Hybridisation

In this age of globalisation and multiculturalism, the question of one’s cultural identity has become problematic. Many of us are untethered from the place of our ancestors, either by personal design or by displacement due to wars and societal collapses. Many of us are the children of transplants from other cultures, both recent and historical, seeking to put our roots into the cultural soil of Australia. Some of us are hybrids through intermarriages across different ethnic groups.

Even among those of us with Indigenous cultural roots, many of us are local transplants, living in cities or other people’s Country, and/or through intermarriage we have ancestral connections to several different Countries of Indigenous language groups and to colonial settler ancestors.

Thus, questions of identity and our connection to place, language and ethnicity have become significant cultural issues in contemporary society.  No more is this so that in Australia as we seek a conciliation with our colonial-settler history, and are asked to vote YES in a Referendum to enshrine recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in the Australian Constitution, including their constitutional right to a Voice to parliament and government on matters that affect their lives.

Ethnicity and Race

Questions of identity and hybridisation are close to me. I am a fourth generation of Anglo-European cultural descent, born in Lithgow NSW, but I grew up in Queensland during the Bjelke-Petersen era of rabid anti-intellectualism, racism and machismo.  I married a man from the Trobriand Islands of Papua New Guinea (PNG) with whom I have two sons and four grandchildren, one of whom is also of Aboriginal descent.

My parents reacted in two ways when after first visiting PNG to meet my then boyfriend’s parents, I called into Bundaberg to tell my parents I was going to marry a politician’s son from PNG. My father was horrified, considering such a marriage ‘unnatural’ as if we were two different species.  My mother, who took me to the airport to say goodbye, said: “Barbara I don’t think I could cope if he was as dark as a full-blood Aboriginal”. I thought to myself, thank goodness for your sake he is not from Buka in Bougainville for they have almost black skin, like the Sudanese.  Then she looked across the room and whispered to me, “Barbara is he as dark as that man over there?”  I looked and turned to my mother, saying, “Mum that man is Italian. He is a European.” My parents were definitely children of the White Australia Policy, whereby even Europeans from Spain, Italy and Greece were not ‘white’ enough.

I was never cast out of the family for my decision to marry someone from another race and culture and in fact both my brother and sister were completely accepting and supportive. But my mother could not see a future for my children. She said they would be neither one thing nor the other.  I blithely answered, they are the future.  I longed for a world of cosmopolitan identity, free of the strictures of race, ethnicity and nationality.

Later, after my marriage and moving to live in PNG, when my mother came to visit me in Port Moresby, she was reassured that I lived in a European style, housed in a modern western style house. She could locate my husband as a Trobriand Island version of Sydney Poitier in the film,  ‘Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner’. For my mother, race and skin colour was not the issue.  It was culture. My mother could not compute that Trobriand Island culture sat on equal terms with European culture in the hierarchy of things.

The Outsider

In my experience of my childhood and early adolescence in my family home, my father was an insecure racist bully of little formal education. My mother was kind and loving, one of the kids really: so, no protective matriarch to the bully father.  Home felt like a foreign land. Even my mother would say to me, Barbara where did you come from?  So, I was in search of other identities, first outside my country town in search of a different identity – the ‘big smoke’ – Brisbane, the capital city where my maternal grandmother lived.  But she was a passionate anti-papist Anglican, and the two friends I made in Brisbane were both Catholics of bohemian intellectual parents. There was no real refuge here. I was still the rank outsider.

Through them I discovered the possibility of further education, and the glamour and romance of being a university student. But even in this I was marginal, as the scholarship I won that paid my way was to Teachers College. I was only a part-time student, studying university subjects at night, making the long trip from Kelvin Grove to St Lucia, in search of my tribe. The world of literature and history were my refuge as I embraced the idea of ‘The Outsider’ drawn from the works of Colin Wilson (1956). It was these Outsiders—H.G. Wells, Franz Kafka, Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, T.S.Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, T.E, Lawrence, William Blake and George Gurdjieff, who were my beacons in the cultural darkness of 1960s Queensland where I could find no such local companions. For these reasons I was never interested in my own Anglo-European ancestry.  The first subject I chose to study at university was the Cultural History of India since 3000 BCE, followed by the History of the Far East since 1500.  The first countries I visited overseas were Japan and Communist China, during its Cultural Revolution, as a member of a National Union of Australian University Students’ study tour.

Upon my return from this study tour, I left Queensland for Sydney, where with a Later Years Commonwealth Scholarship, I was finally able to study fulltime at university. I sought my tribe with the Kensington branch of the Sydney Push, a leftist libertarian intellectual group, as we engaged in the culture wars of the 1960s and 1970s—against censorship, against racism, and against transnational capitalism and its wars. It was a result of one such demonstration, the march down George Street to the offices of Vestey, the British Pastoral Company, in support of the Gurindji people who had walked off Wave Hill Station in demand of fair wages, and rights over their traditional Country, that my life took a dramatic turn from my imagined future.

Across the Colonial Divide—Papua New Guinea

I had always wanted to go to Paris, to the Left Bank, home to the existentialism of Jean Paul Sartre and Simone De Beauvoir. Instead, during that fateful march down George Street, I met a fellow student from the Trobriand Islands of PNG, studying at my university on an ACTU scholarship, who would become my lover and later my husband. Thus, pulled by forces I never anticipated, I crossed the racial and colonial borders of identity. I set forth to make a life in PNG as it was transitioning to self-government in 1973, and full independence as the new Nation of Papua New Guinea in 1975, with its own Constitution, parliament and administration. Thus I spent my twenties caught up in all the excitement of nation building while encountering indigenous cultures radically different to my own.

Despite PNG’s colonisation—in the northeast as German New Guinea by the German Imperial Government, under the management of the German New Guinea Company from 1882 until the end of WWI, and in the south by the British Crown, as a Protectorate under Australian administration from 1884, formalised under the Papua Act of 1905, these colonial intrusions was entirely focused on extracting resources, not settlement.  Thus the 700 language groups of PNG remained largely culturally intact, albeit subject to intensive Christian evangelising. So much so that today PNG loudly declares itself a Christian nation.

The most populous areas of the New Guinea highlands were not contacted and brought within the colonial regime until the 1930s. However, with the move to self-government and independence in the 1970s under the encouragement of the Whitlam Government, the people of Papua New Guinea began the significant cultural challenge of developing a new ‘national’ identity that cut across old tribal and language distinctions, including the colonial distinctions between German New Guinea and British-Australia Papua, between highlander and coastal peoples, and between the mainland and islanders like those of the Trobriand Islands, New Britain and Bougainville. Melanesian Pidgin became the lingua franca of the people, with the English language that of administration and government.

Papua Guineans found themselves now engaged in the Western project of ‘development’ and ‘nation-building’ by which they would enter into the modern globalising economy, requiring them to intensify export-oriented agriculture, such as coffee, and explore mining opportunities, initially copper in Bougainville and the West Papuan Highlands. With movement for work or education, and a new concept of land as collateral for economic development, Papua New Guineans also entered into the difficult pull between group obligations for sharing and land ownership, and the individual nuclear family’s requirements to ‘look after itself’ through wage savings and capital accumulation, and through individual legal title over land.

This was the world I stumbled into when I arrived in Papua New Guinea in 1972 as one of a small number of ‘white’ women who had married Indigenous men, mostly those we had met through university, and a larger number of ‘white men’ who had married Indigenous women, either formally or informally, creating a significant mixed-race population. When it came to citizenship, these were matters of considerable contestation for the new Constitutional arrangements, for many of the children of these unions also had claim on Australian citizenship via one of their parents.

When I married my husband and went to live with him in PNG, I fully expected to live there for the rest of my life.  But I was also realistic.  What would happen to me should the marriage fail?  What would happen to our children?

By marrying into Trobriand Island and the wider PNG culture, I had become the foreigner, the one who could not speak the local language, who did not know its customs and beliefs. I would become the clumsy outsider, not the romantic Intellectual Outsiders of Colin Wilson’s tales who I had decided were my ‘tribe’. My new family knew nothing of these cultural heroes. They were anchored deeply in their own worldview, with a smattering of Christianity and the ‘whitefella’ laws they had had to obey during colonial times.  However, in truth, I did not live in the village. I lived in Port Moresby, an urban culture shaped by ‘white’ Australian norms, where I worked as a professional on the grand task of ‘development’.

Getting to Know my Family

I first met my family before we got married in Sydney.  Charles and I flew up to Moresby during our university summer break for me to meet his parents. We were met at the airport in the steaming heat of Port Moresby by Charles’ father’s official driver, for by then he had become a ‘native’ member of the House of Assembly, one of the first generation of ‘natives’ to be invited into participate in Australian colonial administration. The family lived in the new native housing estate in Hohola for such new ‘native elites’ – two-bedroom fibro houses on stilts with internal showers and a toilet, a fridge and electric lights, but still a wood stove, and no internal doors. Charles and I were allocated the second bedroom: there was no question that we would be sleeping together. His cousin brothers debunked to sleep under the kitchen table. Two days later we flew in a small aeroplane to the Trobriand Islands, a group of small coral islands off the east coast of PNG.

Charles had not been home there for many years, having spent his high school years at a Townsville boarding school, and then university studies in Sydney at UNSW.

He’d told me a bit about his culture.  After all we got to know one another after I asked him to come along to my Sociology of the Family course, to discuss the unique matrilineal nature of his culture, made famous through the anthropological writings of Stanislaw Malinowski, The Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922), the Sexual Life of Savages in North-west Melanesia (1929) and Coral Gardens and Their Magic (1935).

The intriguing chapter titles of his 1929 work included: the relations between the sexes in tribal life; the status of women in native society – descent through the female line, including their share in magic; the sexual life of children, including the amorous life of adolescents; avenues to marriage, husband and wife as companions, and the polygamy rights of the Paramount Chief; divorce and death, and the nature of mourning rights.  What was particularly intriguing, for me, was the description of eroticism in Trobriand Islands culture—sexual play, the psychology of erotic love, ideas of beauty and the importance of magic in love and beauty rituals, and also the rules of exogamy and incest. Heady stuff for a girl in the Australian culture of the late 1960s, being challenged and transformed by the counter-cultural sexual revolution sweeping Europe and America.

In a matrilineal society where the maternal uncle is the clan elder, thus placing sisters and brothers in a quasi ‘marital’ relationship, strict taboos controlled relationships between sisters and brothers.  And I would experience the strength of this in my own family in the relationship between Charles and his sister.

 

What I encountered in my first visit to the village in the Trobriand islands introduced me to a completely ‘other’ world that challenged many of my assumptions about how ‘things should be’.

The senior woman who lived in the family home was a reputed witch, able to travel in her spirit body and cause ‘trouble’ if angered. If I wished to move past a group of men sitting in discussion, I had either to crawl past, ensuring my head was lower than theirs, or call out and ask them to stand up. There was no designated toilet facility. One was required to very discreetly retire to the bush. Although women walked about bare breasted, the unmarried ones with very short colourful grass skirts split down one side, to show the inside of one’s thighs, such as in a western bathing suit, was considered shameful. Men, as well as woman, all adorned themselves with earrings, necklaces and decorative hair ornaments, and could be seen walking around carrying young children on their hips while their womenfolk walked alongside them carrying foodstuffs in woven baskets on their heads.  I would also learn that, as I had sat openly with Charles family to eat meals, I was considered already married to him. To eat openly with the family of one’s sexual partner was not possible before a commitment to marriage.

However, although the outsider-stranger, in this new world of an Indigenous society transitioning to self-government and independence, I held a privileged position. I had a foot in both camps. I was a highly educated ‘white’ woman at ease within my own culture, whose institutions and assumptions were busily shaping PNG’s entry into global society as a nation state.  But I was also part of Indigenous PNG society through marriage. I was an in-law for my husband’s broader family members, and whose social rules of respect and behaviour my husband was determined I should follow. But they also saw me as a member of the colonial ‘masters’, whom they’d had to obey. As a ‘white’ woman I was easily seen as a Sinebada, the wife of the Taubada’s of colonial administration. They were excited and interested that such a ‘Sinebada’ had married one of their own, thus seeming to bring things into a more even keel. Part of the promise of a new order.

After the birth of my first child, I entered the workforce teaching ‘Development Studies’ at the Administrative College, which was tasked with developing the urgently required generation of Indigenous public administrators, particularly those sent to the rural areas as kiaps – regional administrators. After cutting my teeth on this task, I then took up a position in the National Planning Office as a social planner working on things like the role of women in PNG, the relationship between health and cash agricultural policies, and urban settlements. Once my husband took over as its Director, I moved across to the newly established Office of Environment and Conservation to head up its Social Policy Unit, working on the social impact of large-scale agriculture and mining developments, and heading up the National Population Policy program.

The Development Story

I would confront my fellow Australians as members of the old colonial class who regarded the Indigenous people of PNG as primitive ‘savages’ whom they had used as forced labour on plantations or as house servants, known as ‘houseboys’—their inability to speak the English language permanently infantilising them as less than adult. For such folk as these, I was almost an outcaste—a white woman who had married an Indigenous ‘native’—the darkest fears of the colonial white male being sexual contact between white women and black native men.  Of course the reverse, sexual contact between white men and black native women was only too common, most not sanctified by marriage, but the source of an increasing population of mixed-race people.

At the same time, another group of ‘whitefellas’ were arriving, as university lecturers and researchers and ‘development’ experts, keen to help PNG in its massive task of transitioning to a self-governing and independent nation state. These were the people my husband worked with, as one of the first generation of university-educated Indigenous people, rising rapidly through the ranks: first as a researcher for the Public Service Union on a national wage case, followed by Chairing the National Wages Board, then to lead up an organisation looking after PNG workers in the private sector, and finally as Director-designate to the newly formed National Planning Office.  Thus I found myself at the table, through my marriage, to the group of people who shaped modern PNG.  Known as the ‘Gang of Four’, these newly appointed Indigenous heads of departments worked closely with the new Prime Minister Michael Somare and his Treasurer, Julius Chen, to find a pathway from a colonial vision of PNG’s future to one shaped by Indigenous values.  This became known as the Eight Point Plan, that guided all future expenditure in the national budget.

Caught up in the grand project of ‘development’, it never occurred to me to challenge its parallel requirement that PNG’s indigenous culture would need to relinquish many of its deepest values of group sharing and generosity free of ideas of great wealth inequality and ‘class’ differences as capitalism took hold. In those days we thought a more socialist path could be forged.  However, many years later, long after my husband and I had separated and when he was tasked by the Australian Government to review the impact of their ‘development’ aid, he said his conclusion was that the bad news was that not much of it got out to the rural areas, where public administration had largely broken down, but the good news was that the traditional subsistence culture of gardening and fishing on the coast were still intact, feeding the people and sustaining village life.

My husband was young, handsome and full of the charisma of political influence in this new world of an independent PNG. He thus attracted the attention of many women, particularly foreign women. Eventually the tension of this led to our decision to separate and divorce, and my decision to return to Australia. As the divorced wife of such a prominent figure in PNG, I felt I needed to make a new life for myself back in Australia.

Alone as a Single Working Mum in Australia

I arrived back in Australia as a single working mum.  I had a job as a social planner in the NSW Department of Environment and Planning, but I had lost contact with all my old friends in the Sydney Push. They weren’t into families, but still engaged in political struggle, now things like prison reform. I was back to feeling like an outsider, alone, struggling to find my tribe.

I dreamed of the possibility of living in a group house with other singles families, but that never eventuated.  All this time, I was also still anchored into the so-called Third World through my long-distance relationship with Professor Yash Ghai, the constitutional legal expert who had guided PNG into independence, and who had since worked progressively on similar tasks with the Solomon Islands and Vanuatu, and racial difficulties in Fiji between Indigenous Fijians and their considerable population of Indians who had come there to work the sugar plantations.

Yash was based at Upsala in Sweden, when I first met him in Port Moresby, and then at the University of Warwick in England. We met up when he visited the Pacific on his consulting trips, and when I took time off work, when my two children visited their father in PNG, to spend time with Yash – either in England, or in other exotic locations such Nepal and New York. When Yash moved on to the University of Singapore, we spent time at Lake Tobah in Sumartra,

Himself adrift—as an Oxford boy from Indian parents in Kenya, the founding Professor of Law at the University of East Africa, and then Professor at Warwick, despite our cultural differences Yash and I shared in common the dislocation from failed cross racial-cultural marriages. We also shared a strong commitment to social justice and recognition of the cultural integrity and importance of those countries who found themselves victims of European colonialism. As he travelled on a Kenyan passport—a gesture of solidarity with the country of his birth, Yash would regularly suffer another indignity—pulled aside by immigration officials, and on one occasion even subjected to a full body search, whenever he passed through Australia and other European airports.

This 10-year long-distance intimate relationship kept me going, as I meanwhile tried to find my place back in Australia.

The Turning Point

In 1983, on leave without pay from my permanent job at the Cabinet Office in the NSW Premiers Department, for a two-year stint as the Director of the Council of Social Service of NSW, I had a transformative experience when taking my two young sons on a visit to the Trobriand Island (Massim) collection of artefacts in the Australian Museum on College Street in Sydney.

While we were looking at the beautifully carved canoe prows of the Kulu Canoes and I was telling them about the important of Kula in their father’s culture, and the beautiful clay pots from the Amphlett islands that were traded through the Kula, my mind drifted back to a journey I had made when my eldest son was only 18 months old. We had travelled by a motorised outrigger canoe for the final ceremony of mourning for Charles’ grandfather, the chief of Vakuta, which lies on the southern tip of the main Kiriwina island. On our return journey to the main island of Kiriwina, to the family’s home, I recalled my father-in-law standing at the prow of the canoe shouting magic incantations to the storm spirits as a storm blew up. As wild winds and rain began to fall, we pulled in for refuge at Gilibwa Village on the southernmost tip of Kiriwina Island.

Suddenly waves of strong energy seem to pass from these artefacts behind their glass walls, out and through me. It was beyond anything I had ever experienced before. I felt as if a doorway had opened in my mind—one that I had to walk through. My assumed ideas about the nature of reality, shaped by my education as a sociologist and professional in the fields of development and social policy, were no longer adequate.  It was if, all those experiences of cultural dislocation I had in PNG finally broke through the wall of my intellectual constructions, my sense of the solidity of the world.  So powerful was this experience that I decided to quit my job and go on what I called my journey into the epistemological abyss—into different ways of knowing encoded in other cultures. From this moment I have been deeply interested in the whole idea of epistemology—the way different knowledge systems are shaped and validated outside the hegemony of the Western worldview.

I moved to live in a house in Stanwell Park on the Illawarra Escarpment which I jointly bought with my new boyfriend, my first ‘white’ Australian lover, the one whom I thought I could finally make a life with. But this was short lived.  Further shocks ensued. After two years together, he left me for another woman after bringing me home from hospital for an operation on my cervix to prevent detected cancerous cells from spreading. I sat alone with my broken, bleeding body and asked it what it was trying to tell me.

I cannot tell you how, but the answer was clear.  We want you to give birth to your inner feminine or these cells at the opening to your womb will turn against you and kill you. I decided to ask my neighbour Shelley who had a ceramics studio to teach me how to make fertility sculptures for my garden.  The first vessel that I made using hand-built coils was a bowl fashioned from a Chinese wok, to which I attached legs and an arching neck and head. Along the rim of the bowl I lovingly shaped her breasts and inside her legs I carved her secret vulva. She is still with me, forty years later, with an azalea bush sprouting from her belly.

Meanwhile I had begun a master’s degree in science and technology studies at the University of Wollongong, which led to my professor Ron Johnston inviting me to join his research group at the Centre for Technology and Social Change. Through this study I discovered the feminist critiques of the masculinity of science, the philosophy of Francis Bacon who saw mother (female) nature as something that could be ‘raped’ and plundered by the rationality of ‘masculine’ science. This led me to read my way through the literature on comparative mythology, especially the influential work of Joseph Campbell and his idea of the ‘hero’s journey’ as the basic narrative structure of the West—a structure that can be found shaping much of our Hollywood movies. I was now hooked on the importance of the recovery of the mythopoetic to balance the dominance of prosaic rationality in Western culture.  Many dreams came to me during these turbulent times of relationship breakup, study, art practice and readings.  I learned how to go into the dream and ask its different symbols what they were trying to tell me.  Invariably the answer was always the same.  We want you to dance.  I knew this didn’t mean learn tango or ballroom dancing. Rather it was to learn a different way of living—to dance with life rather than seek to control it.

Encountering Tibetan Buddhism

Tossed around in this turbulence, I realised that I was going on a spiritual journey for which I needed a spiritual guide, a teacher. It was something I could not get from books. And with this thought in mind, I took myself off to a talk being given by a visiting Tibetan lama, Sogyal Rinpoche, on his first ever visit to Australia—at the invitation of some Australians who had encountered him overseas. Sogyal Rinpoche spoke fluent English. He was earthy, funny, and somehow he opened something in my heart that I didn’t even know was closed. I asked him if I could be his student, and thus began my journey into the ‘magic and mystery’ of Tibetan Buddhism, a spiritual tradition that uniquely combines intense rational philosophical inquiry with the mythopoetic world of tantra using sound (mantra), visualisation and meditation.

In this tradition taking a teacher is vital, for it is through the mystical practice of what is called ‘guru yoga’ that the student can somehow mysteriously enter into the mirror of the teacher’s awareness to directly find their own innermost self, what this tradition calls the ‘nature of mind’.

Two Paths

Alongside my continuing professional life as a sociologist of technological change working with Professor Johnston, first at the University of Wollongong and then at the University of Sydney, I continued to follow the teachings of Sogyal Rinpoche. Each year he visited Australia and gave teachings at retreats, and I would also visit his retreats at his new international retreat centre, Lerab Ling, on the Longuedoc Plateau in southern France. This immersion into the Tibetan Buddhist tradition finally resulted in my undertaking a closed three-year retreat between 2006 and 2009.

The Challenge of Wisdom

Being a student of the history and philosophy of science, I became interested in the meaning of the idea of wisdom, as a domain of knowledge, in different cultures. I discovered that, unlike in Buddhist cultures, wisdom is an idea that receives scant attention in the Western knowledge system with its strong focus on a mechanistic idea of reasoning, especially through the scientific method of hypothesis testing and abstract modelling. In my discussions with Christian and Jewish friends, I discovered that in Christianity and Judaism, wisdom is predominantly a mystical idea associated with experiencing the grace of God.

Meanwhile, as an Australian, I felt I should try to understand what the idea of wisdom meant in our Indigenous knowledge systems, a faculty attributed to Elders as cultural custodians and ‘knowledge holders’.

This is how I met Tjilpi Bob Randall, a Yankuntjatjara man from Central Australia, at a Tranby College Aboriginal cultural camp on the Central Coast. Uncle Bob asked me to help him with the draft of his memoir on which he had first worked with an American women.  After reading the draft, my advice to Uncle Bob was to get rid of the ‘white woman meets exotic Aboriginal man’ aspect and reveal more of the spiritual wisdom aspects of his culture.

He came to live at my house at Stanwell Park, where we worked on his memoir for the next 12 months, including a long road trip back to his Country, a trip down to Uluru to meet his aunties, and then a long trip north to Ainslee Point in Arnhem Land, across which sits Croker Island where Uncle Bob, as a stolen child, had been sent to its Anglican mission by the Alice Springs orphanage, when he was but 6 years old. All records of his birth Country deliberately expunged.

Travelling with Uncle Bob into Central Australia, I was easily reminded of colonial days in Port Moresby. I realised that many Aboriginal people living in remote communities in Australia live in a ‘third world’ within Australia—ruled and managed by colonial-settler rules that pay scant attention to their Indigenous culture and knowledge systems. It was a rude awakening for me. For all its challenges, Papua New Guineans have never been denied their languages and culture.

Within the cultural protocols of Aboriginal culture, Uncle Bob taught me much about the experience of his generation and the nature of knowledge development and transmission in his culture via ceremonies and Songlines. We explored where Buddhist ideas of wisdom might meet those of Aboriginal culture, even where we couldn’t find the language for a shared respect for ‘inner spacious awareness, full of compassion’, which is common to both.

Meanwhile between 2002 and 2005, I spent three years in New Zealand looking after a young Tibetan refugee lama, Amnyi Trulchung Rinpoche, with whom I travelled to Tibet in 2004, visiting his home monastery in Junyong at the headwaters of the Yalong River (a tributary of the mighty Yangtse) in the upper reaches of what it now the Sichuan Province of China, and thence travelling to Lhasa and south to the famous ancient Samye Temple.

This sits on the banks of the Yarlung Tsangpo River that runs along the high plains to the north of the mighty Himalayan Mountains, before turning south fighting its way through the Yarlung Zangbo Grand Canyon to become the Brahamaputra River flowing into the Ganges Delta. While visiting Samye, I travelled with Amnyi Trulchung Rinpche to the Chimpu caves, where Padmasambhava, the Indian mystic who brought Tantric Buddhism to Tibet, had meditated with his principal Tibetan disciple, the Lady Yeshe Tsogyal, the human embodiment of the power of the feminine principle in Tibetan Buddhism. I spent time meditating in the Nyarong Cave, the very place where the cycle of teachings that I would practice in my three-year retreat, were originally revealed to a 19th century Tibetan mystic.

At Home in Australia

Now in my old age, nurtured by this long journey of life, I live in Katoomba in the Blue Mountains. When one of my Buddhist teachers, Wangdrak Rinpoche was taken by a local Gundungurra Elder to a nearby sacred site, he experienced a local rock formation as a manifestation of Vajrvarahi, a representation of the feminine principle of dynamic awareness that is core to my own personal practice.

At the same time what I learned from Uncle Bob and the host of Indigenous post-colonial scholars, and generations of creative artists, writers, singer-songwriters and filmmakers have filled me with the wonder of how much Australia’s ancient knowledge system has to teach us. But if only we can find an authentic pathway that is free of ‘white’ culture’s inexorable tendency for appropriation and commodification. Having exported global capitalism to the world, such appropriation and commodification has spread via tik tok, instagram and global manufacturing to the entire world.

This is our greatest challenge as we hybrids seek to develop and nurture a truly Australian identity.