BuddeBlog

You may recall an article I wrote two years ago based on the book published by internationally-acclaimed Aboriginal artist, Tex Skuthorpe.

Tex not only lives here in Bucketty - he is also the partner of our HR manager. We are very privileged to be able to regularly tap into Tex’s wealth of knowledge and wisdom. At our annual BuddeComm conference in May he gave a painting workshop and we hope to show this off to you on our Christmas card later this year.

I am motivated to write about Tex because of something I have heard him say many times:

 In my language we don’t have a word for knowledge.

This is an astonishing notion to us, but Tex explains that the reason there is no word for knowledge in his language is that to his Noonghaburra people everything is knowledge - the land, the stories - everything around them is knowledge.

Tex recently had exhibitions in Sydney, Helsinki and Stockholm, but this week Yarramalong, a community adjacent to Bucketty, had the honour of hosting Tex’s latest exhibition, called, like his book, Treading Lightly.

I am currently working on a book, myself - on my pet subject, history - and I recently spent quite a bit of time researching pre-history. As a result it became clear to me that people, let’s say, 40,000 years ago were actually very similar to the people of today. They enjoyed a chat around the campfire; had meals together; boys and girls flirted with each other; the men took a drink together; they played with their children and grandchildren, and so on.

And life could be tough for them, as it can be nowadays - they lived through wars, famine and disease, just like us.

The Treading Lightly exhibition was opened by Tom Jeffrey, Chair of the Board of Studies of the Australian National Institute of Dramatic Art (NIDA) and Tom made the comment that the problems people had 40,000 years ago are the same as we have today, but that the scale of these problems differentiates the past from the present.

The Aboriginal people were able to survive for more than 40,000 years, yet we are saying that we will be lucky to survive into the next century. We claim to live in the ‘age of knowledge’ but in fact, like our ancestors, the knowledge actually resides within us, the people. And we need to use what we intuitively know of the world if we are going to survive.

If we look inwards we will find the solution. We do have the wherewithal, not only survive, but to flourish and reach even greater heights. We are facing problems that have been experienced before, but we are being held back by their sheer magnitude.

As the Noonghaburra people have been saying for thousands of years, all the knowledge we need exists within and around us. Let’s take the simple statement In my language we don’t have a word for knowledge seriously and look inwards for solutions, rather than searching for some external Holy Grail.

Modern technology, especially facilitated by the Internet, makes it even more possible to share knowledge and for the modern-day ‘tribes’ to communicate and collaborate. Together we know all that is necessary to survive into the future. And as the complexity of our world increases so do the tools to enable us to move forward into the challenging centuries ahead.

Let’s sit around the global table, share the knowledge and get things done.

Treading Lightly: www.treadinglightly.sveiby.com

This entry was posted on Monday, August 25th, 2008 at 4:12 pm and is filed under BuddeBlog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.