Seize the Moment
Viv Harte has set me a challenge to write about group work and indigenous folk beyond racism.
I hasten to start that these days I am a poet and author foremost, though the depth of my background in psychology does spike my thoughts and manifestations.
Can anything change for a people so dispossessed and culturally misplaced? Does it take the acceptance of each other and our stories? Mine is solitude.
I do try and keep touch with indigenous culture and country and friends with whom I have largely a friendly disposition. I appreciate however, that I represent the imperialist, who has the ascendancy and capacity for destruction over this culture of sixty thousand years and millennium which is still vibrant. Despite all of our impediments, I am creating a body of my own work in all its metaphors and hope my empathy works and reconciliation occurs.
It does take solidarity and acceptance in this endless struggle.
I am always trying to create community wherever I am, but where does one place subjectivity and beyond the object in this?
Have you heard of the concept of ‘Dadirri’ or ‘inner deep listening and quiet still awareness’, as promulgated by Miriam-Rose Ungunmerr-Baumann AM PhD[1]. She became Senior Australian of the year in 2021. Miriam Rose suggests that this process is best when the indigenous folk are the protagonists and hold the conversations in their hands and create a group for listening.
Now we are searching further to give them a voice through The Uluru Statement from the Heart[2] and raising their faces in the world of civil politics. The conversation is at risk of becoming a volatile space. Everything has become so vulnerable.
In terms of the notion of group work, I had set in motion locally to create a communal meal, through which I continue to seek to cross the boundaries of black and white and met political intransigence and condescension in my local activity centre where I play a key role. I called it Daddiri and planned to use indigenous catering. The goal was to create a space where we could learn to speak to each other and listen over difference. We had planned to have indigenous leadership in Clarence Slockee.
In the end the pandemic killed it but the idea is still alive amongst some of us as we yearn for it again and of course it requires financial support and that is still our search and a search for meaning.
Life can be isolating and lonely but the courageous thing I do each day is to get up and correlate and connect with the people I have sometimes known and made contact within the intellectual space of the internet. Every day I seek to create my world and my body of happenstance as more than an individual.
I feel blessed when contact is made and feel disrupted when ‘unsubscribe’ is the hallmark of attendance from my contacts.
This is my sense of group work, and my body. I do belong to a faith congregation and practice my own solitude and try to meet my neighbours in this housing estate, in the acts of visitation and charity, though we all lead our own lives.
It can be challenging for me as an intellectual and gay man and LGTBI elder as I am basically introverted and have a white colonist settler history and have travelled the world to a limited degree and check myself for racism and its superlatives.
As a child, indigenous folk were a race apart and existentially silent. I only discovered their existence later and discovered the world of social injustice and I claim them as an errand beyond patronising and now I am mobilised.
In a cultural perspective and my justified isolation, the view is that our indigenous friends are a colonised, traumatised people, with whom now we are faced with making treaties and righting wrongs. The country is indeed theirs, and where there is a wealth of identity. This poses questions to me. How do I make cultural exchange? I think I fall down in that.
This is the body of my work of new alignment and working beyond the boundaries and creating new reality. Sometimes it is unimaginable, yet play we must, to find the other and difference and create narrative between us.
[1] For further insight, see the Miriam Rose Foundation website at: https://www.miriamrosefoundation.org.au/about-miriam-rose-foundation/