Encounter

In today's program, former Chair of the Reconciliation Council and former Catholic priest, Pat Dodson, shares his thoughts with Bill Bunbury about contemporary Christianity and the way it has interacted with traditional belief since European settlement.

Transcript

This transcript was typed from a recording of the program. The ABC cannot guarantee its complete accuracy because of the possibility of mishearing and occasional difficulty in identifying speakers.

CHOIR - Palestrina Sanctus/Arrente Ilboraterarirai

Bill Bunbury: Welcome to Encounter. I'm Bill Bunbury and in today's program, Vatican 2 or Mission Control, we'll share the thoughts of the distinguished indigenous leader and former Chair of the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation, Pat Dodson.

Pat Dodson: Three days ago I was out on part of my traditional country for which I normally can't get access through, because of the pastoralists that hold it. But on this attractive country that I have traditional association with, there's a lease, there are some 20 or so chalets being built. I was there three or four months ago, there was absolutely nothing. Nothing was there, except the bush and the stories and the song, and evidence of the occupation of the land from my people, in terms of middens and shell and those things, because it's on the coast, an absolutely tragedy. The song that's sung for that part of the country is about the turtles coming up to the beach and laying the eggs on the beach there, and the wind that blows through there, the cool breeze and the water is a central water place for where people travelled and met. And now this is being promoted as a holiday resort.

When we see that, it goes to the very heart of our being. It goes to the very, what we call our lian, our spirit. And that spirit becomes sad, and the sadness of that spirit is what leads to people being depressed, people being lost, people being alienated, people feeling severed from anything that's given them life.

Bill Bunbury: I recorded those comments from Pat Dodson some years ago, but his views of the connection between land and religion haven't changed, probably depended, in fact.

So in today's program we'll explore both his personal Encounter with Christianity and his perception of the way a Western religion has affected his own people.

Pat Dodson was born in Broome in 1948.

The Dodsons were Yawuru people from the Kimberley. His mother was brought up in Broome but had grown up under the influence of the Beagle Bay Mission to the north of Broome. Later, however, the family moved to Katherine in the Northern Territory where they were among the few indigenous Catholics in that town.

In his late teens, in the 1960s, Pat Dodson worked with a team of Aboriginal drovers.

Pat Dodson: From my own personal experience in the early '60s, working with a group of four or five Aboriginal men, we drove a mob of cattle from a place called Wularoo in the Katherine, which is about 80, 100 kilometres or 100 miles from Katherine, three or four days. We got to a point outside of Katherine where the Manager came out, picked me out from the team, gave me five-pound I think it was, gave those men five-pound, and they were experienced ringers and I was a jackeroo, and when they got to town, he told them to go to one of the shops and they'd get a new pair of trousers and a shirt and a hat, and then that would be it, that's the wages.

Now they got the same wages as me for men who were experienced and people that I admired, so there was very little monetary remuneration for these people. There were no Social Security entitlements, so if they didn't have family, they had to basically find another job somewhere if that was possible, or fish and hunt in the vicinity of where they were dumped, to get sustenance or be looked after by someone else.

Bill Bunbury: Concern for economic and social justice for his own people, together with this strong sense of the value of their culture were two influences that impelled Pat Dodson to train for the priesthood.

He was ordained in Broome in May 1975 and shortly afterwards went to work as a parish priest at Wadeye near Port Keats in the Northern Territory.

In his own words, he didn't feel an urgent call from God to become a priest, but rather acted from his personal conviction that European pastors couldn't always reach through to Aboriginal Christians. And they couldn't always understand indigenous ways of looking at the world and their understanding of their place in the cosmos.

Though he's no longer a priest, those beliefs still sustain Pat Dodson in his work in the secular world.

We spent time recently talking about his view of Christianity and its relationship to traditional belief, starting with his work as parish priest in the Northern Territory.

Pat Dodson: In tune with that period, also looking at how the religious beliefs of the Aboriginal people who lived in that area, and there were a number of different tribes, but very closely aligned, but how the religious beliefs interacted with the form of Christianity, the Catholic form of Christianity, that had obviously influenced and brought about change in the belief. So there was this almost denial of the Aboriginal belief and structure because the belief and structure in the Aboriginal world is about also the law, what is called the Aboriginal law, and the law is often, in Western eyes, confused with forms of morality, and practice, and usually the practice is seen as contrary or detrimental to individuals.

I think to try and ground this down, there was a moral view that the Christians had, the Catholics had, that there was aspects of the Aboriginal law that were morally detrimental to the salvation of people. And so the clear response, and it was a blatant response in the early period, where the ceremonial objects that belonged to the people, were destroyed, collected up and destroyed.

Now that level of insensitivity seemed to pervade a lot of the practice, and what it then does is try to substitute a totally new and alien belief structure onto people whose whole foundation and identity and whose customary obligations to one another, and interaction with one another, is grounded on a totally different basis, in the sense of its knowledge and information and its practice.

In terms of its principles, those principles aren't necessarily that diverse, because they're principles about respect, they're principles about acknowledgement, there's principles to care, to look after and there's principles to abide by a moral protocol, so you don't marry the wrong people, which is part of the customary law that you should marry in a certain predetermined way within choice, that is, that you marry according to a certain kinship classification, and you don't marry other people. And you bring in the Christian tradition which says, 'Well you can choose to marry whom you wish' and that those customary classifications are no longer relevant, then you lead to certain social decay and chaos.

Bill Bunbury: In the marriage situation, where you talk about who you should marry or not marry, is that based on an intuitive understanding of the risk of in-breeding, of incest, or what's it based on?

Pat Dodson: No, it's based on the belief that there are certain categories to which you're born to, and when you're born as a child, you're born as a particular person. You get a name, but you're also born into a class of people. A Bunniga person is born as a Bunniga person.

Bill Bunbury: This isn't class in a vertical sense then?

Pat Dodson: No, no, it's a classification, and some other person, who's born on the same day, but from different people, are born as a Burungu person for instance. You're born into that, and that sets about how you respond and relate to other people. So you marry according to the pattern, or the authority that's embedded in your society. That's the ideal.

There are people, because of Christianity, made choices, and marry outside of that, and sometimes they marry what we'd say is in the wrong way. So you get a son marrying his mother, in a classificatory sense, which would be not permissible in our society. So those laws are there not to respond simply to notions of incest or inter-breeding, it may well have had some foundation, but they've come from ancient times. The reason is not as clear-cut as 'You do this because we don't want in-breeding, the reason is a different reason, is that it comes from what we would say the Dreaming, the Boogarigura, the creation time, as the way to live. And that way is based for all sorts of reasons. One of those may well have been to prohibit that form of social behaviour.

Bill Bunbury: But its value would be what? to strengthen your identity as a person, to know who you are and where you are in the scheme of things?

Pat Dodson: Absolutely. There's should never be a stranger or a lonely person in an indigenous society, because your kinship requires you to look after people and behave towards people in a certain way, whether they're your mother, your mother-in-law, your father-in-law, your sister-in-law, your wife, your grandchild, whoever it is in a relationship to you. There's no such thing as the stranger, there's no such thing as, I think in Christianity there's a fine story about the bloke being picked up on the road.

Bill Bunbury: The Good Samaritan.

Pat Dodson: The Good Samaritan. That was so impressive because that person was considered to be an outcast, not just someone lying by the side of the road. The notion of that outcast just doesn't exist in our society. But it is there today as a consequence of religion and society impacts.

Bill Bunbury: Pat Dodson and traditional Aboriginal marriage obligations.

For Pat Dodson, in his work at Wadeye, the conflict between the Christian notion of marriage and traditional law was just one of many problems faced by indigenous Christians.

Pat Dodson: That fracturing of kinship obligations, which is grounded in the law and in the belief, is continuously being substituted by appeals to Christian tenets of love your neighbour, do good to others, everyone's equal, which is fine, but could well have been a far more intelligent way of dealing with it. Now that's not to look back in hindsight and say people should have been smarter or not, I think that within their own beliefs, they should have been smarter about what it is that they did.

Bill Bunbury: Did you find those obvious signs of strain at Wadeye when you were working there, that people were dysfunctional because of this conflict of values?

Pat Dodson: I think that it was clearly an ongoing tension about how people ought to marry, and thankfully the societal practice, the societal practice, the customary law still governed that in the main, and there'd be strong protestation if people were to marry outside of their classification. I think it was with the social imperatives of how to live in the society, that often conflicted with the customary values.

The sacred places, sacred times, that is that mass was this time and you had to be there, or you need to perform and follow these sorts of instructions, and yet no credibility or not allowance for the sustaining and nurturing of the indigenous requirements, for instance if young men were required for pre-initiation instructions, then the school time-tabling and the requirements of that prevailed. Work prevailed, so the use of the assets to move people from point A to point B, became problematic.

And that tension came about until we finally, in my time, with a very enlightened brother, Catholic brother who's now passed away, Brother Andy Howley, who spent a lot of years at Bathurst Island, and worked with the Tiwi there, and so he was attuned to the cultural dimensions. He and I were able to work together in a way that allowed for the men in particular to stand aside from the normal mission pattern of work and obligations there, to actually sit down and reflect on what had happened in the course of missionary experience, and what had happened to their custom and law, and how might some of that custom and law be revived, and where they might see any aspects of their own law that they didn't particularly want to revive because of concerns that they might have about its dangers. And certainly to look at how to accommodate now the position of particularly women, and how to deal with accommodating their interest in a proper way.

The criticism of our society has been that it somehow or other is detrimental to woman. I must say I don't see that. I see some aspects where there's abuse, and obviously corruption that's taken place of the genuine beliefs of Aboriginal people, and there's far too much violence and those things, but that's not because of our society, that's a corruption of it. Because the position of women is quite clearly one of respect, and their position within the society is one where they do exercise a fair amount of influence and control over the events of the community. Because a lot of the study of Aboriginal societies have been by men, anthropologists who have focused basically on what men do. But there's a lot that the women do far more, that is of essential importance to the sustaining of the Aboriginal society, and that's a matter that the men recognise.

CHOIR - Arrente Altijirana Banbala

Bill Bunbury: Pat Dodson, parish priest at Wadeye in the Northern Territory in the late 1970s.

If his Aboriginal parishioners had problems reconciling traditional belief with Christianity, how was it for their priest? Did he find the same difficulties?

Pat Dodson: It became more of the disciplinary aspects I suppose, if you want to put it like that, of the church. That is the social ethos within which the church wraps itself up in, and the political allegiances it gives to the society, the western society, which become problematic.

I never had any conflicts with the Scriptures, with what they talked about, or the image of Christ, the exclusivity of all of that was a problem for me, that there was only one way in which you encountered the spiritual presence, and that was through the sacramental system for instance, that was an encountering moment of human beings and the divine. Whereas for me there are many occasions in Aboriginal practice which are just as sacramental, that they were encounters with the spiritual and with the capacity to be solvific, that is to save people, rather than there being an exclusive path to salvation which tended to be the Catholic Christian position, despite Vatican II, which had said that there were other ways in which people might find their salvation if they remained genuinely true to their own traditions and practices. And it was that tension I think that arose out of the Vatican II doctrines of Agentes and other things, that really weren't being intellectually, if I could put it that way, intellectually grappled with, they were set to one side, and that's where the tensions arose for me, that we did have some leadership out of the church at its very senior level, but at ground level, we were battling to accommodate anything that was different to what had been set by the founding fathers as it were of the mission, which was the pattern of destroying the culture.

There have been some attempts to adjust the liturgy so that the mass for instance might have aspects of Aboriginal dance or ceremony incorporated into it, or some language which is fine.

But central to that was still in the Catholic tradition, the act of consecration, and the belief in the transubstantiation, that is the changing of the wine and the water into the blood and body of Christ. Now as a concept, that kind of transformation is totally capable of being accepted and understood within the Aboriginal domain, there's nothing extraordinary about that, I think that's a point at which the Aboriginal intellect engages with the non-indigenous or the Western Christian concept.

MUSIC ARRENTE SINGING

Pat Dodson: The impacts of the Vatican Council were very slowly being acknowledged and trying to transfer. So it had just come out of being Latin in the main, to English, the vernacular. Now the vernacular wasn't English, the vernacular was Murrinbutha. But yet we hadn't quite got to the vernacular, it was that sort of inconsistency, because the English concepts are not always readily understood for what they're trying to project in an indigenous world. And similarly with indigenous concepts. But at that time there was no dialogue, there was no discussion. Truth resided in the one entity, that it was the local priest. Even for the sisters if there were Catholic operations, or whoever the minister was, the truth resided in him, which I always found quite quaint I must say, given that no-one's got a hotline to God. And no-one's got a monopoly on morality.

MUSIC - Tallis - Sanctus.

Bill Bunbury: You're with Encounter on Radio National, and we're sharing Pat Dodson's thoughts on reconciling European Christianity with an Aboriginal world view.

Pat Dodson: It's trying to shift the trappings of the manifestation of the Western religion into a more logical setting. For instance, sitting under a gum tree celebrating the Eucharist as a more relevant setting, with people sitting on the ground around, rather than all in a pews in the church looking at an altar. And then having the regularity of time and place, which I think was what Christians originally rebelled against the Jewish foundations for becoming so tied to time and place, whereas God was everywhere, in the belief, and so he is in the Aboriginal belief.

There is an omnipresence of spiritual beings and creation, and again, that there is only one creator, and in a sense that's not a major problem for indigenous people either. Because there are traditions of our beliefs, which rely on creating beings that gave form to the surf and gave form and language, and gave countries, and all the moral codes to indigenous people.

Now the Christian story is a bit different, and there are various forms of Christology, if you look at the four Gospels, you get four different versions of who Christ is, and some of those images of who he is are far more attractive than others. I think John's Gospel is a bit more ethereal and takes us to a more divine, removed entity, whereas you get down to Mark and some of those blokes, who are more practical, who have a healing type Christological presence. Now there are similar sorts of stories within the indigenous traditions of healing, and of good and evil, of people who do things wrong and create things for the good of people, and the moral code is compatible, it emanates from those stories, in the same way as they do out of the Bible in the Old Testament and the New Testament.

Bill Bunbury: You spoke earlier about the idea of having mass under a gum tree, and that made me think about the intense commitment in Aboriginal cosmology to living within the environment, belonging to it, and I'm thinking there of passages from Scripture that might conflict, like 'Man shall have dominion over the earth, the fish, the fowl and everything that is in it.' Is that reconcilable with an Aboriginal cosmology?

Pat Dodson: No, man is certainly not the dominant figure; man is part of creation, and all other forms of creation have a relationship to mankind, and they have special relationships in some cases, so people have what we would say is a ri or a spirit that is actually in a kinship relationship to you.

You might call that your brother, because that's the symbolic representation of where the essence of your life and being have come from. Now that might sound a bit Buddhist, but it's definitely indigenous. So your job or your responsibility is to look after creation as if you look after your own family. So it's not to dominate and exploit, it's to actually live in harmony and in association, and to take what will sustain you, rather than to exploit that. And the notion of exploiting things for profit is just totally anathema, and that's what we're being groomed to learn these days, is to become economic opportunists, in the same way as the Western society expects people to.

Bill Bunbury: Western society is very critical of theocracies and the concern about for example an Islamic state is that you would have a society where God's laws would dictate everything that happened. In a way though, what you're positing in a way is a theocracy, isn't it?

Pat Dodson: Well it's interesting you say that, because there was an argument, a debate, at one stage, that I had, and put forward this concept that we're really about trying to create theocratic states, because the rule of religion, or the laws that emanate out of the religious beliefs that underpin Aboriginal societies, should have equal value in the way we manage and govern the society, which is interesting; the High Court of Australia has come to a similar view lately, about Mabo, that the customary laws of Aboriginal people should be given equal recognition. It's taking us a bit of time to get to that, but in religion the dominance of indigenous laws as the basis for the society, I still don't see, maybe we don't understand the Islamic beneficial aspects as much as we should, and therefore we become afraid it represents a form of society that is alien.

Bill Bunbury: Well we tend to think of it as proselytising and suggesting everybody else should be like that. Would that be an important distinction for you, that an indigenous theocratic state would be a conservative institution which would sustain the law, but not seek to impose it on others?

Pat Dodson: Absolutely. Aboriginal societies are respectful of other traditions, and it's not a proselytising based belief structure, it seeks to sustain and maintain the beliefs of its people, and it's quite clear about that, and it's unique in that it is location specific. That is, it belongs to certain area, a certain place, those people belong to that place, they're not transportable to other places, and in that sense, its kinship based, that is the relationships are regularised on the basis of your obligations and responsibilities that flow from the particular kinship grouping that you belong to, and if you have a society that's ordered in that manner, far less social decay takes place, and far more order.

ABORIGINAL CHANTING

Bill Bunbury: But was this 'order' in traditional society, in one way or another, considerably affected by first contacts?

If many Aboriginal communities today are cultural dysfunctional, Pat Dodson sees that condition in part as the result of early missionary assumptions about their own culture.

Pat Dodson: I think it's really the Westernisation that comes within which the Christianity is wrapped up in.

Bill Bunbury: So if we put that into an historical context, the missions, if we look at the work of missionaries for example in the 19th and 20th century, they're still, what, in your view, subordinate to the requirements of the State?

Pat Dodson: Absolutely. They're carrying out State policy, you know, there is no doubt that they were part of the stolen generation's philosophy.

Bill Bunbury: And yet they saw themselves, didn't they? As ameliorators of the indigenous condition; they saw themselves as protecting them against the worst outrages of settlers and pastoralists.

Pat Dodson: Absolutely. And many of them did, and genuinely belief that, that they were a bit of an oasis in the sea of slaughter and massacre. When pastoralists were going out and killing people. But these were little havens for indigenous people to be cared for in the most humane manner as possible. Now not all missions have got the same record. There were some places that were absolutely diabolical, in terms of the people that ran them, and I'm not referring you just to Catholic missions.

Bill Bunbury: What, they became authoritarian in the same way that anyone else did?

Pat Dodson: Absolutely. They dominated the lives, they were prescriptive about how you behaved, they obliterated languages, they separated kids from their parents, put them into dormitories, they basically treated adults as children till their dying day, and they did this all under the guise of this being something good to do. Now there's been some enlightenment about this since those days, but that tradition was very much the mould in which I encountered the church in that period that I was there.

The schooling, the institutional aspects of Christianity is usually through the school in the first instance, and the schools were very much about transforming yourself from this entity and environment into some other one, which never ever happened, never happened in most cases. Very few people actually moved away from their societies, and if they did move away, they ended up on the streets or on the margins of some other town. But they never moved into the promised land that is the middle-class Australian way of living, which is what part of the educational aspects were about.

And certainly to see the strengthening of the inter-relationships, that is the inter-marrying of indigenous people to themselves, Aboriginal people marrying amongst themselves, was often seen as an impediment to the progress. So it is fairly grounded in assimilationist thinking, and that's got nothing to do with Christianity, absolutely nothing to do with it. Except it's coming through the people of that background, and it's a re-shaping; the missionaries were trying to re-shape Aborigines into their own images, which was not what Christianity's about. So the need for real dialogue and discussion and collaboration were not operational principles of missionaries. They did not work on consensus. They did not work on collaboration, they worked on control and management and on diminishing the remnants of the indigenous societal practices, with a view to a smooth transfer of assimilation into the Westernised way of living.

Now that might be taken as a broad criticism of a lot of this, and I'm not pretending that I would have been smarter or not, but I think as an indigenous person, you know these things, and you try to bring these things to the forefront of those who've had these responsibilities, and so the social decay that we've got now in Australia is partly brought about because of the failure of the application of assimilation, and the failure of the attempt to Westernise us. We've got the dregs of all of that, and there's no belief in the value of anything.

CHOIR - Agnus Dei - Tallis

Bill Bunbury: Pat Dodson, and a critique of Christianity, European-style, as it affected Aboriginal Australians. So does traditional belief offer an alternative?

Pat Dodson: Traditional belief provides an integrated intelligence to your position as a human being within the cosmos and within the society, and it's integrated to the locations of the land that you come from. The Western belief structure creates an artificial concept that there is a community somewhere, called the Christian community, who ostensibly are practising love for their neighbour and caring for each other, which is not manifest. We have a totally different encounter with what the Western society is, and that's a very uncaring society, and you see the uniqueness of individuals within it who are extraordinary in how they do care for those who are marginalised and impoverished and left at the margins of the towns and the cities, and the poor. But that's not the centrality of the society.

When indigenous people talk about our society, we talk about the centrality of it, that is, these are universal rules for our society, and we're all bound and obliged to honour them and to live by them and to ensure that they're handed on for the preservation and the sustaining of our people.

Unfortunately we have ideological differences with the policymakers of the country. Assimilation, self-management, self-empowerment, what do they call these things? It's all about changing us from who we are to something different. And Christianity's part of the motivation for that, and its stereotypical views about who indigenous peoples are, and what we're capable of, sustain those policies. So that, OK, you can't allow Aboriginal people a say over the capacity to deal with those things that are impacting in a land-based context, is about a right to negotiate over the impacts that are going to happen. The enlightened people in the past have seen the importance of that connection, that the authority to say what happens to you is a very important thing. For some reason, it's seen as almost anathema in Western society to allow the indigenous people to have that capacity.

Given the negative influences and the impacts and the lack of freedom that we've experienced in the capacity to determine our own directions and lives, in the face of the inter-face between Western society and outs, the freedom of choice to us has always been denied. Christianity has assisted the process of bringing about that form of subjugation.

Announcer: And now here is Dr J.J. Stultz, the President of the United Evangelical Luthern Church of Australia, to explain the service.

J.J. Stultz: Hermannsburg and the mission work of the Lutherans there, and among native tribes in Central Australia, is well-known. The plan evolved by the present Superintendent, Pastor F.W. Altrecht. He is keeping untouched natives away from white settlements where they would quickly perish like moths in a light, replacing the state, which their ancient beliefs gave them by a higher faith, a Christian faith, claiming them in a benevolent segregation in crafts gradually to make them fit into an Australian community.

SINGING

Bill Bunbury: I guess the tragedy was always, wasn't it, that this way of thinking was invisible to Europeans, just as Aboriginal evidence of occupation seemed invisible. There weren't buildings or palaces or castles, there weren't temples or churches. Is it true to say that in the same way for missionaries perhaps, and for other Europeans, that religion, that sense of understanding of the cosmology was also invisible?

Pat Dodson: Well I think that's true, but I think it's probably more pro-active, in the sense that they had constructed images by Darwin and other people about the noble savages or the missing links, or the evolutionary stage, that we were at some phase of that evolutionary stage but hadn't quite made it to the supreme stage that the Westerners had made.

So you had all of that, and it's still got that in our society, that somehow or other we were childlike or so simple or incapable of bearing our own responsibilities, etc. And so there was the invisibility was absolutely clouded by the misperception, and the misperception is something that we're continuously trying to unpack in the inter-relationship with non-Aboriginal people today. That we are a unique people, and we do have some strong beliefs, and that they are valid. They're valid, and that they should be respected and they should be honoured in the way that we tried on everything, of value to human beings in this world.

But the invisibility I think is more constructed than simply someone with a good heart not seeing. I think it's a construction of the societies out of which these people came. And to destroy the belief structures of another race of people, whether it's the Aboriginal people or whether it's been the Island peoples by missionaries, would have to be the grossest form of assault and act of abomination. Christianity has got a role to liberate people, and the liberation should be in accordance with the beliefs of those peoples, not through the imposition of the beliefs of Christianity on the top of those people.

Bill Bunbury: Are you hopeful that that wheel has turned? That there's a recognition that this has not been the best way to do it?

Pat Dodson: Oh well Christianity's having its own problems at the moment, it seems to me, and there are obviously people far more enlightened about these matters today. But there's still an underpinning I think, of sustaining the assimilation's mode as the means by which to achieve salvation. Now that's got to be an erroneous way of thinking, and it's trying to create the dialogue I think and the interaction and understanding at some of these greater levels, than simply the prejudice of the pub or wherever it is, dictate how to perceive indigenous peoples in this country.

CHOIR - Kyrie - Palestrina

Bill Bunbury: In your own position now, and with your own thoughts about this, have you rejected Christianity and the way that you were brought up to respect it and observe it?

Pat Dodson: In the way it's been packaged, yes. But I don't think the broader spiritual understanding of it, I think there's a lot of flaws in some of its disciplinary approaches. A good example for me is the third right of confession for instance, or what do they call it? Reconciliation. Which has allowed people who for whatever reason, found it difficult to go to a one-on-one interface encounter with a priest to confess whatever it is that they've ever done wrong in their life. It allowed a public absolution of type. That has now been almost taken out of the practice of Catholicity.

Now I think that's a silly move myself, because it allowed the lost sheep, as it were, to find a way back through the beneficence and the gratuity. It's as if the prelates of the church have a monopoly on who is allowed in and who isn't. It's not their role.

That's a matter for the divine himself, or herself, whoever he is, to determine, and I would have thought if there's anything that Christianity should teach us is to err on the side of generosity, and not to become judgemental and condemnatory of those who may have failed in some way. And that's a huge thing, it's not something small, that's a huge thing, to actually forgive those who do wrong to you, it's a big thing. But to also keep alive in the sense of the spiritual life, keep people alive to see where the hope is for their salvation or their harmony or their peace or their happiness.

Bill Bunbury: Your views sound closer to a Protestant ethic of the direct relationship between the individual and the God; is that true in a sense of indigenous belief, that you have a direct relationship with the Creator?

Pat Dodson: I think that's the case. I think there is a very clear sense of awareness that wherever you are and whatever you do, there is a sense of the presence of the Creator, and how you behave and where you behave, is in some way within the knowledge of the Creator. So me and you sitting here having this discussion, I have a sense of the Creator in my life, and if that's closer to Protestantism, then maybe it is, but I don't think I sanctify the individual to that extent, because we are a collective, we live in society, we live communally, we are communally bound, and it's not the predominance of the individual who has to prevail.

Bill Bunbury: When we talk about that sense of someone being aware of how you behave, is that a fearful relationship, because you often think of those Christian images of Christ is watching you, the kind of thing if you ever remove and scrutinise in indigenous relationships to the divine, is there that sense of fearful apprehension or not?

Pat Dodson: No, it's not that. It's not that at all. I know, I've sat through some of these missions they used to be called when a certain religious order would go around and breathe hell and death and damnation basically and frighten the daylights out of you, that God was going to descend almost tomorrow, or he was outside the door and he's going to come in and whip you away.

No, it's not like that at all. It's a sense of a reassuring presence, and I'm sure in the best elements of Christianity that's the case as well. It's a reassuring presence, but it's also a reminder that your behaviour is accountable.

But it's accountable not just to God, but it's accountable to the structure and the society that you live within. Now that's what Christianity took away from indigenous societies. It became this God is watching you, sitting on some hill and you can't see him, or he's up there in the clouds, and he's likely to manifest himself at any point with lightning and a thunderclap.

Bill Bunbury: Or a big telescope.

Pat Dodson: Or a big telescope or whatever, and it's unreal. It's unreal, but hopefully Christianity's moved a bit further on than that.

FX MUSIC GONDWANALAND "LANDSCAPE"

Bill Bunbury: You're with Encounter on Radio National, and sharing the thoughts of former Catholic priest and indigenous leader, Pat Dodson.

For him, apprehending the creator is less a sense of a vision from above and more a matter of sensing the divine presence.

Pat Dodson: That was where the early Christians talked about in the breaking of bread there would be this sense of the presence of God, or Christ. Now we're a long way from that, it seems in Western society, and it's the moral overlays that often cloud whatever the image of God is for people, whereas for indigenous people, there's an integration because of the topography, the landscape, the sea, the waters, the hills, the trees that grow, the weather, the manifestation nationally where you see fires and floods, to me has a direct causal link to the fact of the extinguishment of native title in this country.

I see that as part of the creation, the part of creation that I believe in, and the creators I believe in, as a response to what it is that the Western society has done to the indigenous people, through their law. Now that probably isn't understood by John Howard or other people in Western society because they don't have any appreciation of the inter-relationship of the indigenous people, of the human beings to the cosmology and the topography, to the world.

But these forces that we call forces of nature, are in fact real dynamics, within our life, and it's the creation, the awareness of the creator, that these things can happen, that makes us aware, and we're careful about how we behave and how we should look after the country, and why we feel responsible for it.

Bill Bunbury: So if you explained that in Western rational terms, you've got to live inside an eco-system, not outside it.

Pat Dodson: And you live with it, you live inside of it, and you live with it. And you interact with it, and you're affected. We know that, if we haven't got water, we die.

We know if we don't look after the ground, the country, and we see this from the salinity problems we've got in this country, all these other things, that if you abuse what is provided, if you keep ripping down the trees, you abuse the country, then repercussions will flow, not just because of nature, nature for sure, but we have a belief about that. We believe that that is not the way to live, that is not the way to live in harmony with the creation, and if you continue to abuse it, it leads to the destruction of mankind himself, brought about by his own hands. It's got nothing to do with the God, it's the stupidity of human intelligence.

Now our belief has provided us with ways to cope with living in our environment, rules about what to eat, when to eat that sort of animal, or whatever it is. And when people die, for instance, they don't eat meat, they eat fish. There's customary practices. There are certain times you burn, and certain other times you don't. There's songs you sing for the country to keep it alive. You go and visit places so that it's not left empty, the country's not left empty. You don't have to build high-rise on these things you know.

There is a reverence for country, but it's not a reverence that makes practical survival irrational, I mean you've got to live, so you kill things to live and eat. But there is a reverence, even for the things you kill for food, or you take for food. And when you don't have those, you talk to the creation about the lack of them. In the past some of those things have been jested at, you know, rain dancers and those sorts of things, but these are real expressions of our beliefs. The same in the Christian tradition, they have prayers for rain, they have all these other things which is an aspect of those beliefs.

We pray when there's a disaster, well we have the same sense, we pray in our way. Indigenous people's beliefs are unique, they're not like the Greeks or the Romans or anyone else, these are indigenous beliefs of this country, a unique set of ways of living in harmony within the environment, within the cosmos, within the eco-system that has sustained us for thousands of years. The way of unique groups of people, absolutely unique people, with their own unique beliefs and practices, that was just trampled.

Bill Bunbury: Pat Dodson, former Catholic priest and former Chair of the Aboriginal Reconciliation Council.

Technical production for today's Encounter: Ian Manning.

I'm Bill Bunbury, and you've been with Encounter on Radio National.

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