Cultivating connections between the young and “old land”
Posted: October 18, 2012 Filed under: News, Recommended | Tags: aboriginal belief systems, community and place, indigenous peoples, people-place relationships, place dreaming, place meaning Leave a commentNews from Kangaroo Valley, New South Wales (Australia), of an initiative that will actively seek to cultivate sense of place, particularly among the young. Run as a World Responsible Tourism Day activity, it will seek to foster connectiveness to nature using Aboriginal belief systems.
Organiser, Christopher Warren, writes “research confirms that individuals who have pro-environmental values also hold a strong connectivity to nature, and are frequently positive thinkers. Methods [therefore] need to be found to build connectivity to nature which in turn can influence pro-environmental social practice and behaviour”.
To achieve this highly intangible yet very valuable prize, Chris and his colleagues at a local school and in an aboriginal community will try “to determine if elements of traditional environmental care can be transferred to school children [to] successfully build pro-environmental values through connection”.
The 2012 World Responsible Tourism Day marks just the start of this very local action–the activity will run for at least a year and seek to engage youngsters through workbooks, encounters, reflections and story-writing. To find out how this progresses, and perhaps contribute your ideas and moral support, follow Chris and colleagues here.
Memories of Down Under and visiting the “real” Australia today
Posted: June 11, 2012 Filed under: Recommended, Reflections, Visiting Places | Tags: Australia, indigenous peoples, people-place relationships, place identity, urban tourism, walking tours 1 CommentWhen I was in Australia, over ten years ago now, aboriginal Australia seemed largely absent from the coastal cities of the south and south-east. Not an uncommon sensation for newcomers and visitors, I suspect.
It wasn’t until I visited Darwin and other parts of the Northern Territory that I felt I had arrived in the Australia of my preconceptions, as well as the Australia of certain desires I perhaps held at the time. I had heard accounts of horrific events and read about the chronically dislocating effects of colonial and other incomer changes wrought on the aboriginal people of Australia. I had witnessed a couple of saddening sights first-hand too. But I felt that at least here I was closer to Australia’s soul, where people’s connections with their environment were “real, deep and distinctive”, as in steeped in ancestry and a profound understanding of the land.
Then again, I might have been “place dreaming”. You see I was also aware that those Australians who helped impart all this to me were in fact white descendants of Europeans, particularly a remarkable friend of my parents, the late Lance Brooks. They too had intimate connections with this part of Australia.
Sense Our Way 