When did the ever-present allure of bonding with an enspirited Australia grow stronger? The revelations of anthropologists in the 1960s brought real Aboriginal testimonies to Australians for the first time. W.E.H. Stanner, for example, wrote in 1962:

Scholars familiar with the Aborigines have usually had one impressive experience in common: to be taken by Aboriginal friends to places in the wilds and there shown something ... with formality, pride and love. Conversations follow rather like this: ‘There is my Dreaming [place]. My father showed me this place when I was a little boy ... ‘What had his father said? ‘He said: “Your Dreaming is there; you want to look after this place; you don’t want to let it go ... it is from the first [totemist] man.”’ ... What else did his father say? ... ‘He said this: ‘“My boy, look! Your Dreaming is there; it is a big thing; you never let it go ... all Dreamings [totem entities] come from there; your spirit is there’” ... The mystical link – of belief, trust and faith in mysterious, powerful unknowns – has been proclaimed.

What white Australians took from such overheard conversations was, firstly, the genius loci specific to a certain site; secondly, a sense of a personal relationship with that spirit; thirdly, that the relationship implied a reciprocal relationship of care and responsibility. And they began to express their passionate place-specific spiritual needs in response to the newly published spiritual revelations.

Here are three classic statements of Mulvaney’s ‘spiritual concept of place’ of the 1980s and 1990s. They will seem familiar, and perhaps endearing, as they do to me.

The mountains are almost like our church – that’s where we go to fulfil ourselves so that we can carry out our lives.
(a Victorian mountain cattleman)

Every time I go back to the Upper Murray, I feel that tie of blood, the intrinsic bond so important to our Aboriginal people. It’s where you know your ancestors arc buried.
(media personality Bill Peach)

I believe in the ancient spirit of the Great South Land
Her health is my responsibility,
And her fruits will be mine only in return for my caring.
(singer-songwriter John Williamson, ‘My Oath to Australia’)

By the mid-1980s expressions of spiritual belonging, usually tied to a precise site, were often touched with anxiety. Frequently coupled to these emotions was a consciousness that the irreversible consequences of the invasion had brought to white Australians profit but not forgiveness. Judith Wright wrote in 1981:

The two strands – the love of the land we have invaded, and the guilt of the invasion – have become part of me. It is a haunted country. We owe it repentance and such amends as we can make, and one last chance of making those amends is to keep as much of it as we can, in the closest state we can to its original beauty.

Manning Clark, writing in 1988, put it this way:

Sometimes when I stand in the Australian bush on a clear windless day, I am visited with strange thoughts ... I wonder whether I belong. I am not alone in such thoughts. I am ready, and so are others, to understand the Aboriginal view that no human being can ever know heart’s ease in a foreign land, because in a foreign land there live foreign ancestral spirits. We white people are condemned to live in a country where we have no ancestral spirits. The conqueror has become the eternal outsider, the eternal alien. We must either become assimilated or live the empty life of a people exiled from their source of spiritual strength.

These two deep human emotions, a desire to assuage guilt and a related desire for spiritual belonging, should be read a one of the cultural markers of Anglo-Celtic Australians in the last decades of the twentieth century. By what means, to follow Clark’s image, could one legitimately become assimilated in the Aboriginal ancestral spirits of the land, and so in the land itself?

I wrote the book Belonging (2000) in part to investigate my own feelings of how and where white Australians might belong, in a country of which Aborigines had been dispossessed. In the course of many interviews I found, not unexpectedly, impatience at the question among rural students at a Sydney boarding school. Of Aboriginal specialness, they commented:

[T]hat’s all crap. They should belong as much as any Asians. There’s not Chinastudy is there, or Italiastudy, there’s Austudy and Abstudy. And Abstudy is a joke. Because they want to be treated as equals, so fight for Austudy like everyone else has to. So they’ve got a right to say that, but I’ve got a right to say, well, I’m special.

There was unreflective celebration in some country music: ‘And your dreaming has vanished as though it’s never been / Gone with all your culture like the passing of the wind.’ And there was cautious reflection amongst the poets: ‘We cannot ask forgiveness – but this site / Bears our name now, our mark as well as yours.’

Not unexpectedly, Aboriginal readers were also impatient. The academic Sue Stanton, reviewing Belonging in the Australian Journal of Outer Education, wrote:

It is time that non-Aborigines got past their highly privileged and immobilising guilt. Belonging should become for them an opportunity to forge respectful social, political and economic relationships with Aborigines about who belongs, what constitutes real belonging, and stop trying to invent some kind of primal coherence in regard to this belonging.

Guilt is indeed immobilising. Another reviewer was so inhibited that she felt that even to raise the question of non­Aboriginal belonging was inappropriate or insulting to Aboriginal people. Julie Evans, writing in Overland, concluded:

In the end we are left with the uneasy feeling that was there from the beginning ... in Australia of 2001 any general settler musing on this issue remains discomfortingly premature and introspective.

We return to Mulvaney’s proposal but rather less positively than his words may have first suggested. It is clear now that the ‘greatest gift of Aboriginal society’ brought many white Australians to imagine that if they were to form deep attachments to the land of their birth, the connections had to be both spiritual and analogous to Aboriginal senses of belonging. The ‘great gift’ brought a little presumption, it brought some anxiety. It brought, too, a conviction implanted so deeply since the 1970s that, even today, it is easy to forget that spiritual belonging need not have any connection with land at all.

I suggested that the great gift did not come without cost to indigenous people themselves. A few lucky social scientists working for long periods with remote and self­confident Aboriginal elders were, and still are, granted an almost parallel inheritance of the stories, the mythology and sense of mutual obligation, as if they had been born into that country themselves. Others spent shorter periods with spiritual elders such as David Mowaljarri or Miriam Rose Ungumerr, but were still assured that Aboriginal spirituality may, under certain circumstances, be shared by others. But in southern Australia, where land, identity and the conditions of daily life are under enormous strain, very few Aborigines welcomed the advance of outsiders into their spiritual domain. Colon Mullett, a Victorian Koori, when asked if the white mountain cattlemen could ever really belong to the high country of Victoria or to the Snowies, replied:

Not in the same context as the Aboriginal people. Australian European people have lost contact with their land over the last 2500-3000 years ... There’s no comparison. I can understand non-Aboriginal people who maybe come from a farming background and have a relationship with the land, and they see a similarity to the land they’re using with where they come from, and they become very attached and very spiritualised as well, I suppose, to that country, and feel they’re protecting and looking after it; but in realistic terms they’re destroying it.

Pete Hay, an environmentalist teaching at the University of Tasmania, reported this arresting experience:

[L]ast year, in a postgraduate seminar on place, an Aboriginal student (a warm, witty and erudite man and a valued personal friend) looked at me in the eye and, entirely unprompted, said that he does not want descendants of Europeans to develop a deep commitment to this place, because it is not their land to identify with.

Hay concluded that Aboriginal claims to specialness are founded upon the assumption of a superior and unshared embeddedness, of a more authentic claim of being at home here, within the Australian landscape. The same point was put more elegantly, but just as forcefully, by Archie Roach. In ‘Native Born’, the first song on his first album, he sang:

So bow your heads you eucalypts and wattle trees
Australia’s bush is losing its identity
For the trees and the parks that they have planned
Look out of place because the spirit’s in the land.
…
We cry, the native born.

There’s no doubt, in Roach’s mind, as to who was, and who was not, native born, though I wonder if his non-Aboriginal admirers understand the implied but comprehensive rejection of white Australians.

From the words of his Aboriginal student, Hay drew the inevitable conclusion that, in developing their own sense of belonging, non-Aborigines need to find their own centres of power and deep significance. In this case, ‘confrontation with indigenous Australia in the project of creating an empathetic sense of place may be unavoidable’. Unpalatable though it may be for the thousands of non-Aborigines working side by side with Aboriginal Australians in a common cause of legal, social or terrestrial rights, sooner or later they may have serious differences with their indigenous friends about the meaning of spiritual Australia and their own place in it. I reached the same conclusion in Belonging:

Leave the spirits to the people who made them or were made by them. Let the rest of us find the confidence in our own physical and spiritual belonging in this land, respectful of Aboriginality but not necessarily close to it. Let’s intuit our own attachments to country independently of Aboriginals. We can belong in the landscape, on the landscape, or irrelevantly to the landscape ... To understand that is a step to our belonging.

I made a third suggestion: that, so far as I know, non-Anglo-Celtic Australians have not embraced with any enthusiasm the idea of a spiritual belonging to the land of Australia. Clearly, not all Australian ethnic minorities are the same. At least a dozen Chinese-speaking Australian communities identify themselves as born in a country other than China, yet they are often referred to here as Chinese Australians. Nevertheless, of the eighty communities now calling themselves Australian, more than half of those communities are of neither Aboriginal nor Anglo­Celtic descent. Interestingly, their attempts to belong or re-belong to their new land do not seem to make Aborigines nearly so uncomfortable, or angry, as the claims by the Anglo-Celts. Taken together even though their senses of spiritual belonging are still to a point based in Australian land, the Chinese or Hindu or Botswanan or Bolivian senses of belonging seem to offer a much lesser challenge to Aboriginal sensitivities.

What seems to make southern Aboriginals uncomfortable, or angry, is white Australians’ spiritual acknowledgment of a genius loci of a precise site, which they hold in a dialogic relationship of mutual care. Yet non-Anglo-Celtic Australians do not, as yet, express their senses of belonging to Australia in these terms. Indeed, this huge group of other Australians – the non-Anglo-Celts have, in all the lengthy and serious discussions on belonging in recent years, been largely ig­nored by both Aborigines and Anglos.

How do they, then, express sentiments of Australian belonging? First, simply in terms of relief at being here. We might expect a spiritual or dialogic ethnic connection with the sacred lands of Australia to appear first among those who have been here longest: the Chinese, who became an established community within a generation of the First Fleet’s arrival. But ‘Harvest of Endurance’, the pictorial scroll produced by the Bicentennial Chinese history of Australia, dwelt more upon the misery of early Chinese grieving for their own lost homeland and, in later generations, on their pleasure at working within an enclosed but outwardly accepted, Chinese Australian society. Mo Yimei (1893-1983), rejoiced in his inspiring more and more Chinese migrants and Australians of Chinese origin to follow his fine example to devote their efforts to the nation they have settled in’, and in persuading other Australians to accept them. Chinese Australians haven’t shown much interest in the particularity of the Australian land spirit, still less in bonding with it.

One reason for this is that the Chinese geomancers, as well as some other Asian sages now established here, regard the whole earth as equally and potentially enspirited. A feng shui master will recognise any mountain, hill, headland or flat plain as having certain energies of which the geomancer must be aware. The spiritual energies of, say, Wilpena Pound will be specific to that region; but the practitioner can recognise equally well the energies of any other region of the earth. Not so the indigenous elder of that country, who may not be able to find a connection with any site overseas; nor, perhaps, the white Australian who feels in touch with the genius loci of Wilpena Pound. Equally, Muslim Australians recognise no spiritual sites in Australia, because no sufficiently revered or holy spiritual leader has died or practised here. To Hindus, God may reside in any object here – or anywhere. A Hindu priest may be called to carry out the ceremony of puja, to encourage the spirit of a deceased person to begin its rightful journey towards the godhead: in principle even the spirit of an Aborigine who died centuries ago. If he or she is successful, the site may revert to a state of spiritual inertia. A new Chinese temple will usually be enspirited by a formal process that may involve bringing lighted joss sticks from another temple already enspirited, possibly from overseas; and the sacredness of the temple does not extend far outside the structure. Buddhists recognise no sacred places in Australia except the temples or, possibly, where a holy person has meditated for a long period. Southern European Christians may recognise sacredness outside the church, not to ‘the land’ but to a single site.

Belonging to a new land can be via the intellect. For Belonging, I asked an Indian-born middle-aged Australian how she had bonded with Australia. She had consciously grafted herself, she said, to Australia because she liked the look of the land; because she felt accepted by its people; because she held a commitment to its democracy; because of her memories, and because occasionally she felt an ache for the land. WE can begin to understand why such philosophies of enspiritedness may offer little challenge to Aboriginal sensitivities. And the great gift of the Aborigines obscured the fact that land that is loved or revered does need to be enspirited as well. A Cuban-Australian maintained: ‘[In Cuba] one spills one’s blood for the land, wrestles with it, buries one’s dead in this very active and central part of your life. But you don’t make it sacred.’

Finally, in this too-brief excursion into some major spiritual understandings of the Australian land, we should recognise the political/emotional/spiritual responses that inevitably follow as a consequence of being in any place. Pino Bosi, born in 1933in a town ceded to Yugoslavia in 1945, wrote a powerful short story, ‘One’s Land’, about the death of the Italian migrant Pietro, accidentally killed while building a dam in Australia. Returning by train from the funeral, a man shouts at Pietro’s grieving widow and her uncle for speaking Italian. Her uncle retorts:

What we speak not interest you but I tell you we not want thanks for our work because we do for ourself, but leave in peace the men who die in a dam that brings water to this country! This is your country, it is your land, but the grave where today they put this woman’s husband, he pay with blood and she pay with tears. This is her land, not yours!

My argument is that what threatens Aboriginal spiritual land-connectedness most intimately, as Pete Hay’s Aboriginal student perceived, are those feelings of spiritual belonging that Anglo-Celtic Australians began to express in the later 1970s. They claimed, and believed, that they shared specific Australian site energies at least parallel to those of Aborigines. Was it inevitable in a country losing, in the postwar decades, its faith in its own traditional religion?

We seem to be different from New Zealanders. Compare the ‘John Williamson’ sense of reciprocal responsibility with those of the pakeha of New Zealand, who, living in a nation analogously challenged by the Maori, might be expected to articulate analogous expressions of spiritual belonging. ls the principal theme of pakeha belonging their spiritual bonds with the land? No. Some New Zealand farmers in the 1970 argued before the Waitangi Tribunal that they, not Maori, were the true (secular) inheritors of the land because they, not the Maori, had loved and cherished it for 200 years. The most articulate spokesperson of pakeha belonging, the late Michael King, argued in Being Pakeha Now (1999) that, finally, he belonged to New Zealand because:

[t]o be Pakeha on the cusp of the twenty-first century is not to be European: it is not to be an alien or a stranger in my own country. It is to be a non-Maori New Zealander who is aware of and proud of my antecedents, but who identifies as intimately with this land, as intensively and as strongly, as anybody Maori. It is to be … another kind of indigenous New Zealander.

The spiritual challenge to Aborigines, then, clearly emanates from Anglo-Celtic Australia. This was the great gift. ln the 1990s there was not much difference between John Williamson’s ‘ancient spirit of the great south land’ at Uluru and the Aboriginal singer Bruce McKenzie’s appeal to spirit creators in ‘Big Mountain Wilpena Pound’: ‘That’s Big mountain, you mean so much to me ... / The old Adnymathana people told me stories about you, / why I always feel so glad when I see you so misty blue.’

Another demonstration of the changing sensibilities towards an enspirited Australia was Judith Wright’s alienation from her country’s past, which dominated her poetic thinking for decades. Its weight militated against her belonging to Australia as her friend Oodgeroo Noonuccal did; the history of her forebears prevented a full friendship between the two women ever fully flowering. In ‘Two Dreamtimes’, Wright wrote to her ‘shadow sister’:

Let us go back to that far time,
I riding the cleared hills
plucking blue leaves for their eucalyptus scent,
hearing the call of the plover,

In a land I thought was mine for life ...

But we are grown to a changed world:
Over the drinks at night
We can exchange our separate griefs
But yours and mine are different ...

The knife’s between us. I turn it round,
The handle to your side,
The weapon made from your country’s bones,
I have no right to take it.

But both of us die as our dreamtime dies,
I don’t know what to give you
For your gay stories, your sad eyes,
but that, and a poem, sister.

Compare Wright’s pessimism with that of Neil Murray, the contemporary singer and former member of the Wurumpi Band. Murray knows our history (he has as many Aboriginal friends as Wright did), but musing on his sense of belonging, he asserts his right to belong not only by acknowledging the chilling history of landscapes now empty of Aborigines. He claims it not only by supporting reconciliation, by having lots of Aboriginal friends or by being the driving force of the famous Northern Territory band. In the end, Murray’s sense of belonging derives from the accident of his birth and from his continuing responsibility to the environment. It is a claim that Wright who loved the land as passionately as Murray, could never have made. A generation younger, and writing more than a decade later, Murray sang:

Australia, where have your caretakers gone?
I am just one who has been battered
By the damage within your shores,
Australia, I would not sell you for a price,
I would not strip you of your forests
Or pollute your clear blue skies,
I would not desecrate your sacred lands
I would not plunder on your shores
I would not foul your precious waters
For I am your native born.
                                                              (‘Native Born’)

John Cameron, an Australian ecologist, has edited a series of essays entitled Dwelling in Place: Dwelling on Earth (2003). The contributors demonstrated the waxing influence of this more generalised sense of the whole earth as a living and connected organism, a waning insistence on a specifically Australian genius loci. Cameron himself finds that he is now more sympathetic to his European migrant neighbours who created European-style gardens in the bush of the Blue Mountains: ‘As this picture emerged I felt a softening of my judgement towards people who construct European gardens in Australia. It was clearly a life affirming activity for them than I could only begin to appreciate.’

John Seed, director of the Rainforest Information Centre described in Dwelling in Place the analogous process whereby his deep attachment to the Terania Creek rainforest ultimately released him to work in, and love, other forests:

At first I would return from these overseas tours and immerse myself in the Nightcap forests, running naked up the creeks and covering myself in leaves, feeling the healing and empowerment. But then my relationship with the forests where this began became less straightforward. The rainforests that were connecting me, rooting me in that place later released me, almost shooing me away to defend their cousins in far-flung lands.

Meanwhile, young people can put an altruistic globalism more prosaically, but just as pointedly, as one young woman attested in Belonging: ‘I think I’m a world citizen first, not an Australian. That’s my ultimate responsibility.’

It is possible, therefore, that what seemed to be a painful emotional and spiritual challenge to Aboriginal people in the offer of the great gift is already resolving itself. It seems that non-Aborigines are now less concerned than they were two decades ago to parallel or appropriate Aboriginal spiritual place belonging. In 2003 the historian Mark McKenna reviewed the constitutional preambles written by a number of eminent Australians: almost all acknowledged the land but not the enspirited land. Even a passionate proponent of Aboriginal-style spirituality such as David Tacey, quoted in Dwelling in Place, stated that:

The Aboriginal sacred experience becomes, whether we like it or not, our own cultural heritage as soon as we send cultural tap roots down into Aboriginal soil. This is a dangerous and controversial thing to say, and it must be immediately qualified. I do not mean to say that we European Australians must ‘acquire’ the Aboriginal Dreaming like a material appendage or consumer item. If we grasp greedily for the Dreaming. then we may rightly be accused of performing the last, the most fatal act of imperial appropriation in our tragic history of dispossession ... It is not that, in our desperation and emptiness, we reach out for the Dreaming, but rather that the Dreaming, with the wisdom of the ages comes gradually and subtly towards us ... If we are attentive to the land, and receptive to our own souls in the land and drawing from the land, then we may find that we are, as it were, Aboriginalised by dwelling in the spirit of place.

Where to, then, from here? Pete Hay’s Aboriginal interlocutor may find his wish being steadily granted. More positively, to return to the Aboriginal critic Sue Stanton: ‘The true measure of belonging will only come when non­Aboriginal Australians have confidence in their own identity, and celebrate it.’

That newer identity may include an assumed responsibility for the whole world. Or one can proceed in the way anticipated by Hay: an assertion of spiritual belonging offered in the hope that one’s Aboriginal friends will understand, but if they do not: too bad. This is the informed, constructive but finally non-negotiable position of Neil Murray, which does not seem to derive from a symbiotic relationship with an enspirited earth. Murray, in his song, does not claim an expectation that the land will care for him in return for his care. No, his responsibility owes as much to the international networks of thinking that produced James Lovelock’s ‘Gaia Hypothesis’ in 1979, the whole earth ecology movement that began to challenge senses of Australian specific enspiritedness. Murray’s song was a further sign that white Australian attitudes to the ‘great gift’ were beginning to unravel.

Among Anglo-Celtic Australians, the land little by little, is becoming unhaunted. To most non-Anglo-Celts, in the Aboriginal sense, it never was. Judith Wright’s twin preoccupations – love of the land and guilt at the invasion – have just recently begun to sound a little dated. We have become a little more reflective. The southern Aborigines, at least, should be pleased.

And yet, and yet. The years 1970-2000, the period of the strongest expression of a reciprocal genius loci, were also our most productive epoch in two centuries in terms of Aboriginal reconciliation, the recognition of the stolen generations, land rights, the dispossession and in measures of social and economic alleviation. Was it a coincidence? If not – and I don’t think it was – then it may be that the declining quest for Australian-specific place belonging is linked to the era of political uninterest in Aboriginal causes in which we now find ourselves.

Have non-Aborigines done enough, to quote Noel Pearson, to acknowledge present-day infidelities? Have they the right to conclude that the land is no longer haunted because their own need for spiritual belonging has been in part assuaged?