A place to humble yourself

By Caryn Rogers

Posted Jul  4, 2016 in Culture

It was dark when we arose on Friday morning, gathering ahead of our procession to our sunrise location. The air was cool, and the sky was beginning to yawn to life with golden hues.

As we met on the hill that morning, on the edges of Ikara (Wilpena Pound), Rev Denise Champion encouraged us to open our ears to hear the ancient voice of God speaking to us.

Huddled under layers of coats and scarves, we began to sense this presence – through our eyes as the sun bathed the immense rock-faced mountains, through our nostrils as the dewy earth ground beneath our tread, through our beings as the growing sun warmed us.

Aunty Denise told old stories and drew our voices out to join in. Voices rang out in song, croaking softly at first, then confidently calling out across the hilltops.

As we wandered and reflected, I felt an anticipation for the day ahead – what we would hear, how we would feel and what sights would impress themselves on our hearts.

We had begun to gather on Thursday 19 May, in Quorn, South Australia to begin an Adnyamathanha Spirituality Pilgrimage, as a mixed group of people with different backgrounds, different hopes and different lives.

The two days that followed brought forth the voice in the wilderness, and the voice of the wilderness.

Joining with Aunty Denise was her daughter Candace, Aunty Pauline McKenzie and Uncle Mick McKenzie. They brought Adnyamathanha stories to life, full of aldanara (barking lizards), adnu (bearded dragon), wakala (crow), urrakuli (magpie), wadna (boomerangs) and all sorts of other elements to help us consider light, darkness, learning and spirit. We were asked to consider these stories within the framework of what they taught us about ourselves, our relationships and our spirits.

The relationship between the Adnyamathanha people, their land and their language is evidenced in the importance of geography and sense of place in their stories. This mixed with the need to frame the story in the context of how it changes our way of being, demonstrates a natural and intimate interplay between all of these elements.

Denise spoke of these stories and the threads that drew them into her faith and into her hopes for the future.

For Candace, this future has many pressures. That of being a young person who needs to earn a living, wants to start a family and think sensibly about housing, but also the pressure of what it means to be Adnyamathanha and to have a place to go home to country.

A proposed nuclear waste site situated on a fault line, near a natural spring, is threatening the latter. As we stood there hearing Pauline, Denise and Candace share their pain about this land being even considered for such an abhorrent use, the disrespect of this proposal became abrasively clear.

Looking out over the natural spring, feeling the magnitude of Ikara behind me, Candace’s words from the night before sprang to mind – “Coming back to country means having a place to put your feet on the ground and to humble yourself…”

And humbled we were; by the past, by hopes for the future, and by the privilege to share a campfire with some of the matriarchs of the oldest continuing culture in the world.

The Adnyamathanha Spirituality Pilgrimage was an event run by the Centre for Music, Liturgy and the Arts and included input from CMLA Musician in Residence Michael Hawn.

This article was originally published in the June/July 2016 print edition of New Times.

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