Thursday 16 March 2023

TINY HOME RESIDENTIAL COMMUNITY GARDEN



DESIGN for an off-grid TINY HOME RESIDENTIAL SETTLEMENT and COMMUNITY GARDEN under Permaculture principles

 

Governments have unique powers to utilise economies of scale to build mobile homes at the absolute lowest cost possible.  One of my ongoing projects is to get governments to sponsor the manufacture of tiny homes, using best practice design such as this one: https://fb.watch/jiidDC1Fkx/  in every suburb and town, according to population and demand. 

 

There are just so many applications…roll them out  (on 9 by 2.5m trailers) to remote communities where people can adapt the design to their own specific requirements, to house seasonal workers, temporary settlements for asylum seekers and refugees, for homeless people, aged care, women’s refuges, low-cost housing and in community gardens EVERYWHERE. 


I have designed this settlement as somewhere I would love to live myself, informed by 30 years of experience living in small spaces on the land and having set up a number of gardens. It can be adapted to a homeless shelter with on-site employment in the communal garden, an aged care facility with the garden providing peace, gentle exercise and nutrition (raised beds would feature and wheelchair access), and just about any other configuration of lifestyle choice. 

 

The design is basically the same for urban community gardens for unemployed people, without the residences of course, just a caretakers cottage. My advice to state and local governments is to fund these urban community gardens according to need where unemployment is high. This will provide benefits all round with local business supplying and building the infrastructures, and local nurseries supplying the stock. Eventually the gardens could become self-supporting. 

 

Tall fencing all around is an important part of the design for security, due to future social instability which will be inevitable with worsening climate change – these fences will be densely planted with an array of edible climbing vegetation as well as topiaried fruits & nuts, all of which can be picked from both sides of the fence, benefitting the wider community. The four corners of the site is layer-planted with a food forest of fruits, nuts and vines to give every home a lovely view of greenery through their large living room windows.

 

The homes themselves will be locally constructed according to best practice design, of which this is a good example:  https://www.stuff.co.nz/life-style/homed/houses/117731225/tiny-home-let-mum-keep-lonelinessbusting-social-enterprise-running

Each home will have a full-length sliding window on the side facing the fence with a narrow balcony, to give a maximum view of the forest …roof windows could add light and a feeling of space. An extended wall along the left will provide privacy. Another wider balcony runs along the length of the building with a retractable washing line.

 

Gas, water, electricity and sewerage may be connected in urban settings but off-grid options, including compost toilets, are also feasible for all services and any combination of services. All the buildings have solar panels on flat roofs feeding into the main battery bank in the community rooms via a micro-grid. Small wind turbines around the outside could also feed into the microgrid. For off-grid, each house will have a rainwater tank, and larger ones for the community and caretakers area. 

 

Wet compost, ie kitchen scraps, discarded fruits, will go either to the worm farm or into the large  central ‘keyhole’ garden, where it continually breaks down and feeds the garden. The ‘hot’ compost is kept in a row of bins – these piles are perfect to compost aggressive weeds as the heat generated within them will destroy seed and any pathogens. A mulcher will supercharge the process. The clearing around the community area could have a fire-pit for night time gatherings.

 


Thursday 23 February 2023

Watershed Democracy - Recovering the Lost Vision of John Wesley Powell

 

Watershed Democracy

Recovering the Lost Vision of John Wesley Powell

Donald Worster


The watershed is the natural home of democracy.”


In the American environmental movement, two figures stand like gods, gathering followers and handing down sacred texts: John Muir, the lanky, bearded rambler of the West and prophet of the wild, who founded the Sierra Club, and Gifford Pinchot, the well-groomed patrician advocate of wisely using the nation’s natural resources, who founded the U.S. Forest Service.

 

The problem with this picture is that neither man’s shadow covers the wide middle ground where most of us live. Less than 10 percent of the country is protected by national parks, wildlife refuges, or wilderness areas. Only a third of the country is owned by the federal government and directly managed—however well or badly—by government agencies. Who then is there for the inhabited United States, telling us how to live successfully within our locality or region, pointing toward an enduring partnership between humans and the rest of nature?

 

I have no new saint to promote, but I do want to suggest that a 19th century contemporary of Muir’s and Pinchot’s deserves better notice today. John Wesley Powell introduced precisely that environmental ideal that we have long needed but have never really achieved for the nation’s inhabited landscape: watershed democracy.

 

Revised and updated for our day, watershed democracy can comprehensively and practically incorporate Alice Hamilton’s quest for environmental justice, Aldo Leopold’s land ethic and Rachel Carson’s plea for eco-logical health. It can link soil and water conservation to a more ambitious, integrated program of environmental restoration. It can provide a common cause for biocentrics, who argue that we should put the natural world at the centre of our moral concern, and anthropocentrics, who want to keep humans at that centre. Finally, watershed democracy can engage the rural landowner while acknowledging that we are now an overwhelmingly urban people. It is an environmental vision that city as well as country people can find meaningful.

 

Who was this prophet of the watershed? Powell, who died in 1902, a century ago, was born in 1834, the product of evangelical Methodists who emigrated from England, and of the wide prairie farmlands and stately rivers of the Middle West, growing up in Ohio, Wisconsin and Illinois. Although as a young man he walked behind a plow and threshed wheat, he chose not to make farming his life work. After losing part of an arm in the Civil War, he headed west toward canyon lands and mountains, seeking to make a name for himself in science and discovery.

 

In 1869 Powell led 10 men in four wooden boats on the first scientific expedition down the unexplored Colorado River passage through Glen, Marble, and Grand canyons. It was a bone wearying and tension filled three month voyage, near the end of which Powell lost three men to mutiny. What he won, after so much brutal effort, was national fame, so that ever after the Colorado would belong to him as much as the Missouri and Columbia would belong to Lewis and Clark.

 

Posterity, however, has not remembered well the post 1869 Powell, the man who came back again and again to understand the fuller nature of the West. He was determined to know what potential the new country had for America, particularly for its rural people hungry for a secure place on the land.

 

Looking at the West through agrarian eyes, Powell saw a more formidable challenge than many of his contemporaries wanted to admit. It would be difficult, he realised, to extend beyond the 100th meridian America’s traditional dreams of democratic society, private property, and self-reliant and prosperous producers. Past that line, the water gets more and more scarce, until in places it vanishes from the earth’s surface. Farmers in the East faced the growing power of railroads, grain dealers and other middlemen who were beginning to take most of the wealth out of their hands. Farmers in the West would have to confront the added threat of scarce rainfall.

 

 [Right: University of Kansas. Powell sought to educate Americans to think in watershed terms with appealing, informative maps of the natural topography. With contour lines they showed the shape and elevation of place, its natural divisions, and its articulation with other places, and with colors the place’s ecological zones and coordinated uses.]

 

The greatest danger was the ease of monopolising such a scarce necessity. In 1890 Powell told the North Dakota constitutional convention, “Fix it in your constitution that no corporation—no body of men—no capital can get possession and right to your waters. Hold the waters in the hands of the people.”

 

He was aware that putting a few words into a state constitution would not offer sufficient protection. Every state must also empower its residents with knowledge and authority to govern the use of land and water. Democracy, as Powell understood it, requires more than half-attended, half-ignored rituals of political campaigns and elections. It must be built on a secure environmental foundation. All land and water must be put under the control of all the people, who then must want to safeguard that shared heritage. Because in his day most Americans were agriculturists, he argued that land and water must be put securely into the collective hands of small farmers.

 

At the core of Powell’s thinking was a revolutionary perception of the landscape. He saw America as a series of watersheds more vital and significant than any artificially constructed political unit. Pointing out that nature follows its own demanding logic, he warned that the very shape of a human community, the shape of its rights and rules, must be tailored to that logic. Communities must be adapted to the watershed around them.

 

By watershed I mean the land area that drains to a single body of water—a river, marsh, or estuary. Sometimes called a catchment basin, a watershed may be as large as the Mississippi River’s, which drains some 40 percent of the country, or as small as an upland rivulet draining a few hundred acres. Powell studied watersheds on all those scales, founding a new science of dynamic topography and promoting a new way of conceptualising that abstraction we call the American land.

 

In 1890 he began laying out his vision of a watershed democracy in speeches before state constitutional conventions, in the Century magazine, and in congressional testimony. He recommended that the West be settled not acre by acre, but watershed by watershed. Settlers should enter a watershed only after it had been carefully surveyed and described on a scientific map, and then they should hold that unity of land and water in common. They should make rules for each kind of ecosystem within their watershed: the high mountain slopes covered by forests, the mid-level grasslands and the rich alluvial bottomlands. Powell advocated setting aside the first of those types, the mountain forests, as common property, with local supervision to control fires and lumbering. On the middle terrain he suggested the grazing of livestock under rules that would prevent over-stocking and erosion. The bottomlands were where the people’s homes and fields should cluster, farms and communities down where the creeks and rivers ran, where people could irrigate crops.

 

Respecting the watershed requires first being able to see it, which has not proved easy to do. We readily see a forest or rocky cliff, or a river running through meadows or hills. But seeing the entire watershed takes training— takes the aid of modern science. For Powell, who became director of the U.S. Geological Survey in 1881, educating Americans to think in watershed terms depended on making appealing, informative maps of the natural topography, showing with contour lines the shape and elevation of place, its natural divisions, its articulation with other places, and with colours the place’s ecological zones and coordinated uses.

 

Undoubtedly Powell’s vision owed much to the example of Mormon Utah, whose settlement patterns he observed closely during the 1870s. He drew on that particularly in writing his famous 1878 Report on the Arid Lands of the West. But there was another influence that was at least as important as the Mormon example: the philosophy of democratic agrarianism, or populism.

Populism, like its predecessors the Grange and Farmers’ Alliance movements, was criticised for standing against progress, for bigotry toward the cities, for cranky, ignorant self-righteousness. More recently, historians have revealed Populism as more forward-thinking, creative and progressive. 


Overcoming their deference to the seats of power and privilege, the Populists set out to stop the drift of the country toward corporate control and centralized ownership. Their most important instruments of resistance were producer and consumer cooperatives, self-organized and self-managed at the grass-roots level. Then they pushed on into politics, calling for democratic ownership of the means of production. The platform drawn up in 1892, the year they nominated their first candidate for the presidency, demanded a graduated income tax and said that “the land, including all the natural sources of wealth, is the heritage of all the people, and should not be monopolized for speculative purposes.”

The Populist movement roared through the late 1880s and early 1890s, when Powell was developing his vision of watershed democracy. Earlier, as a young man, one of his key influences was brother-in-law John Davis, a farmer, newspaperman, and brilliant critic of corporate power, twice elected to Congress on the Populist ticket. In working to prevent the arid West from becoming, in effect, the property of an economic elite, Powell was in league with Davis and the rest of the Populists, all of whom were intent on getting railroads, banks and marketing under the control of farmers or their elected representatives.

 

So far as I can discover, Powell was never active in the Populist movement, and it seems unlikely that this lifelong Republican would have voted for a Populist presidential candidate such as William Jennings Bryan. There was in Powell, it must be said, a contradictoriness. He was inclined to celebrate the advance of industry and the rise of scientific expertise, and even to see the trend toward corporate power as preparing the way for a more collectivised future. But when he came to think about Western land and water, and about the best way to inhabit the watershed and govern its use and development, Powell thought like a Populist.

 

In 1896 the party was defeated in national elections. After that it faded away, leaving behind a name that has often been resurrected only to be misunderstood. Real, genuine populism is no longer a force in the West or the South or any other part of the country.

 

So also was Powell overwhelmed and defeated, until like the Populists he faded from memory. North Dakota ignored him completely in drawing up its constitution. So did Montana, Idaho, Nevada and every other Western state. And so did Congress, which went on as it had always done, parceling out land with no water rights attached, disregarding the lay of the land in its land disposal policies, and stubbornly insisting on old ideas of private property and straight fences. Powell eventually retired from government and, disillusioned by his failure to put the West on a revolutionary ecological and political course, went home and shut up.

 

I have been recalling ideas and movements that rose and fell more than a hundred years ago. You may be thinking that the past is irretrievably gone. Since Powell’s time the West, indeed the whole of the United States, has changed dramatically. When he saw it, the West was scarcely populated, and the total size of the United States was less than 100 million. Today many watersheds on the Western side of the continent are brimming with people, while the nation as a whole has swollen to nearly 300 million.

 

When we look at that heavily populated United States of today, we must admit that the patterns of land and water use, and of ownership, have become less, not more, democratic. In most Western states, whoever go there first and claimed the water still, in a sense, controls its destiny by passing the claims to heirs or selling them to corporations. In some places those rights of possession have passed to metropolises, which can take water completely out of its watershed, across valleys and over mountains, and sell it as an abstracted commodity to thirsty consumers. Seldom do we see any strong local or community ownership or management.

 

True, there are irrigation districts where, at least nominally, farmers hold water in common, though not the whole watershed, and where they make collective decisions about its use. In practice, however, many of those farmers have become wealthy businessmen, not a few of them absentees, and the districts have become powerful water-controlling corporations. Such powers commonly lock out of their boardrooms most of the residents who live within the watershed. Also, over the past hundred years state and federal bureaucracies have acquired much power over water by means of the dams, reservoirs and levees they have built. Chains of command go from riverbank to regional office to headquarters, and it is in that headquarters, often shielded from public view, where professionals and technicians make important decisions.

 

With water, we have at best the shadow of democracy. We do not have Powell’s watershed democracy shaped to the contours of the land, with full and effective community participation. The water that flows past America’s millions is not, in any meaningful sense, their water. It seems to belong to somebody else. It is managed by forces and powers beyond them. It is disconnected from most of the decisions made on the land. Where do we actually vote on water or the watershed? Who do we hold responsible for what happens to the environment in which we live our daily lives? How do we learn to behave responsibly when our connections to the land have become so weak and remote?

 

Changes toward more concentrated power and control, toward metropolitan and industrial growth, are responsible, I believe, for much of the degradation of the American environment. Polluted streams, overdrawn and depleted resources, flood-plain mismanagement, a plague of eroding soils, and a severe loss of wildlife habitat - all this we see around us today, and all this despite a hundred years of environmental legislation.

 

In 1972, Congress passed the Clean Water Act “to restore and maintain the chemical, physical, and biological integrity of the Nation’s waters.” Every river, it promised, would soon be safe for fishing and swimming. Despite making some significant progress, only about half of our rivers meet the 1972 goal. Powell’s old agency, the Geological Survey, reports that between 900,000 and 2 million people become ill each year by ingesting protozoan, bacterial and viral pathogens in incompletely treated water. Then there is that ghastly brew of petrochemicals, nitrogen fertilizers, pesticides and endocrine disrupters suspended in our waterways, more of them in fact than there were in Rachel Carson’s day.

 

The damage done to the other-than-human world may be even more severe than that done to our own health. According to the Pacific Rivers Council, in their recent book, Entering the Watershed:

From one-third to three-fourths of aquatic species nationwide are rare to extinct, and aquatic species are disappearing at a faster rate than terrestrial species. An estimated 70-90 percent of natural riparian vegetation, vital to maintaining the integrity of riverine-riparian ecosystems and biodiversity, has already been lost or is degraded due to human activities nationwide.

 

When we move away from riverbanks and in-stream water quality to survey the entire watershed, we find increasing loss of agricultural lands and wildlife habitat to urban sprawl. We find more soil erosion occurring than ever before in our history. According to the Global Change Research Information Office, the nation’s soil is eroding at about 17 times the rate at which it forms. Net loss occurs on 90 percent of our cropland. The Natural Resource Conservation Service says 108 million acres have excessive erosion, losing 1.3 billion tons of topsoil each year.

 

These facts argue that we need a better way than we have found to address the intertwined problems of water quality, public health, habitat diversity and soil protection. Our persistent environmental problems are often local, and they defy the attention and the competence of the individual landowner and the badly fragmented bureaucracy. City and county planning commissions are of little help, for they narrowly focus on subdivision platting, traffic flow, and sewage disposal. The Department of Agriculture’s conservation districts, dating back to the 1930s, are limited to farm owners; they lack a comprehensive foundation in both the human community and the natural watershed.

 

Because of this continuing impasse on significant environmental improvement, a movement is stirring across the United States to embrace the idea of the watershed. Many state natural resource agencies have come to see that the watershed is the best management unit. At the same time thousands of non-governmental watershed associations have formed, seeking to educate themselves about their environment, to promote a more integrated approach to conservation, to lobby for better land and water regulation, and to restore watershed health. The Environmental Protection Agency says nearly 3,000 such organisations now exist nationwide. In June 2001, nearly 500 of their representatives gathered in Arlington, Virginia, for the first National Watershed Forum.

 

So far these groups seem to be little more than clusters of devoted activists who can claim no political authority, do not represent the whole electorate, and tend to focus only on quality of the water, not of the land. Only in the state of Nebraska do we see anything like Powell’s vision being realised. Since 1972 Nebraska has been developing a genuine and far-reaching watershed-based system of governance, dividing the state into 23 natural resource districts with fairly broad powers over all resources. What is needed is a new set of public institutions, matching and surpassing those of Nebraska, all across the nation, new institutions charged with protecting the beauty, integrity and long-term productivity of watersheds.

 

We might begin by going back to Powell’s idea of designing the best possible watershed maps for the people—lovely, attractive, informative maps. Such maps should hang in every school building, civic meeting place, and assembly hall. Topographic intelligence must be followed by new arrangements of power. There is a danger in the watershed concept that it could become the exclusive province of technical experts, undermining democratic participation. To prevent that we need to establish for every watershed in America a governing board answerable to the citizenry, backed with adequate revenue, and responsible for setting up comprehensive environmental standards. Our democratic traditions tell us that each resident of each watershed should have a voice in setting those standards.

 

I have no elaborate blueprint to offer for achieving that new environmental ideal. One should emerge from the citizens themselves. It is they who must decide how such watershed governance would fit in with or relate to existing structures of government. I sense that Americans are groping toward a new environmental politics that is broader than agrarianism, broader than environmental justice, broader than wilderness preservation and more sensitive to environmental realities than our current fragmented and out-of-date political system. They are groping toward a new structure of policy-making that, ideally, would give every citizen a better chance to be involved in vital decisions over land and water at the local and regional level. They are looking for a concept as bold as those that excited John Muir and Gifford Pinchot.

 

The watershed is that concept. It has taken us more than a hundred years to rediscover the vision that John Wesley Powell brought out of Utah and the canyons of the American West, and out of his Midwestern populist sympathies. The watershed, we can faintly hear him saying, is the place we inhabit on earth.  It is the place we must learn to live within and where we learn to live with each other. The watershed is the natural home of democracy.

 

A version of this essay was presented at the 2001 Prairie Festival.

 

Sunday 8 September 2019

Tjapwurrong Country


ASSIGNMENT for INDIGENOUS STUDIES BA at Southern Cross University

Aborigines, Torres Strait Islanders and Contemporary Legal Issues LAW00055 Topic 2: Land Rights



TJAPWURRUNG COUNTRY

(Neil Murray)


I’ve been around a lot of places
But now I’m back where I started from
Back to a lake in Tjapwurrung Country
Where the sunlight shines on fresh water
And green rollin’ plains meet the mountains
Make you catch your breath any time of year
But why does this place seem so empty?
Home of my spirit, but pain in my heart
Pain in my heart
I wanna tell ya one thing


(chorus)
I sing for my home in Tjapwurrung Country
(Sing for my home)
I sing for the people to come back there
(People gonna come back there)
I sing to be healed in Tjapwurrung Country
(Sing to be healed)
I’ll keep on singin’ till my people come



I see a lot of farms and houses
And I see a lot of damage on that land
And there’s not many know what I sing for
They must be livin’ some place else
Some place else
Somewhere different to me

(chorus)



The light still shines on that water
Movin’ through green country out there
And there in the west, those same old mountains
They keep on pullin’ me back here
Pullin’ me back here
To where I always wanna be

(chorus)



People gonna come back there

I sing to be healed, I sing to be made whole again
Keep on singin’ till my people come

In Tjapwurrung Country



----------------------------o0o-------------------------------





           The colonisation of Australia resulted in the majority of the Indigenous population being dispossessed of their tribal lands and stripped of their culture. This caused unthinkable grief and suffering for those who survived, a trans-generational trauma that is continuing to this day. The road back to their homelands has been long and hard, but with patience and steadfastness, the land’s rightful custodians have made much progress towards reconnecting with the country of their ancestors. Tjappurwong Country, written and performed by Neil Murray, encapsulates the spirit of the land and the ineffable emotional pull it has on its people to ‘come back home’.

        I chose this song, track 8 disc 2 on a Mabo Commemoration Double Album, Our Home Our Land[1], because it has particular relevance for me personally but mainly because the song has great power to ‘move’ people, to elicit a deep emotional response, and to confer profound insight into metaphysical concepts relating to land that are both distinctly Aboriginal and at the same time universal, resonating with all those who feel a strong connection to Mother Earth. I believe it has the power to inspire people and change their entire outlook – it transcends cultures, cuts through rigidly held perceptions and goes straight to the heart. Although not explicit, for me it raises issues of land justice, self-determination and governance and holistic ideas of identity, health and wellbeing.

         Although Neil Murray is not himself an Indigenous Australian, he has for most of his life had very close relationships with Aboriginal people, musicians in particular. His affinity with an Indigenous world view goes far beyond just empathy – he has far-reaching insight and understanding of the land and the enormous affection and attachment Indigenous people have to it, a quality he shares with few other non-Indigenous people. The song itself truly engages our emotions - it draws out feelings from deep within, inducing 'goose bumps' and even tears, the hallmarks of an exceptional synthesis of message and melody.  Like his friend Martin Flannagan,[2] I too can hear the rippling of the sparkling water through the music - it conjures up images of that breathtakingly beautiful and numinous landscape; I see the shimmering lake, the green rolling hills and the mountains in the distance; I can feel its tranquil, healing presence.

        “But why does this place seem so empty? I sing for the people to come back there…”  

The land is empty without people; they bring it to life, animate it, they pour their energy, love and respect into it.  They perform the sacred rites, the source and increase ceremonies and rainmaking rituals that invigorate the land’s ecology.  The land needs its people as much as people need their land – they are enmeshed in an intricate and complex reciprocity. It could be said that the homeland movement began when Vincent Lingiari and his fellow workers walked off the Wave Hill Station[3] and staked their claim on their own land, but it was the watershed victory of Mabo in the High Court[4], overturning the pernicious doctrine of terra nullius, that gave the momentum for people to begin to imagine and dream and believe that they would one day return to their homelands and live in freedom and dignity in the country of their ancestors. They have been further encouraged with successive legislations such as the Native Title Act and Indigenous Land Use Agreements that have given them access to country to revive traditional practices.

         “I see a lot of farms and houses, and I see a lot of damage on that land…”

It is an undeniable fact that all the recent species extinctions in Australia have been caused by habitat loss, i.e. land clearing, for cattle, monoculture crops or plantation timber and mega-dams, which has continued uncontrolled and unabated to the point where over 3,000 entire ecosystems in Australia are endangered.  Western farming practices were never appropriate for this continent’s soils, climate and ecology. Indigenous land practices on the other hand, acculturated over thousands of years, were adapted to changing climate and conditions and fine-tuned for maximum production by daily practice and keen observation of nature. Indigenous people managed, maintained and harvested an abundance of plant and animal species for food and medicine, knew the life cycles of each one intimately and understood the complex relationships between them. The European settlers remained entirely ignorant of this vast body of knowledge and the wealth of riches that the managed biodiversity provided; their farming methods, using the few European food plants and animals they brought with them, required the eradication of this ecological bounty. Consequently, their very presence on the land, their houses and farms, strikes a discordant note and usually equates with the land’s degradation.

       “Those old mountains keep pullin’ me back here to where I always wanna be…”

There is a whole world of meaning in the physical and metaphysical attraction the land has on people, the inexplicable way the land 'speaks' to them and draws them to it. Indigenous people have discerned, comprehended and developed the metaphysical or spiritual reality over eons but it is a realm of knowledge not explored by Western science. Hence discourse on the spiritual aspects of the land has been mostly missing in the public domain, other than in a few specialised arenas,[5] and are usually dismissed as "New Age" or as "mythology" with no basis in reality. This is an omission that needs to be addressed by Australian law as Indigenous cultures are fundamentally based on this spiritual relationship with the land;[6] sacred site legislation in particular is by necessity founded upon it. The intense shame and humiliation that Ngarrindjeri women felt when their spiritual beliefs were dismissed as a 'fabrication’ in the Hindmarsh Island Bridge Case[7] demonstrates the need for Indigenous people to educate the legal profession and the wider community in this aspect of their culture, which will mean translating it in ways understandable to a western mindset. Their spiritual connection with sacred places is so strong, it has survived through generations of dislocation, a fact which also needs legal recognition, especially when determining Native Title claims.[8]

          "I seem to be healed in Tjappurwong country ... made whole again"

Certain wild places, especially springs and waterholes, have been revered by humans as places of healing since our very beginnings. Maybe telluric emanations of magnetic energy realign and attune our bodies and minds in harmony with the earth when we are in direct contact.[9]  It is undeniable that connecting with ancestral country and revitalizing land management practices and cultural traditions restores physical and spiritual health and wellbeing. One such healing place has quantified the significant benefits of being on country and eating the bush tucker.[10]

          I would love to see Tjappwurrong County promoted more as it has largely been passed by; it would help people understand complex matters concerning Indigenous spiritual relationships with the land; it could perhaps be an anthem for a return to homelands just as Murray’s composition My Island Home was embraced by the Saltwater People.  In words echoing the song’s theme, Jill Tucker expresses her people’s sheer joy to be able to work on country again:

I get a wonderful feeling, I do, about bringing my people back to this land. We've been broken, but we're flying now, spreading our wings, and keeping the way we believe.[11]

          Tjuppurwong Country is essentially an ode to hope and renewal, a ‘hymn to the earth’[12] and a heart-felt prayer that people will return to the country where their belonging is. It expresses sadness for the degradation that the land has suffered, and the sheer happiness and joy that ‘coming home’ to it brings, communicated in a way that helps us understand, at a more intuitive and emotional level, how Indigenous people relate to their homelands. We cannot all write an anthem, but maybe, as Munduwuy Yunapingu hopes, we can all learn to “sing love songs to the land”[13] in our own way. 

 











[3] An oral history from the Wave Hill strike  http://www.greenleft.org.au/1996/251/13239
[4] Mabo  (WEBSITE)
[5] Such as Geomantica online magazine -  http://www.geomantica.com
[6] The fundamental truth about the Aboriginals relationship to the land is that, whatever else it is, it is a religious relationship ...  It is not in dispute that each clan regards itself as a spiritual entity having a spiritual relationship to particular places or areas, and having a duty to care for and tend that land by means of ritual observances ....Milirrpum v Nabalco Pty (1971) 17 FLR 141
[7] A Royal Commission investigating allegations concerning the 'fabrications' of certain 'sacred/secret' gender-restricted traditions or beliefs (which came to be known as 'women's business') belonging to the Ngarrindjeri people of the lower Murray in South Australia, concluded that "the whole claim of 'women's business' from its very inception was a fabrication." This fuelled wide-spread suspicion that the commission had been set up and influenced by the objections of the developers.  (Information taken from Kartinyeri v The Commonwealth [1998] AILR 15, commonly known as the Hindmarsh Island Bridge Case
[8] “Since sacred sites represent the cultural core of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander countries, it is not surprising that knowledge about these places has survived across much of Australia, even in places where other cultural knowledge may have been lost.” Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation, 1994, ‘In the beginning…’ Understanding Country:  The importance of Land and Sea in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Societies, AGPS, Canberra, in  CUL00401 Indigenous World Views
“There are differences between judges as to what the practical difference is between spiritual and ongoing physical connection to the land. The current position is that there may be a break in the physical occupation of the land, however it cannot be for many years. This issue is very relevant for those vast tracts of Australia where Aboriginal people have even excluded from their land for lengthy periods of time.” Topic 3: Native Title, LAW00055 If a spiritual relationship is articulated so that judges can understand - these places of critical importance must be recognized in law and the custodial caretakers given title to them, or at least rights of access.

[9] a)  "The Land is my backbone...My land is mine only because I came in spirit from that land, and so did my ancestors of the same land ...  My land is my foundation."   GaarrawuyYunupingu 1976 in McRae
"A different tradition leaves us tongueless and earless towards this other world of meaning and significance. When we took what we call 'land' we took what to them meant hearth, home, the source and focus of life and everlastingness of spirit. (Stanner 1979) In McRae
      b)  “We sit or recline on the ground with a feeling of being close to a mothering power … it is good to touch earth, to walk with bare feet – the soil is soothing, strengthening, cleansing and healing. That is why Aborigines sit on the earth instead of propping themselves up and away from its life giving forces, enables us to think more deeply and to feel more keenly – we can see more clearly into the mysteries of life and closer in kinship to other lives.”  This quote was in Indigenous World Views Unit but unfortunately I have not been able to find it again to reference it.
      c)  Another reference from IWV Topic 3 is one I wish to follow up:  “Our land also has an important role to play in healing.  The land is a powerful healer, as is the sea. When your ancestors have walked these places for millennia, they hold an energy of timelessness that invokes serenity and the feeling that one is not alone, but in the presence of these ancestors, who are able to communicate via the senses and convey the feelings and thoughts that are most conducive to healing.  When we are able to sit on land in contemplation and hear, feel or see the spirits of our old people, then we have been to a place within ourselves of great depth an connectedness.  It is this place that we need to go to in order to truly heal ourselves; and once we have learnt how to do that, then we move forward." (Clarke & Fewquandie 1998, p3)
      d) The Aborigines conceived of forces emanating from the land that bore and produced life of all kinds. Such powers were concentrated at especially significant sites such as wells, rocks-holes, waterholes, creeks, and trees.  The spiritual knowledge surrounding these places, the ritual techniques, the legends, the songs and interpretations that accompany them, were the property of individual members of clans - (McRae et al, 2003: 202)  Aborigines, Torres Strait Islanders and Contemporary Legal Issues LAW00055, Topic 2: Land Rights
       e)  “The core of Aboriginal philosophy is their spiritual and material relationship to land. Land was and is central to Aboriginal way of life, their culture and their resource base.” Aborigines, Torres Strait Islanders and Contemporary Legal Issues LAW00055  Topic 2: Land Rights
[10] Places of Healing:  Raymattja Marika: Big problems with alcoholism and drug addiction, violence and psychosis generated by the hard core drugs, also from long uses of alcohol in some people here living in what they call the long grasses. And the women's movement here always work towards having something set up like this for those people to help revive their spirits and to help them with going back to the country so they can learn the survival skills that's lost here. (REFERENCE radio national)

[11] a)  From Australian Geographic, July 2007  CARING FOR COUNTRY -  a cross-cultural collaboration, where traditional cultural custodians are working alongside a government departments
         b)  Preliminary findings of the Northern Territory University’s Key Centre for Tropical Wildlife Management and Tropical Savannas, indicate that Indigenous participation in the customary economy is generating local, regional and national benefits in land management and maintenance of species biodiversity. Activities include burning of country, weed eradication, erosion control and preservation of scarce breeding habitats for wildlife species. The potentialities to convert sustainable harvesting from the customary to the commercial sector (examples range from harvesting of species like crocodile eggs and turtles to joint venture safari hunting and recreational catch and release fishing ventures) are being investigated and trialed in joint ventures (Bawinanga Aboriginal Corporation, 2000; Vardon, 2001) – in Indigenous Hunter-Gatherers in the 21st Century: Beyond the Limits of Universalism in Australian Social Policy? Jon Altman, Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research, The Australian National University, Canberra
           c)  ALP Indigenous Ranger Program would deliver benefits for all Australians - The package would provide 300 new jobs for Indigenous Rangers, support for Indigenous Protected Areas (conservation reserves on Indigenous lands) and further development of a ‘carbon economy’ in Northern Australia by reducing carbon pollution from wildfires.  Mr. Joe Morrison, Executive Officer NAILSMA, 0429695324, Joe.Morrison@cdu.edu.au; www.nailsma.org.au  Dr. Barry Traill, Director, Wild Australia Program, Pew Environment Group, 0427261885/ 0754296622, btraill@pewtrusts.org, www.pewtrusts.org North Australian Indigenous Land and sea management alliance  http://www.nailsma.org.au/news/ranger_package.html
[12] “…and then there was this other sound, coming out of the land. Like a giant heartbeat in the background, a murmuring, a whispering, a humming of insects and birds calling, wind sighing in old casuarinas, distant thunder, rain drumming on the plains, the wake and sleep of the seasons. In the end it was the land that shaped me more and I would seek to capture it in song.”   Neil Murray (quoted from his website -        )
[13] This is a quote from a speech Manduwuy made in the late 1990's, which I taped and transcribed from the radio - it was influential in my growing understanding of Aboriginal people and their issues. It is somewhere in my files but I have not managed to find it on the internet.

Tuesday 2 April 2019

ABORIGINAL FIRE REGIMES and CONTROL BURNING

(A post from January 25th, 2018)

ABORIGINAL BURNING REGIMES

With today’s news on the ABC that the Wye River fires happened “despite years of extensive planned burns”, hopefully governments will finally understand that their fuel-reduction control burning regimes are fatally flawed and have been so from the very beginning.(1)  The inescapable conclusion after decades of expert research is that following the principals of Aboriginal fire regimes is the solution to wide scale environmental protection, restoration and ongoing management, bearing in mind that although these principals hold true, details may need a collaborative adaptation with Western experts, as what worked well for them no longer necessarily applies now that the biodiverse ecologies they once managed so effectively have been massively cleared, degraded, polluted, built-on and altered in many detrimental ways.

Indigenous forest management burning regimes, revealing a deep and profound integration with Nature and based on successfully tried & tested practices over many thousands of years and through numerous changes in climate, are receiving increasing attention. My own research reveals a pan-Aboriginal practice of never interfering in any way with any dense, closed-canopy ecologies, such as tropical and temperate rainforests, dry vine scrub, brigalow, mangroves, montane ash forests and monsoon thickets – such ecologies were left intact and protected from fire by routinely burning around the perimeters to prevent any uncontrolled wild fire from entering them.(2)

Aboriginal burning regimes were traditionally used for hunting, farming, signalling(3) and discrete ecosystem micro-management. Wide corridors and small patches were kept burnt in these forests however, for marsupial grazing, ceremonial purposes, access to sites of significance and for trade route thoroughfares, which enabled easy walking, kept snakes away and provided fresh grazing for prey animals to feed people on their long stretches of journeying. The nature of the high density biomass of these zones generated regular rain cycles which also helped keep undergrowth damp, thus inhibiting fires. Clearing and fragmentation has severely disrupted them and dried them out.

The recent fires in Esperance WA were fueled by pre-harvest standing crops and stubble, initiated by lightning strikes in extreme weather conditions. This scenario will inevitably be repeated across the continent with global warming causing more frequent and severe weather conditions and events. No amount of control burns in bushland can prevent that. In fact, the only hope there is to stop wildfires is to regenerate and restore some of those vast areas of cleared and degraded habitats back to bio-rich, naturally fire-retardant bushlands and to connect last remnants wherever possible with either wildlife corridors or stepping stone islands.(4)

We can never go back to the perfect equilibrium in which Aborigines maintained the biodiverse ecosystems of this continent, but we can learn to manage what remains of them in collaboration with the Traditional Owner Knowledge Keepers. It is appropriate that Aboriginal science, fine-tuned over many millennia, informs today’s management of these ecologies.

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(2) Still practiced by Traditional Owners – (provide link when found)
 
 

Wednesday 27 March 2019

THE MERIDIAN WAVE


The Meridian Wave

POWER TO THE PEACEFUL!

“There is no power on earth that can withstand the united cooperation on spiritual levels of men and women of goodwill…”  Wellesley Tudor Pole

There is one very easy and enjoyable thing that everyone could participate in and include in our daily routines to help combat the fear, anxiety and negativity in the world today, and that is to observe a minute’s silence at midday every day, based on The Big Ben Silent Minute.* Its simplicity belies the enormous potential it has to bring about profound beneficial changes to the world, to embed peace in our hearts and minds and to promote harmonious relations between people of all ethnicities & faiths.

The esoteric knowledge of this self-embedding wave of energy was reputedly used by Winston Churchill during World War II, an initiative of Major Tudor Pole after an epiphany he’d had to help bring an end to the war. Over the airwaves, he implored the people of Great Britain as they were gathered around their radios to listen to the 9 pm news, to collectively pray in silence for the minute that the broadcasted chimes of Big Ben were striking the hour. Everyone participated, millions of people fervently praying for the war to be over and their sons returned to them safe & sound. After the war, Nazi records noted that “the Britons had a secret weapon connected to Big Ben" - they never uncovered the nature of this weapon!  

Synchronised meditation is an ancient tradition in many cultures that goes back thousands of years. It is understood that the power of prayer is greatly magnified when people synchronise their passion and will and attune to the same intention at the same time. The theory suggests that energy produced from this combined willpower would generate a self-embedding roll of energy (aka Ouroborus, the snake eating its own tail symbolising an eternal cycle of renewal) that would create a wave around the planet, overcoming all negativity and bringing peace & harmony to all in its path.

Today it is needed more than ever to overcome the low vibrational negativity, cynicism, fear & hatred many people harbour within them, unwittingly spreading mind & environmental pollution and violence that disregards all living things. All this darkness & disease might be neutralised if we all participate in this daily exercise, Matrix style, our united body channelling high-vibrational love, compassion and understanding, humanity working together as one, all of equal value, transcending race or religious persuasion. We could create a veritable tsunami of pure love and bliss, overcoming all obstacles, lifting spirits and healing all in its path.

Maintaining peace will then allow us to devote our energies to urgent priorities, such as adapting our societies to cope with extreme weather events, catastrophes, environmental & climatic changes. With our time and energy freed up and focussed, hundreds of species and entire ecosystems currently in danger of extinction could be restored back into balance & re-invigorated.

I truly believe that if millions of people synchronised their goodwill and prayers at the same time every day, it would set up a roll of energy that will bring lasting peace everywhere on Earth. Every city, town and village could observe this simple ritual as 12 o’clock rolls slowly round the planet, the radiance from each one adding to this unstoppable force of nature, increases in power with every human settlement and with every additional mind focussing and contributing.   

TV and radio stations could help by remaining silent for one minute at midday. There could be a Meridian Wave app (which I would be delighted to help set up) or even a dedicated TV channel, to coordinate synchronisation in each big city as midday flows around the globe.

This is what many people are already doing, and this is what we can all do, starting tomorrow, by just being mindful for one minute at noon each day, and meditating on a world at peace… our ‘secret weapon’ against negativity connected to the Meridian.
 
Peace will come.



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The Silent Minute, Wikipedia

The Silent Minute was an historic movement begun in the United Kingdom by Major Wellesley Tudor Pole O.B.E. in 1940. It continues today as a London-based charity following its revival by Dorothy Forster. During the Second World War people would unite in meditation, prayer or focus (each according to their own belief) and consciously will for peace to prevail. This dedicated minute received the direct support of King George VI, Sir Winston Churchill and his Parliamentary Cabinet. It was also recognized by U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt and observed on land and at sea on the battlefields, in air raid shelters and in hospitals. With Churchill’s support, the BBC, on Sunday, November 10, 1940, began to play the bells of Big Ben on the radio as a signal for the Silent Minute to begin.

The idea was developed in Britain in the Second World War, initially from an idea by Major Wellesley Tudor Pole. People were asked to devote one minute of prayer for peace at nine o’clock each evening. He said: “There is no power on earth that can withstand the united cooperation on spiritual levels of men and women of goodwill everywhere. It is for this reason that the continued and widespread observance of the Silent Minute is of such vital importance in the interest of human welfare.”

The Silent Minute began in 1940 during The Blitz on the UK when Major Wellesley Tudor-Pole perceived  ‘an inner request from a high spiritual source that there be a Silent Minute of Prayer for Freedom’, at 9pm each evening during the striking of Big Ben. If enough people joined in this gesture of dedicated intent, the tide would turn and the invasion of England would be diverted. [2] Tudor-Pole went to the King and Prime Minister with his request and won both their support.

An anecdote emphasizes the profound power of the group meditation of the Silent Minute. In 1945 a British intelligence officer was interrogating a high Nazi official. He asked him why he thought Germany lost the war. His reply was, “During the war, you had a secret weapon for which we could find no counter measure, which we did not understand, but it was very powerful. It was associated with the striking of the Big Ben each evening. I believe you called it the ‘Silent Minute.’[3][4]

The Silent Minute was revived by Dorothy Forster and gained a new following of people after the 9/11 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center and the commencement of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It continues as a small charitable organisation based in London, but with a worldwide list of participants. Some people had continued the habit of the 9 p.m. prayer ever since the Second World War, but diverting their focus to the different areas of the World wherever there were conflicts currently ongoing. Apart from these few people, the practice had been largely forgotten by the British public for almost half a century until it was revived.

The trustees maintain that there is always war going on somewhere in the World and that uniting in a collective will for peace may have some beneficial effect for humankind, whether or not there is any direct effect upon the conflict. At the heart of the effort there is a community united from people of all ages, races and backgrounds, and a focus on our collective humanity and the benefits of peace in society.

The Silent Minute does not have any political affiliations and receives no funding, but runs entirely on donations from the general public.