Posted by I have suggested that the Wiradyuri wisdom of Yindyamarra could be described as the practice of living respectfully and patiently, growing polite, humble, and gentle. This description comes from an understanding of yindyamarra as taught by Wiradyuri Elder Uncle Bill Allen (see Yindyamarra Part 1).
Yindyamarra grows in the practice of being on country; being still and aware enough to allow the grace of nature to heal and change us. This is what Uncle Bill speaks of when he talks of his times of being on the Wambool/Macquarie, with a fire and “the wind blowing through the River Oakes”, being still and listening “to the Wind Spirit and the water flowing and the birds.”
There is something special about being present on and to country, with nature, that can be gift to all of us. It can help grow yindyamarra as a way of life.
Journalist and Wiradyuri man Stan Grant also speaks of yindyamarra. With Charles Sturt University (CSU), Stan Grant has set up a program called Yindyamarra Nguluway. Nguluway is the Wiradjuri word for meeting. In english, Yindyamarra Nguluway means ‘respect(ful) meeting’.
The CSU and Grant (the program’s Director) hope to develop a space for meeting and dialogue on Wiradyuri Country where Australians can experience and practice yindyamarra with each other. The hope is that this will, over the longer term, help to shape public discourse and how we relate with each other more generally. Grant’s hope is that participants can “find a space on our country where we can find each other”; that, prior to speech, prior to request and demand, we might first, with yindyamarra, “offer the other the love and respect and the generosity required” to hear each other’s truth[1].
This will take time. If yindyamarra as Uncle Bill Allen and Stan Grant describe it is to influence more Australians, then more and more of us will need to have an appreciation of the practice, an insight into its importance for us both personally and civically. And because yindyamarra is a transforming and healing practice, this appreciation will only come via the example of others and our own experience.
Without the practice it is, yindyamarra is just a word.
Remember how Uncle Bill described his practice of yindyamarra by the river:
Sitting in the quiet by the river is something that helps clear your mind, it helps to clear you. All you need to do, just to go and sit at one of these particular sites. You just get away from everything and then just sit and contemplate. You let things wash away. Particularly sitting around with a fire. It’s soothing and healing[2].
This is a great challenge generally for the Western mind, a mind that identifies itself first with action, thought, language, and concept. To practice simply sitting and being, that is, to just be in the moment with nature, is foreign to many, and a significant challenge. It can be a challenge for every human mind, of course, not just the Western mind.
The difference seems to be that First Nations Peoples in Australia have roots deep in a continuous and living culture that values practices such as yindyamarra at the heart of life and what they do. Traditionally, in the West, any equivalent practice has not been mainstreamed, taught to children as a way of life. Our schools and families do not teach anything like yindyamarra with the same commitment the West has to math or english, for example.
Stan Grant speaks of the lessons his father, Uncle Stan Grant Snr, has taught him about yindyamarra; that it “calls us to a deep respect, a quietness, and silence”; that it is “not about who we are, but about where we are.” Yindyamarra, with the practice of sitting and being on country at its heart, teaches us, in Stan Grant’s words, that “the human being is not the limit of the world.”
All of this speaks to me of a different way – to the Western secular mind, at least – of being human. We are meant to be humans in context, living respectfully and gently our uniqueness as part of nature, and of each other.
All of this is a new thing when compared to an emphasis on the ego as who we are and how we live, an emphasis that arrived with the colonisers of 1788, continuing as a psychological inheritance to this day.
[1] Stan Grant, 2024 Yindyamarra Fire Side Oration. See here for the full oration.
[2] Bathurst Regional Art Gallery online exhibition ReConnect Bathurst