On The Rock
Sydney Morning Herald
Saturday January 16, 1999
IT USED to be symptomatic of two vastly different attitudes to the physical environment in general and the so-called "Red Centre" in particular. For years, visitors to Uluru (formerly known as Ayers Rock) climbed to the summit of the monolith as if to assert their dominance over a foreign landscape. But when the traditional custodians, the Anangu people, took over the management of the site, they encouraged visitors to understand the religious status of Uluru and to respect its spiritual significance by not attempting the climb. This week the Acting Prime Minister, Mr Tim Fischer, lent his weight to those efforts. He said he now regretted having scaled Uluru as a youngster back in the 1960s and said that visitors "should respect the polite [request] of the traditional owners not to climb the rock".
In so doing, Mr Fischer has highlighted a significant issue. There is a widespread expectation these days that governments, pastoralists, and miners will respect Aboriginal sacred sites and that environmental impact studies will take them into account in determining the suitability of development proposals. But there has been little attempt to popularise an awareness of Aboriginal belief systems or to encourage a general sensitivity to Aboriginal spirituality.
In The Aboriginal Gift: Spirituality for a Nation, Eugene Stockton writes that for Aboriginal people the land "is not just a surface over which people walk, hunt and live out their lives. It is not the inanimate, unresponsive stage for the action play of separate individuals who are superior to it in being animate, sentient, intelligent, self-conscious, as the European instinctively views the land. Aborigines are confirmed by their religion with the conviction that the land, together with its people, flora and fauna, and everything else it contains, is a corporate organic whole, at least as animate, sentient, intelligent and self-conscious as any of its organic parts."
Stockton is a Catholic priest and archaeologist who has worked in Aboriginal chaplaincy for many years. He believes that from an Aboriginal understanding of the land all Australians can learn something of the nature of the Divine and gain insights into their own national self-identity. That process may still be in its early, tentative, exploratory stages. But Mr Fischer this week has given it a boost which should not go unrecognised or unendorsed.
© 1999 Sydney Morning Herald
