The Wild Reed: An Australian Spirituality: “A Festival of Light and Rock”

Saturday, July 12, 2025

An Australian Spirituality: “A Festival of Light and Rock”

Following is a second excerpt from David Tacey’s 1995 book Edge of the Sacred: Transformation in Australia. (For the first, click here.)

Our spiritual way here [in Australia] cannot be, as was said by Hermes Trismegistus and other real or legendary Europeans, an opus contra mnaturam, a work against nature. There is too much nature in Australia, too much rock, too much prima materia or untransformed matter. If we heroically pitted ourselves against nature here in a bid to transform nature into spirit, we would go mad, breakdown, or be consumed by nature. The entire heroic fantasy about subduing nature, conquering Gaia or controlling Mother Earth is a European fantasy, which can never work in Australia. This country demands a different archetypal style, a style that works with nature rather than against it. The very notion that spirit is opposed to matter cannot take root here. Our spiritual mode will have to be ecological, a work with nature, an opus cum natura.

In this important aspect we must take our cue from the Aboriginal people and not from Western Europe. Herein lies what must be regional, local, or particular about an Australian spirituality. We cannot simply import Judeo-Christianity into this country and think that this will suffice. It won’t work, because it is based solidly on masculine and dualistic notions of spirit and matter that can make little sense here. The Australian Way will have to be ecological, like the Aboriginal people themselves. The new spirituality that arises from Australian experience will, I believe, be precisely the kind of spirituality that will set a timely example to the rest of the world. It will be non-heroic and will not go the way of the now exhausted heroism of Western Europe or North America. It will not be patriarchal, because the Earth Mother is far too strong here.

. . . My own experience in Alice Springs taught me to love and respect the Earth Mother in ways that I could not have achieved while living in Melbourne. It was the Earth Mother and her stony landscape that broke the encasement of my rational ego and drew me into a larger sense of identity, that opened up a dialogue between myself and the archetypal other. Naturally the vast expanses and the sheer weight of all this rock terrified me at times, and one can easily feel crushed by it. But Australian landscape is like the unconscious itself: if you respect it and realise the ego can never hope to assimilate, conquer, or transform it, you are allowed to survive. That is and must be our way, a humble aboriginal way, a shamanic way. Les Murray has said that the sheer space and size of this country is “one of the great, poorly explored spiritual resources of Australia,” since “in the huge spaces of the outback, ordinary souls expand into splendid [forms].” Randolph Stow has pointed out that “when one is alone with [the country], one feels in one way very small, in another gigantic.” The actual ego-personality is dwarfed and made to feel quite small and puny, but the soul leaps out of its human encasement and ecstatically unites with the greater world. “Alone in the bush, with maybe a single crow . . . a phrase like ‘liberation of the spirit’ may begin to sound meaningful.”

. . . I have felt that the rocks and mountain ranges of central Australia were large enough to accommodate many Dreamings: perhaps a different dreaming for everyone who comes into geophysical contact with them. The fact that there could be many Dreamings did not, for me, cancel out the validity or importance of my own or any other dreaming. The landscape itself was plural, ever-changing, a festival of light and rock, always different, and so naturally this complex world would give rise to many stories, to many myths of place. In my heart I realized the priority and respected the major status of the Aboriginal stories that had already accounted for the places that I mooned around as a boy. But I always felt, arrogantly perhaps, that there was still room for my own psychic participation in the land. It had already happened anyway, and it was not something I could call a stop to on political, ideological, racial, or any other grounds.