Like an Aboriginal under the sky

Nothing in my life had prepared me for the emotional impact of my stay in the Australian desert, the "inaccessible" Outback. Inaccessible because one has to travel in a four-wheel drive jeep packed with enough gas and food to complete the journey.

In contrast you can get to the "accessible" Outback by taking a tour in a bus. Having said that, there were some very good "dirt" roads everywhere, and the amount of work Australians have put into keeping roads everywhere is impressive.

Nothing in my writing life has given me the words to describe the emotional awakening of driving through hundreds of miles of desert without seeing another vehicle. Sleeping under stars that were close enough to touch, surrounded by a crispy milky way and finding out in the morning that a dingo had been close by without making a sound is almost impossible to put into words. Such is Australia!

The marvel of traveling in such an isolated countryside is that people take in their stride. It's no matter most of the roads are constructed in terrain which can flash flood up to one meter in a matter of minutes. Road crews quickly repair the roads and the scarce travelers are on their way.

Should one be fortunate enough to pass another vehicle, a hand signal gives the message that people are more than ready to help when needed. That very gesture dissipates the feeling of isolation which is a constant companion on the journey.

It took a while to realize that places written in huge letters on the map very often have simply two or three buildings and corresponding inhabitants. Time after time a place on the map is a refueling and overnight post and nothing more. That's the way it is. Nature dominates in spite of all man has done to tame it.

It's this dominance of nature which is so special. The land is nearly perfectly flat and not only is there nobody on hundreds of miles around, but you can feel there is not a trace of anybody, ever, on hundreds of miles around. There is nothing special except untouched desert life. There is no other place that can make you feel more alive than this vast living land, isolated on the earth.

Glowing words on a tourism brochure conjure up North American images where bigger is better. Here glowing words like Milparinka are used to describe two restored buildings, the ruins of two more and a new house under construction for the caretaker. Yet somehow there is something magical about the place. There, remain so many traces of the previous inhabitants that you can feel their ghosts floating around. It revives the precious memories of old-time Newfoundland. Less is more!

There is nothing more incomprehensible than man's inhumanity to man and nowhere is it more evident than in Australia. When the British first colonized the country in 1788, they used Australia as a penal colony. At the time there were estimates that between 300,000 to 700,000 aboriginals who inhabited the land. In the beginning some colonizers, such as John Batman, signed Treaties with the natives.

However, in 1835 the British Colonial Office issued the Proclamation of Governor Bourke, implementing the legal doctrine of "terra nullius" upon which British settlement was based. The proclamation reinforced the notion that the land belonged to no one prior to the British Crown's taking possession of it. Earlier treaties with Aboriginal peoples were quashed.

Lying under the desert sky, in a land still barren of people but sometimes rich in cattle, it's easy to imagine the anguish felt by the natives when foreigners they neither knew, nor understood, forced them off their land. What horror they must have felt when their peaceful, healthy, sustainable life was uprooted and destroyed.

However, in contemplating colonization, we mustn't lose sight of the fact that the colonizers were themselves a lost people. In Britain, at the time, there were 222 crimes for which a person could be put to death and most of them were crimes against property.

A starving person (even a child) could be put to death for cutting down a tree, taking a loaf of bread and stealing a rabbit. Charles Dickens immortalized the Britain of the time in his novels. The harsh reality is: prisoners who escaped the noose or the poor looking for a better life could hardly be expected to pay attention to the natives, who at the time were regarded as sub-human.

In our time, we can look back and contemplate what has been lost by disregarding the wisdom of the natives who survived by living in harmony with the land. Today's Australians are coming to terms with their history. Although some of it remains in contention, much like in Canada.

Australia's Aboriginals, like Canada's, saw a whole generation uprooted into religious schools to erase the remains of their culture. They, too, are trying to heal from that intellectual violence. The Aboriginal culture and its methods of sustainability are gaining favor slowly. There are no truer words than: what goes around comes around!