In mid-June, I flew to Alice Springs to participate in a ‘father & son Spirit journey’ guided by East Arrernte elder and Christian, John Cavanagh, and facilitated by a member of our church, Assoc Prof Rev Geoff Broughton.

We travelled 750km by 4WD in often rugged terrain north of Alice Springs through the McDonnell Ranges, east to the western edge of the Simpson Desert, south around the Harts Range and back to Alice, visiting Ruby Gap, Arltunga Historical Reserve and other sites along the way. At night, we slept in old canvas swags, on the red desert dirt and under the stars.

I suspect that I will continue to learn from these experiences for some time, but I would like to share some of my reflections over the weeks ahead. These experiences have certainly informed my personal inclinations in respect of the impending referendum on an Indigenous Voice to Parliament. However, I hope you can trust that I do not believe there is one ‘Christian way to vote’ on this issue, and that this is not an attempt to smuggle in arguments. This is a personal reflection – my reflection, and so reflects many of my flaws and ongoing ignorance and, to be frank, my somewhat embarrassing lack of competence in this space.

I want to begin by sharing with you John’s connection with his people’s country. 

John was our guide. He would wave his hand in a general direction, and off we would go. Often the way was blocked as pastoralists had established new roads and fences. John’s map, though, wasn’t the tiny, fragile artifacts of human occupation, but the sun and stars, hills and rivers. 

I, like many of you, have read of Aboriginal navigation. One day, however, we travelled many kilometres, to a small rock on the side of a nondescript hillock, in the midst of a plain littered with many such piles of stone. Under that rock, John showed us a natural cistern full of clear water, the last water for 700km. Utterly hidden, but effortlessly found.

John’s country is vast. To make their way safely across its expanses, his people hand on songlines which describe every feature and waypoint. There is an old cliché about knowing something like the back of your hand. This is how John seems to know hundreds and hundreds of square kilometres. 

I have reflected that we rarely come to know even our much smaller neighbourhoods with anything like this detail and intimacy.

In part, this is because we simply don’t care. John and his people do not think of themselves as owners, so much as custodians, of their country. The Sydney obsession with property ownership is really about property wealth and property prestige. We buy in order to be able to sell and buy again, moving ever closer the beach, or to blue ribbon suburbs, or to lifestyle opportunities. Property, to us, is a commodity. It is, as I learned recently, ‘fungible’ – readily exchangeable for another packet of land of equivalent value. Why would you strive to learn every detail and feature and season of your property when it is only home for a while – until you can do better?

But our First Nations are custodians. In analogy to the nation of Israel, they understand themselves to have been given responsibility and care for an area, in all its particularity, which they are not free to dispose of in return for other resources. So profound is this sense of responsibility that I heard from a number of Indigenous men how being ‘off country’ created in them a profound sense of disquiet, even malaise, and being ‘on country’ healed. They expressed a profound sense of burden to steward the particular region entrusted by God to their people, in such words that it was clearly a spiritual and existential reality.

This, of course, offers an insight into how thoughtless it is to insist that the desert mob, amongst whom are the most financially disadvantaged Indigenous Australians, move to the cities where there is work. Culture, identity and country are, for them, inseparable. To deny them one is to harm or even cripple the others. It also explains something of why more funding for welfare and NGOs is a figleaf so long as Indigenous communities are confined to small outstations, introduced buffel grass strangles native flora and fauna and eradicates bush tucker, cattle destroy everything else, and country is divided up for European pastoralists and agribusiness behemoths.

We might say: all cultures must change. And, in fact, the gospel itself changes culture. But consider the following: when the apostle Paul applies the givenness of Israel’s land to the places and boundaries for all nations (Acts 17:26), and when we think upon the call to stewardship and creation care found in Genesis 1 & 2 and just how abysmally developed nations have applied that call, and when we read how European farmers such as the essayist and poet Wendell Berry now echo the Indigenous commitment to listening to the land, this land, in all its particularity – is this wisdom of our first Australian cultures the wisdom which we can most afford to discard, to evolve past, to unlearn?

No, it seems to me that the destruction of these Indigenous cultures (particularly, I think, as held by Indigenous Christians, who profess faith in Jesus in far higher rates than European migrants to Australia) would be a profound loss to all of us who call this island nation home, because we have so much to learn.