A Facebook group – Sahul Perspectives – has now been started for anyone wanting to join the discussion. It is a public group.

https://www.facebook.com/groups/757095408965906/

Bruce

From the Conversation

We mapped the ‘super-highways’ the First Australians used to cross the ancient land

Published: April 30, 2021

By S. Crabtree, A .N. Williams, C. J. Bradshaw, D. White, F. Saltré, S. Ulm.

https://theconversation.com/we-mapped-the-super-highways-the-first-australians-used-to-cross-the-ancient-land-154263

We acknowledge the original peoples of Sahul and their living descendants in Australia and New Guinea.

This website is intended to work on developing perspectives on life from our understanding of the Ways of First Peoples in Australia and New Guinea.

In his Chairman’s address to the 4th Conference of the European Society for Oceanists (Leiden 25 June 1999) the late Dutch Anthropologist Jan Pouwer spoke of a Sahul ‘epistemological-ideological shift’ which:

… elevates … Australia, New Guinea and Western Melanesia from a receptive periphery of Island Southeast Asia to an active and creative centre of its own.

Pouwer 1999

An active and creative centre quite different to that of the Western European tradition. The research of scholars support the strong political statements of Sahul’s living peoples that “Land is Life”.

It is as though, when people first emerged in Sahul there were two brothers (Earth-Beings) and their families – Elder Brother and Younger Brother. They spread out over the vast new country. After the country became fully peopled – after 40,000+ years – the sea rose and cut off the two brothers. Sahul was divided into what we call Australia and New Guinea.

In Australia peoples-and-countries form a fundamental unity. Elder Brother remained true – and in good faith – to an eternal life design. Ceremonies were directed at ensuring life reproduced itself in an orthodox manner and that the cosmos remained well-tempered. These are the Ways of Elder Brother and his family.

The situation in New Guinea is more nuanced as a result of the experiments with ‘neolithic’ ways – horticulture, animal husbandry, village life. The underlying connection with country remains a powerful force in their lives. They constantly seek to keep these new ways and life in balance. These are the Ways of Younger Brother and his family.

In Europe people underwent a split in their Being – resulting in Human and Humus. When this fundamental unity is ‘spilt’ – conceptually and/or in practice – damage is of done to the fabric of life.

The chaos introduced into European life by the split in Being eventually resulted in their arrival into the lives of Sahul peoples and spreading chaos into the well-ordered lives and countries of First Peoples

Life is a complex cosmic balancing act. It is as though the contact of European life with Sahul posits a global healing challenge – reconnecting unearthed European practices. Care for the soul and care for the soil are two sides of the one story.

Starting from the position that First Peoples lives are the country is a necessary initial step. How we new arrivals treat them is how we treat the country we find ourselves in.

Developing Sahul perspectives is part of how this – the greatest of life’s stories – unfolds. We are in a process of becoming.

Bruce (Japaljari) Reyburn

July 2022