THE PARADOX OF COUNTRY

The word country is used frequently and casually without complications, but do we know what ‘Country’ means? We have tried to probe this complexity previously -  see: https://voussoirs.blogspot.com/2024/06/country-outside-inside-place.html - but the phenomenon still remains an enigma to our everyday perceptions; an alien circumstance, a vague notion that we are told is not only meaningful, but also critically vital to the everyday wellbeing of the First Nations people. The concept is wielded around to justify and support almost all the claims made by this portion of the Australian population as it fights for its rights. Sadly, the situation is not helped by publications like The First Inventors, (Allen & Unwin, 2026), Billy Griffiths, Larissa Behrendt and Sean Ulm, that use 'Country' with a capital 'C' whenever it turns up in the text. Whether this word is referring merely to country as landscape, location, or real estate, or to some mystic, spiritual understanding of story, song, or dance, it is always printed with the capital.*

The proposition is that this general, 'grab all' reference to/recognition of the land in all of the various aspects that this term relates to in different contexts, only confuses the ordinary understanding of this complex experience.

One could argue that everything is referred to with the big ‘C’ because everything in this relationship with land and place is integrated into a rich and complex wholeness, a position confirmed in the previous analysis. The concern is that the failure to differentiate ‘c’ and ‘C’ only promotes a confusion in the thinking about these matters, dragging things spiritual down into the dregs of the ordinary, rather than vice versa, allowing them to be mocked and dismissed.

The proposition is that this belittling only demeans ‘Country,’ with what appears as a grand claim for perceived ordinariness that stimulates the perception that the 'knowledge' being claimed is merely a cultural hoax, a fabricated phantom, a position that is only encouraged by the social problems in some First Nation communities.

So it seems that, ironic though it might appear, the special circumstances of ‘Country’ would be better respected and reinforced by fragmenting the wholeness of the experience so that the Western mind might be able to identify the difference between say, harvesting food from, walking on, or burning 'country,' as in countryside or land, and acknowledging the spiritual ancestors, (the 'Old People' referred to in The First Inventors), or stories of place in ‘Country,’ even though the act of harvesting and burning land might involve the care of recognition of spirits as well as being a practical everyday occasion. As is noted in this publication, burning is not a clearing act alone. p.73: Fuel reduction was not an end in itself, but a colonial paradigm in which fire is seen as fundamentally bad.

By identifying this duality, the outsider might be better able to come to know how the two aspects might co-exist in the one; such is the nature of the rational, analytical mind that holds by definition and necessity, a natural dualism in the differentiation of black and white in order to gauge some sense of 'between.' That everything becomes ‘Country’ is seen by this diagnostic thinking as one pretentious, fanciful, amorphous muddle that is simply claiming too much to be taken seriously.

So the suggestion is that ‘c’ and ‘C’ be used in their proper places, with the argument of wholeness being left as another step in the understanding of ‘Country,' that embodiment of meaning in the everyday that encompasses the richness of a living and lived symbolism, forming and framing a context for this referencing rather than leaving it as an amorphous, meaningful mystery in everything as a matter of course, because that's how 'we,' as First Nations people who know, see things. The West defines the sacred and the profane as a stark difference. Asking this perception to be changed establishes a difficult challenge that frustrates and alienates; mystifying matters with a doubting puzzle.

By fragmenting the aboriginal experience, the Western mind might come to appreciate this oneness rather than being forced into the position from the other direction that demands prior knowledge or blind acceptance.

There is something irrational in wanting to emphasise the fragmentation of wholeness, its integrity, when one is seeking to understand the vital complexity of the oneness of the experience being identified, but sometimes we need to pull things apart in order to better understand the relationships between the bits and pieces involved; such is the scientific method. We have Karl Popper's  conjectures and refutation; right and wrong; black and white, being used to understand all and everything (c.f. Guidjieff).

Calling everything ‘Country’ is correct and proper, but reads as promoting a bold, somewhat cocky position that stimulates a negative perception of pomposity by being read cynically as claiming just too much, too easily, too casually, perhaps for social, financial, and political gain rather than for any clarification or identification of experience.

There is the complication that this wholeness is essentially something that cannot be told. Tradition notes that if it could be told, it would have been. The best we can do in the effort to comprehend this mystery is to talk about it; point to it, as in the Zen notion of the finger pointing to the moon. This involves attempting to communicate with another. What we have to understand is that we need to think about the method, and use language and analysis that can be meaningful. Writing ‘Country’ for every context is like using a foreign language to explain a phenomenon. One needs to understand the other's perception of things if there is any chance that a position might be understood, let alone respected. Tolerance needs to be shown by everyone. Bland, undifferentiated claims for ‘Country’ do not help.

The argument is that there needs to be a clear difference between what the Western mind would call ‘country,’ and the reference to the mystical life of the aboriginal that relates to ‘Country.’#

Yes, we know it is all one, but we are not going to convince the questioning rationalist with the subtle vision without spelling things out as clearly and diagrammatically as might be possible while being careful not to destroy the wholeness of the spirit experience of ‘country’ named ‘Country.’

*
There is one quote in this book that refers to ‘country’ with a small ‘c’ when it does not start a sentence, suggesting that it is not using the special capital ‘C’ reference - see p.153:

Country is loved, needed, and cared for, and country loves, needs, and cares for her peoples in turn.

#

One is tempted to add: as with songlines. This concept lingers with an uncertainty, even in The First Inventors where the suggestion is that these are merely lines in songs that tell the stories about ‘Country’ - what we might call lyrics. The reference to ‘Country’ in this explanation only complicates any clarity with further murky unknowns. Yet there is the sense that much more is involved. We need an approach to this matter that adopts much the same strategy as that suggested for ‘Country.’ It is not useful to leave these things in a vague, feel-good, 'meaningful' muddle.

NOTE

In The First Inventors, p.181, the text on the black bean tree refers to songlines as though they are merely lines of a song that records a story:

It appears that people not only transformed these mountainous rainforest environments through deliberate planting strategies in the deep past, but they preserved a record of this practice in their ceremonial song archive and memory.