Look, listen, there are no straight lines....
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| Sophie Lizares |
In February 2015, Deacon candidate Sophie Lizares and Aboriginal Pastor Denise Champion, also a candidate for Ministry of Deacon in the Uniting Church in Australia, shared time together in the Flinders Ranges, about 5 hours north of Adelaide in South Australia.
This is Sophie's story:
“You asked about how to approach Aboriginal people,” Aunty Denise
Champion picks up our conversation from several days ago. “This is how,”
she says as together we step onto a path leading to a low circular
monument.
Nothing would have kept me from walking directly to the sinuous rust
stone carving that mimicked the two snakes of Ikara (Wilpena Pound), the
vast geological monument that surrounds us. There were no barriers, no
instructions, no protocols, just a stone marker at the mouth of the
path announcing, “Ngarlparlaru yata”.
“This is our country,” Denise translates as we walk the two-toned
gravel walk that wound its way to the centre. In the Aboriginal world,
nothing is direct, the subtleties confound.
I am saved by the saying ‘relationship before stories before
questions’, a way so counter-intuitive to the journalist in me. At the
brown centre of the monument, however, on a grim grid, no words were
minced:
“We lost our traditional way of life to pastoralism and our land
to pastoralism–and adapted to an alien culture, a new language and
religion.”
“My dad couldn’t vote, he was under the Dog Act. I felt so
bad.”
“If the missionaries heard us kids speaking our language, they
would refuse to sell our mother groceries at the store. She would have
to wait for the next week or travel to the next town to buy flour and
sugar.”
“After years of pastoral settlement, our traditional life has
disappeared.”
Embedded on the ground are crosses, horseshoes, and a length of
barbed wire that cuts across. Even for me, it is painful, the line
between prison and freedom. For all the Adnyamathanha place names that
Aunty Denise had earlier asked us to remember – Vandha Urthanha, Yura
Bila, Ngurri Madlanha – she gives us no name for this memorial. She
refers to it as the ‘National Park Rangers Quarters' - in English.
Aunty Denise, a Uniting Aboriginal and Islander Christian Congress
elder, is leading a pilgrimage of about 30 persons on Adnyamathanha
country, 430kms north of Adelaide. There are whitefellas and
blackfellas, but when one looks closely, the lines blur. There is Rhanee
whose mother is Aboriginal and whose father came from Indian, Malay and
Anglo lines. With her is her American-born husband, who traces his
genealogy to Costa Rica and to Africans who were taken there. Their
children are dusky blonde beauties. There are the three brothers from
the Taize Community, one French, another German, another Australian,
their own ‘Pilgrimage of Trust’ intersecting with us: Anglo-Australian,
German-Australian, Italian, French, Liberian and Filipino.
