This year we held the third iteration of the Healing Rites for 7 Sites walk in Footscray.
We are convicted anew of the necessary work of telling our ‘hidden’ stories, acknowledging the pain, and undertaking the healing rites that not only work for our own recovery, but also towards the collatoral benefit of our neighbours and communities.
The Healing Rites for Seven Sites are an invitation to walk the way of the Southern Cross, and visit seven sites looking at issues we all grapple with, such as the referendum result, addressing food security when the cost of living is so high, climate change and the impact of the Maribyrnong flooding. By connecting with significant social issues of our time, in curated and collective ways, we believe can develop tools in creative resilience and recovery that can keep us hopeful.
This tool is most effective when it tells site specific stories – do you know the stories of your place?
This is an offering we make free to our community – if it’s something you see value in, please feel free to make a koha (gift) to our work to support us to show up this way.
An early settler name for Footscray was Cut Paw Paw a transliteration from the Yalukit-willam tribes’ Koort boork boork meaning: A clump of She-Oaks.
Image description: Harakeke (flax) seeds have been used to symbolise my footsteps as a migrant arriving on Country to contextualise myself as ngamatiji (a non-indigenous person)
Tena koutou katoa Ko Ngai Tahu te iwi, me Ingarangi me Kōtirana te whakapaparanga mai Ko Takitimu te waka Ko Takitimu nga maunga Ko Aparima te awa Ko Te Whanga nui a Tara te whenua tupu Engari, ko whenua o Wurundjeri Woiworrung o nga tangata Kulin te kāinga Ko Talitha au Tena Tatou katoa
That is my mihi in Maori that acknowledges the Maori/English heritage of my mothers line and my fathers’ Scottish side.
I’m naming the mountains and rivers of the bottom of the South Island, this story follows the pathway of water from the high ground in the mountains down to the sea, recognising this catchment as ancestors and acknowledging the ancestors of these lands and myself as a visitor here in Wurundjeri country.
I am manuhiri (a guest), ngamatiji (a non-indigenous person) and it’s important to me to start from a place of recognising it’s not my land or language…
The Maori word for land (whenua) is also the word for placenta.
In both Maori and Wurundjeri Woiworrung deep memory stories – soil was taken and shaped in the figure of a person and divine breath gave earth life in a new form. We are shaped from earth, we are shaped by earth.
With funding made possible by Maribyrnong Arts and Culture, I was able to spend August/Sept undertaking a project called ‘Language Lines’.
“On Country, after a birth, the father would have the placenta and the mother would have the seed from the bush tucker. They would go and plant a tree, which is called a directions tree. That tree would then represent that baby. And that baby would grow in conjunction with that tree. So, that’s there for that child to go back to and reflect on their life. However that tree grows is a direct reflection of how that child is growing – that child’s life.VicRoads and Major Road Projects Victoria are cutting down Djab Wurrung Directions and Birthing Trees in order to widen a road. Culturally there is a clear association to devaluing human life and potential by destroying these trees.“ Djab Wurrung man Zellanach Djab Mara
A particular passion that has arisen from reading Healing Haunted Histories: A settler discipleship of decolonization is to connect more intentionally with my own neighbourhood as a Ngai Tahu/Pakeha settler on the lands of the peoples of the Kulin Nation. A resident of Footscray, I was delighted to discover that the Maribyrnong River’s name comes from the Aboriginal term ‘Mirrang bamurn’, which translates as ‘see’ a ‘ringtail possum’ at a time when we had some living in our roof. What other words are in the local landscape that might connect residents more deeply with place?
I am interested in mapping Aboriginal terms that continue to hold space in the land. What do they have to tell us about where we live? Are there words that have been erased that might be recovered? In Maori lore, there is an idea of the ‘hidden face’, this is similar to the way that you cannot see ‘wind’ but can see its influence. What might this exploration into the landscape reveal about what is already at work?
It was a continuous thread of my residency to keep updating a map of those places in my neighbourhood that I saw possums and koort boort boort – this allowed for a practice of quite intentional “presence” in my neighbourhood across the weeks. The central image above was submitted as an entry to the 2022 Picturing Footscray Photo Exhibition named: ‘Koort Boort Boort consultation’ for the conversation happening here between the trees that are local to this place and the new development going up along the riverside. The haunting mist makes it seem as if it is the new development that is disappearing and temporary rather than the trees.
The experience of these 6 weeks allowed for me to explore and play with new skills in eco-printing, pyrography, photography and different forms of weaving. So much of what I thought I’d do, and have to show for this experience, were confounded (and rightly so) by being open to where the investigation led me instead.
There’s a lot of stories to that journey, but let me frame them here within this invitation to advocacy…
My exploration of place names in Melbourne as part of my recent art residency helped me understand that there are layers of harmful naming in our landscape: there are names of early settler colonisers and “conquorers”, there are names of deceased Aboriginal people which shouldn’t be spoken, and then there are words like Maroondah. Maroondah means ‘throwing’ and/or ‘leaves’ in Woiwurrung language.
This image shows some of those small pieces of language for place that remain in the landscape around us to learn from once other names are removed. An opaque sheet of acetate sits over the map covering those names beneath which are now ‘ghosted over’.
I just signed this petition advocating for the new Maroondah hospital not to be named after Queen Elizabeth II as Dan Andrews is suggesting. What Dan Andrews is missing here, as Victoria (ahem, we’ve already recognised a Queen) negotiates Treaty, is an opportunity to partner with local elders to reclaim language for a new naming. What words might mean ‘healing place’? We as Settlers need to progress on this stuff and not replicate and repeat harms of the past. The link is here if you want to sign the petition.
I would not have learned so much without support and resources from Maribyrnong Arts and Culture, the Footscray, Sunshine, and Braybrook libraries, the Footscray Historical Society, the Living Museum of the West and, most significantly, elder Aunty Faye Muir who encouraged me to wake up at 5am to Listen.
The desire in the woven pieces is to represent cultural exchange of welcome between the Welcome to Country, during which gum leaves are burned, and a Maori powhiri (welcome) where an elder speaking in the ceremony might wear a pataka around their waist as a skirt or across their shoulders. There was learning over this residency, that to deeply connect with the culture where I am, I will need to deeply connect with the culture where I am from. In both Maori and Wurundjeri Woiworrung deep memory stories – soil was taken and shaped in the figure of a person and divine breath gave earth life in a new form. We are shaped from earth, we are shaped by earth. When I am grounded by where my placenta is buried, know my mihi… when my introduction is from a deep memory story, not a colonising story, we are starting from a place of shared understanding and Welcome.
These times we’re living in are strange. We have the long-term impacts of social and geographical isolation. We have been separated from friends, family, and favourite haunts for a long time. We did it to be safe ourselves, and to make the world safe for others. Now the messaging is changing. It seems like there’s talk about “pre-COVID” times and “post-COVID” times but what about COVID-now?
This post offers two free downloadable PDF resources that we hope will be a gift to individuals and communities working to make sense of our experience of COVID over the past few months and begin to process what has been a pretty traumatic experience.
The first offering are some gentle questions from Dusk Liney from The Listening Squad with artwork by talented Tasmanian artist Elizabeth Braid. The Listening Squad crew offer amazing strategy retreats and have a podcast on contemplative listening. Dusk is also a Doula and Matrescence facilitator and she’s been running Listening Circles for Mummas through lockdown. Her voice here is a quiet invitation to healing that will hold safe space for you – just as you are.
This second offering is mine – I’m Talitha Fraser a NZ/Ngāi Tahu, Melbourne-based writer. I’m interested in theopoetics, radical discipleship and feminist theologies. My contemplative practice brings together photography and poetry, philosophy and theology, observation and mindfulness. Creating this resource was, for me, an exercise in practical theology – I knew I needed this and so I had to make it. Whether you are conscious of it or not, this life experience of a pandemic we are in is an extraordinary one and there is strength and wisdom in you – likely loss and grief and anger too – that is good to hold space for and acknowledge. This is less gentle I’ll admit, but it’s when we look into the shadows, I find, that we can see the play of light.
In a bit of pain today, I asked the flowers: “What should I do?” and they answered, “put your feet on the ground and turn your face to the sun”
The cat came to join me and I said: “Now what?” He answered: “Lie here and soak it in”
I lay back and looked up at the blue sky and asked: “Now what?” And the wind danced over my face and played with my hair and said: “Breathe. Deep and slow.
This afternoon I got to hear some of a fantastic panel session moderated by Sandra Kailahi, on the panel was keynote speakerNgāhuia Te Awekōtuku, with Sheridan Waitai, Leali’ifano Dr Albert L. Refiti, Nigel Borell and Zech Soakai.
I came in late but these are some fav snippets for listening and learning, I’m sorry they’re not attributed!:
“Decolonising” is a new word but this is something we’ve been negotiating since first contact.
Not all knowledge is taught in the same school (or held in the same museum)
Know me/us for our joy before knowing us for our trauma.
Our youth are defined as “troubled” instead of resilient.
Message from youth: “We could do so much more if people believed in us”
Success is so often measured by tertiary education but we have many paths that are not seen as ‘less than’
Whakapapa got us here, but whakapapa will get us further.
It’s a practice: play the game, beat the game, to change the game.
We need to leverage space to talk about our truth.
Connections with others around the world has been invaluable. Other people of colour. Our ideas, ways of thinking and doing are heard and valued.
Stuff has travelled so far, had an amazing story. They are rooms full of dead things. We need to sing the vā and ask: how do we receive this here? Sing ancestors to the present. Wake them up. We need to articulate that and make plans.
Exhibits can be enriching. We can feel embraced/represented. But not by telling it in the Master’s voice. We need to seize the doing.
Need to establish relationships/partnerships that aren’t pass/fail but allow for narrative, vision, space… where we are all experimenting together and able to try, learn, and try again.
They are a visual representation of self. Take your things home.
When/if Pacific lands are lost to climate change, what role might museums play in preserving taonga of a place that doesn’t exist anymore? How can they be guardians to preserve and protect so that people can visit and remember.
Can the word ‘decolonised’ even be applied to spaces like museums? The collection might be decolonised but the structure remains >>need to make a commitment to opening other avenues.
If you cut up a text that shows violence but if you read a text, read with the grain. What’s unemphasised? I try to read the two texts together, see how they can address or talk to each other.
It’s different for Māori and Pacific people they can always address directly – land taken or land given back.
1500 guides were trained for Te Māori. The guides felt safe, there were aunties and koro around but they were deterrents too. To touch tapu or to be around it, some saw it as a house of dead things. A trophy house. From the other side, to see weaving or wood carving… there can be joy, learning, and ownership.
If you work within an institution you must celebrate the small wins e.g. paradigm shifts. If the mauri of an object means it has to be worn. That’s it’s remit. If you can’t see it on display, someone might be wearing it. Be brave. Know what you have to achieve.
2 Māori contemporary curator appointments in the 1990s… there’s still only 2 roles. Allies need to advocate.
The kaupapa is of collecting the odd, exotic, the other, curiosities. We need a reiteration of beautiful, exquisite ‘other’, to decolonise that, to see Te Māori and Pasifika as here.
Decolonising? That’s work for the pālangi and pākehā. I’m already overworked. It’s enough to work to protect and pass on our knowledge. Our absent partner. That’s the ‘other’.
Decolonise oneself, claim all your ancestors including the armed constabulary from 1860s… Norwegians, Germans… we are all of them.
Act like you own it. It’s your whakapapa. We don’t need to decolonise… we didn’t ‘colonise’ it. Be ready for you to be colonised by us!
The Maribyrnong river in Footscray on the lands of Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung and the Bunurong peoples of the Kulin Nation
Read the following items offering an indigenous lens on relating to country applied to the COVID-19 lockdown. How can other ways of knowing and wisdom of elders, inform how we might live out our own discipleship or radical discipleship within community during these times?
‘Aboriginal people talk about Country in the same way that they would talk about a person: they speak to Country, sing to Country, visit Country, worry about Country, feel sorry for Country, and long for Country. People say that Country knows, hears, smells, takes notice, takes care, is sorry or happy… Country is a living entity with a yesterday, today and tomorrow, with a consciousness and a will toward life’.
Deborah Bird Rose ‘(08) Encyclopedia of Religion and Nature
A poem by Ngāti Hine/Ngāpuhi writer Nadine Anne Hura
Rest now, e Papatūānuku
Breathe easy and settle
Right here where you are
We’ll not move upon you
For awhile
We’ll stop, we’ll cease
We’ll slow down and stay home
Draw each other close and be kind
Kinder than we’ve ever been.
I wish we could say we were doing it for you as much as ourselves
But hei aha
We’re doing it anyway
It’s right. It’s time.
Time to return
Time to remember
Time to listen and forgive
Time to withhold judgement
Time to cry
Time to think About others
Remove our shoes
Press hands to soil
Sift grains between fingers 🍃 Gentle palms
Time to plant
Time to wait
Time to notice
To whom we belong
For now it’s just you
And the wind
And the forests and the oceans and the sky full of rain
Finally, it’s raining!
Ka turuturu te wai kamo o Rangi ki runga i a koe (may the tears of Ranginui rain down on you) Embrace it
This sacrifice of solitude we have carved out for you
He iti noaiho – a small offering
People always said it wasn’t possible
To ground flights and stay home and stop our habits of consumption
But it was
It always was.
We were just afraid of how much it was going to hurt
– and it IS hurting and it will hurt and continue to hurt
But not as much as you have been hurt.
So be still now
Wrap your hills around our absence
Loosen the concrete belt cinched tight at your waist
Rest.
Breathe.
Recover.
Heal –
And we will do the same.
rāhui – is a term that has been used by some in NZ to apply in lieu of terms such as ‘lockdown’ or ‘shutdown’ or ‘isolation’
https://maoridictionary.co.nz/word/6420 (verb) to put in place a temporary ritual prohibition, closed season, ban, reserve – traditionally a rāhui was placed on an area, resource or stretch of water as a conservation measure or as a means of social and political control for a variety of reasons which can be grouped into three main categories: pollution by tapu, conservation and politics…
So if a water source has been compromised it might be indicated as a rāhui being in place until it is cleansed, or if hunting has been done in an area, it might be rāhui so that it’s not hunted two seasons in a row which might impact the wildlife population numbers. By referring to lockdown as rāhui, a different intention can be applied to this time – concepts of sacredness and healing are evoked.
On the Ancestors Singing Facebook page they’ve been having Friday night fireside chats and a couple of weeks ago Aunty Judy spoke to COVID and learned wisdom about strength and resilience:
We care about family, take care of our kids and our elders
Go back/connect to a place where your strength is
Place your feet on the ground/draw strength from the land
Check in with your body, what is it telling you?
Grief, resilience, strength… we know something about that. Especially want to acknowledge the loss being triggered if you have kids you can’t see or grandparents you can’t see because you’ve been separated from your family before
It’s not the work of people that heals, it’s the land. As soon as you can, however you can, connect with the land.
Diploma of Community Recovery…working on developing this qualification.
What arises for your community with these readings? How does this lens align or affirm or differ from our thinking/experience of lockdown?
How might using a word like rāhui with implications for healing and sacred time change the way we feel about ‘lockdown’?
I’ve seen lots of people making bread, planting food, crocheting… from kombucha scobies to sourdough starters – is this to control/participate in food systems? how we would like to spend our time if we always had more? A return to ‘old’ ways? What “powers” are interrupted by those choices?
What new things (if any) are people doing? What is honoured/kept by those rhythms? Are there new practices that we’ve started during lockdown that we want to keep?
Does the list from Aunty Judy make you want to try something else to heal?
Looked for the answer today. Didn’t find it. The pav went wrong. The problem wasn’t solved. The result didn’t come. The waiting is oppressive. I go outside and am re-membered. I remember to breathe. Don’t forget to breathe. #answer #whakautu
Our garden isn’t in good shape, but in one particular corner the soil is full of rubbish – broken plastic, tin, glass… it’s kind of not that safe to work in. I’m trying to get time in our outdoor space regularly figuring every little bit helps, and at some point it will tip to beautiful. The other day I felt a glimpse of that when, in addition to all the rubbish above, I started pulling out whole bottles. After about an hour I had a bunch of them lined up.
I think that it might have been easy to think, “I’m just going to dig out this whole section and get clean fill in here”, but there was something to taking a slower approach, picking through and being more careful with my spade. Someone was careless putting all the rubbish out here but I will be care-full in trying to restore it. When we’re looking for ‘good soil’, maybe it’s important to know there may be things in the bad that are worth keeping as a promise of things to come.
I have healing hands
did you know?
They heal when I hold you,
they heal when I reach out for you.
They heal, these hands;
hole, hold, whole
They heal, these hands
when you hold them.
We live in times where the focus is on those things that divide rather than connect us but as Chappo (Peter Chapman) says “You should share communion together, it has a unique power to unite beyond words.”
I’ve heard someone in the community is sick. It’s cancer. It’s advanced. Chemo starts immediately and all their plans, all their future seems a question mark. This is something the community does well, responding when someone is sick, when someone has died, when someone has had a baby… There is a sense of helplessness when people we know are struggling but we want to do what we can. I add more vegies, I add more garlic, I pay for the leanest/highest grade mince and take care cutting everything nicely because I want to somehow imbue the food with wholesomeness and nurture, I want it to be restorative and healing. I pray as I cut and wash and I pray as I drain and brown and stir… I wish that Shepherd’s Pie were a cure for cancer but it isn’t. For some people, church is most meaningful at the high holidays of Christmas and Easter or as a venue for life celebrations like weddings and baptisms but for me often its most profound acts are in moments like these – when you’re scared, tired, sick… you actually can’t make it to church and your family come around and feed you the daily bread that nourishes, the water that quenches every thirst, the casserole that fits in the freezer.
Low Carb Shepherd’s Pie
Serves 24 (fills three large tin foil casserole trays)
Ingredients
Shepherd’s Pie
Extra virgin olive oil
3 onions diced
2kg mince/ground lamb or beef
4 cloves garlic crushed
4 x 400g tinned chopped tomatoes
1 cup beef stock
1 tsp Worcestershire sauce
140g tomato paste
6 carrots (grated or chopped)
½ bunch chard chopped
250g frozen spinach (or fresh)
420g can corn kernels (drained) or 1.5 cups corn
Cauliflower Mash Topping
3 large cauliflower cut into florets (use potato if you want!)
150 g butter
Salt/pepper to taste
Grated cheese
Method
Shepherd’s Pie
Heat olive oil in a large saucepan and fry the onion and garlic until soft.
Add mince and stir until it is all cooked and browned.
[here I transferred to the slow cooker but you can cook at the stove]
Add the beef stock, tomato paste, Worcestershire sauce, chopped tomatoes and vegetables. Mix.
Reduce the heat to a simmer. Simmer uncovered while making the cauliflower topping. Let liquid evaporate so the mince thickens.
Cauliflower Topping
Boil/steam the cauliflower until soft, this takes 8-10 minutes.
Drain and allow ALL the steam to escape. Too much water left in the saucepan will make a ‘sloppy’ mash.
Add the butter, salt, pepper. Using a stick blender puree until smooth.
To Assemble
Place the shepherd’s pie mince/ground meat mix in the bottom of casserole dishes. Top with the cauliflower mash then sprinkle on the cheese.
Wrap for delivery/freezer storage OR
Bake at 180C/350F for 20 mins and until the cheese is browned.
itellyouarise 