The PITCH: We Europeans have enslaved ourselves in geometric prisons. Thanks to the Greeks and Romans. We draw lines upon the landscape and sell it, fill it with bitumen, cross it in roads, pave it in footpaths, cement our waterways and turn them into drains. We have dragged the Aboriginal peoples and the entire environment into this prison of body, heart and mind.
So as we walk around an exhibition such as “Black White Restive” I see Aboriginal artistic expression locked up in squares, rectangles, geometric shapes, because that’s the only way an insane (unwhole) culture such as oursleves can deal with such things.
Traditional Aboriginal art and culture knows no bounds, it exists across the landscape of the Australia and the many countries of the continent, spiritually mapping and connecting, across sky, stars, water, land, all interconnected, an art work on a continental level that holds the keys to 50,000 years of human survival.
What good is our western renaissance science if the good people of Williamtown cannot drink their water, cannot earn their livelihoods because their water and rivers are contaminated, are driven insane with the lack of certainty, or hope from Government officals who get paid a wage, and can afford the inaction, apathy, or buck passing?
There needs to be a marriage between the science that has brought us 50,000 years of cultural wisdom from the world’s oldest surviving cultures, and the science that has brought us the best of the renaissance and western thought. We have to stop enslaving and poisoning things for the love of money. Together we need to break out of this prison of our own making, the one that is currently destroying all remnants of Aboriginal cultural heritage across the landscape.
The keys to our future survival are dependent upon it.
Gionni Di Gravio
Newcastle, Australia
4 August 2016