The Nomadic Alternative – Page 171

provider. Each feature is the very stuff of his intelligence, and since early childhood, he has established a lasting emotional bond with 'his place', snuffed out only at death.

White settlers in Australia would not - and still will not - understand that a few stunted trees, a rock and a stagnant puddle can be a 'big place', which the Aboriginal values with the same emotional attachment as a civilized man values his capital city.

"The countryside", writes Strehlow, "is his living age-old family tree." An old man of the Aranda sat by a sacred water-hole now defiled by the whites and sorrowed. "It has been forsaken by almost all our people; and I shall tend it while I can: while I live, I shall love to gaze on this ancient soil."

The Mbuti Pygmies have elevated their forest to the status of a divinity - Ndura. "The environment", Colin Turnbull writes, "is much more than a passive provider. It is a living conscious thing, both natural and supernatural, respected, loved and obeyed." They make no effort to master their benevolent divinity, but let it flow over them. They have no need for magical spells or sacrifices to appease it, for they do it no harm. They do not hack up or cicatrize it. The forest is sacred ground and the frontier of the profane lies along the fringes of cultivation. The forest is also a lover, and Turnbull describes how he saw a boy dancing alone in the moonlight. "I am not dancing alone", he said, "I am dancing with the forest, dancing with the moon." The gipsies venerate the entirety of nature as a sort of Universal Church; and through some faculty of communication modern man has allowed to lapse, manage to cure those ills which we take on by force.

A human territory is that tract of ground a man needs to think with. His autochthnony, a sense of solidarity with a particular place, is as strong as the bond which cements him to his mother. Land for feeding on or breeding in is a secondary consideration.

The Australian Gidjingalli owned definite tribal lands in which they hoped to be born, which they hoped to revisit throughout their lives, and in which they hoped to die. They identified themselves with it,