Yabun 2022

The symbiosis was not a coincidence, it is evolution in its highest form. A spectrum of connections that began 60,000 years ago.

Gadigal Land. 26/Jan/2022. Photo by Dan Fallshaw.

As the sun went down, we all gathered around the fire.

The dancers called the birds, sulphur-crested cockatoos and bats with their voices and the birds became the humans, and they came to join the corroboree with their songs and shapes. The animals became one with the humans.

The animals called to the spirit of the land and they bound together.

A perfect symbiosis of human-animal and they were one in their joy and grief, the two inseparable.

In their solidarity, they knew the land was theirs and theirs to protect.

The voice of the land tells us a story, that there is no separation between us and them. It was like a dream, the subliminal connection. 

The hopelessness I felt about the destruction of my own culture, became hope.

I had to rub my eyes and make sure I was awake.

The fire in my heart yearned to become a wild conflagration. A desire that burns so brightly, it outshines all other desires. 

Everything else seemed to fade from my awareness. I brushed aside the concrete buildings surrounding me and their inhabitants, and their petty concerns that seemed so trivial. Even that today they still celebrate 200 years of their arrival, which brought only destruction, seemed so trivial.

Symbiosis, ASCII art by Violeta Ayala.

The children laugh and dance in the middle of the corroboree, laughing and singing songs in language.

They have been connected to this land longer than our history has existed.

The spirits of these lands that belong to the oldest living culture of the world, are here, ever present.

The symbiosis was not a coincidence, it is evolution in its highest form. A spectrum of connections that began 60,000 years ago.

I have never felt such connection in my life. Sitting here at the corroboree, I felt such a presence all around me. As if something was telling me that there is no division between spirit beings and real ones. That all things are connected to each other and all existence is one. 

I have never experienced something alike, and no words can do justice to the moment. The future will not remember me; but it will remember the songs of the ancestors and the spirit they had.

The Dreamtime was not something that happened, but a further expression of what has always been. 

Always was and always will be Aboriginal land.