“Time is like a river made up of the events which happen, and a violent stream; for as soon as a thing has been seen, it is carried away, and another comes in its place, and this will be carried away too.” Marcus Aurelius
I like it when people remind me of a goodness I knew
was there, but had temporarily overlooked.
Life is busy. There are challenges to rise to, people
to see, places to go. I live by a river.
I appreciate that it’s there because of the greenery I look out onto from my
window. Sometimes I walk or cycle along the path by the river to get somewhere.
It’s lovely. But I hadn’t really stopped and thought about the river and really
appreciated it for a while.
Last night I spent an hour by the river fishing. We
didn’t catch anything but as I was reminded, it’s not always about catching
fish. Being by the river in a city isn’t quite being away from it all, with the
soothing sounds of the passing trams and cars and the occasional siren as
background noise. But somehow at night, these seem more muffled. And down on
the jetty, it was a little bit like being away from it all.
The Yarra is teeming with life. There are fish sliding
by and insects dancing on the surface. A mother duck watched seemingly
unconcerned as one of her 10 ducklings fell from under her wing and rolled down
the bank into the river and then tried a few different ways of climbing back up
the bank before reaching safety. A stealthy swimmer plopped in the water and
torpedoed itself across the river. I wanted it to be a platypus. I’m fairly certain
it was a rat. There were bats flying overhead, frogs croaking.
For the aborigines of the Wurundjeri tribe (part of the Kulin nation
that had occupied the lands around Port Phillip Bay for at least 30,000 years)
the Yarra River was a life-source that had been etched into the landscape by
the ancestral creator spirit Bunjil - the wedge tailed eagle.
They called the river Birrarrung - "Place of Mists and
Shadows" and it was the dreaming path they followed and camped beside
through the calendar of countless seasons.
When white explorers arrived, they naturally saw the river as a means
for getting what they needed, and not at all in the same way as the aboriginals
saw it. For the white people, it was what made the land an eligible place to
settle. They used it for drinking water, washing water, and a place to get rid
of waste. It eventually provided them with gold during the gold rush years.
When John Batman met a group of aboriginals on the banks of the Yarra in
June, 1835, he gave them scissors, shirts, tomahawks, knives, blankets and
handkerchiefs, and in return, secured the signature marks of the chiefs on a
grant of land.
As is often the case in such situations, there was a disconnect between
parties in terms of language and cultural understanding. While Batman believed
he was now the greatest landowner in the world because the grant of land gave
him possession of 500,000 acres of land, including the Yarra River, the
aboriginals believed they had taken part in a friendship ceremony that would
allow Mr Batman temporary rights to cross through their country.
This riverside transaction signalled the beginning of the end of the
traditional tribal life of the Wurundjeri.
I don’t know what we can do to change the many things that have gone
wrong since then. I wish I did.
No river can return to its source, yet all rivers must have a beginning.
In a small way, and I understand, perhaps in a patronizingly white way,
although that’s not how I mean it, stopping to appreciate the river and all
that’s in it, fishing out an empty bottle to put in the bin and spending more
time with it, might be a step in the right direction.
"We are all visitors to this time, this place. We
are just passing through. Our purpose here is to observe, to learn, to grow, to
love... and then we return home. "
ABORIGINAL PROVERB
Listen:
Down by the river
