After reading another great fish-tale I was reminded about my promise to continue the whale-tale of Bunna Lawrie and the Whale Singers. It is just another predictable story of dispossession and displacement but this one has an added twist. European settlement not only disconnected the Jirkala Mirning tribe of South Australia from their totem animal, it even more rudely stomped all over traditional land rights and a cultural framework that had ordered the lives of these people for about 100,000 years.
During the 1950s the British and Australian Governments conspired to make Miralinga (a rural outpost of South Australia) a nuclear test site. After 60 years it is still unsurprisingly uninhabitable but the Aboriginal people who survived the initial fallout were relocated to other traditional lands. This act alone demonstrates the complete lack of understanding of the Aboriginal birth/spirit relationship to land and its critical importance in maintaining a sense of belonging and identity. Of course the land used for relocation belonged to another tribe, the Mirning whale singers. Needless to say, this decision has caused a fair amount of conflict between the two tribes: one homeless tribe whose lands have been poisoned and one whose ancestral lands have been leased out without their consultation or consent for 99 years. I think that is a lose-lose scenario, and one which I would now like to find out more about.
Prior to this the Mirning had been summoning the whales in the Southern Ocean for who-knows-how-long but had been forced to witness the killing of their sacred totem animal by whalers along the coast. Apparently it was like watching the slaughter of their own children. This animal connected them to their ancestral spirits and the Dreamtime and their slaughter added insult to injury for an already displaced people.
After swimming with a lone dolphin in Dingle Bay on Ireland’s West Coast, Kim Kindersley gave up acting and embarked on a journey to research dolphins and whales around the world. Kim apparently had had an epiphanic moment swimming with dolphins in Ireland where he was delving into his ancestral roots. Kim’s promotional film The Dolphin’s Gift was sent around to indigenous tribal leaders, one of which was Bunna Lawrie. Bunna invited him to witness a whale calling ceremony with his own tribe which resulted in another film about the Mirning and this traditional cultural practice.
Kim Kindersley is the writer and director of The Gathering: The Return of the Whale Dreamers, a 3 part documentary series filmed over the past 10 years. It is the story of the re-awakening of the whale dreaming by the Mirning people of the Nullabour. The journey details the collaboration between the English born film-maker and Bunna Lawrie, formerly front man of one of Australia’s most popular indigenous bands “Coloured Stone”. The Gathering took place on a remote cliff top in South Australia. Stay tuned.
image: Bunna Lawrie
http://www.i-sis.org.uk/WhaleDreamers.php
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