Land - a compelling issue III

For most of human history, land has been a crucial part of how people and communities have understood themselves, their relationship to others, even their relationship to God. Think of the ancient Israelites, as described in the Old Testament. They knew what it was like to be oppressed and homeless, to wander in the wilderness, to be exiled to a foreign country. They also knew what it was like to enjoy God’s blessing in the promised land of Canaan - even as they looked forward to that ‘better country’, the heavenly city ‘whose builder and maker is God.’ [Heb 11:10,16] In peace and war, whether they moved around or settled down, the Israelites’ sense of themselves and their relationship to God was intimately bound up with their experience of the land.

Closer to home, Aboriginal people also relate their identity and spirituality to the land. Over a period of more than 40,000 years, indigenous Australians have developed a unique and all-encompassing sense of belonging to country. For Aboriginal people, land is not so much an object to possess as something to be part of and belong to. It is a source of personal identity not in the mere sense of being from this or that place, but in the very intimate sense of kin identification with particular sites and the plants and animals that exist on them. Land defines an individual’s relationship to economic resources, to past history, to customary knowledge and religious practice. Traditionally, it forms the physical and symbolic basis of every significant aspect of Aboriginal life.


Pic: one of more than 450 Ice Age human footprints at Lake Mungo in Western New South Wales