Reconciliation Sunday Reflection (Neryl McCallum)

There is a shallow creek that runs through our family farm, as a kid I used to spend hours playing and exploring there. On one large, granite boulder nestled in the creek bed there are a series of deeply carved concentric circles. As a kid I was fascinated by the circles, I used to run my fingers around and around them in deep contemplation. I once asked my father what they were – he said that it meant there was water there, and this was true. Just a few metres away there is a spring that holds water in all but the worst droughts. Somehow this answer was enough for me as a kid, I didn’t ask more.

What I didn’t know and what I wasn’t taught was that these rock carvings were tens of thousands of years old and had been chiseled there so that the Nukuna and Ngadjuri people who lived in and travelled through this landscape could find reliable safe, sweet water. The circles also indicate this was a place where people gathered together and inevitably, a place where they would have sung songs and told stories.

You don’t know what you don’t know – you don’t know what you haven’t been taught. But I lament not knowing the story of these circles and I lament that I wasn’t taught that the people that had lived on the land before me were not just my forebears and some white shepherds sent out by rich pastoralists.

I’m not ‘not’ proud of my people, but somehow I’m uncomfortable with my and their ignorance. I wish I had been told the truth of the land I on which grew up.  The land I travelled day in, day out on the school bus, the towns where I played tennis and netball and shopped, the creeks in which my friends and I mooched around campfires. This land has a history and holds deep wisdom and knowledge that wasn’t told to me, perhaps deliberately, perhaps because it wasn’t valued, perhaps for a thousand good or bad intentions, and now most of this knowledge is lost. This I lament.

Aunty Denise Champion’s country, Adyanmathanha country, is just up the road from where I grew up, land which is very familiar to me or so I thought. Sitting around the campfire, she told me, and those gathered with me, stories and history I didn’t know, the stories of her land – stories of creation, stories of moral teaching, stories of funny happenings, stories of food gathering, stories of place. She took me to places where I saw carvings on granite rocks not dissimilar from the ones I traced as a kid, and to other fresh water springs emerging out of arid land. I love that I know her stories, I lament that I don’t know the ones from my childhood place.

You don’t know what you don’t know – but as Aunty Denise says, now I know her stories, I will always know them and be forever changed, that’s the inevitability of knowledge. And so I pray:

Arrawatanha, God Most High, I am heartbroken by the sadnesses of the past, the tragedies of misunderstanding and the brutality of colonialism on the people who have always known you by this ancient name.

Undakarranha, Jesus the Christ, I lament the injustices, suffering and wrongdoings enacted on my indigenous brothers and sisters still in this present day. I confess that I am part of this for I have ignored their voices as they have called out to me asking me to engage with them and inviting me to gather with them in community.

Wandu Wangapi, Good and loving Spirit, open my eyes, change my heart and strengthen me to take courageous steps in the journey of healing and reconciliation that is before us.