Standing on Indigenous Land
By Garth Paine
Art by Turner G. Davis
I was standing barefoot on the western bank of the Shoalhaven River in southern Australia, the cool sand and the still water stretching in a straight line a quarter of a mile ahead before disappearing around a bend. Small cliffs rise up on the other side of the river, some fifty yards away. The river feels deep, physically, spiritually and personally.
This point, this point where I was standing, is a collision of multiple histories.
A few years prior, I had returned to Australia from living in the UK. Those UK years were rich with creative opportunities and success: composing for a West End production of Shakespeare, composing and sound designing for contemporary dance works with renowned touring companies. Yet I felt claustrophobic in London and the urban landscape, suffocated by the lack of wild energy pulsing up from the ground. To me even the Isle of Skye seemed contained, walled and compartmentalized, inhabited by humans for thousands of years; the mellow energy of that land felt like the energy of surrender.
“Energies of the land…can pulse through your being and change the way you live in the world.”
Growing up in Australia, I had felt a wild energy streaming out of the land. A radical, chaotic charge that I missed so terribly that I had to return to Australia to feed my soul.
Within days of arriving in Melbourne, I stood in front of a large Arthur Boyd painting at the National Gallery. Boyd powerfully communicates this intense land energy. His canvasses—mysterious, mystical, sometimes violent, always saturated in color—vividly expressed the cultural dissonance between the Australian aborigines’ understanding of place and the white man’s idea of habitation. They vibrantly communicate the power of the Shoalhaven landscape, which was exactly the place I was standing by the river.
This spot was also the crossroads of my family’s history. Arthur Boyd was one of a number of famous Australian painters, including Sidney Nolan and Arthur Streeton, who had congregated in the house in Sydney of my father’s Aunt Madeleine for soirées that lasted all weekend. My father told me that when he was a child, he would wake up and find these Australian artists draped around the breakfast table, the previous night's activities resulting in paintings on door panels and elsewhere. It was a creative milieux that led him to acting and studying at the Guildhall in London. He and I shared that attraction to the creative power of the London/UK performing arts scene and to the powerful artistic magnetism of Australia and the pulsating energy of the land.
This spot by the river is property that Arthur Boyd had owned, lived on and donated to the Australian people as a contribution for the arts—to create a place for quiet reflection, artistic discourse and residencies. I was invited to this place known as Bundanon, several hours south of Sydney, to make a musical sound work that could capture, interpret and reflect on this energy. This would be a piece for the first-ever Site Works residency and festival there. I was determined to experience and reveal the seemingly contradictory forces of remote rural wilderness, the grass grazing fields, the untamed power of the land and the ever-present Australian aboriginal spirit.
To develop this piece that I called “Presence in the landscape—conversation,” two aboriginal elders shared their insights into how their indigenous spirits connected directly with the elemental forces of the environment and the animals and spirits residing in this land, their ancestral home. My conversations with Richard and Cecil were generous, powerful and open, and I was moved by their invitation to be part of an aboriginal dreaming ceremony.
This was a rare privilege. The white man was not usually welcome to witness this celebration when the guardian spirits of the land are called forth. The energy was intense, open and welcoming. The ceremony involved dancing, singing and drawing patterns in the river sand with a didgeridoo. It combined aboriginal language with occasional English to help me understand what was happening.
“I saw things in those early hours of the morning that I still cannot explain—experiences that have left a permanent mark.”
I saw things in those early hours of the morning that I still cannot explain—experiences that have left a permanent mark. Experiences that have made me really think about the quality of being present in an environment and part of the ecosystem; how my senses expanded to become one with that place; how the aboriginal philosophy sees no separation between the environment, the animals and the human; and how they perceive everything to be vibrational energy, intertwined, enmeshed and available to the observer when called in the right context with appropriate respect.
As I stood on the river’s edge, as Richard and Cecil called up the wind spirit, the mirror-still surface of the river suddenly became ripples of dancing wind patterns, small puffs of wind dancing around our location and then disappearing again. When calling up the Crow spirit, a single crow suddenly appeared around the corner of the river, flew in a straight line not more than 20 feet above the water, then disappeared around the bend. No other bird was seen, no other puffs or gusts of wind occurred.
After the ceremony, I asked the elders about these events. They simply told me that they did not see the world as I did. For them, the world was all vibrating energy, circles within circles, everything related. Their physical selves could disappear through the land that was just vibrating underfoot, or as we had seen, they could bring forth the Wind spirit or the Crow spirit, if called with respect at the right time in an appropriate ceremony.
These things were there all the time, they said. They just needed to be recognized. As they explained, reality has no hard boundaries, no fixed, objective point of reference, but is continuously remade and brought into existence at every moment. The same is said by central Australian aborigines whose practice of “Songlines” is broadly known. As they move across the land, they sing the song that calls into existence the land over the horizon; their traditional knowledge tells them that if they forget that song, the land will no longer be there.
Over the years, I have come to understand this boundless energy in my own life. This perception of the world was never more crucial than when I confronted cancer in my mid-30s. Faced with chemotherapy and the grim prospect of a long and arduous recovery, I was inspired by a friend who set out to find his own solution when medical professionals told him that they had exhausted all options. I learned from his example about clearing and balancing my energy—of imagining a healthy future. I came to understand how the concrete boundaries I perceived in Western medical practice and in my understanding of my condition and prognosis were not fixed—that it was possible to re-imagine those constraints and dream differently.
I have little doubt that that experience made it possible for me to perceive what Cecil and Richard were offering. My awareness of the energy of the land has also profoundly affected my professional work as a field recordist, composer and acoustic ecologist.
Lying on the ground while recording a pre-dawn soundscape requires several hours of utter stillness to avoid disturbing the results. In these moments, be it at Joshua Tree or the Sonoran mountains, the coastal forests of Australia or in the heat of the Mojave Desert, I have come to sense the energy of these places. This is an enormous gift, borne out of the colliding of histories and people and cultures. I have come to realize that, wherever I am, I stand on indigenous land, and that if I am quiet enough, if I am patient enough, if I listen well enough, if I am open and present enough, I can experience what the indigenous populations have long known—that the energies of that land can pulse through your being and change the way you live in the world.
Garth Paine is a composer and professor in the School of Music and the School of Arts, Media and Engineering. at Arizona State University’s Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts. Paine is also the director of the Acoustic Ecology Lab at ASU.