PM boldly commits to First Peoples’ wisdoms

Last month, hidden in among the big spending announcements of the Closing the Gap statement, a profound message went largely unreported.  Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s speech to Parliament was underpinned by a message about an Indigenous concept called dadirri. 

Mr Morrison declared that the Government’s commitment to ‘do things differently…is a path that requires deep listening – dadirri’. 

Quoting the Senior Australian of the Year, Dr Miriam-Rose Ungunmerr  Baumann, Mr Morrison told the House that dadirri is ‘a deep, inner spring inside us’, and ‘the pursuit of inner deep listening’. The word comes from the language in Dr Ungunmerr Baumann’s homeland of Nauiyu, or Daly River, in the Northern Territory. 

As someone who has researched dadirri, and with Dr Ungunmerr Baumann’s generous permission, written a Masters paper that explored the concept, I was astounded to hear these words spill from the PM’s mouth. If this is a change of heart, the implications are very significant indeed. What can we conclude? Time will tell.

Mr Morrison described it as ‘one of the thousands of Indigenous words and concepts that are a gift to all Australians…and tell us so much about the nuanced and powerful connections First Australians make between self, and community, and the land…This is an inheritance that Closing the Gap will, from now on, specifically seek to protect,’ he said. 

Why now? I can only hope the PM understood the implications of what he was saying about First Nations profound culture and knowledge. He must be held to account on this. 

The Uluru Statement from the Heart - an invitation from First Nations to ‘walk with us in a movement of the Australian people for a better future’ - issued in May 2017 is still painfully and achingly waiting to be heard. To mention an historic example, Last month marked 55 years since the Wave Hill walk-off by 200 Gurindji, Warlpiri and Mudburra people. Tired of asking to be heard they eventually demanded equal pay for their work – rather than the meat scraps, flour and sugar rations they had endured as ‘pay’ for 40 years. 

As a non-Indigenous person of Irish descent, I have long considered dadirri and many other ways of First Nations thinking to be (to quote Dr Ungunmerr Baumann) ‘the gift that Australia is thirsting for’ and ‘the greatest gift we can give to our fellow Australians’. She states: ‘When I experience dadirri, I am made whole again. I can sit on the riverbank or walk through the trees; even if someone close to me has passed away, I can find my peace in this silent awareness.’ (http://miriamrosefoundation.org.au)

Senior Arrernte elder Margaret Kemarre (MK) Turner OAM, whose traditional country is east of Alice Springs wrote a book in Arrernte and English called Iwenhe Tyerrtye: What it Means to be an Aboriginal Person. She writes: ‘Apmereyanhe, our language-Land, is like a root, or a tie, to us. It holds all of us. The only way that we can translate into English how we see our relationship with the land is with the words ‘hold’ and ‘connect’. The roots of the country and its people are twined together. We are part of the Land. The Land is us. And we are the Land...’

What happens to any human being when we dare to feel connected? To allow ourselves to become attached to places, animals, trees? To become emotionally and spiritually connected. Irish writer Sharon Blackie asks, ‘We call the places where we live ‘property’… What would it mean to truly belong to a place?’ To be in relationship. 

As we grapple with the recent IPCC Climate Report, one cannot help but think what level of disconnection from place we humans have arrived at, to be facing this catastrophe? The reality is that a deeply felt sense of emotional or relational connection makes it hard to view nature as product. The more connected you feel, the less ok you feel about damage to the land and its creatures and to the nations of people who have been here for millennia caring for this extraordinary continent. 

This land was beautifully and practically known and ‘tended’ when the British landed here in 1788, according to the observations of explorers. In 2021, 233 years later, we are in trouble. The effects of not listening to First Nations peoples are excruciatingly evident around us. The Prime Minister has now made a commitment to do things differently. We must ensure this change is not only adhered to but that it provides a profoundly different lens through which to make decisions. One thing’s for certain: we need to urgently heed Dr Ungunmerr-Baumann’s invitation to start listening. 

Jane Ormonde is a writer, speaker and counsellor. She conducted land-connection research for a Masters thesis.