The Tones of Love that Set Society Above

The Tones of Love that Set Society Above

This article is a direct reference to specific circumstances existing here in Australia, in which children are being raised, which might be distressing to any child or mother, and so it need be cautioned that any breastfeeding mother might want to avoid reading, but the content is worthy and a good read for mothers of older children. The purpose of this article is to provide a few hints as to how any young family might be enabled to work towards Reconciliation with Aboriginal Australians, without ever putting our own children into the shade of what is not right.

Recently my experience includes having had younger Aboriginal mother visiting my house, with her five year old son, with a man of only English ancestry accompanying them, whom the child called Dad. They had been on the run from the Government Departments which attend to child safety issues. The reason my own home could fit them in for a short time, is because of the fact that the child has a very happy disposition, excellent manners, and is exceptionally well bonded with his mother. So now there is a story to tell about how it has come to pass that the situation arose in the first place, but it is a story very broadly connected with my own story also, so let me tell a little of it. Perhaps it is my own indigenous ancestry that enabled me to invite this young mother into my home, but perhaps not.

My own background is only being a mainstream white Australian, but with an unusual set of life experiences. Working in public radio, travelling overseas on a low budget, and being a younger mother, are the hallmarks of my formative experiences. Yet one other stands clear above the rest, and that is my presence, at the age of nineteen, at a significant Corroboree in Sydney at Kurnell on the eve and dawn of invasion day 1988. My heart became bonded permanently to the world of all Indigenous Australians that day. The Corroboree is for the purpose of reinstating traditional kinship regulation for every Australian of any indigenous blood line, even, as in my case, that of so many generations ago that my skin is lily white. There is a further Corroboree enacted in the same location during the Sydney Olympics, by many of those whom performed in the opening ceremony, and which is to include any refugees and exiles within our Australian Kinship.

Let me tell you now a bit more about my real beliefs as a mother. My children are now fifteen, twelve, and nine, all boys, and with an hospital induction birth, then a birthing centre birth, then a homebirth behind me, there is no doubt in me that the style of parenthood defined as attachment parenting, or connection parenting, is clearly that most readily affable of the modern world when placed within the indigenous Australian tradition. Affable is an odd word to use there, but good also. Perhaps knowing that Indigenous Australian tradition is very like an attachment model is enough. When pregnant with my oldest son, my reading included a book named “The Continuum Concept”, which highlighted to me the need for babies to be held. The simplicity of the maternal bond needing skin contact, and also the mother's work efforts in holding and carrying her baby, both as often as is possible without stress, for bonding to be sustained in full emotional safety, is a very real fact of the Human presence. My education in birthing and parenting came initially from Shelia Kitzinger's books, also begun during my first pregnancy. My parenthood style is also influenced by Steven Biddulph and one of my strongest inspirations has long been Ina May Gaskin. My own work has included working as a youth worker, in the young mothers projects run by the YWCA; but more importantly, home-schooling my sons when one of them decided he wanted to fight the schooling system at only eight years old. Basically there is a small point here which needs to be made, in that my level of education around the socially available methods of manifesting a connection parenting style is really far beyond what any black indigenous mother can yet access in this country. My own family background includes that my father has a PhD in science, and my mother is a school teacher, while my own extending of our family knowledge base became inclusive of such matters as the Wiccan tradition as a form of real Islam and Christianity, the world of anthropology and linguistics, Homeopathy and Ayurveda, all whilst sustaining a very solid matter of scientific fact approach to belief in the real world. My belief includes comprehensive certainty in the Cosmology, as a Religion in its own right, of Aboriginal Australia, that is now at 38, just beginning to ripen.

When I was only just 24 years old, and with my first baby in my company, I needed a place in the main street of Coonabarabran to sit down and breast feed. I thought of the park bench in front of the court house, where Aborigines often sit. Unlike many people as well educated as I am, I have no fear of mixing with Aborigines. An elderly Aboriginal woman came and joined me. The fact of that bears significance in that I was being accepted within the local Aboriginal community, which I was not then directly a part of. But just before I began to move to feed my baby, she started giving me a lecture about how bottle feeding is best. I was deeply shocked. Not hurt by her, but feeling a hurt for her. She lived in a generation when Aboriginal woman had their babies taken away from them for no less than breastfeeding. I let my baby be hungry a while longer out of respect for her experience, and her acceptance of me. She was letting me know, that to sit at that bench, it was in my own best interests, in full view of the white community as we were, not to breastfeed. Yet by that time, among the white community in Coonabarabran, were already those who owned an organic farm and a tea house in town, with a room for breastfeeding mothers. The baby health clinic was another venue, but also the local cafes were openly welcoming of my custom while breastfeeding. I am always very welcome in Coonabarabran, even if I am not fulfilling the generational pattern in my family, of passing-as-white, as my great great grandmothers did to protect their children. Still today the standards at which any black mother is expected to raise her children so as to be awarded the reputation of being a good mother, are far higher than what any white mother might regard as Humanly possible.

In late 2002, it came to me that there could be benefit felt in the Aboriginal community, if my business is inclusive of open identification with my own Aboriginal ancestry. Within one year it happened that my children were removed from me unlawfully by their Irish father, on the basis that my involvement with an Aboriginal man was tantamount to child abuse, insanity and having a death wish. Distressingly also the man concerned was abused within his own community for having fallen in love with a white girl. The court case is still current so it can not be here described, but that my children were stolen, and have not yet been returned is the fact. Thank God for the fully strong bond which exists between my sons and I, and that all three were already five before going to visit their father for what was organised to be only a matter of weeks. My experience is of the full berth of extremes of distress which face not only those Aborigines whose children are still today being removed, but the whole of the Aboriginal community. The simple truth is that men are being abused in the prison system, and sent there as juveniles, which is preventing real healing despite the providences of Government for that purpose. However, this article is not about me wanting to shock anybody, or beg for any worth in any of us having been oppressed. All Human worth, but especially that in the world of motherhood, is earned by real labours of love, and never by claiming upon the experiences of oppression. This article is motivated partly by having learned the hard way, why certain forms of work towards Reconciliation will be more effective at this time than others can be. Clearly there is no worth in Reconciling with any social stability in which our own children might be at risk.

One of the things that my experience has taught me, is that the black community have a distinct set of difficulties, which still today need ample tender care in considerations from the white community. Yet also the case is that many many Aborigines still recall in raw wounds, quite horrific degrees of physical abuse perpetrated in contexts identifiable as belonging to the white person’s world. Thereby many Aboriginal children are still today being raised in fear of white skin persons. The other side of the situation is that enough white teenagers have been hurt in their social needs by the black community that we must be very careful what we are teaching our children. So what is it we better resourced people can realistically do to help? Surely if it were myself missing out on social acceptability in mainstream white Australia, only through carrying on with what is well informed to me by my whole Kinship organisation, to be the practises of decent maternal care, why neither could myself want to know what any white person could offer in assistance. If I were a black family whose teenager assaulted a white kid from a nice caring non-racist family, what would I do, and what would the assaulted teenagers family do in knowledge that black children as young as seventeen are being incarcerated and sodomised in adult prisons. The whole derth of appropriate social interactions is too horrific to detail. But I have a full and strong belief that we whiteys are quite able to provide a level of assistance which might have an immediate impact upon alleviating the situation of what sort of access to the resources needed for parents is at present available to the Aboriginal population.

However, for you to comprehend my ideas can be effective, you might need a little more information. Not many Australians feel fully responsible for providence of a Sorry, and that is fully understandable for those whom have never experienced a decent social context in which our own children might meet and play with Aboriginal children. Only this morning I met a white man whom told me he had been anally raped by older black Aboriginal youths, when he was only eleven, but he also informs me that he has been told sorry openly by a black man, and that black men have cried tears for him. Might it only be that Aboriginal mothers need the tears of we whom can afford to spill a few?

What the real problem is for many Aborigines is that, in all the horrors of invasion, still today ever present and in living memory, the worst things that happened were those which caused alienation from cultural tradition. But worse still is that the invaders are still today not yet making any providence to Indigenous Australians, of any access to what is cultural normality in the invading culture. So many Aborigines are raising children in a sort of a cultural vacuum. That is the full reason why many mothers struggle to keep their children safe from over exposure to societal ills, just because there is no better social contact available in which any movement exists of information flow between black people and white people. If the only white people whom will talk with a black child's mother, are drug dealers, then what is that child learning about being socially acceptable within modern Australian society? So whenever we observe the many problems manifesting in Aboriginal contexts, we can place our concerns well within this context of understanding that there is needed a cultural re-vitalisation.

Any of us can aid such a process of re-vitalisation. We need not all be out there talking with, and socialising among the black community, as is my own path, and so it has passed that so has my own war been. But we can in our daily lives, just remember to consider the needs of the Aboriginal community. Remember we are a culture of the Dreamtime. Aborigines know why we Dream. We all can effect through Dreaming alone, that we aid any young Aboriginal mother so as that she might never suffer from missing out on providing the cultural tools her children will need, and that thereby it need never be questioned again whether her children might be at risk.

This story turns back into a Kinship yarn quite readily. Kinship law is now in this day, a proven scientific fact. Immuno-geneticists have substantially proven that the subdivision of Human society into two extra-marital-maternal-inheritance groups, has a sound biological basis and function. The science is within the fact of a phenomenon known as Major Histo-compatibility Complex, or MHC. The basic knowledge is that if we each believe in ourselves as either a Crow person or an Eaglehawk person, and that our health is improved if we marry the opposite, then we birth healthier babies, but if we marry alike to ourselves, then we put the health of our children at risk.

Beyond the subdivision into Crow and Eaglehawk are many other social groupings noted. My name is Nungarrayi among Warlbiri, and that indicates the way it is proper for me to interact with any other Aborigine. It also names me as having a specific Animal identification, but the nature of animal identifications is that we each must find our own way in time. But also, a mother knows the first identification of her child with nature, by observing what natural phenomenon is within the gaze of her eyesight at the moment of quickening in the womb. If we, as mainstream Australians, teach our children only that much of Aboriginal culture, (for example, “my son you are a Bilby, because it was a Bilby who hopped by me at the nature reserve when you moved inside me”, and what it means is that the child moves and feels in the style of Bilbies. You might prefer to tell to your own children “you are Bilby brained”, or other more thoughtful language.), then we can in fact cause that our own beliefs aid the generation of a revitalisation of Aboriginal culture.

Study of anthropology, from within the perspective of “why might this be real”, rather than from within the perspective of “what are these people supposing is real”, will always aid learning in a two way system. “Two way” is Aboriginal jargon for the process of teaching out Aboriginal culture as method of learning the exact same method from within non-Aboriginal culture. So bearing in mind that it is the realm which belongs to Aborigines to work with the substances of the Dreamtime, it is factually possible for any of us to provide towards the betterment of those substances. If we only undertake to contribute a part extra in our daily labours, within a consideration of the world of Aboriginal Australians, then as we absorb into our own cultural understanding, the blessings of Aboriginal culture, so can we release from our own knowledge stores, what it is we are already burdened with too much of.

For example, if you one day forget to take a baby sling into town, and want not to need to use a pram either, so have the task of carrying your baby all day, perhaps during a long shopping expedition, then if you spend the day rewarding yourself by pondering upon the way Aborigines have always managed, a way which proves that you also can manage without a carrying apparatus, then the knowledge you will release into the Spirit of the Dreamtime, is knowledge about your own certainty of what is effective and ineffective about various sorts of baby slings, and the availability of etc. Here is another example, that of diet. When we go out with our children, if they are influenced to want lollies at the shops, and we feel inclined to give in upon the rare occasion, if we only wonder about what the process has been in the indigenous community, of transition from a hunger gatherer economy, in respect only of children's diets, then in that moment of giving in, we can ensure that any ill effect we might have caused, enables that the beneficial effect is transmitted to the Aboriginal population, rather than towards the multinational companies whom profit from the sugar sales.

When you plant a tree think this way. What tree are you choosing and why and what would an Aboriginal choice be. When you are going along to parent teacher interviews, condition yourself to ponder upon why such experiences might still today be extremely difficult for many Aborigines, only because of that cultural vacuum, and in that consideration, you pour yourself into that vacuum, rather than any other social quarter being poured in.

Why we might want to so give of ourselves into the Aboriginal community is for many reasons. First is that the depravities of stolen generations are still a matter too sad to bear for many, and that if we can accept bearing only one tiny part of the sorrow, then our work for reconciliation is real. Second is that whenever there exists a cultural vacuum, whatever might be poured into it, will multiply. So in the knowledge that Aboriginal culture is already substantially well conditioned to effect excellence in maternal bonding with children, if we can only but pour into that vacuum the spill over from our own certainty in the growing social acceptance of a connection parenting style, then why we will faciliate a further and longer growing social acceptance of our own way also. Third then might be the reason that Aborigines whom have not lost so badly of traditional culture, when in receipt of any decent real way of being a loving Human being, from within this invaders culture, do enact the work of manifesting that such parts of modern mainstream Australian culture are those which become revitalised first. That is, if only we first consider how we might also adhere to traditional kinship, then our own ideas about parenthood and children's needs, will become ratified by the Aboriginal community, and woven into the Dreamtime of the mass Australian sub-conscious. I have no doubt of this being the fact.

If you would like to learn more about Aboriginal culture, start at the children's section of your local public library. Read the Dreamtime stories over and over, and identify with those stories that you just can not seem to escape from. If you are a scholar and can get to Canberra, make use of the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies library, to research the Kinship tradition from the place you yourself were born in. Ask at any local Keeping place if you are allowed to get a lesson in the local kinship traditions. But what will always be important is for you not to fall over yourself with overly apologetic regard towards any person only because of indigenous ancestry or a black face. Hold your own standards of personal demeanour and good manners sacrosanct, because that attitude is the only way to be awarded any respect in the Aboriginal community, while if you play into the too far gone sorry way, then you might paint your self as either a guilty conscious, or as easy pickings for any criminal mind. Sorry was never for the criminals whom have always been present in Aboriginal society as well as in the invading society, but it might be for their children, in that we as a whole society have failed to protect Aboriginal children, but a divide and conquer strategy, dividing people up and spreading them out and imposing upon Aboriginal communities a confusion between the social leadership and the criminals, is the nature of the abuse in which the fact of stolen generations happened and is only just beginning to recover from. Aboriginal children are suffering above all from never having been given the social conditioning in white society of how to discriminate between a white person whom is a criminal, and a white person whom is well minded towards a child.

If we, as white Australians, can not begin to simply consider the needs of Aborigines as fully connected to the needs of our own children, to share a society without race based negative discrimination, but which can properly value cultural property and cultural distinctions, then how will we ever change the world into one which respects all of us in our right to receive in cultural providence. We all have the right to live guilt free, and work against racism, and to find the best possible outcomes for our children. But if a crime against one is truly a crime against all, and the betterment of the majority is truly connected with the disease of the minority, all for one and one for all, then it is in the interests we invest in our own children's futures to ensure that all Aboriginal children are also given the socialisation into the best available as a cup to catch their mother love in.

One aspect of my own approach is that while the Government may not every be likely to give a real sorry, that is no reason to stop us individually. But remember that there are as many individuals among Aborigines whom are not at this time in immediate need of our immediate saying sorry, as there are those whose need is very genuine. Also remember that character of Bart Simpson in the “I didn't do it kid”, because we simply DO NOT HAVE TO BE WHO DID THE CRIME TO EXPERIENCE SORROW THAT THE CRIME EXISTS. So let us begin to work towards making a future in which the social fabric of our country is not snowed under with the influence of fear of the past, but rather just accept that if we ever notice any fact to be sorry for, we might just be experiencing a moment in which our own sorrow can alleviate the burdens of those whom have suffered the unfairest of crimes against themselves as children. Can we organise our pre-schools to make a sorry day event every year in which Aboriginal families are given special welcomes and their stories heard? Not only might we try such strategies, but know that if we are rejected by the black community, our considerations need not be undervalued by other Aborigines in another location whom might need our mode of parenting style to be recognised as available to them also.

My own work in every direction is always so that soon my children will be with me again, despite being caught up with both State and Commonwealth Ombudsman at this time. In that context my own Dream is to be able to produce and publish a home schooling curriculum which is culturally sensitive to indigenous needs. Perhaps like a Suzuki violin method, but for mainstream social education. The idea comes with a how to sew it yourself patchwork bag kit, to make the necessary tool to carry around the home school within, for the many excursions us home-schooling families engage in, that is a self testing device. If you can enable your child to make their own home-school work tools, then you are ready to be a home-school teacher for your child. The goal of making such a commodity accessible to the Aboriginal community is truly not nearly so unrealistic as many might suppose. The standards of childcare in the Aboriginal community are factually good, and the self discipline displayed at all times, but especially in the home, towards their mothers, by many Aboriginal children far surpasses that of most well bonded non-Aboriginal children. Our culture is living and breathing, and does not pass away even when we learn the white man's way, the white man's Dreaming, and skin tone.

Happy learning in every consideration.