Under The Quandong Tree

face. Don’t you want people to like you?’ We have spent our entire lives wanting people to like us when we don’t like ourselves. Fear of not being liked has consumed us.

Songlines are the essence of physical manifestations through Nungeena-tya. These essences continue to evolve as new species of plants, new emotions and changing of behaviour patterns. The essences in songlines are from Nungeena-tya, the earthly realms. There is even a human songline, the ‘essence of ’ our strengths and weaknesses, our humanity. Son

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

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

As you know, when a baby is born the placenta is still attached to the child but it still carries the Miwi print of that life’s journey. The moment that baby sucks its first breath of air, a switch is flicked, signalling to the map-carrying placenta, that it and the baby are about to be separated. The placenta then ejects its seeds of instruction —

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?

It’s all about knowing where you belong. It’s OK to be, say, an Anglican Christian child being reared in Australia and getting the Anglican teachings but still learning how to do your own Dreaming story in school. And it’s all right for a child to be brought up in Australia in the Muslim faith and learn to do this in school. It’s about our country

Because children can let their essence take control, it is important for you to help them to continually learn to be in control. You tell them, say, about the bandicoot essence that they have. It starts from this age and you tell the stories over and over and over. So then your children know themselves so well they are on their way to becoming inti

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