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Becoming Indigenous: Future Cities as a
Network of Waterholes Connected by
Songlines
Steven Liaros
According to Isaac Murdoch, an elder from the Serpent River First
Nation in Canada, the process of reconciliation with First Nations
people begins when we reconcile with the land.1is is a call for all of
us to become indigenous – to nd our connection to Country, to feel at
home on, and to love and respect, the land upon which we live.
Yet there are many obstacles. How do we nd our connection
to this Country from the air-conditioned comfort of urban life? For
people who have come from other parts of the world, how do they
connect with this continent? What about their descendants, like
myself, who feel the tension between their ancestral culture and the
Australian culture? Most importantly, has the dominant Anglo-Celtic
culture assimilated itself with the land upon which the idea of Australia
has been constructed?
Early European colonisers brought with them their European
seasons, which do not align with the actual seasonal changes on this
continent. Australian Indigenous weather knowledge is far more
nuanced, with dierent calendars in various parts of the continent,
each determined by local conditions. In Nyoongar Country, in the
southwest of the continent, there are six seasons. In Yirrganydji
Country in the northeast, north of Cairns, there are two major seasons,
Wet and Dry, divided into ve minor seasons. To truly integrate with
these environments, it is necessary to observe and understand the land
upon which we live locally – not just with respect to the changes in
weather but also how other species respond to these changes.
1 Murdoch 2016.
277
Political economy of Indigenous Australians
ere is an abundance of evidence regarding the complex political
and economic life of First Australians in the journals and diaries of
the early European settlers. Bruce Pascoe synthesises much of this
evidence in his 2018 work Dark Emu: Aboriginal Australia and the birth
of agriculture:
. . . as I read these early journals, I came across repeated references
to people building dams and wells; planting, irrigating, and
harvesting seed; preserving the surplus and storing it in houses,
sheds, or secure vessels; and creating elaborate cemeteries and
manipulating the landscape . . .2
First Australians designed this economic activity through a deep
understanding of the cycles of life in their local environment, which
then informed the many systems of land management and community
governance. In e Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made
Australia, Bill Gammage describes how hundreds of dierent cultures
and languages across the continent were bound together by a common
worldview:
e Dreaming and its practices made the continent a single estate
... ere was no wilderness. e Law . . . compelled people to
care for all their country . . . an uncertain climate and nature’s
restless cycles demanded [a] myriad practices shaped and varied
by local conditions. Management was active not passive, alert to
season and circumstance, committed to a balance of life.
. . . Means were local, ends were universal. Successfully
managing such diverse material was an impressive achievement;
making from it a single estate was a breathtaking leap of
imagination.3
2 Pascoe 2018, 1.
3 Gammage 2011, 2.
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278
is is an example of plurality and diversity bound together by a
common narrative. Local communities were autonomous, while also
being respectful of the autonomy of their neighbours. ere was no
central government enforcing its views over the entire continent, but
a network of societies all choosing to be responsible for their part
of the country and their local community. Borders followed natural
bioregional boundaries, so the law varied from one jurisdiction to
another because the ecosystems in dierent bioregions functioned
dierently.
For Indigenous Australians, the land teaches people the law. Law
is based on understanding and managing the land to ensure an
abundance of life. To learn from the land, it is necessary for each
community to align works and activities with local natural systems.
Systems can vary from place to place but the objective is the same
everywhere: to create abundance. Unlike capitalist objectives of endless
extraction from nature and endless work for people to power endless
economic growth, the objective of Indigenous communities is to create
an abundance of food, minimise work and maximise play and
ceremony.
A network of waterholes connected by songlines
In the arid parts of this continent, Indigenous communities navigated
the landscape along songlines that connected one waterhole to the
next. Uluru was a spiritual centre because it was a permanent waterhole
and so provided a wide array of foods, as well as shade and shelter.
It therefore became a place for teaching, learning and ceremony. e
landscape was perceived as a network of waterholes connected by
songlines – also called storylines or dreaming tracks. e songs
referenced features in the landscape, thus acting as a system of
navigation, guiding the singer through the land. erefore, although
there were hundreds of autonomous societies, they were all nevertheless
connected into a network through trade and other activities.
Imagining the landscape as a network of waterholes connected by
songlines oers an ideal framework upon which to build future human
settlements. Rather than creating evermore congested, polluted and
unaordable cities, while simultaneously depriving rural townships of
Becoming Indigenous: Future Cities as a Network of Waterholes
Connected by Songlines
279
resources and infrastructure, perhaps we could let go of the coastline
and distribute human settlements more evenly across the
landscape. Each settlement would be a waterhole that supports a
discrete community. at community would be responsible for
managing the land, ecosystems and infrastructure in their locality to
ensure these remain in balance and create an abundance of life.
Waterholes as integrated systems of energy, water, food and
shelter
Small-scale renewable energy technology now makes the development
of such new settlements possible. An energy micro-grid can power
a water micro-grid, cycling water through the site via a chain of
reservoirs and wetlands. is water cycle could then irrigate a diverse
regenerative agricultural system. All these systems would be tailored to
the geographic and climatic conditions of each locality, integrated and
optimised to minimise energy demand.
Food-water-energy infrastructure ecosystems would be enmeshed
around passively designed co-living and co-working spaces, allowing
a discrete community to manage the systems that provide their basic
needs. ey would manage their shelters while harvesting, storing and
distributing food, water and energy within their local catchment. e
energy micro-grid could also power a eet of shared electric vehicles,
also oering the charging infrastructure for passing travellers.
Scale and complexity would be achieved through the organic
networking between settlements rather than growing the population
of one settlement. e virtual connectivity of the internet allows us to
form a globally connected estate, with a wide diversity of cultures.
The wisdom of relational philosophy
According to academics Mary Graham – a Kombumerri person from
the Gold Coast area – and Irene Watson – who belongs to the
Tanganekald, Meintangk Boandik First Nations Peoples, of the
Coorong in South Australia – the Indigenous worldview is
fundamentally dierent from the Western worldview and is based on
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280
a deep appreciation of relationships.4Graham suggests that there are
two dimensions to this relational philosophy. e principal relationship
is between people and the land, the secondary relationship is between
the people themselves. is guarantees that the land is the source
of the law, rather than the land being subjected to laws created by
people. e pre-eminence of the land over social relationships, has
broad implications for our understanding of the world around us.
Some of these implications5are noted by Watson in Raw Law:
Aboriginal Peoples, Colonialism and International Law. Binaries,
contradictions and competitions become opportunities to nd useful
relationships in the zone of conict. When we are present in the
landscape and become aware of the cycles of life, time itself becomes
cyclical.6e past and future diminish as our awareness of the present
expands. e present becomes a point in a repeating cycle of life that
claries the past and denes expectations for the future.
Logical thinking – with its assumptions and consequent
externalities – becomes systems thinking. Hierarchical and centralised
systems, become egalitarian and distributed governance systems based
on community consensus. Ownership and control of the land becomes
responsibility for stewardship.
New stories for navigating life and the land
Perhaps the most powerful aspect of the Indigenous worldview is the
acknowledgement that we navigate both the land and life with songs
and stories. Our current prevailing story is that ‘Jobs and Growth’ will
bring prosperity to all. is is so embedded in our cultural worldview
that it is almost impossible to question it. Yet this narrative is
destroying both the people it is intended to support and the ecosystems
and climate upon which we all depend.
ere is a need for new narratives, new songs to guide us. Perhaps
the most important is the story of a transition from a linear to a
circular economy – that is, from an endless growth narrative to one
4 Graham and Maloney, 2019, 389.
5 Watson, 2015, 14.
6 See also Abram, 1997, 183.
Becoming Indigenous: Future Cities as a Network of Waterholes
Connected by Songlines
281
that acknowledges the natural cycles of growth, decay, death and
regeneration. Another is the transition from an extractive to a
regenerative mindset. Rather than just taking what we can, how can we
give more than we take? is is the circle of life. Rather than always
aspiring for more, how do we seek moderation, harmony and balance?
How do we think beyond our bubbles or silos, and see the world
more holistically as a system? Unaordable housing, climate change,
plastic pollution, inequality, droughts, oods, loneliness, stress, trac
congestion, food insecurity, no free time – these are all symptoms of
a systemic problem. We solve all these problems together only by
thinking in systems and creating a new system.
e stories we live by guide the work that we do and so shape
the human settlements that we create. e transition from hierarchical
social structures to egalitarian ones will be reected in the changing
pattern of human settlements from highly centralised cities that
dominate the land and its people, to a distributed network of
settlements. is change will also be reected in a change in lifestyle.
From being permanently settled in a home and anchored to a job, we
would instead be free to travel, explore and nd the place and people
we connect with, who help us be our best and who value our unique
contribution. We would also be free to nd our own balance between
the mobile, nomadic life and the settled life.
As we create the songs that guide our transition – from linear
to circular, from extractive to regenerative, from silos to systems and
from centralised to distributed – perhaps we might also reframe the
founding Story of Western societies. Certain truths are self-evident:
that we are all created equal, and that we are all endowed with certain
inalienable rights and responsibilities. Life, Liberty and the pursuit of
Happiness could be understood as a responsibility to enhance the land
and make it viable for an abundance of all life. Living amongst this
abundance of life would liberate us from unnecessary work and give us
all the time and space for the pursuit of Happiness.
*
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282
is article was originally published by the Sydney Environment
Institute, 6 June 2019. Signicant changes and additions have been
made.
References:
Abram, D. (1997). e Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a
More-than- human World (2nd ed.). New York, NY: Vintage Books.
Australian Bureau of Meteorology. Indigenous Weather Knowledge.
http://www.bom.gov.au/iwk/
Gammage, Bill. 2011. e Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made
Australia. Allen & Unwin, Sydney.
Graham, M. & Maloney, M. 2019. Caring for Country and Rights of Nature in
Australia: A Conversation between Earth Jurisprudence and Aboriginal Law
and Ethics. In La Follette, C. & Maser, C. (Eds.), Sustainability and the
Rights of Nature in Practice (pp. 385-399). Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press.
Murdoch, Isaac. 2016. Reconciliation Begins with the Land.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3pwHxmGU58U
Pascoe, Bruce. 2018. Dark Emu: Aboriginal Australia and the Birth of
Agriculture. 2nd ed., Magabala Books Aboriginal Corporation, Broome,
WA.
Watson, Irene. 2015. Raw Law: Aboriginal Peoples, Colonialism and
International Law. Routledge, Oxford and New York.
Becoming Indigenous: Future Cities as a Network of Waterholes
Connected by Songlines
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