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Category "Aborigines"

The Opposite of Love …

I have not been online here for a long time — and there are many reasons of which I may tell you one day.

Tonight I watched the last few minutes of an interesting documentary on Australias NITV (the National Indigenous Television), “Standing on Sacred Ground“.  In this four-part documentary series, native people share ecological wisdom and spiritual reverence while battling a utilitarian view of land in the form of government megaprojects, consumer culture, and resource extraction as well as competing religions and climate change.[ 1 ] In the last couple of minutes, the author Barry Lopez is being interviewed:

Most of the time when you ask people, “What is the opposite of love?”, they will say hate. But the opposite of love is indifference. People are indifferent to the Earth. What we have in front of us in an enterprise to repair indifference on a vast scale and turn it into a loving relationship.[ 2 ]

This is a remarkable statement.Indeed, you can’t really “hate” nature, rather than another person or a natural feature.  But by being indifferent to either of them, human beings or nature, I don’t care — in essence, I don’t love.

As a migrant I have left my turf in Germany to live in Australia, but here having worked with Aboriginal people I have had the chance to see them “come back” – to their country.

I have to get the chance to watch the full documentary!

Footnotes

  1. Synopses [top]
  2. Transcript, p30 (pdf). [top]

Posted: 13.03.2016, 23:20
Theme Aborigines, Australia, Culture, Nature, Theology.
Tags: , ,
Comments: none

Happy New Year 2015

Dear family and friends,

many greetings from Christmas season-hot Adelaide, with another heatwave record brewing outside (43C today, the third day and not the last until a moderate change tomorrow night).

Also, many greetings from our new (now one-year old) home in Adelaide. Thanks to Lizzie’s efforts, parts of our backyard garden are changing from lawns between long grey metal fences to a garden with vegetable patch, shrubs, vine and some flowers along the fence line. Beneath a large fig tree in the back garden is a little tool shed, so we are all set for our olden days … Our front yard, on the other hand, is very Mediterranean with several citrus and pomegranate trees and an olive tree … we are inly lacking a nice cool cellar to keep all the fruit jars we don’t have …

We also now have a small guest room and a decent folding bed — so feel free to visit us.

Following is my personal part of our news letter.

[Read more »]

Posted: 07.01.2016, 21:54
Theme Aborigines, Australia, Uncategorized.
Comments: none

Ken McKenzie — musician and wise man

While organizing my digital images of the past 10 years or so for putting them up into my new Christmas gift photo gallery (grweb.org/photogallery), I (re-)discovered a series of scan images from a visit in Australia in late 2003.  We had travelled through the Flinders Ranges, all the way north to Leigh Creek and to the last outpost of the main road and railway station, Copley SA. [Read more »]

Posted: 07.01.2013, 20:48
Theme Aborigines, Australia, Christianity, Culture, Language.
Tags: , , , , , ,
Comments: none

The Stolen Generation

Sharron Williams, presenting her life story as an Aboriginal Woman to the Workshop Group “Cultural Awareness (Indigenous) / Breakout Session 3 of the Emergeny Relief South Australian Conference “Making Connections – More than just a Handout”, Department of Families, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs SA (FACSIA), 18 to 19 October 2007. [Read more »]

Posted: 31.10.2007, 0:25
Theme Aborigines, Stolen Generation.
Tags: , ,
Comments: none