Boomerang Australia Studies

Perhaps it is the boundaries of our culture we need to reinforce?

Perhaps "rice" is equitably Australian for money? But seriously, I have a piece of writing to add to this thread that is a purposeful stretch of the mental ability around accommodating what it is that being Australian means. It is surely the case after all, that once we can rest within a certain field of previous speculation, a new uncertainty will arise to rival that been previously! Well, and isn't it the truth that if we didn't have any unity in an Australian identity by now, we'd all be looking like a pack of idiots in the wake of Mr. Steve Irwin's passing from among us? I have noticed a hugely unusual and distinct phenomena in the general response to his passing, but it must be told that I mix among many persons whom are something less that identified with the Australian mainstream, but all the same, more or less Australian.

This is my independent contribution to the whole of the longer term debate about whether Australia has yet a modern cultural identity. In all respects I am greatly relieved to find the article starting this thread here, in that we always knew as though in a National collective subconscious, or in the nation's own true “Ummah” to use an Arabic expression, that we have a united and distinct identity that is so critically embedded in our own culture that we are most often at a loss as to express what that identity really is. But that is the very nature of culture. Any true culture is that ship that is liken to some weird sort of car, the sort that if you get out of it, you can only but lock your key inside, and therefore never re-enter. Culture, by definition, is that which we can not quite know, yet are constantly characterising. Sure the anthropologists will argue until the cows come home about whether you can study any specific culture from only external to it, or only from within it; but in reality is not the very function of anthropology that which is the enemy to culture? It must be stated in an anti-French sort of cultural invasion of tertiary education, that Indigenous Australians have made especially sneaky and clever use of those anthropologists whom came to study us. However, that is not so much the point I wish to make as the simple fact that we are all, at all times, under a substantial influence from the Traditional culture of Indigenous Australians; that therefore it is really long overdue that such is being more properly recognised.

I mean really: Crikey mate! Can't we all just accept our own fate; and that is with at least as much grace as Mr. Irwin, whom I am happy to tell of, has had a few young Indigenous children, perhaps once too often, mention that he happens to be a distant relation. Yet did not we all already recognise this fact in his character? The vast worth of our own culture. That worth of being open about our weaknesses, such that no person could ever accuse us of hiding any fault that we are not in total acceptance of the culpablities. This is the legacy of Indigenous Australia. Many of us white fellas these days, those of us who still have four
grandparents born in Australia, can trace through oral histories, back to a few odd black relatives. Maybe they said they were Spanish? How many of us are there? I once asked the census chappy if it is OK to tick that “of Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander descent” box in the census form when you are a white fella, and not raised within the acceptance of the black community, and thereby within a formally recognisable Indigenous identity. “Of course it is”, I am told. Why not? Because surely if those of us who are certain in our Indigenous heritage as an active component of our modern Australian identity, (and whether or not that identity is white or black is really of far less relevance than any of us might suppose it is), are regarding our Ancestry within its true value, then we want for our numbers to be counted independently from the number of persons who may need special funding for education, housing, health, or legal services, etc. Surely one day there is going to be a series of changes to the nation's cultural climate in which it can become a matter of prestige to openly assert, I am descended from the first Australians. Most black and identifying Aborigines are well and truly sick of their identity being associated with the old standard hands outs of tea, flour, sugar, and when you work for the cattle industry, also grog. There has long now been a first fleeters club, and I reckon it is high time that there became a club for those Australians who can accurately trace back evidence of Indigenous origin. Surely Steve, may he rest in Peace, deserves that a part of his legacy, is that he would have joined such a club if one existed. May be all its members know who we are already, and are responsible for all those flowers he is left?

And here I must inform you all of an additional fact in this matter. It just so happens that the unique and unusual information, we by now have all received, about Mr. Irwin's death; is related with a series of mental impressions inevitably forming, in which the incident comes across liken to the kind of Dream that is experienced by new Muslims when entering the Ummah. But what does that mean? Well I could report that in Islam there are various prophesies about this time we are living in, and that such prophesies include the fact of Nation States each with their own flag. But that might seem somewhat irrelevant to a non-Muslim audience. But I could also write about the fact that there is clear anthropological evidence that at the height of the Islamic Empire, it certainly stretched as far as the north of Australia. The kind of imagery that forms in our minds in connection with the death of Mr. Irwin, and his role as an icon, is a sort of Animist Islamic hour of judgment prophesy come real. This statement is factually not too far removed from the truth. Realistically the communication systems of Traditional Aboriginal Australia were so thorough that once the top end had become Muslim, we all must once have at least been well informed about Islam. Even some of the Traditionally Oriented Song Cycles can be related back into Qur'an. But at that, Qur'an has always been received by every indigenous peoples as a miraculous re-telling of their own stories, and not just some excuse to take up the sword, (or sting ray barb). There exist already some five thousand odd modern Aboriginal converts to Islam, many of whom regard their conversion rather as a reversion to Islam. So then, what is this all about? Surely we are not a Nation of Mussies? (Mussie = Australian Aboriginal slang for a person with an
expressly Muslim identity.) But I want to make this point, it is really high time that we all are certain of our uniquely Australian identity before it becomes a part of a larger more globally oriented series of identifications. What is the Ummah of Islam anyway, and why should any Australian regard it as at all relevant? But then, why are some of the blackfellas putting their minds to the Ummah? Can we be exempt from a Muslim identity because we are Australians, from within a global Islamic world view is a realistic question for many Australians?

We are a Nation in which those of the Indigenous race, myself included, have on the whole been most exceptionally accepting of including the invaders within Peaceful settlement. Any thorough historical and anthropological investigation can reveal that Aboriginal Australians seem to have embarked upon inter-cultural relation within a collective policy of attempting strategies of intermarriage in the first instance, and before any organised resistance. We are also a Nation that was deeply affected by the culture of the British whom invaded. But what is there in British culture that could connect readily to the Aboriginal experience? What not many folk like to realise in the modern world, what with all the negative press that Islam received in respect of war, is that we all go to Church in buildings with Architecture inspired by Islam, we study chemistry books within a scientific method inspired by Islam, and recognise only those histories that are prescribed by Islamic method as verifiable. It is factually Islam that brought Europe out of the dark ages, and any person who cares to undertake any research in this will only be able to verify the fact. Who was Maid Marion, but the daughter of an Islamic war leader called Saladin whom gave her hand in marriage to King Rickard of England in a massive gesture of Peace with all Christians.

Now this is where the whole matter gets a little difficult. You see there was a curse placed by Saladin and all his followers upon any of the Christians whom failed to adhere to one condition that Saladin placed upon that marriage. It seems that the first instance of overt breaking of that condition was with Terra Nullius become planted within the Australian constitution. Now I mean here not to suggest that all Australians are of Indigenous origin, nor that all Australians may want to learn about the reality of Islam, as I have, and am become resoundingly Muslim. But a Muslim with a difference, in that I am a part of the modern Australian Anglo-Saxon oriented cultural mainstream; and within which identity I find that I am frightened to identify with imagery that is of a Rosicrucian connection, but very readily identify with imagery that has any Aboriginal connection. Some black fellas could argue that as a Muslim, I am stealing black culture, but they would be wrong since I give back more than I receive from. Some Christians might try to argue that I have gone insane by rejecting the culture I was raised with as a Christian. But they also would be wrong, since I find that in Islam my truly Christian Faith can be received with far more support than it ever has in any church of those naming themselves as Christians.

This is not intended to suggest that many other Australians share my position or perspective. After all it is rumoured that it was an Islamic organised crime unit
that set up the loan that brought down Whitlam. But I wish to add these facts of my own perspective into the essential National debate about what it means to be Australian. Do we really have to define our selves so definitely as to be all under that same umbrella of one flag? One Ummah? What is the Australian Nation State's Ummah? I mean, is there a National Australian Ummah that is distinct and can lay positive claim to not need for all women to wear Hijab? Is it at all connected to Aboriginal Kinship as a system of well structured and maintained rules of social relations? But what has either the Ummah or Aboriginal Kinship got to do with modern Australian cultural identity? Not much in general, yet the roots of such can be traced soundly but to within both of. So why are not Australians making genuine inquiries into what in Islam is that which we can learn from? Is the Ummah connected with that idea popular within the Aboriginal community of “One Dreaming”? Are we all Dreaming about the same TV shows, internet sites, and newspaper articles? May be I am only being divisive by bringing into a long now resolved debate some new and newly perceived as critical key facts? Maybe no body will agree with me? But above all of that, surely it is that we need to recall that what we each believe in culturally is factually and definitively a different matter from what it means to be a citizen of the Nation State of Australia. So this is an article that tells a little about what I am as a citizen of the Nation State of Australia; and in truth, with the arguments about our mainstream standardised culture, really now all in the bag; are you any more certain than you were before about what you are as a citizen of the Nation State of Australia? Neither am I meaning this as an abstract idea, but as a foundational fact of what we are with our feet on the ground. What is it that we have in common as citizens? Surely it has to be better than only that we seem to have feigned unity in the election of John Howard? I can't see that we'd even let him of the hook if he said “Crikey mate; way to go out Steveo!” to the Queen. (But who will it be that can make the Queen say to John Howard “She'll be right mate”?)