This is not anything like the definitive article on being an Australian.
Today, 26th January 2023 is the official day chosen as Australia Day, the day when Australian’s celebrate our national identity.
I begin by acknowledging that for the First Nations’ peoples of Australia, this day does not reflect for them the possibility of being part of that national identity but rather reminds them of the confusion, conflicts, deaths, wars, cultural and family disruptions, loss of home and betrayals. I take a moment here to acknowledge that the First Nation’s peoples do not have a treaty with their English conquerors or the current other Australian peoples, nor have they ceded the lands known as Australia.
Take a moment, reader, to imagine the pangs you may have felt when first leaving the home and community you grew up, or a home you raised family for 20 years and then left. These pangs of grief are created by the embodied relationship we have to a place that has become an extension of our selves. We might say, the place is Us-I . Indeed if we take but another moment to quietly reflect who ‘I” am, it might dawn on us that who “I” am is all of the consistencies of our world, from the pathway to the door of our house, the way our family moves around in it, the rituals we have during the week and year from doing breakfast to organising special events. All these consistencies in life flow through, wrap around, bear down, and lift up, our own physical structure. They are who we become. And when another such as a grown child, leaves that place, a tendril of our own structure is pulled away. We might think it is like real physical pain. It is exactly real physical pain. The embodied life “Me”, “I”, “Us” is not a separation at the skin. The skin, and every other sensory organ, is a million dynamical attachments, keys, joints, between our perception of a discrete, contained and constrained, and controllable part of ourselves with what we perceive as the external, fluid, unstable, uncontrollable life. While we often think of ‘life’ as the thing we live in, this is just a perceptual comfort. WE ARE the life we life and everything that shows and has attachments with our attachments, that we draw ourselves against or that draws against ours. When a thousand of those attachments no longer exist to tag to, we notice it just as we notice with pain, the loss of a finger to a sharp knife.
Now imagine that the consistencies of Us is many thousands of years in the setting. Now in a very real sense, every rock, every blade of grass, every movement of air, every call of a bird, rustle of a lizard, enjoins Me-Us to rejoinder. In that place-time, where does my consciousness lie, where does my perception end? Perhaps Me-Us is the vast landscape the my hundreds of thousands of ancestors and me have roamed. Now imagine that every rock I can no longer evoke in my daily or weekly or annual ritual because some new intruder has pushed me back from rejoinder. And pushed me back. And broke the rock. And took me right away from all the landscape. Might not, at some time, the loss of so much of Me feel like I am dying, hanging on by the merest thread, perhaps not even a core, perhaps just a dissipated structure without connections, joints, attachments, really only 10% of who I WAS, perhaps less.
What would it take, then to restore Me to Who I AM?
With what capability is remaining of Me and what capability is available in the new space-time and the Others now here, I and Everyone and Everything is moving, feeling about for connection, and anticipating rejoinder.
Much of our landscape is now the landscape of our national population and the structure we have built, physically, politically and socially. Some of us, like many First nations people, have not been party to the new structures and find there are few places for attachment and connection, and the social landscape yet has offered few structures for attachment and less for wholehearted rejoinder. As a white fella I can only imagine from the resonances I feel in my own bones of ancestoral loss and tearing down and building up and other crimes against Me.
We are not yet, Australian, we who live here and only have a home, here. We are short by millions, billions, of attachments to the vital elements, the life within the geographical lines, each other, the First nations’ peoples.
We will vote for the Voice this year at referendum because we will want to have the whole of everything and everyone with the lines, in rejoinder. That is what it means to be an Australian.
We will move Australia Day to a moment when we saw that, indeed we were all in this national project together, as equals and in the possibility of ritual and rejoinder.
I will finish this reaching out and seeking new attachments by this more lighthearted but so very true reflection on who We are, Australian, Not yet Australian, even Un-Australian. Enjoy.