Teila Watson, Destruction Story

Teila Watson
Published

From the start of April I set out on a trip across the most mined place in so-called "australia". Starting in Gangulu Country, my Grandmothers Mothers Country, My Country, and importantly, my descendants Country.

We had ceremony on the Dawson river. Family all gathered, we spent time in a place our old people have been in sacred relationship with for generations, every generation since the beginning of Humanness.

The river is the lifeblood of our culture, our dreaming and our connection.

Some of our little ones placed their feet on the river bank for the first time, took their first breath of the air produced by the eco-system that nurtured their ancestry in every generation and heard their first sunrise songs from the birds and insects, mixed with the sounds of the trees in the wind, the water flowing and us, the Murri's who belong there.

Once our ceremony was done many of our family members travelled back to where they are based, some to Countries they belong to on other lines of family, some back to cities or towns that have grown close and gained meaning through generations of community building and relationship with place.

For me, I travelled another 3000km or more. To see Country, the Country that has been relegated as the scapegoat for “australia’s” coal industry for over 100 years. The place they used to call ‘The Killing Fields’, they now call ‘Coal Country’.

Places that are sacred to us, Mundagatta's place, our rainbow serpent dreaming stretching all across and through these areas.

I came to see, to feel, be and to grow my knowing, strengthening and building on my bond to Country, culture and history.

Setting off from where we held ceremony, we came across the first mine, less than 50kms away.

Easily mistaken for mountains, the visual landscape of our homelands is devastated, with the spoil of Country that has been brutalised and desecrated, stripped of it's selfness and turned inside out, in the name of progress (a code name for reckless greed).

Mine spoils have replaced what should be a birthright, our natural ability to see and know the horizon of our Country, the sights and signs, left for us by our creator, covered up and changed, replaced with devastation. And as I look at the enormity of the destruction, a question dawns on me, forming a lump in my throat and raising the hairs on the back of my neck: Are we witnessing the birthing of a new dreaming story?

Instead of Mundagatta, a creator of enormous size spreading the colour, life and Laws of its rainbow, bringing life, we have trucks, larger than most houses, drills and explosives that shake homes like earthquakes from hundreds of kilometres away. These tools of destruction are controlled by corporations, also of enormous size, equipped with "power", earned by greed, instead of natural, sacred Law.

Destructive spirits, turning gigantic areas of our Country from the homes of our plants and animals, in the beautiful colours gifted from Mundagatta into great gaping holes in the earth. The pits are shades of grey, and the absence of colour makes it seem as though Mundagatta never shared her rainbow at all. No more plants, animals, no space for life in those pits. Just Rocks, soil and the dust of thousands, millions of years of sacredness being violently dragged up to the surface. The rivers and waterways that Mundagatta created to sustain our lives and hold her in her slumber are now defiled and infected with their poisons. The sun bursts with anger at the violence of these acts and the whole world, the whole natural world is trying to cleanse itself of the beasts that have taken hold of our ability to live naturally, without harming ourselves. Greed and money, new dreaming, new gods, destructive spirits, un-creators. While we try to heal ourselves from the contaminants that were once the sacred underground, now toxic to the body itself.

View of the Dawson Range across the plains, at risk of being covered up by mine spoils if the Baralaba South Coal project goes ahead

The Dawson Range across the plains, a view that is at risk of being covered up by mine spoils if the Baralaba South Coal project goes ahead.

Looking out across the changed horizon, I wonder what of the next 100,000 years? Will our descendants remember our Mundagatta? What of the Mountains left by the destructor spirits? Will they tell the story of our fight to protect our ancestors, our Mundagatta, and them, our descendants? Or will we be no more? Will the oldest living culture, and humanity at large be the collateral damage of colonial greed and the worst possible traits of humanness?

Yet even in asking these questions, I know this: we are still here. Through every great change of Country, through ice ages, rising seas, invasion and survival, Aboriginal people have endured not by remaining unchanged, but by having a culture that carries us forward in new ways while keeping our spirit intact. Our dreaming has never belonged only to the past, it lives and continues within us, because we exist within it. Our Mundagatta was never tied to the colonial idea of time, instead they exist within every now, every before and every after, forever.

It is this knowing of Mundagatta, Country and us that tells me that we will continue. That the remnants of this destruction story may one day stand as evidence not only of greed and violence, but of the best potentials of humanness too. Because regardless of who or what or why, the destruction will stop. Whether by people changing course, or by the violence of destruction making continuation impossible. And when it does, we will still be Country. Proof of our dreaming’s persistence. Existing like Mundagatta, in every now, forever.

As the sun set across the plains, we journeyed on.

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