Australia’s role in the world

In his celebrated 1931 poem Australia, A.D. Hope wrote about Australia’s sheltered isolation and resulting relative innocence and lack of sophistication or falseness or alienation. He described how Australia’s freshness and raw honesty can produce prophets, people capable of seeing through and defying the superficial ‘chatter’ of the world of intellectual evasion, denial and delusion and thus capable of reaching the full truth about our divisive condition. These are the words of Australia: ‘A nation of trees, drab green and desolate grey / In the field uniform of modern wars / Darkens her hills, those endless, outstretched paws / Of sphinx demolished or stone lion worn away // They call her a young country, but they lie / She is the last of lands, the emptiest / A woman beyond her change of life, a breast / Still tender but within the womb is dry // Without songs, architecture, history / The emotions and superstitions of younger lands / Her rivers of water drown among Page 471 of
Print Edition inland sands / The river of her immense stupidity // Floods her monotonous tribes from Cairns to Perth / In them at last the ultimate men arrive / Whose boast is not: “we live” but “we survive” / A type who will inhabit the dying earth // And her five cities, like five teeming sores / Each drains her, a vast parasite robber-state / Where second-hand Europeans pullulate / Timidly on the edge of alien shores // Yet there are some like me turn gladly home / From the lush jungle of modern thought, to find / The Arabian desert of the human mind / Hoping, if still from the deserts the prophets come // Such savage and scarlet as no green hills dare / Springs in that waste, some spirit which escapes / The learned doubt, the chatter of cultured apes / Which is called civilization over there.’

That soulful part of humans, that they have lived in denial of, is the only part from which truthful thinking can come. It is the neglected centre of humans—the deserted part of their being, the realm from which they have become alienated—that alone can bring out the reconciling, liberating answers for the human race. That is why metaphorically it is from the ‘desert of the human mind’ that ‘the prophets come’. As Sir Laurens van der Post has written, ‘He [Christ] spoke of the “stone which the builders rejected” becoming the cornerstone of the building to come. The cornerstone of this new building of a war-less, non-racial world, too, I believe, must be…those aspects of life which we have despised and rejected for so long’ (The Dark Eye in Africa, 1955, p.155 of 159). In his award-winning 1979 book, A Woman of the Future, the Australian author David Ireland expressed the same awareness of where the answers would come from as A.D. Hope, and he used the same metaphor of the desert, recognising that Australians hide along the coast, distanced from the truth that exists in the centre of their being/ country: ‘The future is somehow / …somewhere in the despised and neglected desert / the belly of the country / not the coastal rind / The secret is in the emptiness / The message is the thing we have feared / the thing we have avoided / that we have looked at and skirted / The secret will transform us / and give us the heart to transform emptiness / If we go there / If we go there and listen / We will hear the voice of the eternal / The eternal says that we are at the beginning of time’ (p.349).

The prophet Isaiah also used the metaphor of the desert for that neglected part of ourselves from which the healing answers would come, when he said, ‘A voice of one calling in the desert: “Prepare the way of the Lord; make straight in the wilderness a highway for our God. Every valley shall be raised up, every mountain and hill made low; the rough ground shall become level, the rugged places a plain. And the glory of the Page 472 of
Print Edition Lord will be revealed, and all mankind together will see it”’ (Isa. 40:3–5).

In an exceptionally prophetic 1995 book, Edge of the Sacred, David Tacey, who at the time his book was published was a senior lecturer in English and Australian literature at La Trobe University in Melbourne, anticipated Australia’s pivotal role in lifting the siege humanity has been under of the dilemma of the human condition. In the book’s final chapter titled ‘The Transformation of Spirit’, Tacey said: ‘Australia is uniquely placed not only to demonstrate this world-wide experience but also to act as a guiding example to the rest of the world. Although traditionally at the edge of the world, Australia may well become the centre of attention as our transformational changes are realised in the future. Because the descent of spirit has been accelerated here by so many regional factors, and because nature here is so deep, archaic, and primordial, what will arise from this archetypal fusion may well be awesome and spectacular. In this regard, I have recently been encouraged by Max Charlesworth’s essay “Terra Australis and The Holy Spirit”. In a surprisingly direct—and unguarded?—moment, Charlesworth says: “I have a feeling in my bones that there is a possibility of a creative religious explosion occurring early in the next millennium with the ancient land of Australia at the centre of it, and that the Holy Spirit may come home at last to Terra Australis”. I am pleased that this has already been said, because if Charlesworth had not said it, I would have been forced to find within myself exactly the same prophetic utterance’ (p.204 of 224). (Note, it should be clarified that while the arrival of understanding of the human condition brings about an incredible spiritual awakening in humans—as if from the dead—it does not bring a ‘religious explosion’ where people transcend their troubled condition and defer to a deity. As previously mentioned, quite the opposite occurs. The arrival of self-knowledge allows humans to at last confront and resolve their troubled condition, become masters of it; as opposed to being tortured victims of it, forced to abandon and transcend their reality and invest their faith and trust in someone or something else as their only means of coping with it.) Tacey goes on to say, ‘I would like to complete this book with a last glance at A.D. Hope’s “Australia”’ and quotes the final stanzas of the poem that I have previously included. He states that ‘The new spirit is [going to be] “savage and scarlet as no green hills dare”. After [white Australian] contact with archaic nature and the red earth, spirit rises again in a form that is qualitatively different from our ancestral English or European spirit. Spirit will be “savage” in the sense of being untamed, primordial, not Wordsworthian, romantic, or consoling. Page 473 of
Print Edition “Scarlet” suggests not only the red earth and mountain ranges, but also blood, instinct, passion’ (p.206). Tacey here recognises the non-conformity and lack of civility of the defiant, unresigned, denial-free, instinct or soul-directed mind. As the Bible says of the extremely defiant personality of true, unresigned prophets, ‘zeal for your [denial-free] house consumes me’ (Psalm 69:9 & John 2:17).

The Australian character is forged around non-conformity with the sophisticated, false world of denial. Convicts were the basis of European settlement in Australia and many of them were essentially non-conformists; often fey Irish who didn’t want to conform to the artificial, intellectual, resigned world of denial and as a result ended up becoming petty criminals. As was explained on page 353, the Irish as a nation seem to have chosen a ‘ship at sea’ life of mad defiance rather than resign to the false world of denial. Australia’s unofficial national anthem, A.B. ‘Banjo’ Paterson’s Waltzing Matilda, tells the story of a non-conformist petty criminal swagman who chose to jump into a waterhole or ‘billabong’ and die rather than fall into line with the bullshit, sophisticated, establishment squatter mounted on his bullshit, sophisticated thoroughbred and backed up by the bullshit, sophisticated, establishment troopers ‘one, two, three’. These are the words of Paterson’s 1895 song Waltzing Matilda: ‘Once a jolly swagman camp’d by a billabong / Under the shade of a coolibah tree / And he sang as he watch’d and waited till his billy boiled / Who’ll come a waltzing Matilda with me // Waltzing Matilda, Waltzing Matilda / Who’ll come a waltzing Matilda with me / And he sang as he watch’d and waited till his billy boiled / Who’ll come a waltzing Matilda with me // Down came a jumbuck to drink at that billabong / Up jumped the swagman and grabbed him with glee / And he sang as he shoved that jumbuck in his tucker-bag / You’ll come a waltzing Matilda with me // [chorus repeated] Up rode the squatter mounted on his thoroughbred / Down came the troopers, one, two, three / Whose that jolly jumbuck you’ve got in your tucker-bag? / You’ll come a waltzing Matilda with me // [chorus repeated] Up jumped the swagman, sprang into the billabong / You’ll never take me alive said he / And his ghost may be heard as you pass by that billabong / Who’ll come a waltzing Matilda with me // [chorus repeated].’

Australian journalist, Stuart Rintoul, recognised the influence of the Irish in the Australian make-up when he wrote, ‘The distinctive Australian identity was not born in the bush, nor at Anzac Cove: these were merely situations for its expression. No; it was born in Irishness protesting against the extremes of Englishness’ (Weekend Australian, 7–8 Nov. 1998).

The Australian character is essentially defiant of the world of denial. Australians would rather be ignorant and, as we say, ‘fair dinkum’ Page 474 of
Print Edition or ‘true-blue’ than be artificial, sophisticated and false. Australia’s favourite folk hero is the bushranger Ned Kelly, a man of Irish descent who, in 1880, took on the establishment dressed in a coat of armour he made from plough shears. Ned Kelly symbolises how much uncompromising defiance is necessary to stand up to the world of denial. ‘Brave as Ned Kelly’ is a common euphemism in Australia. Kelly’s armour, an Australian icon, was his bullshit deflector, his denial resistor. I keep a photo of Ned Kelly’s armour beside my desk, and I’ve even designed an Australian flag (below) featuring the head-piece of his armour. How wonderful it would be if Australians were brave (secure) enough to have this kind of meaningful flag, and, the profundity of Waltzing Matilda as our official national anthem.

Incidentally Tacey not only anticipated the truth about the human condition emerging in Australia. He also accurately anticipated the attack upon the emerging revolutionising understanding of ourselves by the media and a Church leader who holds literal, fundamentalist religious views. He wrote, ‘Unfortunately, the televisual and print media thrives on the negative or inferior expressions of the spontaneous religious impulse. Extreme or bizarre elements…are sensationalised and are automatically used to damn everything that seems a bit odd, unusual, or out of the ordinary…The Church will most likely close its doors to the new revelations of the spirit, because its primary task is to defend and support [the literalist] orthodoxy’ (Edge of the Sacred, 1995, p.125 of 224). Again it has to be emphasised that while the arrival of true self-knowledge is synthesised through the guidance of uncorrupted and thus unresigned and thus unevasive ‘spiritual’ (ie soul-infused and inspired) introspection, it is fundamentally different to a ‘religious impulse’.

Page 475 of
Print Edition Hope, Ireland, Tacey and Charlesworth all intimated that enlightenment of the human condition was going to emerge from the isolated, sheltered, unsophisticated innocent backwater of Australia, and from the backwater within that backwater of Australia’s inland or ‘bush’ as we call it, rather than from the sophisticated ivory towers of intellectualdom in places like Cambridge, Oxford and Harvard. Extraordinary as it may seem, Australia’s two most loved poets and essayists, Henry Lawson and the already mentioned Banjo Paterson, both wrote poems expressing sentiments and prophecy identical to those of Hope, Tacey and Charlesworth.

Firstly to quote part of Henry Lawson’s 1892 aptly titled poem When the Bush Begins to Speak: ‘They know us not in England yet, their pens are overbold / We’re seen in fancy pictures that are fifty years too old / They think we are a careless race—a childish race, and weak / They’ll know us yet in England, when the bush begins to speak [when innocence makes its contribution] /…“The leaders that will be”, the men of southern destiny / Are not all found in cities that are builded by the sea / They learn to love Australia by many a western creek [while Australia as a whole is relatively sheltered and thus innocent, it is from the Australian inland countryside or ‘bush’, rather than from the cities, that exceptional innocence will appear] / They’ll know them yet in England, when the bush begins to speak /…All ready for the struggle, and waiting for the change / The army of our future lies encamped beyond the [coastal] range / Australia, for her patriots, will not have far to seek / They’ll know her yet in England when the bush begins to speak /…We’ll find the peace and comfort that our fathers could not find / Or some shall strike the good old blow that leaves a mark behind / We’ll find the Truth and Liberty [the truth about the human condition that brings liberating understanding to humanity] our fathers came to seek / Or let them know in England when the bush begins to speak.’

Banjo Paterson’s 1889 poem Song of the Future includes strikingly similar chords: ‘Tis strange that in a land so strong / So strong and bold in mighty youth / We have no poet’s voice of truth / To sing for us a wondrous song [no exceptionally denial-free thinker or prophet has emerged in the exceptionally innocent country of Australia yet, but such a profound thinker is due] //…We have no tales of other days / No bygone history to tell / Our tales are told where campfires blaze / At midnight, when the solemn hush / Of that vast wonderland, the Bush / Hath laid on every heart its spell [of sheltered, soul-drenched innocence] // Although we have no songs of strife / Of bloodshed reddening the land / We yet may find achievements grand / Within the bushman’s quiet life //…For years the fertile western Page 476 of
Print Edition plains / Were hid behind your sullen walls [The sullen walls referred to eastern Australia’s coastal mountain range, aptly called “The Great Dividing Range”, that barred the way to the interior during the early days of white settlement. While the ranges had been crossed long before Paterson wrote this poem he was using the crossing as a metaphor for the future expedition to take humanity from the alienated bondage of the human condition to the fertile, sun/ truth-drenched freedom of a human-condition-resolved free world.] /…// Between the mountains and the sea / Like Israelites with staff in hand / The people waited restlessly: / They looked towards the mountains old / And saw the sunsets come and go / With gorgeous golden afterglow / That made the west a fairyland / And marvelled what that west might be / Of which such wondrous tales were told // … At length the hardy pioneers / By rock and crag found out the way / And woke with voices of today / A silence kept for years and years [brought an end to the silence of the resigned world of denial] // … The way is won! The way is won! / And straightway from the barren coast / There came a westward-marching host / That aye and ever onward prest / With eager faces to the west / Along the pathway of the sun // … Could braver histories unfold / Than this bush story, yet untold— / The story of their westward march // … Our willing workmen, strong and skilled / Within our cities idle stand / And cry aloud for leave to toil // The stunted children come and go / In squalid lanes and alleys black [the end-play state of terminal alienation that humanity arrives at just prior to breaking through to self-understanding]… // And it may be that we who live / In this new land apart, beyond / The hard old world grown fierce and fond / And bound by precedent and bond [bound up in sophisticated, intellectual denial] / May read the riddle [of the human condition] right and give / New hope to those who dimly see [those who are embedded in denial/ alienation] / That all things may be yet for good / And teach the world at length to be / One vast united brotherhood [human-condition-ameliorated, reconciled world] // So may it be, and he who sings / In accents hopeful, clear, and strong / The glories which that future brings / Shall sing, indeed, a wondrous song.’

Paterson’s words, ‘The way is won! The way is won! / And straightway from the barren coast / There came a westward-marching host’, anticipates the time when, with the healing, reconciling understanding of the human condition finally found, humanity begins its great exodus from the false world where it has been incarcerated since consciousness emerged in humans some 2 million years ago. In Plato’s metaphor, humanity begins to leave the cave-like state of denial.

It is clear that both Paterson and Lawson were prophetic writers, Page 477 of
Print Edition more so than any other Australian writers that I have encountered. Interestingly Paterson refers to the influence for the coming ‘wondrous song’ as being the ‘vast wonderland, the Bush’. Lawson similarly talked about ‘the leaders that will be, the men of southern destiny’ learning their love beside ‘many a western creek’, and he also said ‘the army of our future lies encamped beyond the range’. It is no coincidence that Paterson and Lawson spent their early formative, childhood years only 50 kilometres from where I spent mine, over the coastal ranges in the Australian inland, in the central west of the state of New South Wales (NSW). Paterson grew up on a sheep station near a small town called Yeoval, I grew up on a sheep station not far away near another small country town called Mumbil, while Lawson grew up nearby in sheep grazing countryside near the town of Mudgee. Humanity spent its childhood in the savannah country of the Rift Valley of Africa. That is where our soul’s home is, and the central west of NSW with its rolling hills of golden grass and clear, humidity-free blue skies, is that part of Australia that most closely corresponds to the environment of our soul’s home in the African savannah. To not even see the sun for months on end, like those living near the Earth’s poles, is extremely disorientating to our species’ instinctive self. It is not surprising that in ‘Greenland, depression affects as much as 80% of the population’ (Time mag. 16 July 2001). Sir Arthur Streeton’s 1889 landscape titled Golden Summer held at the Australian National Gallery in Canberra is considered to be an icon of Australian art. It is a painting from our species’ psyche, from the subconscious, as much as a painting of Australia because Australia is reminiscent of Africa; it is Africa without all the teeming wildlife so typical of that continent’s natural state. Sir Laurens van der Post was struck by the physical similarity of Australia to Africa, observing: ‘When I first went to Australia…my senses told me at once that here, beyond rational explanation, was a land physically akin to Africa’ (The Dark Eye in Africa, 1955, p.35 of 159). The dominant gum tree in Golden Summer almost has the horizontal strata of the acacia trees of Africa’s savannah; the eagles in the sky look more like African vultures in their size and flight. Even the Australian magpie in the foreground of the painting has the markings of an African crow rather than the markings of an Australian magpie. As if to compensate for the absent wildlife in the Australian landscape Streeton has included some sheep in the foreground. Standing amongst the sheep is a boy, seemingly there to evoke the presence of a shepherd boy, or possibly even a little Bushman hunter from the landscape of ancient Africa. Page 478 of
Print Edition On the right hand side in the distance there is a building and a man but they are so faintly painted that you have the feeling that Streeton was subconsciously trying to remove modern man from the landscape, make the landscape pristine, uncorrupted. Just how deeply moved Streeton was by the Australian landscape is apparent in letters he wrote to fellow Australian artists. In a letter to Frederick McCubbin in late 1891 Streeton said, ‘My path lies toward the west which is a flood of deep gold. I felt near the gates of Paradise—The gates of the west’ (www.artistsfootsteps.com). In a letter to Tom Roberts postmarked 16 November 1893, Streeton wrote that ‘I intend to go straight inland (away from all polite [dishonest] society) and stay there 2 or 3 years and create some things entirely new, and try and translate some of the great hidden poetry that I know is here, but have not seen or felt it. It all seems to me like an immense bright sky’ (Letters from Smike, eds Ann Galbally & Anne Gray, 1989, p.61). In another letter to Tom Roberts in the first half of 1891, Streeton wrote of ‘the great gold plains, and all the beautiful inland Australia and I love the thought of walking into all this and trying to expand and express it in my way. I fancy large canvases all glowing and moving in the happy light. And others bright decorate and chalky and expressive of the hot trying winds and the slow immense Summer’ (ibid. p.30).

In his 1889 poem Clancy of The Overflow, Banjo Paterson wrote evocatively of the extraordinarily nourishing, soulful beauty of the Australian bush: ‘I had written him a letter which I had, for want of better / Knowledge, sent to where I met him down the Lachlan, years ago / He was shearing when I knew him, so I sent the letter to him / Just “on spec”, addressed as follows: “Clancy, of The Overflow” // And an answer came directed in a writing unexpected / (And I think the same was written with a thumbnail dipped in tar) / ‘Twas his shearing mate who wrote it, and verbatim I will quote it / “Clancy’s gone to Queensland droving, and we don’t know where he are” // In my wild erratic fancy visions come to me of Clancy / Gone a-droving “down the Cooper” where the western drovers go / As the stock are slowly stringing, Clancy rides behind them singing / For the drover’s life has pleasures that the townsfolk never know // And the bush hath friends to meet him, and their kindly voices greet him / In the murmur of the breezes and the river on its bars / And he sees the vision splendid of the sunlit plains extended / And at night the wondrous glory of the everlasting stars // I am sitting in my dingy little office, where a stingy / Ray of sunlight struggles feebly down between the houses tall / And the foetid air and gritty of the dusty, dirty city / Through the open window floating, spreads its foulness over all // And in place of lowing cattle, I can hear the fiendish rattle / Of Page 479 of
Print Edition the tramways and the buses making hurry down the street / And the language uninviting of the gutter children fighting / Comes fitfully and faintly through the ceaseless tramp of feet // And the hurrying people daunt me, and their pallid faces haunt me / As they shoulder one another in their rush and nervous haste / With their eager eyes and greedy, and their stunted forms and weedy / For townsfolk have no time to grow, they have no time to waste // And I somehow rather fancy that I’d like to change with Clancy / Like to take a turn at droving where the seasons come and go / While he faced the round eternal of the cashbook and the journal / But I doubt he’d suit the office, Clancy, of “The Overflow”.’

Graziers love their flocks of animals without realising that they are subconsciously relating to Africa with all its herds of animals. It is no wonder ‘Clancy rides behind’ his stock in an African-like environment ‘singing’. With regard to the alienating effect of cities that Paterson describes in this poem, I wrote in Beyond that ‘The truth is cities were not functional centres as we evasively claimed, they were hide-outs for alienation and places that perpetuated/ bred alienation’ (p.180 of 203). In Rousseau’s 1762 classic, On Education, he wrote ‘Cities are the abyss of the human species. At the end of a few generations the races perish or degenerate. They must be renewed, and it is always the country which provides for this renewal’ (p.59 of 501). ‘The bush’, as Lawson said, is from where the required innocence will come to stand up and ‘begin to speak’ in defence of what is true. As I have said, Australia as a whole is a bastion of innocence compared to other, more alienated, sophisticated and intellectual, human-condition-exposed parts of the world, like ‘England’ where there now exists, as A.D. Hope described, ‘The learned doubt, the chatter of cultured apes / Which is called civilization over there.’

Interestingly, Sir Laurens van der Post also grew up around the same 30-degree latitude as I did, albeit in Africa, while the unresigned prophets Zarathustra, Buddha, Abraham, Moses, Christ and Mohammed grew up around the 30-degree latitude in the northern hemisphere. Again this is not merely coincidence. The climate of these regions is very similar to the climate of the Rift Valley of Africa where humanity spent its childhood. While the Rift Valley lies on a higher latitude, being extremely elevated it has a similar climate to the lower altitude climate of country at the 30-degree latitude. As we emerge from our alienated states we are going to discover just how sensitive our soul is and these occurrences won’t seem so extraordinary. If people don’t believe that Africa is our soul’s home they only Page 480 of
Print Edition need to visit natural Africa and experience for themselves the mind-bending experience of feeling that you have been there before, that this is where ‘you belong’ and that everything is ‘as it should be’. In her 1967 book, appropriately titled A Glimpse of Eden, Evelyn Ames, a poet and novelist, recorded the experiences of a month-long safari undertaken in East Africa. She wrote: ‘We thought we knew what to expect. Several friends had been there and told us about it; some, even, had made the same trip we were…going to make, but we discovered that nothing, really, prepares you for life on the East African Highlands. It is life (I want to say), making our usual existences seem oddly unreal and other landscapes dead; that country in the sky is another world…It is a world, and a life, from which one comes back changed. Long afterwards, gazelles still galloped through my dreams or stood gazing at me out of their soft and watchful eyes, and as I returned each daybreak, unbelieving, to my familiar room, I realized increasingly that this world would never again be the same for having visited that one. Nor does it leave you when you go away. Knowing its landscapes and sounds (even more in silence), how it feels and smells—just knowing it is there—sets it forever, in its own special light, somewhere in the mind’s sky’ (pp.1–2). ‘Each day in Africa my heart had almost burst with Walt Whitman’s outcry: “As to me, I know of nothing else but miracles”’ (p.204). In Henry IV, Shakespeare wrote of ‘A foutra for the world and worldlings base! I speak of Africa and golden joys’ (Part 2, Act V, Scene iii, c.1597). A sign at the entrance to the Serengeti National Park states ‘This is the world as it was in the beginning’. Sir Laurens van der Post wrote that ‘There was indeed a cruelly denied and neglected first child of life, a Bushman in each of us’ (The Heart of The Hunter, 1961, p.126 of 233), and, ‘We need primitive nature, the First Man in ourselves, it seems, as the lungs need air and the body food and water…I thought finally that of all the nostalgias that haunt the human heart the greatest of them all, for me, is an everlasting longing to bring what is youngest home to what is oldest, in us all’ (The Lost World of the Kalahari, 1958, p 151 of 253). Natural Africa is our species’ spiritual home, it is the most sacred place on Earth. At least once in a lifetime every human should make a pilgrimage there.

In his 1943 poem, The Stockman, David Campbell, a sheep grazier, rugby player and another of Australia’s best poets, evokes this sense of belonging, this sense of everything being as it should be, that immersion in Australia’s African-like landscape generates. He talks of ‘that timeless moment’ when ‘the sun was in the summer grass’ bringing ‘fresh ripples to my brain’. It is another memory of our species’ magic time in Africa bubbling up from our soul. These are the words of The Page 481 of
Print Edition Stockman: ‘The sun was in the summer grass / The coolibahs were twisted steel / The stockman paused, beneath their shade / And sat upon his heel / And with the reins looped through his arm / He rolled tobacco in his palm // His horse stood still. His cattle-dog / Tongued in the shadow of the tree / And for a moment on the plain / Time waited for the three / And then the stockman licked his fag / And Time took up his solar swag // I saw the stockman mount and ride / Across the mirage on the plain / And still that timeless moment brought / Fresh ripples to my brain / It seemed in that distorting air / I saw his grandson sitting there.’

It should be pointed out that, while this soulful countryside can be so reinforcing, nurturing and nourishing, it can also be confronting and hurtful. As I said above, cities were hide-outs for alienation, they were places where alienated humanity could escape confrontation with the all-exposing and confronting natural world of our soul. I am sitting and writing at this moment in a house in the very heart of the rolling hills of golden grass in the central west of NSW that I have been describing. It is mid-summer and rain fell a few days ago and the beauty of the landscape is so intense that I feel that I can’t go out into it, that I must stay inside, that I can’t look at it for very long without being overwhelmed. When I was a boy I ran around in this world with such happiness but after a lifetime of defending that happiness, and all the truth it has access to, I’m now sufficiently embattled to feel the pain that the exposing purity of this countryside can produce in humans. Nowadays, when I do venture outside I have to be carrying out a task, like digging out weeds, to distract myself from all the beauty, because I can’t face it head on.

Some disturbing quotes from big-game hunters were included in the Resignation essay to illustrate the extent to which innocent purity could be condemning and hurtful. The quote from the sport hunter who shot the chimpanzee was particularly revealing. While acknowledging how uplifting, inspiring and healing pure, innocent nature can be, it is also important to acknowledge just how confronting, condemning, criticising and hurtful it can be.

As emphasised, it is not only the climate and vegetation of the savannah country of the Rift Valley that we instinctively remember, it is also the wildlife. The vast array of different species and the great herds of animals are imprinted in our soul’s memory. Mohammed observed ‘that every prophet was a shepherd in his youth’ and it is recorded that, ‘Until he was twelve, Muhammad tended his uncle’s flocks among the Bedouins of the desert’ (Eastern Definitions, Edward Rice, 1978, p.260 of 433). Page 482 of
Print Edition Again it is no coincidence that unresigned prophets were shepherds in their youth. As has been mentioned, the flocks of sheep are like the herds of animals our soul is so familiar with. Of course a shepherd’s life is also very close to nature and an occupation that is as far removed and sheltered from the battle and angst of the human condition as one can get. Nature is our instinctive self or soul’s original companion and thus growing up with nature is going to be of comfort to, and thus preserving of, our innocent soul. Humans are bereft if they don’t have any animals in their life. A shepherd’s life is the polar opposite of life in a city.

Zarathustra grew up on the steppes of northern Iran where shepherding is still the main occupation. To quote a description of Zarathustra’s origins: ‘sometime around or before 600 BC—perhaps as early as 1200 BC—there came forth from the windy steppes of northeastern Iran a prophet who utterly transformed the Persian faith. The prophet was Zarathustra’ (Time-Life History of the World, A Soaring Spirit 600-400 BC, 1988, p.37 of 176).

Christ’s upbringing is described in the Bible thus, ‘And the child grew and became strong in spirit; and he lived in the desert until he appeared publicly’ (Luke 1:80). The only occupation in ‘the desert’ is herding sheep and goats. Someone ‘strong in spirit’ is a conscious mind infused with a strong conscience, that is, infused with a strong instinctive orientation to cooperativeness.

The exceptional prophet, Moses, grew up in the desert with shepherds and was himself one: ‘Moses was tending the flock of Jethro his father-in-law, the priest of Midian, and he led the flock to the far side of the desert’ (Exod. 3:1).

The prophet David, whose pure courage enabled him to kill Goliath and who later became King of Israel, was a shepherd in his youth: ‘David went back and forth from Saul to tend his father’s sheep at Bethlehem’ (Sam. 17:15).

The prophet Isaiah described the upbringing required to produce a prophet when he said: ‘The virgin will be with child and will give birth to a son, and will call him Immanuel. He will eat curds and honey when he knows enough to reject the wrong and choose the right’ (Isa. 7:14-16). The word ‘Immanuel’ means ‘God with us’. It is the description of someone not alienated from their cooperatively orientated instinctive self or soul. ‘Curds and honey’ is the traditional food of shepherds. They live on curdled milk (yoghurt) and are always on the lookout for the sweet honey from wild bees nests. Someone who ‘knows enough to reject the wrong and choose the right’ is someone Page 483 of
Print Edition who has grown up sufficiently free of upset to avoid having to choose a resigned life of evasion. To be able to hold onto, and reveal the repressed truths—to be able to ‘utter things hidden since the creation of the [corrupted, resigned] world’ (Matt. 13:35)—required an exceptionally strong conscience, someone with an unresigned, unevasive, non-soul-repressed mind. The significance of the ‘Virgin Mother’ as being the metaphor of an innocent mother, a woman capable of nurturing an innocent offspring, has already been explained.

Sir Laurens van der Post grew up in the ‘back veldt’ (from Laurens van der Post’s Introduction to Turbott Wolfe by William Plomer, p.17 of 215) in Africa on a farm that ran ‘thousands of sheep’ (About Blady, 1991, p.117 of 255).

Banjo Paterson wrote about his upbringing in the Australian bush. In A.B. ‘Banjo’ Paterson complete works 1885–1900, in the chapter titled ‘First Impressions’, Paterson referred to his ‘long days spent out shepherding sheep’, and said that he was told to go out ‘every day and learn to be a shepherd’. Interestingly Paterson even made the comment that ‘Nobody who has anything to do with sheep ever forgets it’ (collected by R.Campbell & P.Harvie, 1983, pp.4,5 of 723).

Henry Lawson was an infant of about two years old when his parents left the goldfields of Grenfell and his father ‘took up a selection of land for farming and built a cottage which was to be the family home’ (The World of Henry Lawson, ed. W.Stone, 1974, p.11 of 504). The selection of land was in the sheep grazing district of Mudgee.

The family property I grew up on near Mumbil was a 3,500 acre sheep station and when I wasn’t at boarding school I was helping muster the sheep on horseback and generally living a life immersed in nature.

While Banjo Paterson and Henry Lawson were both prophetic, Banjo Paterson was exceptionally so. Henry Lawson wrote the exceptionally honest poem included in the Introduction, The Voice from Over Yonder, and When the Bush Begins to Speak, but Banjo Paterson, in addition to Song of the Future, Waltzing Matilda and Clancy of the Overflow, penned his most famous literary work with The Man From Snowy River. Since it was published in 1895 it has become Australia’s favourite and most emblematic poem. An enduring literary work can only be enduring because it contains truths that resonate deeply. In fact, The Man From Snowy River is an extraordinarily prophetic work. It describes how a ‘stripling’ boy (the embodiment of innocence) goes, beyond where the alienated adults dare go, down the ‘terrible descent’ of the mountain side where ‘any slip was death’, to confront the Page 484 of
Print Edition issue of the human condition and retrieve the truth about ourselves, symbolised by a thoroughbred horse that has escaped into the impenetrable mountains: ‘There was movement at the station, for the word has passed around / That the colt from old Regret had got away / And had joined the wild bush horses—he was worth a thousand pound / So all the cracks had gathered to the fray / All the tried and noted riders from the stations near and far / Had mustered at the homestead over-night / For the bushmen love hard-riding where the fleet wild horses are / And the stockhorse snuffs the battle with delight // There was Harrison, who made his pile when Pardon won the Cup / The old man with his hair as white as snow / But few could ride beside him when his blood was fairly up / He would go wherever horse and man could go / And Clancy of “The Overflow” came down to lend a hand / No better rider ever held the reins / For never horse could throw him while the saddle-girths would stand / He learnt to ride while droving on the plains // And one was there, a stripling on a small and graceful beast / He was something like a racehorse undersized / With a touch of Timor pony, three parts thoroughbred at least / The sort that are by mountain horsemen prized / He was hard and tough and wiry — just the kind that won’t say die / There was courage in his quick, impatient tread / And he bore the badge of gameness in his bright and fiery eye / And the proud and lofty carriage of his head // But still so slight and weedy one would doubt his power to stay / And the old man said: “That horse will never do / For a long and tiring gallop—lad, you’d better stop away / The hills are far too rough for such as you” / So he waited sad and wistful, only Clancy stood his friend / “I think we ought to let him come,” he said / “I warrant he’ll be with us when he’s wanted at the end / For both his horse and he are mountain-bred // “He hails from Snowy River, up by Kosciusko’s side / Where the hills are twice as steep and twice as rough / Where a horse’s hoofs strike firelight from the flintstones every stride / The man that holds his own is good enough / And the Snowy River riders on the mountains make their home / Where the Snowy flows those giant hills between / I have seen full many horsemen since I first commenced to roam / But never yet such riders have I seen” // So he went; they found the horses near the big Mimosa clump / They raced away towards the mountain’s brow / And the old man gave his orders: “Boys, go at them from the jump / No use to go for fancy-riding now / And, Clancy, you must wheel them—try and wheel them to the right / Ride boldly, lad, and never fear the spills / For never yet was rider that could keep the mob in sight / If once they gain the shelter of those hills” // So Clancy rode to wheel them—he was racing on the wing / Where the best and boldest riders take their place / And he raced his stock-horse past them, and Page 485 of
Print Edition he made the ranges ring / With the stockwhip as he met them face to face / And they wavered for a moment while he swung the dreaded lash / But they saw their well-loved mountain full in view / And they charged beneath the stockwhip with a sharp and sudden dash / And off into the mountain-scrub they flew // Then fast the horsemen followed where the gorges deep and black / Resounded to the thunder of their tread / And the stockwhips woke the echoes and they fiercely answered back / From cliffs and crags that beetled overhead / And upward, upward ever, the wild horses held their way / Where mountain-ash and kurrajong grew wide / And the old man muttered fiercely: “We may bid the mob good-day / No man can hold them down the other side” // When they reached the mountain’s summit even Clancy took a pull / It well might make the boldest hold their breath / The wild hop-scrub grew thickly and the hidden ground was full / Of wombat-holes, and any slip was death / But the man from Snowy River let his pony have his head / And swung his stockwhip round and gave a cheer / And raced him down the mountain like a torrent down its bed / While the others stood and watched in very fear // He sent the flintstones flying, but the pony kept his feet / He cleared the fallen timber in his stride / And the man from Snowy River never shifted in his seat / It was grand to see that mountain horseman ride / Through stringy-barks and saplings on the rough and broken ground / Down the hillside at a racing-pace he went / And he never drew the bridle till he landed safe and sound / At the bottom of that terrible descent // He was right among the horses as they climbed the further hill / And the watchers, on the mountain standing mute / Saw him ply the stockwhip fiercely—he was right among them still / As he raced across the clearing in pursuit / Then they lost him for a moment where the mountain gullies met / In the ranges—but a final glimpse reveals / On a dim and distant hillside the wild horses racing yet / With the man from Snowy River at their heels // And he ran them single-handed till their sides were white with foam / He followed like a bloodhound on their track / Till they halted, cowed and beaten—then he turned their heads for home / And alone and unassisted brought them back / And his hardy mountain pony—he could scarcely raise a trot / He was blood from hip to shoulder from the spur / But his pluck was still undaunted and his courage fiery hot / For never yet was mountain horse a cur // And down by Araluen where the stony ridges raise / Their torn and rugged battlements on high / Where the air is clear as crystal and the white stars fairly blaze / At midnight in the cold and frosty sky / And where, around “The Overflow,” the reed-beds sweep and sway / To the breezes and the rolling plains are wide / The man from Snowy River is a household word to-day / And the stockmen tell the story of his ride.’

Page 486 of
Print Edition As this poem expresses so prophetically, only innocence can overcome alienation, tame and return the escaped truth. Incidentally the ‘terrible descent’ into the issue of the human condition was perfectly described by the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins in his late 1800s poem, No Worst There is None, when he wrote, ‘O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall / Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed.’

The same mythology of innocence overthrowing denial occurs in Hans Christian Andersen’s 1837 fable, The Emperor’s New Clothes, where it takes a child/ innocent to break the spell of deception and disclose the truth. Similarly in the story of David and Goliath, the innocent, ‘David’, goes out from the besieged ranks of the Israelites (humanity) to defeat the monster ‘Goliath’, who symbolises the issue of the human condition that the all-dominating state of denial has been blocking access to. Elsewhere in the Bible, in Isaiah 11, this truth is more clearly spelt out where Isaiah describes how ‘a child will lead them’ to the state where upset and innocence are reconciled, to where, as Isaiah says, the ‘wolf will live with the lamb’. Only innocence, which the child symbolises, is able, as Isaiah says, to ‘delight in the fear of the Lord’—or, as Deuteronomy says, face the cooperative ideals or God ‘face to face’—and by doing so, as Isaiah states, make ‘the earth…full of the knowledge of the Lord’ (eliminate the need for denial in the world).

In the great European legend of King Arthur, the wounded (alienated) king whose realm was devastated (humans unavoidably made their world an expression of their own madness) could only have his wound healed, and his realm restored, by the arrival in his kingdom of a simple, naive boy. In the legend the boy’s name is Parsifal, which means ‘guileless fool’. To the alienated only a naive, guileless fool would dare approach and grapple with the confronting truths about our divisive condition. The American Jungian analyst and prophet, Robert A. Johnson, gave an account of this legend in his 1974 book, He, Understanding Masculine Psychology. Johnson says firstly that ‘Alienation is the current term for it [the state of humans today]. We are an alienated people, an existentially lonely people; we have the Fisher King wound’ (p.12 of 97). He then describes how ‘The court fool had prophesied that the Fisher King would be healed when a wholly innocent fool arrives in the court. In an isolated country a boy lives with his widowed mother…His mother had taken him to this faraway country and raised him in primitive circumstances. He wears homespun clothes, has no schooling, asks no questions. He is a simple, naive youth’ (p.90). Johnson goes on to Page 487 of
Print Edition describe how in the myth it is this boy, Parsifal, who, when he becomes an adult, is able to heal the Fisher King’s wound of alienation, so that ‘the land and all its people can live in peace and joy’ (p.94).

In the Resignation essay I quoted Hopkins’ 1885 sonnet No Worst, There is None, and I included part of the sonnet earlier in this section. The sonnet talked about the state of depression (which, as the title says, there is nothing ‘worse’ than) that most people experience if they try to look into the human condition. Following on from ‘O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall / Frightful, sheer, no-man fathomed’, Hopkins added ‘Hold them cheap / May [any] who ne’er [have never] hung there.’ As these words intimate, only innocent people, those free of upset, could investigate the human condition without becoming depressed—’hung’ being the perfect description for the depressed state. For innocents it is not costly, rather, as Hopkins says, it is ‘cheap’ for them.

Sir Laurens van der Post clearly saw the truth of innocence having to lead humanity home when he wrote, ‘Whatever happens, I shall be there in the end, for I, child that I am, am mother of your future self’ (Jung and the Story of Our Time, 1976, p.167 of 275).

It is guidance from the long-repressed unevasive, innocent, soulful clarity that humans had before the upset, alienated human condition developed that is needed to synthesise the liberating truth that frees humanity from its alienated state. Again to quote from Sir Laurens van der Post, ‘One of the most moving aspects of life is how long the deepest memories stay with us. It is as if individual memory is enclosed in a greater which even in the night of our forgetfulness stands like an angel with folded wings ready, at the moment of acknowledged need, to guide us back to the lost spoor of our meanings’ (The Lost World of the Kalahari, 1958, p.62 of 253).

In Paterson’s The Man From Snowy River the character Clancy of the Overflow persuaded the station owner Harrison to let the boy join their expedition to retrieve the escaped thoroughbred by saying, ‘I warrant he’ll be with us when he’s wanted at the end’. While innocence was unbearably confronting while the search for understanding was being undertaken, it was needed at the end to synthesise the unevasive explanation of the human condition from science’s hard-won, but evasively presented insights.

The alienated simply cannot open the door to the human condition—or easily assist in holding it open—because that door is our block-out or denial or evasion or alienation. In the human-condition-Page 488 of
Print Edition confronting new world the order is reversed. Soundness or innocence leads whereas for the last 2 million years it has been oppressed because of its unjust condemnation of humans. Innocence comes to the fore now to lead us back home to soundness and away from the alienated state. The following quotes illustrate the point: ‘The meek…will inherit the earth’ (Matt. 5:5) and ‘many who are first will be last, and many who are last will be first’ (Matt. 19:30,20:16; Mark 10:31; Luke 13:30). Artful, sophisticated, evasive, intellectual cleverness was needed to establish, defend and maintain the safe, non-confronting, escapist, alienated state but artless, simple, honest, soulful, instinctual soundness is needed to retrieve humanity from the alienated state.

Just as the sophisticated, cleverly evasive, esoteric, cryptic, intellectual world benefited from a high level or quotient of intelligence, so the unevasive, honest, unsophisticated, direct, open and plain new world depends on soundness. It is the more innocent who are able to lead humanity home to the full, compassionate, reconciling, dignifying, upset-subsiding, ameliorating truth about ourselves.

In Australian mythology, there is yet another truthsayer who has written about the finding of the Holy Grail of understanding of the human condition, and the exciting liberation of humanity that follows. Mark Seymour, the lead singer of the Australian rock band Hunters and Collectors wrote the following words to the band’s 1993 popular song Holy Grail (some of this song was mentioned earlier in this essay, and it was also included in the Introduction): ‘Woke up this morning from the strangest dream / I was in the biggest army the world had ever seen / We were marching as one on the road to the Holy Grail // Started out seeking fortune and glory / It’s a short song but it’s a hell of a story / When you spend your lifetime trying to get your hands / on the Holy Grail // Well have you heard about the Great Crusade? / We ran into millions but nobody got paid / Yeah we razed four corners of the globe for the Holy Grail // All the locals scattered, they were hiding in the snow / We were so far from home, so how were we to know? / There’d be nothing left to plunder / When we stumbled on the Holy Grail // We were so full of beans but we were dying like flies / And those big black birds, they were circling in the sky / And you know what they say, yeah nobody deserves to die // Oh but I’ve been searching for an easy way / To escape the cold light of day [I’ve lived a life of resigned evasion] / I’ve been high and I’ve been low [suffered the consequences of recurring depression] / But I’ve got nowhere else to go / There’s nowhere else to go! // I followed orders, God knows where I’ve been / but I woke up alone, all my wounds were clean [our psychosis was Page 489 of
Print Edition cleared up] / I’m still here, I’m still a fool for the Holy Grail / I’m a fool for the Holy Grail.’

Before concluding this section some explanation should be given as to why Australia is so devoid of animals compared to Africa. It is thought that Australia’s marsupial mega fauna—we even had a marsupial lion—died out because, having not emerged with humans, as the mega fauna of Africa did, they weren’t sufficiently adapted to humans to survive when humans finally arrived in Australia. In particular they were too easily hunted. The same reason is given for the extinction of the mega fauna of South America. In Australia’s case I suspect there is another contributing factor that to date hasn’t been acknowledged. Australia has been taken over by gum trees or eucalypts which are extremely fire-encouraging (because of their very waxy, oily leaves and bark) and extremely fire-adapted (because of their epicormic buds which are kept protected by the outer bark but grow quickly after fire). The fires that now erupt every 10 to 20 years in the all-dominating gum forests of Australia incinerate virtually all other wildlife, animal and vegetable. Interestingly, in the history of Australia’s flora ‘the gums are…all but absent until a few tens of thousands of years ago’ (from a review of Ashley Hay’s 2002 book Gum, Bulletin mag. 19 Nov. 2002). It was the arrival of humans to Australia a few tens of thousands of years ago, with their practice of burning off the scrub to both trap game and later attract game to the short regrowth, that apparently enabled the gum trees to become so pervasive. Fires started from lightning strikes are evidently too infrequent to allow the fire-weed, gum tree monoculture to develop the way it has in Australia. If fires from lightning strikes had been numerous enough to allow gums to proliferate then surely gums would have proliferated much earlier. You can tell gums are an upstart variety of tree because they still haven’t refined the distribution of their branches to efficiently catch the light; they are extremely disorganised and messy trees. Eucalypts are so successful now in Australia that it is said that every variety of plant community will be dominated by a variety of eucalypt, with the one exception perhaps being the very dry inland which still seems to be dominated by acacias. I have read that, be it heathland, scrub, open woodland or forest, ‘eucalypts always come out on top’. Australians have come to love their eucalypts but in some ways eucalypts are like dangerous crocodiles planted tail-down everywhere.