PHIL FITZPATRICK
ON several occasions in the mid-1970s I trekked on foot into the Petermann Ranges in Central Australia with a group of elderly Pitjantjatjara men.
We left our Land Rover at the foot of the range and followed the rugged valleys into the high country. The old men left their clothes in the Land Rover and only took their spears and woomeras with them.
What they showed me and what I learned in those stark mountains has remained with me since.
I came away with my own tjukurpa (dreaming) and totem and yet, if you asked me to describe what those visions and lessons were and what is the meaning of having the waiuta or possum as my personal totem, I’d be taxed to articulate it.
In fact, the import of that well-remembered experience has not really had much significance until just recently. I respect and have an abiding interest in the dreaming but I don’t believe in it, just as I don’t believe in other religions.
Those old men knew that and weren’t out to convince me. They were merely happy to involve me because I was interested.
This sort of undefinable knowledge is often referred to as the “wisdom of the elders’.
I had experienced similar, but nowhere near as intense, encounters in Papua New Guinea. Going back to both places now reveals little sign of the existence of that wisdom.
Although remnants of it must exist, maybe buried in the psyches of the sons and daughters of those original people or in those who still live close to the soil.
The “wisdom of the elders” has now been hijacked by new-age enthusiasts and aging hippies. Books are written about it and it has become a marketable commodity. However, it puzzles me how you can absorb intuitive knowledge without actually experiencing it.
I think what these people now peddle is largely fake interpretations of something they don’t really understand. By embracing the “wisdom of the elders” in this superficial way they have destroyed its potency and devalued it in the minds of the general populace.
And yet, now of all times, the world needs that wisdom.
What we now get instead is science and statistics. If the science is not there we are inclined not to believe what those elders knew and probably still know intuitively.
People all over rural Papua New Guinea, for instance, know that the climate is changing.
Gogodala on the Aramia River know it and so do the remote Enga communities along the headwaters of the Yuat River.
People in Collingwood Bay know it and have made the connection between clear-felling the forest and climate change.
People on Manus know that the sea is turning acidic because of climate change and that over-fishing is making it worse.
But ask them for scientific proof and they will give you blank stares.
If you try to explain this to the rapacious loggers, miners and fishing moguls they will laugh at you. They don’t care – profit is their bottom line.
Try to explain it to their partners in crime in government and they will demand evidence, not because they are concerned but so that they can produce their own statistics to counter what you are saying.
In our insular world the wisdom of the elders matters little. It is not quantifiable, cannot be represented in graphs and stubbornly eludes cost benefit analysis.
Science is great, it has brought many benefits to humankind but it very often obscures the obvious.
Hippocrates knew instinctively that a good diet prevents illness. Science, on the other hand, prescribes drugs as short-term fixes to treat symptoms.
It won’t work on a sick planet however.
A greater wisdom is required but I fear we may have already lost it.