An elegant German couple hold themselves steady as the car moves slowly over rough ground. They are curious and observant, and it seems they have been exploring the world for decades. We are on our way to see paintings on rocks of the Laura escarpments. Steve, one of the guides from this Cape York country, steers the car along the track, picking the smoothest path. We learn about local plants and notice the areas tended by the rangers during last season’s burns, evident in healthy new shoots. We talk about grains harvested from towering grasses, and how many varieties grow across Australia.
The conversation meanders until we reach the site of the paintings. Here the couple’s idreverence is palpable and everything is focused on the characters born of this area. These include Quinkan spirits such as Timaras and Imjims, along with flying foxes, fish and echidnas. Many other animals are shown among plants, tools and other anthropomorphic figures, all telling vivid stories, spanning generations in their making.
We are offered a colourful view into the minds of the painters and their families, the great-grandmothers and grandfathers of the people who live in the nearby community. We can all delve more deeply into the knowledge cultivated right here, beneath these great rocky overhangs, and this is just one of many such opportunities available to us across this vast country. Within these images and the connected stories are clues for our contemplation, for how we might farm the land without destroying her soils and using all her water, even how we might maintain our economy without undertaking gas exploration with a very real risk of contaminating the Great Artesian Basin.
More and more Australians are reflecting on these rich stories and this land’s management, which some archaeologists say has lasted for over 120,000 years. The specifics of how many thousands of years is one aspect, but a real clincher is the intimate knowledge that has come from refinement over thousands of generations of practice. Add to this a philosophy that embeds the care of country, and we have a terrific and sustainable resource – if we choose to nurture its presence and growth.
Engaging with those ideas means we learn to better love our country, and there is no better time than now. Covid means we can’t leave our shores to sit on Kuta beach with half the population of Marrickville and Coburg, or stand in a queue with the other half to admire Hagia Sophia and the genius of Byzantine architecture in today’s Istanbul.
There is so much to learn and admire about this continent and its history, and many Aboriginal communities have organised tours of their country, so they can share its complex story and spirit from their point of view.
These experiences are not just about knowing country and good holidays, but also social justice with significant economic benefit. If we begin to treat the country more carefully and use more Australian plants in our diet we will be better protecting our native animals and conserving water and soils, the foundations of our agricultural economy.
So, whether we decide to walk, listen and learn, or sit with a book, the resources available to us are innumerable. If you inhale the recently harvested plants transformed into healing balms by the ladies at Banatjarl Strongbala Wimun Grup of the Jawoyn Association, you may also choose to share a yarn and find out about their activities, or turn to your local resources if you are far from the Katherine region.
If you walk the tracks of Carnarvon Gorge, seek out the details of the oldest human stories of this particular land, and at Moyjil, near Warrnambool in Victoria, you can learn a story that the rest of the world will soon be hungry to know.
If you talk to the elders of the Birriliburu IPA in central western Australia, you may deepen your passion for incredible creatures such as the bilby, mulgara and marsupial mole, all of which have a range of names depending on the patch of country in which they live. While Covid is restricting intercontinental travel this is your chance to have a front-row seat to the revelations of recent archaeology and how it is illuminated by cultural story. You are tracing a strand in the development of the human species and a philosophy which largely eschewed land war and protected biodiversity as an essential part of the everyday.
We have opportunities to learn about ourselves, to push our own understandings, and as a nation, honour the culture of this country that has long revered its abundance.
Bruce Pascoe and Vicky Shukuroglou are the authors of Loving Country: A Guide to Sacred Australia, out now through Hardie Grant. A series of extracts from the guide will be published weekly on Guardian Australia from Sunday 20 December to Sunday 10 January.
