Elsie Chan, born in Canberra to Chinese parents, finds herself somewhat excluded by white Australians who seem to want her always to remain a Chinese Australian. She tells me that her sense of sharing the land can strengthen only after she herself is accepted as an equal. A postgraduate anthropologist asks me why we privilege firstness. Many linguists who have spent long periods with Aborigines in their own country come to speak to the spirit ancestors as a matter of course because they tell me well, because in some sense the spirit ancestors are there. In deep Aboriginal country it's easy to accept alternative realities.
Witches practise rituals on indigenous women's sites.
For I am native born. Geoff Page's long poem Bandjalang ends with a disputed interpretation of the past between a family of white settlers in northern New South Wales and an extended indigenous family. The protagonists in this work do not rely solely on Western adversarial law, but insist on recognition for what each has achieved, the deep significance to everyone of the land Australia, and of their own proper or local country. These whites don't commune with spirits in the landscape, they negotiate with real, self-confident Aboriginal people. They exchange passion and knowledge and history an awareness of the local past, and the hard love that treasures the land as deeply as do the indigenous people but differently.