Click here to read an essay I wrote about the performance of liyan (feeling and intuition) on the Lurujarri Dreaming Trail. The essay is published in Issue 11 of the PAN: Philosophy Activism, Nature Journal.
Category Archives: Dogs & Trees
You’ve got to drown in it
Filed under Articles, Birds, Birds, Dogs & Trees, Dogs & Trees, Theory, Walking
Dingo Love: towards multi-species peace
On reading Deborah Bird Rose’s latest post, Dingo Nation, I discovered a man by the name of John Cooper. In an ABC Open story on Cooper, Debrah Novak writes:
This is a story about a man’s love and passion for his Australian Dingos. He and his pack live in the the upper reaches of the Clarence River country in Northern NSW. With him I had the privilege of watching and recording a very special moment for this story: dingo pups being born in their lair. It is just one special moment in a story about a farmer who has come up with an unusual way of keeping wild dogs under control on his property.
The truth that rings clear for me, in both Rose’s post and the video on Cooper, is the opportunity to expand our (human) deep listening and compassion to more-than-human animals and other entities. Rose refers to research by Arian Wallach which highlights the capacity for dingoes to exist in…
complex family structure (known as a pack), collaborative care of the young, cooperative hunting, territorial defense, limits on family size and structure, individual personalities, and other features that indicate highly social animals with strong loyalties and a deep sense of duties and responsibilities.
To exist within, and maintain closely-knit kinship structures is surely evidence of a highly evolved and intelligent community of beings. To know what we belong to, and our role within kinship structures, gives us a place to dwell within.
This is obviously a huge questions, but, what is it that we as humans need to resolve, to be at peace amongst ourselves and other species? Is it a Deep Ecology/Transpersonal Ecology approach to life which shepherds all life forms (I would claim all entities) into a realm of identification, where we perceive ourselves connected infinitely through multiple networks of relationships? To have a heightened sense of compassion and expand our concern with more-than-human life surely requires the realisation that we depend upon the well-being of living networks for our own physical, psychological and spiritual well-being.
The thing I love most about John Cooper’s approach to life is his openness and surrender to embracing the life that surrounds him – oh the love!
Filed under Birds, Dogs & Trees, Moving Images
‘Seeing’ home
I had a conversation with a woman in a dream. She told me that she had seen a mamara (spirit tree) that I had written about (see The Women and the Mamara), but not on the Lurujarri Dreaming Trail. I was confused, I had not written about any other mamara. Which place and which mamara was she talking about? This dream was so hauntingly vivid, I felt as though the conversation had happened during a lucid conversation. The next day as I walked through the native gardens close to where I live I looked up and saw her, as if for the first time. It was her, the mamara from my dream. Fat girth, limbs outstretched and caressing the sky, this mamara was old. I found a shallow dip near the base of her trunk and burrowed in, my back supported by her body.
How had I not see her all the other times I had passed by? Perhaps I had see this eucalyptus, but I had not seen her, the mamara. With eyes open, I began looking around at the surrounding country and noticed that I could see a long way into the distance, in all directions. This was the highest point for a long, long way. A big tree on a big hill right under my nose and I’d never noticed… From this mamara, on this hill which used to be called One Tree Hill, you can see unimpeded all the way to the Dandenongs, out to the Yarra Ranges, over to Mount Macedon on the western side of the city and a long, long way to the south.
My friend J grew up next to this park. When I asked her about the tree she knew which one I meant in an instant. She told me a story about when she was little… whenever there would be thunderstorms passing through, she would worry that the lightening would strike their home because they too were perched on top of the hill. Her mother told her not to worry, that the tree (the mamara) would protect them.
A week later I came back to the mamara and started to feel another tree calling. Not far away, near the adventure playground I found her. A sprawling coast tea tree (Leptospermum laevigatum) hugging the earth and creating protective caverns for children to hide and imagine in. Her limbs twisted into impossible turns, diving down into the soil (just like the jigal mamara on the sand dune at Bindinyankun) and rising up again. A child discovered me whilst I was meeting this mamara. He had come to visit his ‘magic tree’ and draw a picture of his secret cave in this journal. I asked him if he thought this was one tree or many. He carefully considered my question, gazing and what looked like at least 10 different tree ‘trunks’ (actually limbs) rising out of the earth. I showed him the emanation point, the place of convergence where all the branches came from – the well hidden original tree trunk. He was shocked that this could all be one tree!
To have two mamara (that I know of) close to home has awakened the possibility of seeing other entities in this place. It makes ‘coming home’ feel like a process of renewal; a deepening of my being with this country into which I was born.
Filed under Birds, Dogs & Trees
Being with Country 
