A number of years ago I was a regular guest teacher at a yoga teacher training program. I was there to speak about the yamas – five of yoga’s ten ethical guidelines and the first stage of raja yoga’s eightfold path to enlightenment – and their connection to the history of Australia. I first prepared the presentation as part of my own teacher training with Katie Rose.

Yama everyone. Yama is the greeting that Aboriginal people in north western NSW use amongst one another. Yama is also the topic of today’s discussion. Specifically the yamas of satya – truth telling, ahimsa – non-violence, and asteya – non stealing.

As we begin, I’d like to set an intention for our time together. The quote that I will read is drawn from The Spirit of Yoga.

Remember:

There is no joy without sorrow

No good without bad

No truth without lies

As you being your practice of yama do not be disturbed by what is unveiled. Appreciate your flaws as you appreciate your qualities. They help you to learn.

Today I’d like to explore the way in which our country – contemporary Australian society – built its foundations on the antithesis of these principles of satya, ahimsa and asteya.

Before I begin however, I want to acknowledge and pay my respects to the traditional owners of the land on which we meet today – the Gadigal people of the Eora nation – and I would like to note that I am not an Indigenous person and am not here to speak on behalf of Indigenous people.

Satya

My purpose in being here is to speak on behalf of my ancestors – the non-Indigenous people of this country – and to practice satya; to publicly acknowledge the truth of what we did, in the hope that this will contribute to a growing awareness and understanding of race relations in this country, because it is my fervent belief that without an acknowledgement of the truth, we cannot heal, and we will not be able to move forward as a strong and cohesive nation, confident in its own identity.

So I’d like to ask you, if you grew up in Australia, to take a moment to consider what you learned about Aboriginal cultures and people in school.

For those who didn’t grow up in Australia, or who may have a vague recollection of their schooling days, I will share my experience. We spent a lot of time in history class talking about bushrangers, the settlers, squatters, Eureka Stockade (a revolt of workers in a goldmining town in Victoria), the explorers, Captain Phillip and the settlement of Sydney, and the rum rebellion (where Sydney famously ran out of rum).

For two classes in year nine I learned about Aboriginal people as the people that lived here before Europeans. I learned that Aboriginal people sat around fires, wore very few clothes and hunted with boomerangs. I was taught that the descendants of these people live mainly in the NT and WA and I was taught that no Aboriginal people live in Tasmania any more.

I was taught nothing about contemporary Aboriginal communities. I learned nothing about the differences between Aboriginal nations; and I learned nothing about the spiritual lives or beliefs of Aboriginal people. I was taught that we peacefully settled the Australian landscape and I learned nothing about assimilation policies or stolen generations.

It wasn’t until the early 1990s when I went to university that I was taught anything different to this. It wasn’t until that time that I started to really learn about the history of this country – about the lies, about the violence, and about the theft. And the reason for this was that it wasn’t until the early 1990s (1992 to be exact in the case of Mabo v the State of Queensland) that the Australian legal system partially came to terms with the lie on which it had been based. The lie I’m referring to is the doctrine of terra nullius.

Before I describe terra nullius, you need to cast your mind back to a time when the British Empire was at the height of its powers. Countries were being invaded, the British navy was unbeatable and explorers such as Captain Cook were busily sailing to foreign lands to find new nations to conquer.

In this environment, international law outlined the ways by which countries could come to legally own other countries. Of course they could invade a country, enter into warfare and successfully conquer the country. But, if a country was asserting that they peacefully came to own another country, then there was only three ways by which this could occur:

1. cession (where the voluntarily inhabitants gave up their ownership of the land)
2. succession (through inheritance by monarchs for example) or
3. by applying the doctrine of terra nullius.

In Australia’s case, the British asserted the doctrine of terra nullius. What this means is that, at the time that the First Fleet arrived in Sydney, the British Empire claimed that the land belonged to no one. This is what terra nullius means: land belonging to no one.

In 1889 the highest court in Britain referred to the difference between “a Colony acquired by conquest or cession, in which there is an established system of law, and … a Colony, (such as New South Wales,) which consisted of … territory practically unoccupied, without settled inhabitants or settled law, at the time when it was peacefully (acquired by) Britain.”

Clearly it was difficult to deny that people occupied the land when the First Fleet initially sailed into Botany Bay. We don’t know the exact numbers of Aboriginal people who lived in Australia at that time, however, we currently estimate that approximately 70 languages were being spoken in NSW alone. Making the assertion, therefore, that NSW was practically unoccupied at the time of European occupation, is patently untrue.

And so, to support the claim for terra nullius, myths were constructed about the nature of Aboriginal people and their society.

One of the first myths was that Aboriginal Australians were barbarians and (I quote) so “low in the scale of social organization, they and their occupancy of … (the) land were justifiably ignored”.

In 1837 it was reported to the British Parliament that the state of Australian Aborigines was “barbarous” and “so entirely destitute … that their claims, whether as (owners or occupants) of the (land), have been utterly disregarded.”

Of course, this British Imperialist view of the world was not peculiar to Australia. In 1919 the highest court in Britain (the Privy Council) justified their occupation of Zimbabwe (or Southern Rhodesia as it was known at the time) by stating:

“(Estimating) the rights of aboriginal tribes is always inherently difficult. Some tribes are so low in the scale of social organisation that their (idea) of rights and duties (cannot) be reconciled with (those) of (a) civilized society. Such a gulf cannot be bridged. It would be (a waste) to (give) to such people some shadow of the rights known to (us)…”

(So you see the line of argument developing here – we rightfully own the land because it was vacant when we got here. Oh, ok it wasn’t actually vacant but the people don’t live like us – don’t wear clothes, don’t believe in Jesus, don’t have permanent housing, they don’t appear to have laws like us – they’re barbarians) -so we have justifiably pretended they don’t exist).

Ahimsa

The other claim that’s patently untrue, is that New South Wales (and subsequently) Australia was peacefully acquired by the British Empire.

The Bringing Them Home Report, (which was published in 1997 and which outlines in great detail the history of stolen generations in this country), states that within months of the ‘First Fleet’ arrival at Sydney Cove in 1788 there was ‘open animosity’ as Indigenous people protested against ‘the Europeans cutting down trees, taking their food and game, and driving them back into others’ territories.’ Bitter conflict followed as Aboriginal people engaged in ‘guerrilla warfare – plundering crops, burning huts, and driving away stock’ to be met by ‘expeditions of great ferocity in which … Aborigines (that were) encountered were indiscriminately killed.’ (p. 39 BTH)

Henry Reynolds has written many wonderful books exposing the fallacy of peaceful occupation of Australia, including “An indelible stain: The question of genocide in Australia’s history”. In that book he records a government officer, who in the 1840s observed that “the (white) settlers in his district were, with some exceptions, ‘averse to the Blacks almost to the spirit of extermination’. He notes that one of the wealthiest squatters in the area told him: ‘to go in search of (Aborigines) to pacify them I (cannot) get a single man to accompany me, but if I … go in search of Aborigines with the intent to exterminate them I … get at least 30 men in the surrounding District who willingly volunteer in the service.”

Reynolds quotes a different government officer in the same period as stating that the ‘hatred with which the white man regards the Black… (results) from fear… from the consciousness of having done them great wrongs and from the desire to escape this painful reproach by laying blame on the injured party.”

Asteya

In the midst of the lies and violence on which contemporary Australia was founded, another policy was developed in relation to Aboriginal people. This policy was the opposite of the yama of asteya. It was that Aboriginal children should be removed from their parents in order to bring them up in ‘civilised society’.

The Bringing them Home Report (BTH) comprehensively documents this removal of children from their parents. It notes: “Violent battles over rights to land, food and water sources characterised race relations in the nineteenth century. Throughout this conflict Indigenous children were kidnapped and exploited for their labour…. Governments and missionaries also targeted Indigenous children for removal from their families.”

The policy continued in Australia until the early 1970s and it is estimated that between 1910 and 1970 approximately 50,000 children were taken from their parents. As a consequence, today many, many Aboriginal people, who have lost connection with land and language, are still searching for their families.

BTH quotes an Aboriginal woman living in Tasmania: “I’ve often thought, as old as I am, that it would have been lovely to have known a father and a mother, to know parents even for a little while, just to have had the opportunity of having a mother tuck you into bed and give you a good night kiss – but it was never to be.

Another person from Queensland is quoted as saying: “It never goes away. Just cause we’re not walking around on crutches or with bandages or plasters on our legs and arms, doesn’t mean we’re not hurting…. I suspect I’ll carry these sorts of wounds ‘till the day I die. I’d just like it to be not quite as intense, that’s all.”

On a more positive note, the BTH report is part of a growing body of evidence that contemporary Australian society is slowly coming to terms with its violent past. In 1997 the NSW Government was the first government in Australia to formally apologise to Aboriginal people for the stolen generations. All other state and territory governments and many local governments have subsequently apologised, with the exception of the Australian Government. Apologies have also been formally made by the Uniting and Catholic churches. In the year 2000, thousands of people also walked across the Sydney Harbour Bridge in support of reconciliation between white and black Australia. And in 1992, the High Court of Australia handed down the Mabo case. The Court found that:

“The facts as we know them today do not fit the “barbarian” theory underpinning the … law… (T)here is (therefore no reason to apply rules which) which were the product of that theory. It would be curious … to (say) today that, when … (British law was introduced in Australia), its first (action was) to strip Aboriginal people of their right to occupy their ancestral lands. Yet the supposedly barbarian nature of indigenous people provided the … law of England with the justification for (doing so).”

The Court went onto find that:

“(Regardless of) the (fiction) advanced in earlier days for refusing to recognise the rights … of (Indigenous people), an unjust and discriminatory doctrine of that kind can no longer be accepted (and has no place in the contemporary law of this country).”

Satya

As further evidence of Australia’s growing willingness to come to terms with its history, on 10 December 1992, then Prime Minister Paul Keating made the following historic speech in Redfern Park at the Australian Launch of the International Year for the World’s Indigenous People (a speech which I love because it is an excellent example of satya in recent times by a political leader in this country):

… we have committed ourselves to succeeding in the test which so far we have always failed…. This is a fundamental test of our social goals and our national will…. It is a test of our self-knowledge. Of how well we know the land we live in. How well we know our history. How well we recognise the fact that, complex as our contemporary identity is, it cannot be separated from Aboriginal Australia…

 … perhaps the point of this Year of the World’s Indigenous People (is) to bring the dispossessed out of the shadows, to recognise that they are part of us, and that we cannot give Indigenous Australians up without giving up many of our own most deeply held values, much of our own identity – and our own humanity….

… the starting point might be to recognise that the problem starts with us non-Aboriginal Australians.  

It begins, I think, with the act of recognition. Recognition that it was we who did the dispossessing. We took the traditional lands and smashed the traditional way of life. We brought the disasters. The alcohol. We committed the murders. We took the children from their mothers. We practiced discrimination and exclusion.

It was our ignorance and our prejudice. And our failure to imagine these things being done to us. With some noble exceptions, we failed to make the most basic human response and enter into their hearts and minds. We failed to ask – how would I feel if this were done to me?

As a consequence, we failed to see that what we were doing degraded all of us.

If we needed a reminder of this, we received it this year. The Report of the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody showed with devastating clarity that the past lives on in inequality, racism and injustice in the prejudice and ignorance of non-Aboriginal Australians, and in the demoralisation and desperation, the fractured identity, of so many Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders…

… we need to open our hearts a bit.

All of us….  

… it might help if we non-Aboriginal Australians imagined ourselves dispossessed of land we have lived on for 50,000 years – and then imagined ourselves told that it had never been ours.

Imagine if ours was the oldest culture in the world and we were told that it was worthless. Imagine if we had resisted this settlement, suffered and died in defence of our land, and then were told in history books that we had given up without a fight. Imagine if non-Aboriginal Australians had served their country in peace and war and were then ignored in history books. Imagine if our feats on sporting fields had inspired admiration and patriotism and yet did nothing to diminish prejudice. Imagine if our spiritual life was denied and ridiculed.  

Imagine if we had suffered the injustice and then were blamed for it.

It seems to me that if we can imagine the injustice then we can imagine its opposite. And we can have justice.

The caption to Sally Morgan’s paining “Ghosts” states “Your heritage will haunt you if you don’t own it. People must come to terms with their history; their heritage.”

I believe that the exploration of the yamas gives us that opportunity. SS. Varma’s book, Yama and Niyama talks about ahimsa and encourages us, as yogis, to ask ourselves at the end of each day “Have I done anything to hurt anyone?” and then, “Have I missed any opportunity of showing kindness or being helpful to others?” I would encourage all of you, now that you know the truth of this country, to consider how we might, as non-Aboriginal yogis, show greater kindness to our Aboriginal brothers and sisters.

The first step is to overcome our own ignorance

I think the first step is to overcome our own ignorance by searching out and really listening to Aboriginal people’s stories. I encourage you to reverse the tide of history and stop asking the question that well meaning white people have asked for 200 years, which is “what can we teach them”, but ask instead, “what might I learn from them?” One of the things that I think you will discover in asking this question is that the ethical framework by which we lead our lives as yogis, has many similarities with the belief systems and ethical frameworks of Aboriginal Australians.

My hope is that all Australians come to have a better understanding of the history of this country, and that with this knowledge, people develop a greater compassion toward Aboriginal Australians who continue to suffer the effects of European occupation on a daily basis.

I hope also that our time together has inspired you to think about the powerful link between the ethical practices and principles of individuals within a society, and the stories, history and social fabric which results from those collective practices and principles.

The Spirit of Yoga states:

Satya is about approaching the world with pure intentions. It means to speak the truth with the spirit of kindness. It means communicating from the heart.

Ahimsa involves consideration for all beings. Living in a way that causes as little harm as possible. Cultivating love and compassion for all life.

Asteya is more than non-stealing. Only taking what is freely given. Only taking what we need.

If you could all bring your hands into prayer, bow your heads and close your eyes.

Remember:

There is no joy without sorrow

No good without bad

No truth without lies  

As you being your practice of yama do not be disturbed by what is unveiled. Appreciate your flaws as you appreciate your qualities. They help you to learn.

Namaste.

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