Didjeridus, Rites and Reconciliation

As I have noted (in Chapter 6), the didjeridu (or 'didj', as it is colloquially known) has proliferated in the alternative sector. It functions as a sacralising conduit in firewalks, is held to possess unique therapeutic qualities for the recipient ('didge healing'), and may, as Sherwood (1997) conveys, provide the player with a 'feeling of wholeness' or groundedness - a 'tuning in' to the land. The didj's Aboriginality provides the basis for the amplification of these qualities and effects. Yet, the didj's potential as a 'healing' catalyst may extend even further. That is, according to manufacturers and players, taking up the didj amounts to taking up the cause for reconciliation. This is a message often promoted by ConFest workshop instructors. For example, according to Heartland Didgeridoo:
Aboriginal spirit is rising again through a greater respect for our indigenous people and an acceptance for their rights, their autonomy, their spirituality. More Koori folk are feeling a greater sense of pride. With it they are taking their lives back into their hands ... Until all or the majority of Australians reconcile with Aboriginal people then every white person carries some degree of guilt or shame and every Aboriginal person carries some degree of animosity and this land is not united ... I challenge every one that takes up the didge that they take up a responsibility to be part of the reconciliation - the healing.
As Sherwood comments (1997:150), the didj is 'an instrument of expiation' holding the potential for users to be absolved of 'guilt' or 'shame'. Considering the majority of young non-Aboriginal didjeriduists are aware of Australia's 'dark past', the didj's adoption is a likely demonstration of empathy.28 At the same time, from a position of detachment, the didj represents a 'bridge to facilitate the journey back to the land' (ibid). It is almost as if mastery of the didj generates a more 'geosophical' outlook - whereupon 'all knowledge and wisdom' and 'moral teaching' is considered to reside within the earth' (Swain 1989:348-9). The didj is thus an instrument via which one may achieve simultaneous reconcilement with indigenous peoples and the Earth.

I want to complete this section by drawing attention to two further extra-ordinary moments transpiring in the context of collective performances. Both are 'intercultural' experiences within which the didjeridu is deployed. In each, I rely upon on-site commentators' recollections of events, readings which reveal the contingent and uncertain trajectory of 'reconciliation'.

Defilement at Berri

The late Aboriginal activist Burnam Burnam attended the early ConFests. A cultural broker, in 1979 Burnam Burnam encouraged a group of performers from the Oombulgarri-Kununarra area of the Kimberley region of Western Australia, who were at that time participating in an Aboriginal Arts, Crafts and Music festival in Adelaide, to perform at the Berri ConFest. He was to receive a 'devastating shock':
By arrangement they were to perform around a campfire hosted by white 'hippies'. The didgeridoo players, clap stick artists, singers and dancers were performing when, to my horror, a nude male crazily picked up the end of the didgeridoo while it was being played and placed his erect penis into it. The horror and shame of the single act made me hate whites. I was to miss the next five annual Down to Earth Festivals because of the sickness and irreverence of that one act. (Burnam Burnam 1987:97)
The sanctity of what has been referred to as an 'ancient ceremony' or 'mini corroboree' was thus defiled. This penetrative act seemed to be a most disturbing reminder of the history of psychological, socio-cultural and political violations suffered by the same people. Burnam Burnam makes this much clear:
My feelings of revulsion were all the more intense as I knew that the performers came from an area which has seen the destruction of their burial sites and hunting grounds by white men, following the non-consultative decision to dam the Ord River in Western Australia. (Burnam Burnam 1987:97)
Designed to generate an intercultural alliance, the 'mini-corroboree' instead provided an occasion where history was seen to be repeated in a most audacious and shameless moment of 'acting out'. Though there is no evidence to suggest that it was the intention of the perpetrator to do so, for estranged spectators such as Burnam Burnam the event occasioned a lascivious dramatisation of past violations carried out by white men.

Burning and Building Bridges

The Tek Know village at Moama IV occasioned another unexpected incident. On New Year's Eve, a large twelve hour clock was suspended from the top centre of a high scaffold tower from which an enormous Aboriginal land rights flag was also draped. The flag featured a smiley face (symbolising rave culture) on its sun. Near midnight, the rhythm became wilder as throngs of jugglers and fire-stick twirlers raised the tempo of their manipulations at the base of the scaffold, and two men swirled ignited catherine wheels at opposite ends of the tower. At this point, Dama approached with flame-thrower in hand. He intended to set the clock alight to signify the termination of the old year, a feat he achieved at midnight. However, when a couple of propane balloons backfired an unanticipated conflagration illuminated the amazed faces of hundreds of revelers as the flag itself went up in flames.29

Dama later informed me that at the time of the incident, 'Quoll the Koori', who operates a St Kilda Market didj stall, was at the base of the flag playing didjeridu with his son. Although nobody was burnt and 'the show went on', Dama sensed Quoll's pride had been 'naturally dented'. Nonetheless, something uncanny had transpired. As Dama recounts:

some of the women in the group came to me and sort of said 'Oh my god! Dama, what have you done now?' You know, 'not only have you burned the Koori flag, but you've done so with a Koori underneath it at the time'. Oh my god, woe is us, we are doomed, you know. And I tried to sort of shrug this off because it all sort of felt a bit too sort of pessimistic for the tone of the event. I mean it was New Year's Eve and something very strong had happened, and I wasn't quite sure what it was.
Despite initial uncertainty as to what to make of the incident, a resolution was ultimately achieved:
The week before I'd been through South Melbourne market and I'd passed a stall with a lot of belt buckles on it and one jumped off the table at me. It was a beautiful oval brass buckle with a lovely rendition in enamel of the land rights flag in the centre. And I had this in my pocket. As I later found Quoll at breakfast at FOE, I looked him in the eye and said 'well Quoll, sorry about ya flag mate', you know, and 'here ... here's another one'. And he said 'thanks mate'. And he took this belt buckle and he felt the weight of it and he said 'right, yeah I'll wear that'. And I should have been honoured and that should have been the end of the conversation. I should have said 'thank you Quoll', and this pesky little voice came up inside of me and I said 'Quoll, you don't need to wear that'. And he said 'yeah, right'. And I looked him in the eye again and I said 'that was total fucking anarchy last night wasn't it, just total fucking anarchy'. And he said 'yeah mate'. And I said 'and we don't need a flag do we'. And he said 'no mate ... we're all one peoples, and we don't need no flag'. And that I think is what happened there. To me that was the truth of those moments. And he honoured and I honoured it, and we actually destroyed between us the last vestige of separation that may exist between the whites and the Koories ... So that felt very very very powerful to me actually. And I've seen Quoll since, and we're good mates and give him a hug and we carry on. So it wasn't a great 'woe is us' at all ... The girls however have since made a new Aboriginal flag, and I'm not gonna go any where near it in case I burn it.
In Dama and Quoll's interpretation of this incident a positive resolution was achieved in the face of potential disaster. This stands in stark contrast to Burnam Burnam's reading of the former incident.

The series of privileged moments reconstructed in this section convey, in disparate but often cognate ways, the ultimacy of Australian indigeneity for alternates. At Cotter and Birdlands, putative indigeneity was valorised for its sacralising and authenticating legitimacy. There, ConFest folk-theories celebrated indigenous presence, and local practices indicated a non-Aboriginal desire for em-place-ment. I argued that didjeridu use may be a means by which non-Aborigines reconcile with indigenous peoples and ecology. The events at Berri and Moama IV of which Burnam Burnam and Dama speak occasioned unexpected 'disturbances' which threatened the reconciliatory processes of which these events were, in part, an expression. The first incident was interpreted as a sign of the perduring injustices experienced by Aboriginal peoples, therein indicating a fissured relationship, the second ultimately signified an alliance.



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Footnotes
Maps
Chronology
Appendices
Glossary of Acronyms and Abbreviations
References: A-L
References: M-Z
Chapter Seven Contents
Thesis Contents