Morgan, Sally et al. (ed): Heartsick for Country: Stories of Love, Spirit and Creation. Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 2008.
ISBN 9781921361111
The recent Victorian bushfires have caused many Australians to ponder the nature of land, love, community and identity. Aside from the paroxysms of some in the conservative press, it has been a time of reflection with few instant answers.
Fremantle Arts Centre Press's new anthology Heartsick for Country is profoundly relevant in the current climate because its 16 Indigenous authors answer in a rich variety of ways the question of what it means to belong to 'country'. Their country is one whose ancient landscape and traditions of custodianship were violently disrupted well before the 2009 fires.
In some cases it is silent country. Worrima man and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island Social Justice Commissioner Bill Jonas, for example, wonders what became of his ancestors at one of the early contact sites in New South Wales. And Nyungar lecturer Joe Boolgar Collard considers the colonial silencing of Indigenous environmental practices of fish stock replenishment and burning-off on pain of flogging.
Other country is not the stereotypical marriage of Indigene and 'land' in the soil-based English sense, but is composed by Indigenous cosmologies, skies, stars, oceans, rivers, dreams and cities. The final chapter even includes post-colonial interpretations of Stars Wars and Star Trek via the Death Star of Terra Nullius and Captain Kirk/Cook.
Above all, Heartsick for Country is about re-orientation: re-orientation to country and traditional knowledge within Indigenous peoples' lives. It also calls for a re-orientation of values and spirituality by all Australians, and for the conversations Australians must have in order to remove our dingy Age of Reason eyeglasses to see what is plainly before us. Award-winning author of My Place and Palyku woman, Sally Morgan, wishes Captain Cook had done this in the first place:
The Unknown South Land was supposed to be a place of untold wealth and beauty. So it was with our particular southern continent. But the kind of wealth and beauty the British desired was not immediately obvious here. Unable to read the signs, James Cook could see only too many trees and not enough paddocks.
Subsequent and enduring imperial motifs are deconstructed, as for example the explaining away of Indigenous people as 'nomads'. Palyku mother and daughter, Gladys Idjirrimoonya and Jill Milroy, suggest that it was actually the British who not only travelled the world but