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Flip image 90deg anti-clockwise. Now what do you see? |
of the 15th century Doctrine of Discovery. This doctrine underpinned the mis-named Age of Discovery that took place from the 15th to the 17th century. (Mis-named because it really only refers to Europeans “discovering” lands they previously did not know existed. Those who lived in those lands certainly knew the land existed.)
For Europeans (starting with the Portuguese and the
Spanish, and then taken up by the British, French, and Dutch) the initial “discovery”
was the lands of the Americas, before later “discovering” the lands dotted
around the Pacific.
Sadly for the colonisers – tragically for those
colonised – the most profound discovery they could have made, never got made.
Whereas those living in Europe at the time had lost
contact with Nature and were no longer living in harmony with the land and what
it had to offer, the peoples in the Americas and the Pacific lived in cultural
settings that retained such a sense of place in the cosmos. This sense of place
and harmony was infused within spiritual and cosmological understandings of the
rhythms of Nature and the complex interplay of all aspects of the whole. Within
this understanding, humans were a part of Nature, no greater, and no lesser,
than any other part.
However, the colonising powers and settlers had no
time for “discovering” this understanding of life. They were too busy “invading,
searching out, capturing, vanquishing, and subduing all Saracens and pagans” as
the Doctrine of Discovery gave them power to do.
The colonisers of the Age of Discovery saw only
land. They saw First Nations peoples (pagans in the terms of the Doctrine of
Discovery) as impeding their so-called “right of discovery” to that land.
In Australia the colonisers took this one step further
and declared that the continent was Terra Nullius (land without people,)
a “logical” step from the Doctrine of Discovery. Indeed, it was not
until 1967 that the First Nations peoples of Australia were recognised as human
and not simply as part of the “flora and fauna” of the land.
With eyes only for the land they could “discover,” the
wisdom of First Nations peoples stretching over thousands of generations (the
real value in the “new lands”) remained “undiscovered.” More’s the pity. Had
such wisdom been recognised and understood then we may not have arrived at the environmental
and social mess we are in today.
Today, more than three centuries after the end of the Age
of Discovery, the wisdom of First Nations peoples is still largely
unheeded, unwelcomed, and dismissed.
Those of us with European ancestry living on lands
that were colonised since the 15th century would do well to put
aside our biases of superiority and Eurocentrism. We might find that there is much
of real worth to be discovered by listening to those with thousands of
generations worth of built knowledge and wisdom.
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