing. It was as though I was coming home in my own country, but I was coming home through the Land. I had never really delved much into Aboriginal spirituality or metaphysics, but simply being in the land seemed to open the vast realms of possibility within me. I began to understand how these People 'sang' their land. I began to understand that the world for them was nothing static, but rather a world that assumed many shapes and many meanings. And I began to understand that my own world carried those same potentials. I wanted to stretch my arms out and take it all in. I wanted to scuff my boots on the dusty pavements of Alice Springs. I wanted to touch every rock, pulled always into the magic and soul and vitality of the place. I felt the spirits of Men’s places where I was not welcome. I felt the spirits of Women’s places in which I was embraced. For the first time in my life I felt the strength and fluidity of my body in a landscape.
A couple of years later my own particular life struggles were once again tormenting me. My life was a living death. I had tried every therapy and technique in the book and in the end, none had helped me to live the life that I had hoped for. The one thing that I still wanted to do, was go once more to the Centre. I knew without a doubt that there I would find what I was looking for.
But this time was very different. I looked at that wonderful red earth but saw nothing. I walked down dry creek beds with the ghost gums silhouetted against red rock but felt nothing. I sat with Aboriginal people, and the flies and the sand only gave me the shits! My feet dragged … I ended up in Alice Springs Hospital. I wailed to them that I could not walk in the landscape. They looked at me with sceptical eyes, pumped me full of pills and pronounced me crazy.
I thought I had found nothing that trip except more pain and perhaps a premature death, but nothing was further from the truth. Back in Adelaide I decided that I would try one last time to find a world in which the red-brown earth was in me … and that’s when my journey to the centre of my soul started and a world opened up for me that I can live in. The power of the Land was still speaking. And continues to speak.
