Regarding Storylines: Advance Australia where? (3 December, 2020). Thank you Eli Cook for your well-written and positive article in The Echo.
♦ See Eli Cook’s If not now then when?
My difficulty is, as a white person and being someone active in the town planning process in Byron and surrounding shires, that there appears to be no place to talk with my First Nations brothers and sisters.
I have questions like what makes these sacred places? What makes the songlines? What is the meaning behind native people translocating? What is a rainbow serpent? What was the meaning behind the bridle trails and how do they work?
As we enter a new astrological age there appears to be an opportunity to engage in discussions that will allow white and native understanding of each other’s perspective on life and a way forward that will benefit us all.
European cultures have quashed the intuitive for tens of thousands of years. We now in this new and intuitive age have the potential opportunity to gain understanding from a culture that embraces the intuitive and feels inextricably linked with Country.
Our white culture is poised on the edge of realisation or destruction. We can no longer ignore the lore of the land that your culture embraces now, always has and always will. Communication between cultures is no easy task as your native culture has difficulty coming to grips with white man law and our white culture has difficulty coming to grips with your native lore.
As the oldest culture your people have a resilience and a basic knowing of what is right for the land, and the patterns of understanding underly a knowledge of the land in energy centres and connecting energy lines. This unwritten lore has historically been overridden and denied by our culture by not acknowledging the subtle energies that influence all our lives.
The way forward for indigenous people is to hold and rebirth the ancient knowledge and lead the way to a more sustainable and enduring future. Hopefully we can find a sharing place to talk our stories into the fire of life so that we give ourselves a chance to walk together and pool knowledge.
My feeling is that we as a nation need a bill of rights that respects gender, culture, and nature but this seems a long way off. To start with, let’s see if we can sit down, talk and agree about the way we see things in Bundjalung country and start to derive a meaningful way forward for our local people.
The ‘economic foundation’ that you talk about is minor compared with our ability to understand each other. White man’s knowledge is just a game on a board. The blending of knowledge through communication is the first step and then the so called ‘industry’ will follow.
As one of those lovely ladies on the ABC Drum said: ‘We need connection, purpose and responsibility’.
For four decades The Echo has printed the stories some people loved, some people hated, and some pretended not to read. If you want us to keep telling the truth, the real truth, not the sugar-coated version. We’ll need your support to keep the presses rolling. 
