Modern Myths of Mother Nature

Tanya Plibersek’s eleventh-hour decision to ban a tailings dam essential for the operation of a proposed billion-dollar gold-mine project near Orange will cost NSW dear: $200 million in annual royalties, around 580 construction jobs and 290 permanent operational positions. The ministerial edict, issued under Section 10 of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Heritage Protection Act (1984), came after the Wiradjuri Central West Aboriginal Corporation lobbied to have a protection order imposed because “all water is sacred”. What Plibersek chose to ignore was the project’s endorsement by another Aboriginal group, which did not see the dam site as culturally significant.  As Wiradjuri elder Roy Ah-See observed, the mine would have provided “economic empowerment for us as Aboriginal people”.

The issue with this ongoing saga is not only that the project was cancelled in its final stages and after much money, planning and effort had been invested. Nor is that the wishes of local Aborigines who stood gain the most benefit were ignored. Certainly they are important for what they say about the risks of investing in Australia, and the rivalries amongst indigenous bodies. But there is a much broader issue, one shadow minister for indigenous affairs Jacinta Price has touched on when criticising land councils’ power to stop projects that would help local communities get out of poverty. “There is a lot of concern around the lack of accountability, the lack of transparency with the way in which land councils are being governed in this country,” she said recently in Alice Springs. In a media statement she added how “for too long the status quo has overseen an arrangement whereby traditional owners are land rich but dirt poor, and have little hope of being empowered to use the resources available to them to build their own economic independence.”

The  issue goes deeper than that, however, well beyond land councils and the caprice of ministerial decisions and into the realm of a faux religiosity and unquestioning respect for what confected beliefs.

According to research by Sydney University professor of religious studies Tony Swain and noted anthropologist Peter Sutton, of the University of Adelaide, the idea that “all water is sacred” under the spiritual umbrella of ‘Mother Earth’ is not actually a traditional Aboriginal belief. The idea that all land has spiritual significance to Aborigines is a concept that emerged in the  Seventies under a New Age/‘Christian’ influence. As the duo’s research shows,  the premise of  universal spiritual and cultural connections to ‘country’ which any Aborigine can claim is, in Swain’s words, a “scholarly construct … arisen out of a colonial context … co-created by White Australians.”

In his provocatively titled essay ‘The Mother Earth Conspiracy: An Australian Episode’ (1991) Swain argues that Mother Earth found its origins in the Old World, was adopted by North American Indians in the 19th century and re-adopted by the rest of America in the Seventies as a mislabelled ‘authentic’ Indian tradition. It was then exported to indigenous Australia, most forcefully in the Eighties. One of the first instances of the term being used by an Aborigine came in A.M. Duncan’s 1968 book Where Strange God’s Call. As Sutton quips, “Mother Earth has been pretty busy.”

By the mid-Eighties the phrase ‘the land is my Mother’ had become a common in political speeches by Aboriginal people.  Ronald and Catherine Brendt summarise the issue:

“In recent years, in the struggle for recognition of Aboriginal rights to land, a popular slogan is, ‘the land is our Mother’. That relationship is not usually made explicit in the traditional mythology which serves as the basis of religious belief and action. All ‘Fertility Mothers’, even including the Earth Mothers of Bathurst and Melville Islands, were locally-based deities who were concerned with specific areas of country and ⁄ or sites, and not with the whole of the earth per se … Moreover, although most if not all deities travelled over the land, and some even emerged from it, the land itself was not a kind of collective Mother … The concept of the ‘land our Mother’ is a highly symbolic abstraction, having little direct correspondence in Aboriginal mythologies.” — The Speaking Land, 1989

Put simply, ancient Aboriginal mythology believed spirits were specific to locations, not universally representative of all nature. The misconception of this belief became legally and politically significant when it became a factor in cases such as the  Hindmarsh Island Bridge burlesque. Sutton notes that, in a statement to the resulting royal commission, the South Australian Museum’s Philip Jones wrote,

“…influences [on the Ngarrindjeri people], such as a plethora of ‘new age’ explanations for cultural beliefs, have circulated since the 1960s at least. Meta-explanations involving fertility beliefs and notions of the ‘earth as mother’ have gained great credibility in recent times, throughout Aboriginal Australia as well as internationally.”

Sutton goes on to quote journalist Paul Lyneham, who complained his colleagues were characterised by a

“…cosy, warm, unquestioning coverage which was mixed with an unhealthy overdose of feminism and a view that these Aboriginal (secret business) women couldn’t put a foot wrong. All we saw was this California-style, New Age coverage which I didn’t think did the truth a great justice.”

Aboriginal belief could now be simplified and marketed to a white audience. Today, there are dozens of Aboriginal-themed children’s books, mainstream new articles, and much academic literature using the spirituality of ‘Mother Earth’ to explain modern Aborigines inherent connection to Country. But why is the idea so appealing? As Swain goes on to explain, “Every instance of Aborigines asserting their belief in Mother Earth of which I am aware is contextualised, either in referring to Christian faith or White Australian destruction of the land or, often, both.” The image of a female spirit of the land starkly contrasts with both the modern and often destructive world created by  Western technology and the patriarchal Christian God as a father. Writes Swain,

“Mother Earth is but a negative image of a stereotype of the Western world and thus, as we will see, she cannot be spoken of in detail without including, at the same time, non-Aboriginal beliefs and culture.” Swain unequivocally concludes that the concept of Mother Earth has now been adopted by Aboriginal people themselves and “underpinned the land rights movement.”

But if Aboriginal people have adopted this belief today, why does it matter? As Sutton points out, many “may be reluctant to draw attention to what they perceive as errors of fact because it may seem disrespectful to the beliefs of the authors.” But as the recent NSW gold mine closure demonstrates, one of the most significant barriers to improving the outcomes of Aboriginal people is the lack of jobs in rural areas and, more specifically, the weaponisation of animist beliefs, real and confected, to stop the development of key industries.

Language matters. If political activists continue to silence critics and insist on so narrowly framing the debate that genuflection before Country and Mother Earth is mandatory, then positive outcomes for Aborigines, like gold-mine jobs, will continue to be stymied. Sutton prescribed what is missing and much needed  when he wrote,

“Ffidelity to one’s own intellectual tradition may demand that one ought to be prepared to take a vigilant stand against distortions of the record, wherever they may appear.”

So far, that stand has yet to be taken.