Introduction

This week Catherine and I began a new venture: a fortnightly podcast conversation from the Enlivenment Network community about what living from the viewpoint of a relationist ethos might mean.

Catherine van Wilgenburg is a Gippsland-based eco-artist whom I met at the 2023 NENA Conference in Canberra. She invited me to join with her to convene an arts and culture hub for NENA. This eventually birthed the Enlivenment Network as the organisational anchor of such a hub, through which we are trying to build a community of like-minded creatives and thinkers.

Inspirations

In our first podcast, we acknowledged the core inspiration we took from Dr Mary Graham, a First Nations philosopher and political scientist from the University of Queensland, and founder of Future Dreaming Australia. Along with many other First Nations post-colonial scholars, she has long articulated the need for us all to move from the extractivist thinking of the ‘whitefella’ culture, which arrived with the British coloniser settlers in 1789, towards the relationist thinking of First Nations cultures, which have looked after this country for over 65,000 years. The longest living continuous human culture on Planet Earth today.

In particular we acknowledge her leadership in calling for the development of a distinctive Australian school of philosophy that is inclusive of the First Nations relationist worldview as distinct from the Western philosophical canon. Given that Australia now declares our national identity rests on this Indigenous cultural foundation, we urgently need our philosophers to step up and provide us with philosophy that underscores this, rather than merely plugging into international movements like post-humanism.

Another inspirational thinker we acknowledged in our journey is Vanessa de Oliveira Andreotti from the University of Columbia in Canada, which is a hotbed of post-colonial scholarship. She locates this extractivist logic in what she calls the modernity/coloniality complex. Forcing us to recognise that modernity, for all its embracing of humanistic values, celebrated in the UN Declaration of Human Rights, rests on a bed of colonial exploitation and destruction of First Nations cultures around the globe. The wealth of Advanced First World economies that underpin modernity and its rich materialist culture, was gained at the expense of the colonised, which in the words of Franz Fannon became ‘The Wretched of the Earth’.

For a deep dive into these inspirations, check out our recent past Enlivenment blog posts, particularly:

https://enlivenment.network/2025/08/20/parsing-the-grammar-of-reality-a-response-to-ai/

https://enlivenment.network/2025/07/09/connecting-threads/

https://enlivenment.network/2025/06/21/the-australian-way-part-2/

https://enlivenment.network/2025/04/03/finding-a-pathway-through-the-debris/

Across the Colonial Divide

Catherine and I are both ‘whitefellas’. British, born and bred, Catherine is now an Australian. I am Australian, born of Anglo-Irish-Danish heritage in Lithgow NSW, but ‘bred’ in Bundaberg, rural Queensland. We both began our questioning of our ‘whitefella’ cultural heritage through the culture shock of finding ourselves in Papua New Guinea. Catherine arrived as a teacher of teachers at Mt Hagen Catholic Teachers’ College in 1971, which exposed her to life in several village cultures across the breadth of PNG, enabling her to experience the relationships between dance, carving, singing, clothing, ceremony, language, land and language, in ways previously unknown to her in her ‘western world.’

I arrived in PNG in the early 1970s as the wife of a Trobriand Islander, whom I met and married while we were both students at UNSW. Although I married into an Indigenous family, I was part of the new elite living in Port Moresby, deeply engaged in the business of ‘development’—the deliberative introduction of ‘whitefella’ culture and managerialist thinking in the name of modernisation. I was therefore actively involved in trying to make sense of the clash between indigenous PNG cultural assumptions and those that underpinned this shift to managerialist thinking in order to enable Papua New Guinea to achieve its independence.

This involved PNG changing from being a colony under Australian administration to becoming a new independent nation-state that blended together over 700 Indigenous language groups, whose economy was based on subsistence farming and coastal fishing in largely self-sufficient autonomous small culture groups, each with their own customs and sense of identity. Throughout this time, my ways of making sense of things around me were continually challenged by this world of very different cultures and its clash with the assumptions of my Western worldview and its reliance on scientific materialism.

Questing Cultural Journeys

Catherine is adamant that you need this sort of culture shock of immersion in cultures radically different to your own, to really question the pervasive hegemony of ‘whitefella’ cultural assumptions, and go on a journey to unlearn all the threads that have bound your previous worldview.

After leaving PNG Catherine came to Australia searching for ways to integrate her fragmented worldview in Australia. Privileged with a Gough Whitlam’s Tertiary Education Allowance she enrolled in the South Australian School of Art in North Adelaide during the Don Dunstan years, where she became the founding Coordinator of the first Feminist Art organisation in South Australia, ‘The Women’s Art Movement’, collaborating with women in art in Melbourne and Sydney. Catherine found that due to the rawness and depth of her creative art practice she could tell stories of what was happening from the inside.

Her searching spirit led her to become part of an intentional community, connecting with the Western esoteric spiritual traditions, including the anthroposophy of Rudolph Steiner, while practising as an artist-in-community—from Housing Commission High rise flats to prisons, correctional institutions, mental hospitals and alcohol and drug dependency centres. It was while immersed in the Iramoo Grassland Reserve project in Melbourne’s West, that Catherine learned the on-ground realities of colonisation in allyship with Wurundjeri Woiwurrung artists and Elders, while completing a Master of Visual Arts Research on ‘Colour and Human Functioning’ at La Trobe University. This led to her current practice of creating collaborative artworks on Country, now in East Gippsland.

My journey was long and complex. I came back to Australia as a single mother of two small children of mixed-race/cultural identity after my husband and I separated, continuing on with my managerialist ways of thinking through professional work in the NSW public service and the non-government sector at NCOSS. I’d married across the racial and colonial divide, and so I had the strong humanistic value of challenging racism and arguing for social justice. But it took a weird, visceral experience in the Australian Museum, when visiting the Massim Collection of Trobriand Island artefacts with my two small children, to start the unravelling of the tenacity of my ‘whitefella’ worldview assumptions. This began what I called at the time, my journey into the epistemological abyss, the questioning of the very act of ‘knowing’, of how we experience reality to make sense of the world. This got me very interested in Joseph Campbell’s writings on comparative mythology, looking for deep symbols that formed connections across cultures, for threads of shared meaning in human history.

However, for me it took another failed romantic relationship, along with a health crisis with cancer, for the culture shock unravelling to really gather pace. Thus, in parallel with my undertaking postgraduate studies in science and technology studies focused on the sociology of technological innovation, I sought spiritual and emotional refuge in the teachings of Tibetan Buddhism about the nature of human suffering, and how to transform it. This not only introduced me to a very different worldview about the nature of reality, but also to embodied meditation practices to ‘re-train’ how I used my mind and faculty of awareness. I discovered the power of inner stillness and pervasive non-thinking awareness, which Buddhism regards as the nature of wisdom.

My postgraduate studies, and my interest in ‘ways of knowing’ also exposed me to a wide variety of feminist thinking on the ‘masculinity of science’, challenging the ‘male gaze’ about all manner of ways we make sense of things in our society. Catherine also immersed herself in the feminist thinking that was informing the world of art practice, particularly eco-art practice. My own exposure to feminist thinking got me learning how to make large ceramic sculptures for my garden: celebrating the fecundity of ‘female’ nature in a large vessel featuring a woman lying on her back, which now adorns my outdoor deck, an azalea plant bursting from her belly.

In this way Catherine and I complement one another. She is an embodied practising creative community collaborator artist, whilst I’m a writer-intellectual thinker. But I’ve dabbled in the world of art practice and arts community, while she has also dived into the business of deep intellectual thinking in her own journey.

Reconciliation

Because I am Australian, my interest in wisdom as a domain of knowledge got me interested in finding out how Aboriginal culture treated the idea of wisdom, particularly in the strong role that Elders play in their culture, and the great respect with which both Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island people hold their Elders as cultural custodians. This has some similarity with how wisdom teachers (lamas) within the Tibetan Buddhist tradition are held. This led me to meet up with Uncle Bob Randall, an Aboriginal Elder from Central Desert Country, and at his invitation to work with him on his autobiography, later published as ‘Songman’ (2003).

Thus, each in our different ways, beginning with our separate encounters with the world of PNG, our different spiritual journeys and encounters with feminist thinking, Catherine and I ended up facing the challenge of deeply encountering Australia’s own Indigenous cultural heritage and the whole business of reconciliation that our colonial history of violence, dispossession and cultural denial is demanding of us today.

Through our long history in social activism, both of us have realised that progress in social justice and equity, and truth-telling about the history, is not enough. That there are deeper ontological issues at the heart of the challenge—about the very way we understand the nature of reality.

For, unless we come to grips with this, our attempts at social justice, at ‘Closing the Gap’ becomes just another form of assimilation into ‘whitefella’ culture – educational achievement, good jobs, higher incomes, housing and health status, etc. The psychic gap remains as does the economic viability of remote communities.

While it is understandable that First Nations people want the same access to these ‘goods and services’ as everyone else, the sad and brutal truth is that there is ultimately a high price to pay. We see and feel it growing and intensifying all around us.

The High Price of ‘Whitefella’ Culture

A whole set of other problems have come along with modernity’s high ‘standard of living’: its endless array of material goods; of technological marvels; easy access to international travel; rich variety of entertainment at our fingertips; and access to medical services that prolong life and provide miracle drugs and cures to the illnesses that beset human beings.

More and more we are confronted that all of the following constitute just part of the high PRICE of our much desired ‘standard of living’ and its intensifying consumerism:

• The destruction and desecration of the very conditions that underpin the viability of human life on planet Earth – the climate and environmental crises engulfing us
• The technological intensification of militarised violence in the political contest between and within groups (organised as nation states or political groupings), for access to economic resources, wealth and power
• The progressive commodification of all aspects of society into ‘products and services’ for the market, intensified through the impact of social media and digital marketing, and now being amplified through the application of AI products and services
• Rising levels of psychological distress such as anxiety, depression, suicidal ideation, alienation and loneliness within all human populations, across all income levels, along with increasing wealth inequality and the fracturing of social cohesion within modern multi-ethnic democratic societies, such as Australia.

The Productivity Roundtable, convened with much fanfare by the Treasurer, Jim Chalmers, was an illustration of how the cult of ‘economism’ has subsumed society, to the virtual exclusion of other pressing and underlying concerns. Too easily through the lens of managerialism, we forget that standards of living are not just about material goods and services, but the spiritual quality of our lives as embodied members of the natural world and our more-than-human kin.

As Michael Vardon notes:

At the table were bankers, unionists, housing experts and business groups – but only one environmental advocate, former treasury secretary Ken Henry.

Hard Truths

Vardon goes on to note that in the mid-20th century, economists and policymakers commonly assumed nature had no limits. By the end of the century, it was abundantly clear this wasn’t true. In the 21st century, this view is patently absurd. Nature has hard limits. Water can be used up. Fisheries can be fished out. Pollinators can die out. The environment and the economy are not separate – one enables the other.

The ’whitefella’ cultural response to these hard truths is to advocate for ‘natural accounting’: the collection of hard data about the ‘state of the environment’ so that the environment can be integrated into economic thinking in terms of planning approvals. The sort of transactional trade-offs that the Treasurer is arguing that underpins all budget decisions in the allocation of scarce resources. Former Treasury Secretary, Ken Henry has argued that if we draw down on natural capital without knowing how much we have, how much is needed, or how it contributes to the economy or wellbeing, we will deliver “intergenerational bastardry” – worsening the lives of future generations through our actions today.

But the really hard truth is that this intergenerational bastardry is more than economic.

It is spiritual, it cuts deep into our psyches. 

It cannot be solved through managerialism, however well-intentioned. It requires a deep ontological dive into the very way we know and experience the nature of reality.

The long arm of modernity/coloniality, shaped by the ‘whitefella’ worldview of scientific materialism, and the ontological split between humans and nature as a binary construct, has gradually torn at the very soul of humans in their beingness.

In this regard we must not be blind to the way the Church, as well as providing succour to the ‘Wretched of the Earth’ has always been a hand maiden to capitalist extractivism. It is why humanistic modernity in the form of the well-meaning liberal, is so difficult to confront. One face is full of concern: about social justice, about mercy, about love and support. But the other face of the very same coin is about righteousness, winning, control, punishment, the separation between an ‘us’ and a ‘them’; the preservation of an unconscious and assumed privilege—whether that ‘privilege’ be assigned to humans over the non-human species with whom we share the Earth, or assigned to men over women, or to one ethnic group over another—the possibilities go on.

THIS hard truth is what the journey towards a relationist worldview demands of us.

Cultural Appropriation Hard Truths

Australia loudly proclaims that we are the most successful multicultural nation in the world. The growing support for ‘white ethno-nationalism’ that we see occurring in other modern democratic nation states in Europe remains a fringe movement in Australia, as does the sort of intensifying cultural divides we are witnessing in the United States, whose welcoming mat to immigrants has been symbolised by the Statue of Liberty at the entrance to New York.

We also now proclaim that our national identity rests not on the British heritage of the first colonial settlers 250 years ago, but on our First Nations heritage of more than 65,000 years.

Our difficulty in living the truth of this as that this First Nations cultural heritage is ‘owned’ by only 5 percent of the population, encoded in Songlines and ceremonial knowledge that is held by recognised cultural custodians. Only too well aware of the ‘commodification’ processes of ‘whitefella culture’, First Nations leaders have insisted that protocols about cultural appropriation should protect their cultural heritage. These protocols are now enshrined in intellectual property, research ethics and public policy regulations that lock out non-Indigenous Australians who comprise 95 percent of the population.

Further, as the British heritage, the basis of the institutional structures of modern Australia in law, government, business culture and civil society, is based on an extractivist and binary logic, while the First Nations heritage is based on a relationist and non-binary logic, how then do we develop a shared cultural ontology across this divide?

How then do the 95 percent of us find our way into a relationist worldview so that we can embrace the  cultural foundations of our proclaimed national identity? How do we build the two-way form of learning that the great Yolngu leader, the late Galarrwuy Yunupingu called for, as the inspiration for his Garma Institute? Do the insights of the mysterious world of quantum physics hold some answers?

This is the task we at the Enlivenment Network have set ourselves. Tune in for more Enlivenment Raves as we continue these conversations of exploration and revelation.