Under The Quandong Tree

it is where the mother was when the Spirit first entered her body, usually between the twelfth and sixteenth weeks of gestation. So it’s when the mother feels the Spirit enter her body and move, this is when she is actually pregnant and the Spirit is there. Sometimes the elders sing a totem to a mother because they know her offspring will need the

I want my grandchildren to be fully aware that they are only a small part of a great Oneness and a very small part at that. It is their first lesson in humility and their first step towards wisdom.

The teachings say — and I believe it with all my heart and spirit — that Creation happened here, in Australia.

When the old people used to home birth even without ceremony the placenta was placed in the ground. Nungeena-tya benefited

planet. Every songline, every dreaming track, you had to know it — and one person can’t know it all. I’ve been at it for years and years and years and years and still I know just a grain of sand. I now feel privileged to have been given a very small part of it for safekeeping. When I was a wanai I wanted no part of the teaching. I just wanted the H

If you could go to a school and say, ‘OK, I’ll draw a map of everything that I am aware of about me, all my positive and negative attributes’, how differently would you see life? More importantly, how differently would you live your life, how differently would you respond to others around you, and their essences and all the creatures of Creation?

I can tell within a few hundred metres when I’m moving from one tribal area to another. It’s just so different; it’s unbelievable how different it is. One part of me can’t understand that people can’t see this difference between one tribal land and another

to follow the map — by pumping for about ten minutes through the umbilical cord to the baby. It is important, not only to your baby’s journey but to life itself, that the beginning of all Miwis’ journeys are not interfered with. There is a great need to have a nominated person there, usually the grandmother, who has been instructed to ensure that n

What’s really important for all Australians to know is that, believe it or not, if you are born of this land, you are of this land, you have a responsibility to this land and you have a right to know;