It is hard, perhaps impossible, for non-indigenous Australians to understand the full meaning of land to its original inhabitants. The white people who first turned up in 1788 came from a very different place with very different ideas. They assumed the land was theirs to adapt and own. They dispossessed its Aboriginal custodians, disregarding their culture and claims. And while they imagined themselves as ‘men of the land’ - droving cattle, shearing sheep, eating damper and drinking billy tea - they in fact established one of the most urban societies in the world.
Today their descendents, along with subsequent migrants, tend to live in suburban homes in one or other of the coastal cities. We commute fair distances to desk jobs in the CBD, to earn money to spend on the fruits of industrialised agriculture overseas. We pick products off supermarket shelves and cook them up on appliances powered by gas or electricity. In our spare time, we chat with disembodied Facebook friends and dream of our next holiday overseas. We don’t think or live locally, or know our environment intimately. We are quite removed from the land as a culture and society.
3 comments:
Then there are those of us who commute fair distances to desk jobs, away from the CBD. It's interesting how spending a disproportionate amount of time waiting at the doctor's has made me think a bit more locally in some ways.
Hope you haven't been too sick or anything Jonathan? But yeah, i think its actually quite hard to live locally in our modern cities. I mean, even if we manage to work / play / worship / fairly locally, most of us have to travel to visit other members of our own family.
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