welcome to country

Friday evening dusk stroll along the lake with two companions. We are early for  the opening ceremony/welcome to country  of ‘Floating Land’ at Boreen Point. In this peaceful place, we three are suddenly peaceful, after our day full of busy motion, and chatting, and driving up the Highway. The lake laps gently. The water is a silvery emptiness. Silence hangs in the trees. The sky blurs dreamily from blue to pink to starlight infinity.

We follow the strains of distant music and find someone playing piano by the side of the sleepy little dead-end road, just a few metres from the lake.  A small crowd is gathering at the cooroboree spot. Everyone is rugged up in jackets and beanies. We sit on the grass. Some speeches are made, referring to Art In Nature, installations, the history of Floating Land, international and local artists, workshops. The Water Theme.

Then the Gubbi Gubbi dancers wander out from behind the paperbark trees. Some words of welcome are spoken in  language, by Lyndon, a young man who is a local traditional owner whose ancestors have always lived in these parts.  We in the audience repeat his foreign word for welcome. We repeat it  softly, shyly. Like a talisman, an  offering from The Time Before. Lyndon speaks of his family, his great grandmother, and tells us where Gubbi Gubbi country is  - south down to Pine River, east to The Connondales.

While Lyndon plays the didgeridoo, the other three men make fire in the traditional ceremonial way, by twirling a grasstree stem  in the small hole in a branch lieing on the ground, until the friction ignites  a handful of dry grass and a wisp of smoke spirals up. Once the fire is lit, the dancing begins.

The dances tell of hunting and fishing, of following the dolphin to find mullet, following a certain bird to find wild honey. Always sharing honey with the bird. Never killing the big fish who are about to reproduce, ensuring future food supplies. The men dance sea eagles and black cockatoos. Their naked, painted  thighs quiver with energy;  their stamping feet kick up puffs of dust  in the flickering firelight.

I have seen all this many times - the fire ceremony, the dances. It is always entrancing, always creates a sort of  meditative bubble in time and space. 

Later these pale brown men will put on their jeans and t-shirts and drive back to town in their car, but for this moment, their longing to keep their culture alive offers me a tiny fragment of  Dreamtime reality, when the people of this land hunted and held their ceremonies and lived in rhythms attuned with the cycles of nature. 

After the dancing, there is an art show opening in the sailing club over the road. But it looks crowded, so we meander down the road instead. There are no shops, not even street lights,  nobody. Just the lapping of the water and the tinking sounds of night  insects. A huge cabbage tree palm, monochrome in the starlight looks like a giant creature. J wants to paint or draw it. How do you paint stars? she asks, so hard. Maybe its good that there are some things you just can’t ever reproduce, you have to be there. It is a little crystal of a moment. ‘I want to remember this’, she says. Me too.