Non-cyst-based-news

In other less gross news...

Last night while trying to get to sleep, I stumbled across a show on ABC that showed that battle of the native Aboriginal people of the Yorke Peninsula to preserve their sacred ground from development. It was a very emotional program actually.

You see, all along the coast line there are areas where Aboriginal people lived and died. Thus there are many areas where they were buried. Just like a white cemetery, this ground is special and sacred to them. And it should be special and sacred to us too, because this is our land as well now. But developers don't seem to be able to fit their plans around the local people.

In one case, crushed bones were found where a development had gone ahead despite the claim of local Aboriginal people that the land was a sacred site. There was a water hole, which typically means that there will be burials around the area (any where that people gathered on a regular basis is bound to be a place where people will also die). And despite the claim that the area was significant, and an archeologist's claim that it was also archeologically significant, the develpment went ahead. Lo and behold - human bone fragments were discovered.

Its just shocking. For the Aboriginal people, there is such a connection between the land and the human. Dream time stories illustrate this with the easy shift between humans and animals into landscape. When an Aboriginal person dies, and they are buried, they do not disappear. They are returned to the land that they came from. That spot, that land is sacred. It is the person, just as the person is the land. Life and land are sacred because they are the same thing.

So imagine what it would feel like to watch that land where your ancestors have been buried, being torn up. Being dug up. Being disturbed, changed, desecrated. It was hard for me to watch, and I can't even fully understand what they must be feeling.

So I changed my mind. One of the first things I would do with $90 million would be to buy sacred land and make it protected. To make it a park or something that belongs to the local people.

All sacred sites should be heritage listed. Why aren't they? I mean, if you can heritage list a building that was built 150 years ago by someone who arrived here on a boat, surely you can heritage list something that was made thousands of years ago by generations of people who were born and died in this country, for this country, with this country.

I don't want to go on about it, but it strikes me as something that is incredibly important, but is overlooked by virtually everybody. The cultural landscape of the aboriginal people is hard enough to define as it is. It is hard to preserve. But how can you maintain it even ideologically without the land that is integral to it? That inspires it? How? What is important to one person should be respected by another. That's as simple as I can put it... And how can we keep denying that?