The Australian Way Part 2

by | Jun 21, 2025 | Our Collective

Mulkun Wirrpanda’s ‘Rarrirarri’, photographed by Diana Panuccio, Art Gallery of NSW

Indigeneity and Multiculturalism

As the world’s ‘most successful multicultural nation’, the articulation of the Australian Way, being advocated by the Albanese Government, must not only crack the productivity-prosperity code, it must reconcile three threads of national identity:

  • The ancient cultural foundations of our Indigenous Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples
  • The British immigrant institutional inheritance dating back to colonial settlement from 1788, with its roots in prison (convict) culture
  • The many other post WWII cultural threads of other European and non-European cultural ancestry in our modern immigrant population, which followed the Whitlam Government’s 1973 recall of the White Australia Policy (Immigration Restriction Act 1901).

The Colonial Legacy

Despite our success in redefining Australian identity as multicultural, the brutality of prison culture and ‘white racist’ ideas about culture and ethnicity have deep roots in significant sections of the population. People of Anglo-European cultural ancestry still dominate leadership positions in all our institutions—government, business, unions, academia, media and civil society.

Australia’s British colonial roots lie not in the utopianism of US colonies, but in the emancipation of convicts to become free settlers, known as ‘currency lads and lasses’, asserting their Australian identity and rejecting Britain’s class-based system of social status, in favour of self-made social mobility and economic status based on wealth. This is exemplified by the fact that today ancestry traced to convict status has become a source of cultural pride, rather than one of shame. The British dismiss us as colonials while envying our wealth. We diss the British as stuck up ‘Poms’ while many of us, especially on Sky News After Dark, secretly yearn to be part of the ‘white’ club of culture and Western civilisational heritage.

But the so-called Melbourne aristocracy is based on wealth from the gold rush, not the British class system of landed nobility, and the rebellious materialism of Sydney’s leading citizens traces its roots back to the days of the infamous Rum Corp. Major Grose of the New South Wales Marine Corps used his leadership to abolish civilian courts, exploit convict labour, make generous land grants to his officers (such as John Macarthur who formed the Australian version of ‘landed aristocracy’), and use the corp’s monopoly of the rum trade to their advantage in trade. Although this was overcome by the re-assertion of government control and civilian courts under Governor Macquarie in 1809, it has left a lasting legacy.

The Law of Deep Time

However, as much we might identify with modern Australia resting on its British colonial cultural foundations, it is but a thin cultural topsoil of less than 250 years over our ancient human cultural roots of more than 65,000 years, stretching back well into the last Ice Age. Despite the brutality of colonial dispossession, the spiritual ‘power’ of this most ancient landscape has been kept alive in its songlines—whereby the creation ancestral forces of renewal (fecundity) are experienced, via ceremonial knowledge transmission, as both past and forever present.

Nowhere is this more strikingly demonstrated that in the ‘Power of Yolngu Art’ currently featured in a major exhibition at the National Art Gallery of NSW, and as illustrated in the feature image: ‘Rarrirarri’, photographed by Diana Panuccio.

As Dee Jefferson notes:

“Even just breezing through Yolŋu Power, on display at the Art Gallery of NSW, you get a sense of the vast richness of this culture and cosmology, across almost 300 works in a kaleidoscope of styles, mediums and subjects – from ochred bark paintings of creation stories and intricately decorated larrakitj (hollow poles) to digital projections, detailed depictions of plant life and minimalist abstractions evoking the Milky Way and the estuaries where fresh and saltwater meet. . . 

Plant life is strongly represented, with Malaluba Gumana’s mesmerising paintings of dhatam (water lilies) and Djirrirra Wunuŋmurra’s delicate depiction of wild yams. Mulkun Wirrpanda’s illustrations of flowering vines are animated and projected over a termite-mound sculpture, in a luminous installation at the exhibition’s centre. . . 

But if you take the time to really read the wall text and look at the detail of the artwork, an even richer story unfolds. It’s the story of a people for whom art is inextricably enmeshed with their understanding of the universe and themselves; a community who, since the 1930s, have used art as a tool of cultural diplomacy with outsiders; and a constellation of individuals who have found ways to maintain millennia-old cultural practices, while boldly innovating for changing times.

These designs – or miny’tji – are more than decorative: they express identity, ancestral connections, spiritual beliefs and Country itself. They are sacred and ancient. But these works were painted within the last few years, a statement that the cultural foundations and connections remain strong and vital.”

Indigenous knowledge systems, now re-enforced by Indigenous scholars who have mastered Western science, are forcing us to rethink the approach of Western science, with its preoccupation with categorisation and measurement, and which became the dominant basis for classifying the living world since the European Age of the Enlightenment.

In such a world:

“Plants were things, forests were cellulose, fungi were food, soil was dirt, animals had no feelings (unless they were our pets) and nature was there to be extracted, commodified and sold. The curiosity and ingenuity that sparked the Age of the Enlightenment gradually became scientism, an unswerving rationalism that dismissed other ways of knowing” —Paul Hawken, Carbon: The Book of Life (2025: 8).

It is only in most recent times that Western science is catching up to what Indigenous knowledge systems have always known: the natural world is alive with its own unique forms of communicative sentience. That the whole of the natural world is alive with spiritual presence. That beneath our feet, the soil reveals a vast mycelium network of threads of communication among the plant world. As Hawkens reminds us, the vanity of the solitary self-sufficient individual exists solely in comic books. We humans are part of a vast intricate network of dependent collaboration in terms of our own mind-body system within our skin, and our interrelationships with the whole of the natural world around us.

This understanding is captured in our work in the Enlivenment Network, exploring a pathway for a future that combines our First Nations ethos of Caring for Country in all its multiple levels of meaning, with the values and aspirations of other ethnic communities that make up multicultural Australia.

Tuning into the intricate networks of non-human communicative sentience is treasured ‘secret’ knowledge held in the songlines, and known by First Nations peoples as Law (tjukurrpa). This is the deep incontrovertible Law of Country—the fluid interdependent complex ecosystems that prescribe all life on planet Earth, the Law of Deep Time, not the man-made laws of inherited British colonial institutions.

Just as the Western project of representative democracy is founded on the principle of the ‘rule of law’, the viability of life on planet Earth rests on this deeper ‘rule of law’. Sooner or later we disobey this law at our peril. Cultural historians may read this in the story of the collapse of old civilisations and their empires. Natural historians read this in the fortunes of the biosphere and the species who have lived here together in communities of co-evolution. Today’s futurists read it in the potential collapse of modern human civilisation on a global scale.

Coloniality/Modernity

Of all the challenges facing the development of a uniquely Australian Way, modernity’s reconciliation with Australia’s ancient culture is the most difficult. It is marked by Australia’s continued inability to resolve the social justice issues impacting our First Nations peoples—the high levels of criminalisation, high rates of deaths in custody, high rates of youth suicide, high levels of domestic violence and family breakdown, poor health and housing, and high levels of welfare dependency and unemployment.

This is not a problem unique to Australia. It is found across all colonial settler cultures including Canada, the US, Central and South America and to a lesser extent among the Maori of New Zealand, the Sami of Scandinavia and the San of Namibia. It speaks to the same issue: the profound conflict between extractivist ways of thinking and relationist ways of thinking.

The 2017 Uluru Statement from the Heart called for a change to the Australian Constitution, to establish a constitutionally enshrined Voice to Parliament that would help shape policies to address this conflict. It declared:

“Proportionally, we are the most incarcerated people on the planet. We are not an innately criminal people. Our children are aliened from their families at unprecedented rates. This cannot be because we have no love for them. And our youth languish in detention in obscene numbers. They should be our hope for the future. These dimensions of our crisis tell plainly the structural nature of our problem. This is the torment of our powerlessness. We seek constitutional reforms to empower our people and take a rightful place in our own country.”

Alas. Despite the Albanese Government’s support for this change to the Australian Constitution, it was defeated in a national referendum, principally on the basis that no section of the Australian population should receive special treatment, despite the irony of such an assertion by the majority white population.

However, it was also opposed by some First Nations people on the basis of a notion of Blak Sovereignty, an idea politically spearheaded by Senator Lidia Thorpe.  The Blak Sovereign Movement argued that since the 1992 High Court decision (Mabo V Queensland) had nullified the previous legal idea that Australia was terra nullius; First Nations sovereignty over their lands had never been legally ceded. Therefore, they declared:

“The Sovereignty of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people means an unceded right held in collective possession by the members of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander nations which grants usage, access and custodianship to the lands, waters and natural resources of [the Australian] continent, and the right of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people to exercise an unimpeded and collective self‑determinate governance over their political, economic and social affairs.”

What this would mean, in practice, within Australian common law and the criminal justice system is unclear. Within First Nations cultures, while different language groups have claims over different areas of the landscape, waterways and ocean foreshores, it is not conceived as an ‘ownership’ in the Western sense of property law. Instead it speaks to a sense of custodial responsibility for care in accordance with the deep principle of Law as tjukurrpa, and what is more generally known as Caring for Country. That Country is imbued with a spiritual ‘sovereignty’ of its own is reflected in the fact that it is always capitalised, to distinguish it from the English language word ‘country’ that simply means natural landscape.

The Epistemic Challenge

The defeat of the Referendum to establish a constitutionally enshrined First Nations Voice to Parliament as an institutional structure, to enable the First Nations peoples to shape policies designed to address their disadvantage and cultural disempowerment, speaks to the failure of a majority of non-Indigenous Australians to understand that reconciliation poses an epistemic challenge: the very way we have come to understand the nature of reality and related ideas of progress and prosperity.

Modern Australia is built on the extractivist ethos of European capitalism and on the idea of human exceptionalism, which is emblematic of Australia’s relationship with both its mining and agricultural industries. It rests on the spiritual idea, outlined in Genesis in the Old Testament, that only the human species is ‘made in God’s image’; that is, has a soul. The rest of the natural world is declared brute or inanimate, and therefore subject to human exploitation/use for our needs. While the natural world might also be highly valued for its beauty and wonder in the European romantic tradition, it remains ‘other’ to the human species. And as noted above, these same ideas inform the dominant scientific view of rational materialism.

By contrast, as we pay respect and homage to First Nations cultures being the oldest continuous living cultures in the world, we must recognise that this requires us to honour its relationist ethos, which includes the idea that the whole of the natural world, including humans, have equal spiritual presence and exist in a kinship relationship with each other, embedded in interdependent complex ecosystems of co-evolving sustenance.

The Gay’Wu group of women of East Arnhem Land explain this, in their book, Songspirals (2019) this way:

Country has awareness, it is not just a backdrop.  It knows and is part of us.  Country is the connections between those beings, and their dreams and emotions, their languages and their Law.  Country is the way humans and non-humans co-become, the way we emerge together, have always emerged together and will always emerge together.  It is all the feelings, the songs and ceremonies, the things we cannot understand and cannot touch, the things that go beyond us, that anchor us in eternity, in the infinite cycles of kinship, sharing and responsibility.  Country is the way we mix and merge, the way we are different and yet become together, are part of each other.  It is the messages, languages and communication from all beings to all beings.  And Country is the songspirals (songlines).

While many second-generation immigrants understand the difficulties of walking in two worlds, caught between the worldview of their parents derived from a non-Western cultural ancestry, and those of their new world of modern Australia (often exacerbated by racial and religious bias in terms of appearance and beliefs), such walking in two worlds can take an intolerable toll on even the most successful Indigenous Australians.

This has been vividly portrayed in the life of Indigenous actor-dancer, David Gulpilil, and more recently in the tragic suicides of two of the Page brothers who founded Bangarra Dance Theatre. It is also a feature of Tyson Yunkaporta’s work in the Indigenous Knowledge Systems Lab at Deakin University.

This is not only because Country enduringly claims its kinship with them, but because of the extreme tension between the ethos of extractivism and that of relationism in terms of social, spiritual and economic assumptions and obligations. So what it the solution?

Reconciliation—Two-Way Approach to the Australian Way

Indigenous scholars have pointed out that it is impossible to understand modernity’s progress and prosperity without acknowledging that it is twinned with coloniality. Truth Telling about the history of oppression and dispossession is not enough.

To close the gap, the Australian Way, and create reconciliation, Australians must look both ways: not just ensuring First Nations peoples have equal access to the goods and services of modern Australia (education, housing, clean water, electricity, health services, safety), but ensuring non-Indigenous Australians embrace a very different way, a relationist way, of understanding our relationship with the natural, more-than-human world. And that this different viewpoint informs economic and social policy. Only this can achieve a truly Australian Way. This is the great intellectual challenge before us.

Without this two-way approach, Indigenous people, floundering in epistemic bewilderment and sense of betrayal, will continue to be criminalised, experience high rates of suicide, including deaths in custody, and continue to show all the effects of intergenerational trauma (domestic violence, drug and alcohol addiction, family breakdown) that continue to bedevil policies aiming to address Indigenous disadvantage in Australia.

At the same time, increasingly non-Indigenous Australians are turning away from the utilitariann thrust of managerialism in modernity’s techno-rationalism, and the exposed ‘heartlessness’ of the transactionalism of contemporary life, so exemplified by Trump 2.0’s USA—the cultural powerhouse of global modernity. They yearn to escape commoditification, even as it increasingly intrudes into their psyches, co-opting all in its path—even the psychology of human rewilding. But this yearning to recover the domain of the mythopoetic can be found bubbling in all sorts of small cracks and crevices on the crumbling, discredited rules-based world order. The two-way approach also speaks to this yearning. The recovery of what Andreas Weber calls the bio-poetic.

Such a two-way approach in ‘closing the gap’ was long advocated by such leaders as the great Yolgnu leader, Dr Galarrwuy Yunupingu, in the context of responding to social justice concerns impacting Indigenous peoples. It informed his vision for the establishment of the Aboriginal-led Garma Institute in East Arnhem Land—providing a tertiary education that directly addresses this underlying epistemic challenge.

The contours of this two-way approach is being mapped out by Indigenous scholars, most of whom carry European as well as Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander ancestry, and who have sufficiently mastered Western culture and its knowledge systems to talk back to modern Australia—scholars such as Professor Marcia Langton of Melbourne University, Dr Tyson Yunkaporta of Deakin University, Noel Pearson of Cape York, and Professor Ann Poelina of Notre Dame University WA—along with a host of others too numerous to mention, who are following along in their footsteps. Along with the artists who are giving the world a unique visual language that tells this story: a visual language for which the world is hungry.

While the political class talk about getting more women into parliament and leadership positions, there is an altogether different cultural revolution that is well underway.

Matching the Prime Minister’s political idea of a uniquely Australian Way, my colleague Tarik Cutuk has called for the development of a specific Australian school of philosophy. Indigenous Elder, Dr Mary Graham (Australian Philosophy Research Group, 2021) suggests that this would trace the convergences and resonances between Aboriginal and other non-Western ways of knowing and being, as well as to fruitfully integrate, synthesise, and juxtapose them with the European tradition and the critiques thereof.

What an intellectually exciting prospect this presents!

For when the faculty of reason is detached from the faculty of feeling it leads to a kind of madness, which is the legacy of extreme rational materialism, and the sort of dissociative behaviours we associate with trauma, sociopathic business culture, the growing tendency to conspiracy thinking, and the fevered techno-religious dreams of human evolution across the silicon divide to a new digital species of super intelligence.

That the murmurings of the Australian Press Gallery and political commentariat show little understanding of this greater challenge, while they obsess about defense spending, is a testimony to why people increasingly hold the media and the techno-experts in contempt. And switch off.

These culturally myopic and corrosive trends of late modernity’s so-called experts and leaders undermine the sort of change (reform) that Prime Minister Albanese is advocating for as an Australian Way that empowers a sense of agency and collective purpose, where ‘no one is left behind’. And where we reach towards the sort of consensus ‘togetherness’ that Treasurer Chalmers is looking for in his Productivity Round Table.

Therefore, Cutuk proposes that this unique postcolonial Australian school of philosophy would necessarily need to be broadly post-secular, since the contemporary discipline of philosophy’s demarcation from ‘religion’ is a Eurocentric, modern construct. It is no accident that despite our multiculturalism, university philosophy departments are restricted to the European cannon—the philosophical insights of other cultures hived off into anthropology and religious studies.

Such intellectual hubris precludes the cultivation and appreciation of the idea of wisdom being entwined with spiritual forces and other tenets of the unseen, as well as the empirical and intersubjectively verifiable reality that informs alternative philosophies located within Buddhist, Hindu and Taoist thought, which are confined to schools of religious studies in most Universities, if at all. But where philosophical enquiry has long been more than conceptual ‘thinking’, and requires embodied experiential practice that transcends and dissolves the ‘individual (ego)self’ structure of modern ways of thinking.

Paul Hawken suggests, therefore, that to meet the challenge of living sustainably on Planet Earth we need to recalibrate our thinking. Our social and economic relationships need to be integrated within rejuvenated social and natural ecosystems in ways that recover such sensibilities so that concentrated forms of economic power cannot overrule.

Do we have the intellectual imagination and cultural humility to find an Australian Way that answers this further demand on questions of productivity, engagement and agency in mapping our unique pathway in the new world order? One that truly responds to our multicultural identity and acknowledgement that our cultural foundations rest in the Law of Deep Time?

Catalogue OF Articles by Barbara Lepani July 2018-Present

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