Under The Quandong Tree

Everything that is living is part human; everything therefore is part of us. If we senselessly take life we are bleeding our own life away. If one thread is broken, we can unravel our own beingness and die.

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

The teachings are passed down in stories and stones.

here. In none of the languages in this country was there a word for thank you. How can you be thanked if you are part of the Oneness? What is there to thank? Everything has its place and its part in this Oneness.

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 —

So people who’ve spent their entire lives feeling guilty about being angry, you can now toss it because it’s OK to be angry. It’s what you do with that anger that either destroys or creates.

Now it’s my job — and not only my job but also other women’s jobs — to bring back the stories and tell the teachings: about how vanity was born, how ego was born, all of these things. About why vanity and ego are opponents of ours and how we can learn to walk with them, how we can be intimate with them. A lot of the old teachers have died now and h

What do I mean by Oneness? Imagine I have a large rock in my hand; see this as the Oneness of Creation, a big solid mountain that we are all part of. This gives us strength as well as protection, binding us together. Boss of self is part of understanding Oneness, part of the Dreaming. It is following your Miwi, your spirit path, and knowing your sp

We want to leave our children a better world; we don’t want them to live in filth because they’re likely to die in it. So you must expand on that thinking. If you want a better world for your children this means clean water, clean rivers, clean oceans and trees to sit under.