Note: The term ‘Dreaming’ is used by aboriginal Australians to refer to their stories and traditions, their ancestral past, and their spiritual connection to the land.
My father has always been a self-reliant sort of man. In many ways the typical tough Australian farmer. Both my mother and father are the kind of people that you have to admire. The years of hard work and hard times have made them very practical, resourceful and patient people – and absolutely honest.
I was just a boy when poor health and hard economic times caused my parents to sell the farm. The day they made that decision was one of the few occasions I saw my Dad cry. It was a decision that my parents made, in typical self-sacrificing fashion, for the good of the family. So why was this a tearful occasion?
Over years of living on and working the land my father developed a deep identification and connection with the land – his small piece of Australia. Selling the farm meant breaking away from something very near and dear to him. The land had become part of his identity. His connection to it could perhaps be described as spiritual. It was a connection that I had too, but one which I wouldn’t appreciate until years later, and it was a connection which is profoundly important both to me and my children.
Today in Australia, as in other parts of the world, the debate is raging about land rights of indigenous people. Indigenous people’s connection to the land is similar to that of the farmer, but one which has grown deeper over numerous generations and is deeply intertwined with their beliefs. They’ve dug the earth with their hands and eaten the food that grows from it; they’ve hunted the animals that have grazed upon it and have learned its signs and seasons. The familiar places and landmarks become the subject or stories and legends and serve as memorials of important events in family or tribal history – they become ‘sacred’.
Perhaps at the root of most [white Australians] indifference to the issue of interracial reconciliation – particularly as it relates to land rights – stems from white man’s inability to realise the deep significance of land to indigenous people and culture. Approximately 90% of Australians today live in urban areas and relocate, on average, every 5 years. Urban Australians are culturally conditioned for relocation and understand little of the grief that comes when people are torn away from the land with which they have cultural connections. Their identity revolves around their job or their possessions or their recreational activities. Whilst in East Africa I was amused to learn that a word for white man was ‘musungu’. It is derived from a Swahili word meaning ‘restless wanderer’ or ‘one who wanders about’. Perhaps it’s this characteristic of the European to ‘wander about’ that is at the root of our not being able to understand the deep connection that indigenous peoples have to their homelands. (And one wonders if it is also at the root of our politicians inability to grasp the importance of providing adequate policies for the protection of farmers against the cruel onslaught of global economics.)
Recently I returned with my children to the ‘sacred’ land of my father. The current owners were kind enough to let us ‘have a look around’. I walked back in time as we visited the places where I played as a boy. The large front lawn was still there where on summer evenings we had played for hours with our dear and long-departed dog – and laughed ourselves to exhaustion. I recalled to my children stories of cubby-huts, haystacks, billy carts and shearing sheds. They saw where my brother survived a snakebite and the place where the family gathered once a year to celebrate ‘Guy-Faulks night’ around a huge bonfire. My children listened transfixed as I described every detail of life on the farm as a child.
Even though much had changed many of the landmarks were still there: The front gate and the mail-box which my father had made were still in use; the big old familiar gum trees were still standing there like silent sentinels and patient witnesses to the passing of time; the front verandah where we had so often gathered together to watch the awesome spectacle of thunder and lighting storms roll in.
It was a sacred and precious time which I was able to share with my ‘tribe’, and one that seemed to make my life snap into clearer focus. I left there feeling a little sad but deeply satisfied. I had recalled where I had come from and part of what defines me as a person. My children also came away with a clearer picture of where ‘we’ came from. To them it is ‘the land of our fathers’ – a land which they will never inherit but one which remains special in their lives as it is in mine.
Land rights and reconciliation are not just about the allocation of land. That’s a very European way of looking at it. In many cases it may not be possible to restore the land which was taken from previous generations. Many of the original inhabitants are now gone and those lands have now become the sacred homelands of later generations of new inhabitants. But reconciliation does demand the acknowledgement of what is culturally and spiritually important to all people and giving due consideration and just restitution to all who have been disenfranchised and displaced.
There’s a lovely footnote to this story, which relates to my Dad, Bill Weatherall, and the farm where my siblings and I grew up at Redesdale in central Victoria:
A few years ago I was driving through the district with my own family and feelings of nostalgia gripped me to turn up the gravel road that passed our old family home. I pulled over to admire the house from the road and noticed that the old roadside letterbox that I had watched my Dad make and put in place when I was a small boy was still standing and in use. That mailbox, which was made from an old oil drum with a hand-crafted hinged door on the front, had serviced us and the numerous families who had occupied the house over almost 50 years.
This wasn’t the first time I’d stopped at the old place, but this was the first time that the gate was unlocked and open and the new Melbourne owners were actually home. On an impulse I drove up the driveway and the lady of the house came outside to greet us as we pulled to a stop – just as my family has done when visitors arrived all those decades ago.
When I told her that I had grown up on the property we were shown the same warm country hospitality that was part of my own upbringing, and were invited in for afternoon tea. Her husband was ‘up in the shed’ and she called him to come and join us and so it was a delightful time of reminiscing and giving the new owners some background information through my recollections of our time on the farm. The new owners were particularly interested in knowing more about the underground pipes and water reticulation – details which I vaguely remembered but could not offer any helpful insights on. They were particularly curious about a water trough out in the middle of one of the paddocks that seemed to have no water supply, and I could offer no explanation other than the assurance that it did once have water in it all the time. But I suggested that they should really talk to my Dad, who was then in his late 90s, and assured them that he would be eager to offer any helpful advice and information he could, and the farmer was very keen on exploring that possibility.
I looked at my watch and then realised that there was probably still enough daylight left for me to take my family into Castlemaine and drop them at my parent’s house, then pickup Dad and drive him back to Redesdale for a look around the farm, and I was sure that he would enjoy that very much. So I made a quick call to arrange it with Dad and that’s exactly what we did.
When I arrived back at the farm with Dad he was treated like a VIP and we drove around the farm and Dad talked and talked about every aspect of the farm with the new owner, giving him some valuable insights – including the location of underground pipes between the house and dams, and an answer to the mystery of that lonely water trough with no apparent water supply. We stopped the car nearby and Dad pointed to a small patch of green grass nearby, which was a natural spring in which Dad had previously dug out to get a reliable flow to fill the trough for the cattle. Subsequent owners had, some reason, filled it in. So Dad was able to advise the new owners that if they dug in that exact spot they would be able to get a steady supply of water again for that paddock – very valuable information for a farmer indeed!
Dad sadly passed away last year (2019) at the ripe old age of 102. He’d got to live through tough years, from the Great Depression, WW2 (including being in Darwin during the bombing) and then years of hard work on the orchard and then on the farm in Redesdale, before retiring to Castlemaine. He was a quiet, private, practical and resourceful man who was a walking resource of practical knowledge. Although his health was poor toward the end, he was determined to push through the pain and would still get out in his beloved garden right up until the week before he passed. He is survived by our dear Mum, who is currently 99 years old. Below is the video tribute to Dad which was played at his funeral.
William (Bill) Weatherall, 1917 ~ 2019
