The art of the story is in the listening*
Humans are natural storytellers. Since our ancestors came down from the trees, we have been telling stories. The oral tradition of storytelling existed long before the graphic and written forms as a means of carrying our history. We learn from the past in order to build a future. Whether it’s a yarn told around a campfire, a tale told at Granddad’s table, or a hilarious anecdote in a wedding speech, our stories are our footholds to the future.
The story of Australia is a long and very rich one. The oldest landmass on earth, it contains rocks dated to 3000 million years ago, preceding the evolution of homo sapiens by around 2999 million years. The ancient Gondwana landscape, the supercontinent that ultimately divided to form Australia, Antarctica, South America, South Africa and India, was home to towering rainforests and giant megafauna.
The first humans arrived on what became the Australian continent around 65,000 years ago, and so began the naming of things. Each mountain, river, lake and desert became known by its name. All the beaches, headlands, bays and inlets sprang to life as entities in their own right. Named too were all the plants and animals, and they became known not only for what they were, but for the food, shelter or tools they could provide and their significance in ceremony and lore. The vast unknown and unknowable Gondwana became known to the people who belonged to her and they told her story as well as their own.
In the 16th Century more people began to arrive. White men on ships that sailed along the coastline. They also took stories of this country back to their own lands, and the stories they told were written down. By the 18th Century these stories of a great land in the south had gained popular and political traction and finally a new group of people arrived to stay. Cast out from their own society, they carved a new life in this land, knowing nothing about the names and the stories that preceded them, but creating and telling their own stories. Instead of belonging to the country, however, they sought to have her belong to them.
Two hundred and thirty-five years later, we know many of the original people’s stories, those that predate by millennia the stories of the various waves of settlers and immigrants that have arrived since 1788. We own our stories, but equally, our stories own us. Telling our stories is important, but a story is just a jumble of words unless it has listeners. If people turn away from the storyteller, that story will die. It needs listeners to carry it forward.
Stories bear living testament to what has gone before and inform what is to come. All the stories of Australia, those of the land itself, her original people and the later arrivals, together, weave a tapestry that takes us all the way back to Gondwana. Yet so many of us fail to see how the weft and the warp of those stories fit together. We can’t see the texture of the tapestry because we have failed to listen.
When we fail to listen, we fail to learn. And when we fail to learn, we fail to grow.
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* This first appeared as the editorial in Braidwood's Changing Times, 18 October 2023
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