THE NO.8, MOOLLOOKATT AND ME

Submission to RN Pocketdocs competition: I met a stranger, posted on their website as “An Auspicious Meeting”:

THE NO.8, MOOLLOOKATT AND ME

 

Of the two Oxford dictionary definitions for the word ‘stranger’: ‘a person unknown to oneself’ and ‘foreigner, person in a place where he does not belong’, Moollookatt, aka Thomas Arthur Duncan, was the former but most definitely not the latter – in fact, no-one could belong more to a place than he.

One day while walking across the central park of Murgon’s CBD, a stranger caught my eye and signalled for me to come over and sit with him. He was an elderly Aboriginal man I’d not seen in town before, sitting at a bench with several of his compatriots. I walked over and sat down amongst the small group of elders. I had a question for them, something that was currently intriguing me; did they know anything about the Rainbow Serpent who came out of the ground at Ban Ban Springs? Immediately Moollookatt piped up: No! That’s where he went back into the ground! We then chatted about other places Aboriginal people held sacred in these parts and I told him about the twin spring billabongs in the bushland where I lived and about the giant rainforest tree, a Crows Ash, that stood proudly beside them, a sole remnant in the district of the dry vine rainforests that once covered the land, now shrunk to a meagre 2% of original cover in the South Burnett.  I invited him round to visit the site, which he accepted with enthusiasm.

I believe that he and I were placed at this ‘yin/yang’ veteran tree by an ineffable force of Nature. Let me explain.

The No.8 has dominated my life, from the day of my birth (8^th May), to our Victorian town house in outer London (8 Silverdale Road), to my shoe size, to my consistent weight throughout my life (8 stone), to the address of the 40 acre property where I was literally taken straight to from 2000 kms away and a sale facilitated against overwhelming odds (Lot 8 Althause Road), to the arbitrary amount of funding I was granted by the Federal Department of Environment to restore a patch of dry vine forest there ($8,000), to the appearance of the round twin billabongs from above forming the figure 8 in the landscape, to the cross section of the perfectly balanced double-trunked “Knowledge Tree”*  that stood beside them, to one of the many revelations I experienced there about how the figure 8 incorporated in an eco-technological system known as ‘flow-form’, mimics the energising effects that the rhythmic flow of cascading water through the natural environment imprints in it.

We are polarities, Moollookatt and I – me, a Western Caucasian female, born within an industrial conurbation, and he a deeply cultured Aboriginal male, born on his tribal territory, both in the same week in 1951, but on polar opposite sides of the planet. Perhaps there is some inexorable, metaphysical dynamic around the physical reality of opposite poles attracting that brought us together at the twin-trunked tree by the twin spring billabongs in heart of Wakka Wakka country. Augmenting that theory is what Moollookatt wore on his first visit, captured on film – his favourite footy shirt... with a big bold No.8 on the back.

Maureen Brannan 905 Wilsons Road CLOYNA via MURGON Q 4605 ph: 0427710523

(formerly of The Cloyna Nature Reserve, Lot 8 Althause Road, Cloyna)

PS:   PAIRED TREES or trees with divided trunks often symbolise the principle of duality. In the dualist symbolism of the Near East, the Tree of Life is paralleled by the Tree of Death. This is the biblical Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, whose forbidden fruit, when tasted by Eve in the Garden of Eden, brought the curse of mortality upon humankind. (Our Heritage-worthy ’Tree of Knowledge’ has a perfectly balanced divided trunk – photos of Moollookatt in his No.8 footy shirt and the tree to be supplied)

 

Thanks for sending in your moving story.  We have published it here http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/360/projects/pocketdocs-2014/ and called it An auspicious meeting.

OUR COMMON WAYS - How restoring the network of the world's ancient trade routes with eco-cultural tourism can unite humanity, enhance biodiversity and bring about lasting peace

My entry in the Sydney Writers Competition:  If you were writing a book, what would you call the book and what would be the first sentence for the book?

OUR COMMON WAYS - How restoring the network of the world's ancient trade routes with eco-cultural tourism can unite humanity, enhance biodiversity and bring about lasting peace.

If I told you that it would take just one small step upon an ancestor’s pathway for mankind to make one giant leap, transform Western civilisation and achieve enduring peace and harmony with each other and all living things; that identifying, protecting, buffering and augmenting every last remnant of native vegetation then linking them up with wildlife corridors in contiguous, continental-wide webs provides the best hope for us and the rest of biodiversity to survive climate change and extreme weather events; that simply by realigning political boundaries to harmonise with Aboriginal tribal boundaries, Australians could establish a legal (after signing a Treaty with each Sovereign First Nation) a-political two-tier government system, composed of a minimal federal administration and Autonomous Regional Councils based on the major water catchments and instructed by the relevant Aboriginal custodians; that we could have ‘stopped the boats’ not by spending billions of dollars on further punishing already anxiety-ridden and often traumatised people, but by setting up well-resourced regional processing centres for asylum seekers in strategic places in South East Asia to determine those in greatest need of protection, then offering individuals and family groups resettlement in CERES-based permaculture villages of around 1000 situated near volunteer host towns that they will eventually integrate into, thus invigorating our society as well; that if governments stopped telling Aboriginal people what to do and started asking them what THEY want and need to address their social problems then resourcing them with the goods and services, be it supplying homeland communities with the latest renewable energy technologies, practical and inexpensive earth building programs, or anything else that will help with their social/cultural reconstruction efforts, they could very quickly restore health and harmony in their communities, as they were before we decimated their cultures, social structures and skilfully-managed diversity of bush foods and medicines with assimilationist policies and extensive habitat destruction;  that if governments actually VALUED the priceless legacy of humanity's longest, most enduring, sophisticated and comprehensive continuum of environmental/social/governmental/economic knowledges, instead of demeaning ‘welfare’, they could pay all Indigenous people who wished to restore these 80 millennia plus knowledge streams a fair living wage for this work and the consequent eco-restoration of their homelands that would follow, including re-establishment of their network of Songlines, trade routes and migration trails that are mostly still extant within the stock route system which overlaid them (THE most ancient trade routes in the world, thus taking us back to the beginning of homo sapiens and this sentence), would you believe me? 

1.‘First Footprints’ map that shows the Dreaming Tracks  2. ‘Tracker’ magazine map of an existing eco-cultural tourism enterprise called The Bundian Way that could be replicated across Australia, and in fact across the world; 3. Internet-sourced map of the ancient opium routes across Asia.

This is a real book by the way that I’ve been wanting to write since I began Indigenous Studies at SCU a few years ago – the re-establishment of Aboriginal trade routes/Songlines is going to be my thesis - I will try and enlist famous walkers such as Robert Macfarlane (author of many exceptional nature books such as The Old Ways) and the global Travellers Network, to make this a reality.