The Uninvited Guest

Bill Bryson once wrote that, for an American, travelling through country Australia was like going back in time by four or five decades. I always liked that idea because I spent my primary school years in a country town before moving to the big city and I very much remember the culture shock that came with the transition. I didn’t realise it at the time, but I had received a very old-fashioned education, one that would nowadays be considered not just inappropriate but probably illegal.

One of the aspects of that old-fashioned education was that, even though the school I attended was not an officially religious school, there was a fair amount of religion thrown in. For example, we used to always recite the Lord’s Prayer. To this day, I can still repeat it line-for-line from memory.

There’s a more personal reason that I remember the Lord’s Prayer, however. As a kid, I was puzzled by two lines in the prayer:

forgive us our trespasses
as we forgive those who trespass against us

I knew what trespassing was because many of the farms in the area where I lived had “No Trespassing” signs on the front gate. Combined with the lines from the Lord’s Prayer, I got the idea that trespassing must be a really bad thing to do. I remember even asking my teacher why God was so concerned with trespassing, but she seemed quite taken aback by the question and couldn’t produce any kind of meaningful answer.

Much later, I learnt that the word “trespass” in old English meant essentially the same as what we now mean by the word “sin”. Thus, the more accurate modern translation of the Lord’s Prayer would be, forgive us our sins/as we forgive those who sin against us. Nevertheless, in my mind, the prayer has always had the connotation of walking on another’s land without permission.

It’s for this reason that it recently occurred to me that there’s a connection between the Lord’s Prayer and another practice which has become popular these days: land acknowledgements. But the more I got thinking about it, the more I realised that this wasn’t just a figment of my imagination but that there are some fundamental issues at play.

Land acknowledgements have become far more common in the last decade or so, and this appears to be linked to the fact that they’ve gone international. Recently, Canada and even the USA have gotten in on the action.

Canadian and American readers might be interested to know that land acknowledgements began here in Australia in the 1970s as part of the indigenous rights movement. In those days, their use was limited. But the number of land acknowledgements has increased exponentially in the last decade or so. They are now recited at major sporting events, corporate shindigs, and, apparently, in some government departments, at the beginning of literally every meeting during the work day.

The American and Canadian versions of the land acknowledgement focus around mentioning the names of the tribes who belong to whatever geographical location the acknowledgement is taking place at. That’s also true of the original Australian version. But the Australian one has an extra line that has noticeably been left out of the Canadian and American versions: I pay my respects to Elders past, present, and future.

Long-term readers would know that I have written extensively about what I call the four primary archetypes, one of which is the Elder (the other three being Child, Orphan and Adult). The Elder archetype is conspicuously absent from modern Western culture, and I trace that development back to the Reformation. Perhaps the last vestige of elderhood in the West was the priest of the various Christian churches, but, of course, even those have all but disappeared in the post-war years and have almost no cultural significance for the average Australian these days. That is why only people like me who received a very old-fashioned education (or an explicitly religious one) would be able to recite the Lord’s Prayer nowadays.

It is perhaps because of the absence of Elders in the modern West that almost nobody seems to have realised how weird it must be for us to “pay our respects to the Elders”. We have no connotation of what that actually means or even what an Elder is. We don’t know it from our own culture, and we certainly don’t know what it means in indigenous culture.

In fact, the Elders of aboriginal tribes in Australia were always men and only a subset of men. Elders were both political and religious leaders. They were a combination of what we would call priest and politician. Among other things, Elders were responsible for administering the religious-magical rites around the land. These rites tie in with a worldview which modern westerners can barely comprehend.

Aboriginal people believe that their spirit is directly tied to a geographical location. There is no distinction between the political and the spiritual on the subject of land. Men are believed to be the carriers of spirit, and that is why Elders are always men and always tied to a specific geographical location.

Thus, to some degree, paying respects to Elders does fit with the theology and metaphysics of aboriginal culture in the same way that the Lord’s Prayer fits with the theology and metaphysics of Christianity. Of course, most people in modern Australia do not believe the metaphysics of Christianity any more than they believe, or even understand, the metaphysics of aboriginal culture. It’s perhaps for that reason that we could so easily substitute the land acknowledgement in the place where the Lord’s Prayer used to be recited.

For us, such ceremonies are far more political than they are spiritual and have been for pretty much all the history of modern Australia. Australia was founded at a time when the elites of most of Europe, but certainly of Britain, were no longer really believers in Christianity. Already by that time, the Protestant churches fulfilled less of a spiritual and more of a political purpose. They had taken on the role of “moral policeman” on behalf of the state, and they continued to do so until the post-war collapse in religious observance.

With religion no longer able to fill the role of the moral police, the state has largely turned to academia and its “experts” to fill the void. The substitution of land acknowledgements for the Lord’s Prayer makes sense within this development.

That accounts for the politics of the issue. But, more recently, I saw a fascinating variation of a land acknowledgement that made me realise there was more to it than just politics.

As just mentioned, most land acknowledgements take place in public settings and are issued by public officials. But I recently saw a land acknowledgement written by a private individual in a setting where it was not required. In other words, it was not a political statement but, as far I could tell, a genuine expression of a personal belief.

The author mostly followed the now standard format but added a new line at the beginning. It went something like this: I stand here as an uninvited guest on the land of <name of aboriginal tribe>.

Now, what is an “uninvited guest” if not a trespasser, and what is a trespasser if not a sinner? Suddenly, I realised that the correspondences between the land acknowledgement and the Lord’s Prayer were not merely formal in nature. The land acknowledgement is actually a repetition of the Christian notion of trespass—sin. This person could very well have written “I stand here as a sinner” and captured the exact same meaning.

This is not just an arbitrary or accidental reading. It makes perfect sense when we consider the theology of Christianity.

Adam and Eve sinned and were thrown out of the garden of Eden to walk the earth as uninvited guests and, hopefully, to find their way back to salvation. The original sin of Christianity involves being thrown out of your home.

The founding of Australia was rather biblical in the sense that we had criminals (sinners) being kicked out of their home country and sent far away as punishment. They ran head first into a culture that had a metaphysics almost diametrically opposed to their own.

The aboriginal Australians had a belief system that has probably been shared, in a broad sense, by a majority of humanity for most of history. For them, their own spirit was directly tied to the land on which they lived. The reason why they were born in a specific geographical location was because their spirit belonged to that location and would return to it at the time of death.

A big part of what makes Jewish history unique is that they were a people who were kicked out of their native lands and forced to wander. They managed to do so while retaining a unique culture and religious belief. It is that background that gave rise to Christianity and which was then passed on to the northern barbarians of Europe.

Thus, for medieval European Christians, the “holy land” was not, like aboriginal Australians, the place where they lived but a location far away, and they were prepared to march thousands of kilometres to fight wars over the matter.

All that was possible because the theology of Christianity had already dissociated spirit from any particular geographical location. Spirit was in heaven, and heaven was accessible from anywhere on the mortal earth, whether it be northern Europe, the eastern Mediterranean, or Terra Australis.

Modern Europeans, and by extension modern Australians, inherited a theology where spirit was disconnected from land. In this they were diametrically opposed to the indigenous peoples. It was very much the same story that had played out in north and south America, and I think Jean Gebser was absolutely correct in noting that much of the damage done to the native populations was an unintentional by-product of a situation that was devastating to the spiritual beliefs of the indigenous populations.

The very first governor of Australia, Arthur Phillip, had been given explicit instructions not to engage in violence towards the native population except in self-defence. However, the arrival of settlers who had an insurmountable military advantage inevitably meant that the native population was going to be geographically displaced even without a bullet being fired.

This displacement was devastating to the aboriginals in ways that the settlers could never have begun to understand. Aboriginals believed their very spirit was tied to the land. To remove them from that land was to destroy their spirit and the basis for their magical worldview. That is what Gebser meant when he said that the damage done to the natives was existential not primarily in a military or mortal sense, although there was obviously that side to it, but in a theological and philosophical one.

To try and appreciate what it must have been like, imagine that aliens showed up on earth and all of our technology immediately stopped working. We’d have no idea why it wasn’t working, we’d just know that it stopped working when the aliens arrived. Even if the aliens didn’t actively attack us, it’s not hard to see how this would be catastrophic. Our worldview, our entire understanding of cause and effect, would have been rendered useless.

For an indigenous person, the statement “I am an uninvited guest” could never have been uttered except in a mode of almost spiritual terror. To tread upon another’s land was to tread upon the basis of their spiritual existence. Moreover, it implied that you had strayed from your own land which was the basis of your strength in both a magical and physical sense. In the normal course of events, such actions would require a series of rites and ceremonies, which made the act safe for everybody involved. It would certainly not be a casual statement; an acknowledgement.

At least at a theoretical level, the “Welcome to Country” and the land acknowledgement capture the fact that indigenous peoples carried out such ceremonies. But ceremonies are meaningless without the worldview that informs them. All of this business can go on precisely because nobody really believes in what is being said or done, just as my primary school teacher had never given a second thought to the meaning of trespass in the Lord’s Prayer. It was just words spoken because that was part of her job.

At least the Lord’s Prayer asks for forgiveness for our trespasses. A land acknowledgement is far more bloodless.