Australian J of Anthropology - 2010 - Sutton - Aboriginal Spirituality in A New Age PDF

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The Australian Journal of Anthropology (2010) 21, 71–89 doi:10.1111/j.1757-6547.2010.00068.x
Aboriginal spirituality in a new age

Peter Sutton
University of Adelaide and South Australian Museum
Aboriginal people’s responses to different exogenous religious influences have not been
uniform. Here I contrast Aboriginal responses to Christian cosmology with responses to
New Age influences. I then explore the question of whether a comparison of classical
Aboriginal religious thought with New Age ideas and values yields much in the way of
similarities or compatibilities.
TAKING ON CHRISTIANITY
In the 1970s I once asked Silas Wolmby, a Wik man of Cape York Peninsula, what
happened to people after death. He had been born in the bush between the wars at
Kawkey, near Cape Keerweer, to semi-nomadic parents; he was multilingual, and
had been initiated. He was also a mission-educated ex-stockman and had become,
by then, a Presbyterian Reverend.
He first gave me the standard Christian reply: if you’ve been good you go up to
heaven; if you’ve been bad, you go down to hell. But, he added, he also believed
‘his’ way: your personal spirit-image (koetheth maayn) is sent by mourners to a
localised spirit-centre in or close to your clan estate, and your inner spirit or soul
(koetheth) goes west over the seas of the Gulf of Carpentaria to the place of the
dead, Onchen. He had no trouble with this combination of Wik and Christian
post-mortem cosmologies. Other people have been reported as being equally meta-
physically inclusive and equally untroubled by an apparent doctrine of being in
more than one place at the same time. Like Silas, who has been a superb stockman,
hunter and fighter, these are people whose common sense and empiricism about
mundane life are usually not in question. How do they do it?
This is not syncretism of belief or knowledge, in the sense of two cosmologies
merging into a single, held verity. What were being combined here, or rather played
simultaneously on the same proscenium, were the scripts, roles and sceneries of two
religiously, socially and politically performative dramas that came from different
origins but had come together in a single historical endpoint. The player was in
character, albeit in two roles at once, and his ludic method was so deep he was not
acting, at least not in the less inspired of thespian senses. He was at one with the
two roles, inside both scripts, in a profound state of serious play. There was a com-
plete absence of self-objectification.
This was deeply rooted in Wik cultural experience. Aboriginal religious thought
is performative rather than meditative, and relational more than privatistic. It is
ª 2010 Australian Anthropological Society 71

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P. Sutton
much concerned with similarities, with the integration of oppositions, and with
revelatory semiotic experiences of relationships between entities, especially those of
representation and transformation. Consubstantiality between apparently distinct or
even antithetical entities is its leitmotif. This is an epistemology profoundly suited
to the political management of secrecy, and thus the control of hierarchy, social
bonding, and social exclusion. Power is a corner on knowing how things are not
what they seem. Aboriginal stratifications of religious status work more from inside
to outside than from upper to lower. Concentric circles are a better metaphor here
than triangles.
In this post-colonial context indigenous Wik religion now had company. Two
societies and their two religious traditions intersected in an individual such as Silas,
and in his community of Wik Presbyterians, like the shared space of a two-circle
Venn-diagram. This conjunction had gradually become a matter of community
history since the Moravians arrived to set up Aurukun Mission in 1904. It was also
a matter of individual biography. A dual cosmology was true to people’s hybrid life
histories.
But it was a Wik social-psychological principle, not a European-derived one,
which made a dual cosmology possible. This was not ‘influence’ in the sense of a
one-way street from the West to the bush. It was a one-way street in a different sense:
a dual cosmology was possible for the Wik but not for the European missionaries.
It is inconceivable that the missionaries could have genuinely embraced the same
metaphysical duality in a mirror-image process. The Wik principle making this
amalgam possible was the deeply embedded presupposition that religious facticity
rested on the embodiment of Story in the powers of the custodians of Story. Thus
truth depended on power relations between these authorities and the rest. The truth
was what the Old People, and later the Superintendant, said it was.
Silas’s views were formed when both the church and the Old People simulta-
neously held powerful, if competitive, sway over the definition of reality. The
church, backed by the police outpost at Coen in the hinterland, mediated the new
law when it came to asserting the state’s monopoly over violence, even though
missionary floggings occasionally blurred this. The church also controlled the new
part of the economy. The Old Men and Old Women mediated Wik law and
controlled the economy of autochthonous knowledge and access to the marriage
market, but also mediated between the mission and the people. Given these two sets
of vital relational powers, both embodied in sanctions and benefits, Heaven and
Onchen were both real. Reality in Wik terms was not an abstract truth-value but
ascertainable embodiment. Practice deeply preceded ideology, just as ritual swamped
any explicit metaphysics.
Traditional Wik religion was as much about geopolitics and gender relationships
as it was about supernatural and dangerous powers. Like small-scale society reli-
gions elsewhere, it was not primarily about spirituality as the mistily divine, adrift
from the material, nor was it about transcending our vile bodies through medita-
tion or prayer, even if performers in rituals could be temporary transformations of
72 ª 2010 Australian Anthropological Society

Story beings (von Sturmer 1987). Wik thought embraced the seamless unity of the
supernatural with the biota, of physiography with legend, of sexual-reproductive
knowledge with the real Story world of gender-focused mythology, of abstract fertil-
ity powers with material acts of increase at specific sites, of structural and totemic
clanship with physical (including olfactory) belonging to places, of claims on estates
and repeated patterns of wet season base camping, and of elaborate ritual pretend-
ing (I am a Crocodile) with a Realpolitik conducted between highly competitive
celebrants (I am a man).
Overall, the political preceded the metaphysical in forming the ideological
structure of Wik religion. As much as I am sympathetic to Stanner’s revulsion at
Durkheimian attempts to reduce cosmology to sociology (see further Sutton 2008),
I think von Sturmer was right to identify Wik religious life as intensely and
centrally a dimension of Wik politics rather than a religion occasionally subject to
political use (von Sturmer 1978). That does not end his description, of course.
Whether fleshed out further or not, it is certainly an analysis that would be rejected
by Wik traditionalists. Their power, and social order itself, depended significantly
on the mystification that veiled political reality beneath devices of great imaginative-
ness and performative beauty. The Wik were masters of formal, projected-voice
narrative and elaborate dance-tableaux in which striking sculptures played, and still
play, an integral if diminishing part (Sutton forthcoming).
Historically the early impact of Christianity on Aboriginal Australians was
inextricable from their relationship with the church as an institutional structure. It
is essential that missions were often the primary administrative structures of the
new settled life. Aboriginal relationships with New Age ideas and practices have, by
contrast, had little if anything to do with formal structures, perhaps apart from
small-scale and often evanescent financial ones. And, unlike relationships with
Christianity, Aboriginal-New Age relationships have involved a degree of two-way
traffic in concepts (cf. Cuthbert & Grossman 1996; Hume n.d. c.1997b; Marcus
1988a,b, 1996; Marcus & Huggins 1996; Marcus et al. 1996; Mulcock 1997a,b;
Newton 1988; Sherwood 1997; St John 1997).
NEW AGE INFLUENCE ON ABORIGINAL THOUGHT?

The issue of New Age influence on the religious discourse of Aboriginal people
came up during the hearing of the Simpson Desert (Wangkangurru) Land Claim
under the Northern Territory Aboriginal Land Rights Act, in Alice Springs in 1997.
The claim area was west of Birdsville, in Central Australia. Aboriginal Land
Commissioner Justice Peter Gray commented:
I mean, sometimes you hear [Aboriginal] people speak in what I would describe, if I
were being offhand, as a sort of New Age spiritual way about these things. I don’t
mean to disparage those people, they’re obviously sincere but they speak in a way
which suggests that they have absorbed influences which are not Aboriginal and which
they apply to the re-learning of the knowledge. (Transcript 3 December 1997, p. 359)

P. Sutton
Reports of a New Age influence on Aboriginal people’s exposition of their own

religious ideas had been circulating for at least a decade by this time. Perhaps the
earliest was that of Eric Michaels in his 1988 review of Sally Morgan’s My Place
(1987). But it was not until the Hindmarsh Island Bridge case (Kenny 1996; Simons
2003) that the New Age influence issue came to a head politically and legally. In his
statement to the Hindmarsh Island Bridge Royal Commission, Philip Jones wrote:
Ngarrindjeri people have shown that they are open not only to their own particular
history and cultural influences, but to those of the wider community and, more
recently, from powerful Aboriginal role models provided by western desert and Central
Australian culture. Other influences, such as a plethora of ‘new age’ explanations for
cultural beliefs, have circulated since the 1960s at least. Meta-explanations involving
fertility beliefs and notions of the ‘earth as mother’ have gained great credibility in
recent times, throughout Aboriginal Australia as well as internationally. (Jones 1995: 5)
Journalist Chris Kenny shortly afterwards wrote:

New Age devotees have tended to take up and merge various aspects of indigenous
cultures. Such influences have been evident in the Hindmarsh Island affair and can best
be demonstrated by quoting [Aboriginal man] Doug Milera. He was referring to the
‘proponent’ women (those who supported women’s business) who travelled to the
Pitjantjatjara lands for assistance. ‘‘They go up there’’, I said to them, ‘‘What is the earth
to us?’’ They said, ‘‘Oh mother earth, earth is our mother, same as the Indians, same as
a lot of other nationalities around the world, earth is our mother’’. (Kenny 1996: 97)
Journalist Paul Lyneham complained that the reports offered on this story by his
colleagues were characterised by a ‘cosy, warm, unquestioning coverage which was
mixed with an unhealthy overdose of feminism and a view that these Aboriginal
(proponent) women couldn’t put a foot wrong. All we saw was this California-style,
New Age coverage which I didn’t think did the truth a great justice’ (in Kenny
1996: 166). Anthropologist Les Hiatt, in a paper about Marlo Morgan’s highly
controversial book, Mutant Message Down Under (Morgan 1994), said:
Aborigines are beginning to support their political aspirations with religious ideologies
which, if not directly inspired by New Age doctrines, are at any rate highly compatible
with them. This happened in the Hindmarsh Island case, appears ubiquitously in the
doctrine of ‘Mother Earth’, and is evident in recent re-workings of the writings of
anthropologists. (Hiatt 1997: 39)
Whether or not one accepts these remarks about the Hindmarsh case, it is perhaps
in Aboriginal statements such as ‘the Earth is our Mother,’ that the case for a New
Age influence of recent times can be most consistently made.
HISTORY AND MOTHER EARTH

Historian of religion Tony Swain has chronicled the emergence of Mother Earth
(or the Earth Mother, or ‘the earth as our mother’) in literature written about and

by Aboriginal people (Swain 1992). It seems that it originated in the Old World in
ancient times, was taken over by indigenous North Americans from European
Americans in the nineteenth century, was re-appropriated by non-indigenous
Americans in the 1970s as an Indian tradition (see also Gill 1987; Rothenberg
1996), was exported to indigenous Australia from America as an Indian tradition,
particularly in the 1980s, and has been transmitted yet again from some Aboriginal
people to others as tradition. Mother Earth has been pretty busy.
It is interesting that something similar didn’t happen earlier, given that there
were plenty of potential sources to draw upon, including the popular works of Bill
Harney, as Swain mentions. One popular work not cited by Swain was A.M. Dun-
can-Kemp’s reminiscences of life in south-west Queensland in the early twentieth
century, Where Strange Gods Call (Duncan-Kemp 1968). This source relates to the
area of Mooraberrie Station, near Birdsville on the Diamantina River. In spite of
Justice Gray’s comment in the land claim relating to the nearby Simpson Desert, in
which a number of Aboriginal participants were Wangkangurru people from Birds-
ville, I could find no evidence that Duncan-Kemp’s work had influenced them at
all. But she is a neglected author worth some discussion here.
Alice Monkton Duncan, later Duncan-Kemp, was born at Mooraberrie in 1901
and raised there, mainly by her European Australian mother but in close contact
with Aboriginal station staff, growing up among people of at least the Wangkangurru,
Yarluyandi and Diyari languages (Duncan-Kemp 1968: x, xix;1 Steinhauer 2001;
Kowald 2005). In later life she published several books (Duncan-Kemp 1934,
1952, 1968), with a strong nature conservation message and a strong message
about respecting Aboriginal people and their traditions. For her times, she was a
progressive.
The last of her books was Where Strange Gods Call (1968). Here she made
references to ‘Kooroongoora,’ translated as ‘From out of the earth Mother’s body,’
and to ‘Yammacoona,’ the ‘Earth Mother’ or, alternatively, ‘Woman Wizard’ (e.g.
Duncan-Kemp 1968: 11, 282, 311, 320). She also said that ‘The Earth Mother was
the sacred symbol of all life’. Of a sacred object representing her body in some way,
she said: ‘It was an extraordinary piece of wood carving, and certainly possessed
a personality—not a very kindly one either—that slowly enveloped you as you
looked upon it. A sort of psychic radiation difficult to describe—but it was there’
(Duncan-Kemp 1968: reverse of half-title page).
In Duncan-Kemp’s earlier works there was less emphasis on religious life and
‘Yammacoona’ was there differently defined as ‘Spirit woman who is supposed to
rule the sky tribes. Once she came to earth and made the rivers and tribes’
(Duncan-Kemp 1952: 236). She was also defined as a ‘mythical woman wizard who
was supposed to live in the skies and on the earth, as the whim seized her,’ and at
night she gathered the spirits of the dying into the heavens using her net (Duncan-
Kemp 1934: 32). From all three works it is apparent that the author was exposed
to knowledge about local Aboriginal religion, especially as far as women were
concerned, and in her writing she laid particular emphasis on female Dreaming

P. Sutton
figures, ‘spirit Goddesses’ and ‘wise women,’ female mythic characters, women’s
ceremonial forms, and specialised women’s language.
Interestingly, her 1968 book also placed emphasis not only on ‘remembering the
early pioneers’ and praising them, but on the drastic effects of settlers’ ‘greed and
lack of attention’ on the natural environment. A poignant image in the book was
that of a piece of discarded machinery next to a healthy-looking eucalypt. The cap-
tion said: ‘Revenge’ (Duncan-Kemp 1968: between pp. 288 and 289). This concern
for the wellbeing of the natural environment may have been stimulated by post-war
developments, but even in her first book she waxed most lyrical about ‘Mother
Nature’ (Duncan-Kemp 1934: 43). There were many purple passages indicating the
author’s great love of nature and her fine-grained knowledge of the species of the
Channel Country, though not all as breathless as this:
For Yamma-coona spreads her net over the bushland; her hands have clothed with
blossoms the gum-trees, and her breath wafted frog spume to quilt the creek waters in
scintillating foam. (Duncan-Kemp 1934: 278)
So if one were looking for the source of a possible influence of a foreign Mother
Earth tradition combined with feminism and a conservationist ethic on the Aborigi-
nal people of the Birdsville region, one mediated by popular literature readily avail-
able since at least the 1960s, there could hardly have been a more directly relevant
candidate than Duncan-Kemp’s writing about the Diamantina country. But her
work generally sank with little trace. It was perpetuated most notably by supplying
a name for a once famous Australian puppet company, The Tintookies (Duncan-
Kemp 1952: 233; Scriven 1966).
‘The land is our Mother’ had become a quite common phrase in speeches by
Aboriginal people in the political arena by the mid-1980s. This was even so for
some who were steeped in a predominantly patrilineal country ownership system.
Francis Yunkaporta, whom I knew well over many years, was a bush-born Aborigi-
nal leader of Aurukun community. In his own clan language he would call his
primary country or clan estate aak puul, literally ‘father’s father country’. His aak
kaath, literally ‘mother country,’ was a separate estate, that of his mother’s clan,
and one in which he had, by custom, secondary interests. This was the conventional
usage of his ancestors. I think he adopted the phrase ‘the land is our Mother’ when
in character as the classic marginal man acting as mediator between two societies.
He did so when speaking in English in meetings, and when talking to non-Aborigi-
nal people or urban Aboriginal people who did not share his ancestral cosmology.
It was a politically mediating trope, not a statement of personal metaphysics. But
was it merely rhetoric? I don’t think so. It was truthful for the nonce, a pro tem
device employed in his embodiment as the interstitial political actor. It was not part
of his Wik cosmology but this did not entail untruth. It was true to his role ⁄ self in
the cultural politics rituals of his time.
The extent to which slogans such as ‘The earth is our Mother’ are seriously
meant to represent Aboriginal cosmology, as against being a dramatic device of this

kind, cannot be assumed. I recall ideas of roughly the same kind circulating in the
1970s, although they may not have been expressed in the same way. The poems of
Aboriginal Christian elder, Jean Jimmy of Cape York Peninsula, included these
lines:
Mapoon is the tribal land of our forefathers and fathers,
Flowing with milk and honey.
…
Please take a visit to see Mapoon for yourselves.
Because Mother Nature has created land
With its beauty and richness
Also the culture that God has given to Man. (Jimmy in Roberts 1975: 25)
These lines were recorded at a time of protest about bauxite mining. Was this again
an adaptive idiom of political contact and action, more than a ‘belief’? Belief is not
an autochthonous Aboriginal category.
Ronald and Catherine Berndt, summarising Aboriginal legendary material on
‘Fertility Mothers,’ commented:
In recent years, in the struggle for recognition of Aboriginal rights to land, a popular
slogan is, ‘the land is our Mother’. That relationship is not usually made explicit in
the traditional mythology which serves as the basis of religious belief and action. All
‘Fertility Mothers’, even including the Earth Mothers of Bathurst and Melville Islands,
were locally-based deities who were concerned with specific areas of country and ⁄ or
sites, and not with the whole of the earth per se … Moreover, although most if not all
deities travelled over the land, and some even emerged from it, the land itself was not
a kind of collective Mother … The concept of the ‘land our Mother’ is a highly
symbolic abstraction, having little direct correspondence in Aboriginal mythologies.
But it could well be argued in these terms, if we consider the north-eastern Arnhem
Land Wawalag myth where the Two Sisters are swallowed by Yulunggul, the mythic
Snake. The male principle (symbolically as rain, thunder or lightning) fertilises
the female principle (symbolised by the earth and the growth in nature). (Berndt &
Berndt 1989: 17)
The speed with which the Mother Earth concept was cottoned onto in indigenous
Australia indicates that the idea fell on receptive soil. Swain called his article ‘The
Mother earth Conspiracy’ not to suggest collective deceit, but to suggest a natural
coming together in spirit, a breathing together in the sense of the Latin conspirare, a
term he prefers to the ‘unanimated’ terms ‘syncretism’ or ‘synthesism’ (Swain 1992:
22). Swain suggested the process here was more one of convergence than of syncre-
tism. He did not, however, spare it some animadversion.
DISNEYISATION
It is possible to imagine a combining of classical Aboriginal religion and a foreign
tradition such as Mother Earth without much loss of integrity in the way each

P. Sutton
became represented in the end mix. Reactions such as Swain’s indicate that the mix,
if that is what it is, can often be denigrated as one that fails to do justice to at least
the indigenous contribution, if not to both of its sources.
I am sympathetic to Swain’s thinly veiled horror at the way Aboriginal reli-
gious traditions are sometimes treated. Many of us experience an aesthetic and
ethical revulsion at cavalier shopping-around among traditions so as to create
eclectic, fanciful, simplified, often bowdlerised versions of indigenous religion, fit
for transmission to a mass audience and typically marked by various kinds of
factual errors. That aesthetics plays a serious role in these reactions is fairly clear,
but just how this works is not very clear. Why do knowledgeable people react so
similarly and negatively, for example, to actors playing the roles of bush elders
when they appear wearing blow-dried silver hair brushed-out from under laun-
dered red woollen headbands, uttering apophthegms worthy of Chauncey in the
film Being There? For some, these perceptions of sanitisation and thus falsification
carry the odour of deception, the shadow of the scam. And they don’t like being
treated like mugs.
In his paper on the ‘disaster area’ of Indian traditional religious affairs in
the United States in the 1990s, Vine Deloria reminded us of circus tycoon P.T.
Barnum’s dictum that:
one cannot go broke underestimating the taste of the American public … It is stan-
dard operating procedure for Indian medicine women to give ancient religious secrets
to art collectors from Rodeo Drive in Hollywood – that was written into the structure
of the universe from the very beginning. (Deloria 1992: 38)
Perhaps the most execrable of New Age treatments of Aboriginal religion,

Cyril Havecker’s Understanding Aboriginal Culture (Havecker 1987) is widely avail-
able and has been reprinted a number of times. It is an attempt to recreate
Aboriginal religion in a New Age form. The book is riddled with inanities,
distortions, and falsehoods. The author claims to have been made a ‘blood
brother’ of the Warramunga (sic) tribe of Groote Eylandt. There is no record of a
name of this spelling, or anything close to it, for the Groote Eylandt area, as far
as I can find. ‘Warramunga’ is, on the other hand, a widely known older spell-
ing for the language Warumungu of the Tennant Creek region, about 700 km
away.
In Havecker’s book we read of Aboriginal ‘shamans’ who heal using ‘electro-
magnetic energy’ (Havecker 1987: 94), of ‘phonetic signs’ in bark paintings as in
ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics (Havecker 1987: 85), and of the legendary Nature
Spirits who perform ‘psychokinetic functions’ (Havecker 1987: 21). There is more
but I won’t plague the reader further.
In a case such as this, where a non-Aboriginal person’s writing about Aborigi-
nal culture is being assessed by another non-Aboriginal person, it is safe to be
openly critical. Things get more politically complex when the writing or speaking
being criticised is that of an Aboriginal person proclaiming their own system of

beliefs. In terms of ‘freedom of religion’ principles, what is the position of some-

one making a critical scholarly assessment of, say, the Noonuccals’ Expo book
(Noonuccal & Noonuccal 1988)? Some may be reluctant to draw attention
to what they perceive as errors of fact because it may seem disrespectful to
the beliefs of the authors. On the other hand, fidelity to one’s own intellectual
tradition may demand that one ought to be prepared to take a vigilant stand
against distortions of the record, wherever they may appear. I am of this second
view.
And yet it’s important to make a distinction between contested accounts of the
past and different reactions to belief-systems of the present. Aboriginal people
often ask me: ‘What did the Old People tell you about such-and-such?’ That is,
they don’t regard their past as something they can define free of what their
own elders and forebears have said and recorded. The record of the past is critical
evidence for statements made about it, but to use these records to measure the
validity or defensibility of religious knowledge and beliefs of people concerning the
present, as opposed to their accounts of the past, is a pointless fundamentalism.
By contrast, feelings of anger inspired by the various over-simplifications, distor-
tions and bowdlerisations of Aboriginal religious traditions that have become
increasingly circulated in recent decades are not necessarily inspired by anything
that could readily be defined as simple antiquarianism or even just Grumpy Old
Anthropologist Syndrome. So long as these kinds of popularisation were largely
confined to children’s books or occasional magazine articles written by non-Aborig-
inal authors, one could decide to either attack or to ignore them, but the conse-
quences of either path were not weighty.
Not all of the earlier popularisations were by non-indigenous people, though
most were. A few Aboriginal people were involved in popularisation of their
traditions from at least the 1920s when works of David Unaipon (1873–1967) began
to appear, and on television from the early 1960s when Bill Onus (1906–1968)
presented a documentary series called Alcheringa. Onus was one of the first indige-
nous business people to market aspects of Aboriginal traditions, establishing the firm
Aboriginal Enterprise Novelties in 1952 (Horton 1994: 824–825). But the main wave
of Aboriginal self-popularisation came later, starting somewhere around the early
1980s.
When similar manifestations begin to appear as the words and works of
eminent contemporary Aboriginal people, or achieve world best-seller status, they
acquire a special seal of approval, at least in marketing terms. Occasionally they will
contain distortions or misleading statements, or in some other way lay themselves
open to criticism, as when Eric Michaels (1988) described both the Songlines of
Englishman Bruce Chatwin (1987) and the My Place of Aboriginal writer Sally
Morgan (1987) as ‘para-ethnography’. This was one of Michaels’s more brilliant
insights.
Michaels took the view that for an anthropologist to respond to such works by
making ethnographic corrections would be to:

P. Sutton
fall into the very trap this sub-genre has laid. The demand for facts unwittingly turns
the critic into just another character in this same Peyton Place, arguing their claim to
privileged information – into ‘the expert’, bristling with insider knowledge which is
then employed, as everyone else does, to justify an attempt to dominate the discourse,
to sell their version of the story … I do admit that in the end I mean to approach
exactly these questions of facticity that Songlines and My Place raise for us – but
perhaps in a less sleazy manner. (Michaels 1988: 43)
Sleazy positivists or not, there are a number of scholars who have spent decades
listening to senior Aboriginal cultural experts and systematically recording their
knowledge and who, as a result, may know as much about the distantly past history
and classical cultural traditions of certain groups as do their own now living mem-
bers, and in quite a few cases they know a great deal more. For such people to
remain silent for fear of being denigrated as just another voice among competing
discourses, or for them to feel no obligation to defend the integrity of what the
older generations have taught them – that would indeed be sleazy.
More precisely relevant to the present inquiry are Michaels’s remarks about
New Age influence on Morgan:
There are elements of theosophy, New Age astrology, even something like Pyramid
Power in Sally Morgan’s religion which are indeed interesting syncretisms.
But Morgan implies more than a syncretic invention; she makes the discovery (not the
invention) of an authentic, lineally-descended Aboriginal identity. What she uncovers
is so inconsistent with what we have hitherto understood about Aboriginal theologies
that if Morgan is right, much will have to be rewritten and certain practising elders
will have to be corrected. Perhaps more relevant to the critical criteria I am promoting
here is the supposition that Sally’s very personhood – as an individual who seeks a
cultural identity (and to become a character in her own book) and makes this very
personal journey of discovery to her roots – is also quite a modern construct.
(Michaels 1988: 45)
One of the main reasons why scholars object to many New Age versions or
appropriations of ‘Aboriginal spirituality’ is that these versions often misrepresent
the past, and sometimes the present. This much is a matter of ‘accuracy’ or possibly
even ‘authenticity’—that corruptible conception now so long under a cloud. But
another reason why scholars are likely to be critical or dismissive of such versions is
a sheer matter of intellectuality. I don’t think I am alone in regarding such
re-inventions, no matter who does them, as being in many cases a kind of vulgarisa-
tion, a Disneyisation, a dumbing-down, sometimes a crude sentimentalising, of
something that is, or was before, complex, subtle, multi-layered, and based on a
particular kind of intellectual toughness.
By intellectual toughness I refer to the way Aboriginal people steeped in the
classical traditions have typically demanded very high standards of memory and of
accuracy in reproducing knowledge, have required their students to become crea-
tively engaged in the learning process rather than expecting to be spoon-fed, have

not suffered the mangling or mispronunciation of their languages gladly, and have
had a sometimes astonishing recall of more or less everything their students have
been taught about any particular domain up to a particular point in time.
This intellectuality, in classical Aboriginal practice, is combined with a vivid and
poetic vision of an intimately and empirically well-known local world of places,
animals, plants, seasons, ceremonial performances, objects, groups of people and
their political economy. This vision, in each of its local and regional flowerings, is
barely portable and never universalisable. To grieve over the loss of this parochial
richness and to be angered by its Disneyisation, false universalisation or misrepre-
sentation is perhaps not of itself a case of intellectual snobbery, but I am sensitive
to the likelihood that this label might be used by some. If non-Aboriginal people
act as self-appointed guardians of the integrity of the record of What the Old
People Said, are they not asserting some ownership of the Aboriginal past to which
indigenous people will object? This may be true, but scholars also have a duty of
care towards the integrity of those traditions to which they have been introduced by
the traditions’ custodians. Most of these custodians are now deceased, but this does
not justify riding roughshod over their complex culture to make Aboriginal religion
easy, accessible or marketable. There is no Dreamings for Dummies.
Those Aboriginal people most open to convergent pathways with New Age
philosophies and therapies are those who are culturally furthest from the classical
cultural past of their own peoples. The compatibility of classical Aboriginal
environmental thought with that of the conservationists of industrial society seems
to be more a matter of occasional resemblances than a coincidence of common
deep principles, sentiments, values and intentions experienced by the two kinds of
thinkers.
THE ‘NEW AGE INFLUENCE’

Thus far I have been using the term ‘New Age’ without attempting to define it. The
term has no strict definition, the very use of it is controversial and sometimes
resented, and it is often used too loosely to be of much help. Although arising in
an age that is ‘New’ at least by name, it does look relatively at home in an originally
Western tradition of personal salvation that also threw up Samuel Smiles’s
best-selling manual Self-help (Smiles 1859) and, before that, the fifteenth century
Latin classic Ars Moriendi (The Art of Dying). As the name of a couple of journals,
The New Age goes back to the first decades of the twentieth century (Owen 2004:
25), the heyday of occultism and spiritualism, but in the current sense, the articula-
tion of the New Age has been dated variously to the 1960s and, more exactly, to
1971 (Guiley 1991: 403).2
Among the concepts that stand out in New Age thought are that one creates one’s
own reality; that divinity exists within; and that there is a need for renewed recogni-
tion of the feminine principle and the use of ‘‘feminine’’ traits such as intuition.
(Guiley 1991: 403)

P. Sutton
The Macquarie Dictionary (1991) defined it, somewhat over-creatively, as:

n. a social revolution which replaces traditional attitudes and mores with a new
approach based on a loose mysticism, esp. in health and medicine and attitudes to the
environment. (1991: 1197–1198)
New Age interests can cover a range of phenomena from Acupressure to Zombie
Astrals and beyond, alphabetically speaking. The following are only some of the
techniques, concerns, objects, movements, persons and beliefs usually considered
to be New Age: Alternative medicine, Aromatherapy, Astral travelling, Celtic
stone circles, Channelling, Clairvoyancy, Clearing, Creative visualisation, Crystals,
Dolphins, Druids, Extra-sensory perception, Feng Shui, Foot reflexology, Finding
your inner X, Geomancy, Goddesses, Holistic healing, Homeopathy, Iridology, Men
beating drums in the forest, Naturopathy, Palmistry, Past lives, Patchouli oil, Primal
scream therapy, Psychokinesis, Recovered memories, Runic script, Shamanism,
Shirley MacLaine, Thoughtography, Vision quests, Wilderness, the Wisdom of the
elders.
What might be New Age about any or all of these is not a single common
characteristic so much as a cultural matrix that not only has all of them available
but supports a mind-set that might well shop around among them, or might
simultaneously combine them without any intrinsic sense of contradiction or any
great shift of philosophical base. The main recurring elements of this cultural
matrix are:
Voluntarism. Engagement with New Age things is not usually communally coercive
or required, although there may be subtle pressures involved within families and
households, or among friends. There is ideological freedom of choice.
Optimism. There is often a positive emphasis on healing, overcoming stress, getting

in touch with one’s real self, improving one’s wealth, etc.
Individualism. New Age thought usually represents a rejection of the older institu-
tional religions and aspects of conventional scientific medicine, and stresses the
seeking of a personal pathway of experience rather than a conforming one mediated
by a priestly caste or medical establishment, although gurus may play a role.
Power. There is often an emphasis on mystical or natural energy, where it is located,

how to get it, how to reclaim it. Ley lines are significant here, and some see a direct
link between Aboriginal Dreaming tracks and interconnections between sacred sites
elsewhere.
Naturalism. There is an emphasis on ‘natural’ things, such as stones (Uluru being

one of the more famous) and semi-natural things such as stone arrangements
(Celtic stone circles, Aboriginal stone arrangements), crystals, trees etc. rather than
on humanly-made buildings such as churches and shrines, or artefacts such as
crosses, temple sculptures, painted icons—though there are mandalas.

Conservationism. There is a move away from human-centric and even other-

worldly religion, to an environmentalism that focuses on protecting Gaia or Mother
Earth, and that replaces the conquest of earth with an attempt to live sustainably
with it.
Feminism. While feminism is its own clutch of movements and has a deep history
of its own, there are strong feminist elements in a number of New Age pursuits,
including the Goddess movement, the Wicca movement of Neopaganism, and the
Wild Woman thing (e.g. Estés 1992; Guiley 1991: 239–242, 647–650; Hume 1997a:
83–88; Zak 1989). The rejection of patriarchy is de rigueur.
The bodily. While some New Age tendencies belong to an older mysticism and
encourage transcendence of the sensual, more seem to embrace the body, emphasis-
ing massage, healing, the joy of sex, corporeal energy, power walking. This move-
ment from fleshly denial to valorising the body is similar to the parallel shift of
emphasis from language towards vision in post-1960s urban cultures. The proposi-
tional is in some decline against the experiential, in spite of the fact that one of the
most readily apparent manifestations of the New Age consists of books.
The visual. Much New Age thinking reflects a general shift of emphasis in industria-
lised societies from a heavily verbal, literary and text-based approach to communi-
cation and knowledge towards one that combines these with the visual, especially
the filmic and the televisual (Steiner 1967; Kolig 1996: 376). Some may have prema-
turely oversimplified this as a shift from the Word to the Image, and instead, the
post-1970s phenomena of personal computers and the revival of poetry as Rap
Music may be symptomatic of the capacity of the Word to keep on keeping on, as
are ever climbing book sales.
The indigenous. There is often an embracing of the ‘wisdom of the elders’ (cf.
Lambert 1993) or a seeking of ‘original truths’ from indigenous religious
traditions—albeit in a highly selective way (Lawlor 1991; in vigorous opposition see
Tacey 1995: 129–147). Idealisation of indigenous societies is not uncommon.
De-centering. New Age thought reflects a decline in the worship of personal deities.
The rejection of a central religious authority structure seems to go along with this
abandonment of an omnipotent single God, and of patriarchy.
Eclecticism. There are no canonical texts (cf. the Talmud, Qur’an, Bible, Christian
Science Textbook, etc). On the contrary there is much experimentation (‘finding
what works for ME’), and for many there is no fixed external solution or truth.
One shops around, techniques can be combined, and no fix is eternal.
Consumerism. One also shops around literally, in the ‘New Age’ sections of book-
shops, or in shops carrying merchandise such as crystals, oils, aromatic substances,
special foods. The dichotomy of God vs. Mammon no longer applies. Books have
titles like How to Find Yourself—and Make Money at the Same Time.

P. Sutton
Science. Much New Age thinking is philosophically modern in that it is at ease with a
nature-culture dichotomy, a science-like (if not scientific) and experimental approach
to knowledge, and a tendency to create techniques or bodies of knowledge whose
names end in -ology. For some examples of a combination of New Age appropriation
from Aboriginal culture with science-like models of power see Lawlor (1991: 88–111),
where one finds, in Figure 70, the earth and its magnetosphere pushing the Zone of
Confinement ⁄ the External Eventful Awareness into a stiff solar wind, penetrated by an
arrow representing Ingestion of Cosmic Energy from the Dreamtime. Wow.
In general, the contrast between these principles and classical Aboriginal reli-
gious thought and practice can only be described as stark, although there are resem-
blances here and there. To embark on comparing each with some potted version
of Aboriginal traditions would be dangerous, and bound to be criticised for many
infelicities and simplicitudes—but I’ll do it anyway:
Voluntarism? While there is commonly no single coercive authority in Aboriginal

ceremonial events, simple voluntarism is generally absent and religious knowledge is
not a matter of personal choice. Many participants in ceremonies have little real
option about attending and some, such as initiands, are seized and put through
ceremonies, including genital mutilation, involuntarily. Aboriginal gerontocratic
religion is a lot closer to totalitarianism than to freedom of religion.
Optimism? While there are healing rituals and other practices in Aboriginal religion,
they are not its main thrust. Acceptance of and resignation to a flawed world, not a
progressivist optimism, was standard. As Stanner said of Murinbata people:
‘No social imperative made them celebrate joyously what could not be changed’
(Stanner 1963: 167).
Individualism? The cultural construction of the person in classical Aboriginal thought

is much more as a leaf on a branch on a tree, than as a tree. The contrast with Western
conceptions of the person is strong. In 1958 Stanner wrote of ‘the insistent official
view that henceforth the Aborigines must be treated as ‘‘individuals’’ and not as
‘‘groups’’. I am afraid this shows that authority does not know what it is doing. No
policy or law can transform the Aboriginal from what he is in this region [the North-
ern Territory]—a social person, tied to others by a dozen ties which are his life—into
an abstract ‘‘individual’’ to make the facts fit a policy’ (Stanner 1979 [1958]: 43–44).
Power? Yes, Aboriginal religion is very much about power, and there have been a
variety of manifestations of spiritually-based and personalised powers recorded for
different Aboriginal societies, especially powers exercised by the ‘doctors’ or ‘clever
men ⁄ clever women’ (Elkin 1977: 32–33). Elkin also discussed the widespread tradi-
tion whereby power is considered to be concentrated in certain kinds of object,
especially sacred artefacts but also quartz crystals, pearlshell and certain other
‘natural’ objects, with a special role for the iridescent (Sutton & Snow in press).

Some may see the emphasis on crystals, predominantly a south-east Australian

tradition, as a foreordained link to New Age thought, in which crystals can play a
significant role (Guiley 1991: 133–134). But the usual Aboriginal emphasis is not on
channelling positive cosmic power through one’s person for the purposes of self-
improvement so much as, for example, turning boys into men, celebrating the
Dreaming, reproducing the species of the country, or controlling or unleashing
malevolent forces (e.g. von Sturmer 1987). Power, in classical Aboriginal terms, is
dangerous and destructive as much as it is positive. The most highly sacred is the
dangerous and immanent, not the comforting and transcendent.
Naturalism? There is some resemblance here. Aboriginal focal points in the religious
landscape tend to be geological features, large trees, water sources and so on, and
people do often claim to communicate with animals. There are deep philosophical
contrasts here also. For example, ‘nature’ is not a category reported for any Aborigi-
nal conceptual system. Aboriginal thought classically emphasises a dichotomy
between the substantive and the non-substantive, the inside and the outside, the
experienced and the heard-about, and the embodied and the unembodied, but not
between the natural and the cultural, or the material and the spiritual. The
languages do often reflect a distinction between the animate and the inanimate, and
there is a contrast between the mundane and the immanently powerful. There is
certainly no general concept of ‘wilderness’ (Sutton 1988: 19).
Conservationism? In the classical culture, basically no, not in the modern industrial
society’s conscious sense, and yes, probably, in the overall long-term functional
sense (Anderson 1989, 1994; Anon. 1989; Sackett 1991; Jacobs 1994).
Feminism? No. However, in a classical land tenure system Aboriginal women are
not excluded from landed property, unlike those of a number of other societies. On
the other hand, no clear-eyed modern feminist would countenance the degree of
gender inequality universally reported for traditional Aboriginal societies, especially
in marital relationships.
The bodily? There are some commonalities here. Religion and sexuality are heavily
integrated in many Aboriginal traditions, both men’s and women’s, especially in
mythology. At certain times in certain ceremonies, heterosexual intercourse may
occur, and homosexual intercourse is occasionally reported as occurring during
initiations. Massage, positive energy and healing are often connected in the work of
Aboriginal ‘doctors’.
The visual? Yes, Aboriginal emphasis on the visual as a primary means of learning
about spiritual matters is almost legendary.
The indigenous? This is a post-colonial category but yes, Aboriginal religious

thought also emphasises the wisdom of locally descended elders, or more accurately
the esoteric knowledge they guard jealously and release sparingly. True religious

P. Sutton
knowledge of the people of an area must in a sense be indigenous to that area, and
must arise from the very creation of the local landscape itself. But there is no
presumptive traditional principle that it can or should be accessed by outsiders or
strangers, although this has altered with the art and tourism markets.
De-centering? Aboriginal emphasis on a community of participants, the absence of a

separate priestly occupational group, and an absence of an apical church organisa-
tional structure, does not mean there is no religious hierarchy nor specialised
celebrants in Aboriginal classical religion. In general, however, on this point there is
some compatibility between it and New Age approaches.
Eclecticism? Classical Aboriginal religious thought is more inclined to a firmly

enforced uniformitarianism, within any one local grouping, than to a freedom to
shop around, metaphysically speaking. This does not mean there is no variety of
Aboriginal belief, and mutually contradictory accounts of legends may be normal,
especially if one obtains them from fairly distant neighbours. But this is not eclecti-
cism, nor is it considered a manifestation of free will.
Consumerism? Integration of the religious and the economic is quite high in Aborig-
inal classical tradition, but the formal absence of a neutral exchange medium
(money) and an absence of the accumulation of wealth (excepting wives and sacra,
perhaps), make comparisons between the classical traditions and those of New
Agers difficult: ‘Ours is a market-civilisation, theirs not. Indeed, there is a sense in
which The Dreaming and The Market are mutually exclusive’ (Stanner 1979 [1958]:
58). Money does now play a role in the transfer or performance of Aboriginal
ceremonies from time to time, even outside of the context of commercial ‘culture’.
Science? Classical Aboriginal thought is ‘scientific’ in the sense that people’s very
survival depended constantly on replicable knowledge of the environment and the
use of empirical observation in applying the rules of inductive and deductive logic.
They fostered orderly bodies of specific knowledge (such as, for example, quite
complex taxonomies of rainforest trees, Dixon 1968: Part C), but they did not have
a view that the development of new knowledge was possible or desirable. The
idea of a ‘new and improved’ knowledge distinct from that of one’s ancestors was
widely regarded as anathema. The young were usually prohibited from asking elders
questions, especially about serious and religious matters.
The general picture, then, is of a profound incompatibility between classical

Aboriginal thought and New Age thought, with a few cross-overs here and there.
Classical Aboriginal religion was that of a closed society, New Ageism the creation
of an open society. This lack of fit is combined with the absence of an institutional
power structure in which New Agers might have anything of critical importance to
offer or deny to Aboriginal people.

Together these make it unlikely that Aboriginal people of a classical cultural

orientation would be susceptible to New Age influences except perhaps superficially,
maybe on a part-time paying basis where a mimetic costume is donned so as to meet
the script of the day. On the other hand, where Aboriginal people have become
culturally more like other Australians than ever before, and have developed an urban-
style individualism and eclecticism, the foundation is laid that clearly has made some
receptive to New Age or similarly exotic influences at a deeper level. The same emer-
gence of reflective individualism opens the way to more pietistic, less fully relational
and less deeply ludic forms of Christianness than were culturally possible in the past.
NOTES
1 According to Luise Hercus (pers. comm., 1998) much of the linguistic material in this
book comes from the local language of Farrer Creek, which has varieties known as
Karuwali, Mithaka and Marula, but some of the material is Wangkangurru.
2 More than one branch of Sixties and Seventies progressivism tended to prefer to not fully
notice that similar though not identical movements had preceded it two or more generations
before (most notably first wave feminism; back to nature vitalism; conservation of the
natural environment; indigenous rights; non-establishment spirituality; sexual liberation).
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17576547, 2010, 1, Downloaded from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1757-6547.2010.00068.x by Technical University Ostrava, Wiley Online Library on [09/03/2023].

Aboriginal spirituality in a new age

ª 2010 Australian Anthropological Society 71

72 ª 2010 Australian Anthropological Society

NEW AGE INFLUENCE ON ABORIGINAL THOUGHT?

ª 2010 Australian Anthropological Society 73

Reports of a New Age influence on Aboriginal people’s exposition of their own

Journalist Chris Kenny shortly afterwards wrote:

HISTORY AND MOTHER EARTH

74 ª 2010 Australian Anthropological Society

ª 2010 Australian Anthropological Society 75

76 ª 2010 Australian Anthropological Society

ª 2010 Australian Anthropological Society 77

Perhaps the most execrable of New Age treatments of Aboriginal religion,

78 ª 2010 Australian Anthropological Society

beliefs. In terms of ‘freedom of religion’ principles, what is the position of some-

ª 2010 Australian Anthropological Society 79

80 ª 2010 Australian Anthropological Society

THE ‘NEW AGE INFLUENCE’

ª 2010 Australian Anthropological Society 81

The Macquarie Dictionary (1991) defined it, somewhat over-creatively, as:

Optimism. There is often a positive emphasis on healing, overcoming stress, getting

Power. There is often an emphasis on mystical or natural energy, where it is located,

Naturalism. There is an emphasis on ‘natural’ things, such as stones (Uluru being

82 ª 2010 Australian Anthropological Society

Conservationism. There is a move away from human-centric and even other-

ª 2010 Australian Anthropological Society 83

Voluntarism? While there is commonly no single coercive authority in Aboriginal

Individualism? The cultural construction of the person in classical Aboriginal thought

84 ª 2010 Australian Anthropological Society

Some may see the emphasis on crystals, predominantly a south-east Australian

The indigenous? This is a post-colonial category but yes, Aboriginal religious

ª 2010 Australian Anthropological Society 85

De-centering? Aboriginal emphasis on a community of participants, the absence of a

Eclecticism? Classical Aboriginal religious thought is more inclined to a firmly

The general picture, then, is of a profound incompatibility between classical

86 ª 2010 Australian Anthropological Society

Together these make it unlikely that Aboriginal people of a classical cultural

ª 2010 Australian Anthropological Society 87

Guiley, R. E. 1991. Harper’s Encyclopedia of Mystical and Paranormal Experience. Edison,

88 ª 2010 Australian Anthropological Society

Noonuccal, O., K. O. Noonuccal 1988. The Rainbow Serpent. Canberra: Australian

ª 2010 Australian Anthropological Society 89

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