Before we consider the views of individual Aboriginal poets on the landscape, it is important to briefly survey the traditional relationships between Aboriginal communities and their country, and also the impact of dispossession on these communities, and the poets who voice their histories and aspirations. While it is not appropriate here to describe the essence of myriad cultures in one brief analysis, it is necessary to provide a brief overview of some of the central elements common to many Aboriginal communities, as these are evident in the work of modern Aboriginal poets.
Conservative estimates indicate that Aboriginal people have been present on this continent for around 80,000 years. Over those millennia, divergent cultural communities and language groups developed across the country, and in a wide range of physical circumstances; from the temperate eastern seaboard, to the high country of Tasmania, to the mangrove swamps of the north and the deserts of the centre and west of the country.
It has been estimated that by the time the First Fleet landed in 1788, the population approximated 300,000 people, living in over 500 “tribal units” (Birdsell, 1973: 337) which related to quite specific territories, encompassing almost all of the continent, including the islands of the Torres Strait and Tasmania. A “tribe” or clan is usually recognised as a group of people who are related to one another by birth or other close and acknowledged relationships; who share a language and a spiritual framework; and who relate as individuals and as a group to the country in which they live.
The dispossession by the colonists has meant that a great percentage of people no longer live on the lands to which their community is bound by its traditional ties. The importance of these links, however, has been recognised politically and socially since the dispute over bauxite mining and the first land claims at Gove in the 1960s.
Hence the discussion of “traditional” relationships with the land is conducted in both past and present tense, while the physical relationship of the people to their country may have been altered by the presence of a mine, sheep station or major city on their land. Still, the other aspects of that relationship remain intact for many, and hold important spiritual, social, political and economic implications.
The relationship between the people and the land they occupy operates on a number of complex levels. On a day to day basis, a group has hunting and food-gathering rights within a certain area, although in many cases these are negotiable, and one group may have hunting rights or access to water on another community’s grounds. Some neighbouring groups share a common language, or dialects of a similar origin. Others have been from time to time engaged in struggles over access to resources or bitter disputes, as is the case in most, if not all, societies.
The size of each community’s land varies across the country: prior to colonisation, in some areas, particularly along the coast and rivers, groups lived in close proximity to others; in other areas, such as the central deserts, a single community might occupy a much larger geographical area.
In The World of The First Australians, anthropologists R.M. and C.H. Berndt identified two key sets of relationships with the land, or rather “two levels of ownership — the primary, religious one; the secondary, economic one”. (1964: 143) Economic ownership has to do with the use of natural resources, allocated specifically to particular groups according to rights based on tradition and clear precedent. The religious relationship with the land, although not necessarily more complex than the economic one, is the form of ownership which has most mystified European Australians, and which has been, since colonisation, a source of great conflict between the two cultures.
Both kinds of relationships with the land are necessarily intimate. The nature of the lives the people traditionally led demanded that they be totally familiar with the minutiae of the world around them: what was edible, what was dangerous, what could be used and for what purposes, what changed from season to season, and what should be changed by the people in order to make it more productive. Detailed knowledge of the land, the elements, and the flora and fauna was essential to survival. Further, this knowledge had to be passed on, encoded into readily remembered stories, so that ongoing survival was assured.
“Religious ownership” was inseparable from the physical occupation of place. The ground on which the communities walked was meticulously mapped in song and in story, and in detail, so that people knew the day-to-day details of its resources or dangers, and also how each place had come about and its relevance to the spiritual life of the group. The creation framework that has been rendered into English as "the Dreaming" provided understandings about how the known world and its features sprang from the actions of the spiritual ancestors of the people, the human and animal spirit beings whose heroic acts created the earth and its topography. Each child is born into the spiritual life of his or her family, and each child is understood to possess at birth the spirit of the ancestors, and is given their name.
Each community related to different beings, which were in turn related to different areas, as indicated in this extract from the Rose River song cycle, recorded and translated by Ronald Berndt:
People of southern clans sit there, talking together…
Words flying into the air, as they speak, in those different dialects: words drift from in there, from that place in the middle of the nonggaru, from within the sacred shade…
Talking quickly together, like the voices of birds.
Talking to one another, twisting their tongues to make strange noises like birds…
Speech of different clans, mingling together…
Dua moiety clans, with their special distinct tongues.
People from Blue Mud Bay, clans of different tongues talking together…
Clans of the barramundi, and of the paperbark saplings:
Words flying over the country, like the voices of birds (1976b: 86)
The people of the different clans held sacred specific places in their lands, and these were significant not because they may have been sources of valuable food or shelter, but due to their place in the stories of the community. The nonggaru, referred to above, is not just a billabong which clearly provides safety and a place for the performance of ritual, it is also a dwelling place of Yulunggul, the great snake.
Dianne Bell records a moving and illustrative example of the sense of individual and collective ownership and belonging which still exists in many areas of the country:
It is hard to capture the high emotional tone of much of what Aborigines say about land. On visiting a site after a long absence, they exercise great care. As they approach excitement mounts, and when at last the site is reached, there is a ritualised greeting. Here is one I recorded in 1979 from Charlie Charles Jakamarra who was standing on a cliff at Parlkurlanji overlooking his country. A wind sprang up, he spread his arms and shouted: “Hey! I’m standing, me! I’m showing it to the children! I’m following the dreaming. I brought them here — I’m Jakamarra, of Jinpiya. I’m speaking to them as a Parlkurlanji one, a Jinpiya one, named Kumurlawarru! It was heading westward — eastward. That belonging to the old men… Belonging to my father towards the south at Lamangarraji is Jupurrula. For this country still.”
(Burgmann and Lee, 1988a: 41)
These inter-relationships between the spirit beings, the people and the land were, and are, not simple religious dependencies: the land was shaped and populated by the ancestors, and their lives and the lives of the people are about, and of, the life of the land itself.
The Berndts summarise it thus:
(a) There was/is definite ownership of land, through membership of a specific kind of group.
(b) Persons belonged/belong to it through birth and through spiritual linkage.
(c) Specific territories relevant to the local descent groups can be delineated and stipulated in relation to their major and minor sites.
(d) Possession of that land was/is ratified through the performance of land sustaining rites ...
(e) Both men and women had/have rights in that land.
(f) The charter of land possession rested/rests in the Dreaming expressed through myth and ritual. The title-deed(s) were/are the ritual emblems (objects) possessed by the members (owners) of such a unit. These were/are ‘living’ symbolic representations of mythic beings and/or parts of them and/or their associations.
(g) Such land was/is not transferable; it was/is inalienable.
(Berndt and Berndt, 1964: 140)
“Finally,” the Berndts conclude, “it should be clear that there can be no question, no dispute, concerning Aboriginal ownership of land, in both general and localised terms. In a general sense, the charter of the Dreaming was sufficient justification, and was never in any doubt.” (1964: 143)
This interpretation holds several significant implications: firstly, that the entire land is sacred (although only parts of it are secret/sacred), but in different ways to different people; second, that the right of ownership and access is precise and established; and third, that the actions of contemporary communities remain interwoven with the responsibilities associated with that ownership.
Oodgeroo explained in 1990 that her custodianship of Minjerribah (Stradbroke Island), and her spiritual affinity with the paperbark trees of her people and her name, brought with it a clear responsibility to protect and conserve the earth: “My responsibility is to protect, wherever and whenever I can, my sisters the paperbark trees ... We are their custodians. We not only share with them, we must also guard them”. (1990: 8)
In contemporary Australia, that custodianship has brought Aboriginal communities and their spokespeople to the forefront of public debates over mining and resource rights, exploitation of so-called heritage areas, and battles over their claims to be able to live on, manage, gain access to, or be compensated for the lands from which they have been alienated since the arrival of the First Fleet in what was to become Sydney.