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.