Lead Commentary today: A Global Mail article on a new book about Australian history (Main Forum)

by Brian Coyne , LINDEN, NSW, Monday, September 17, 2012, 15:29 (276 days ago)

Dear friends,

I've been sitting at this computer since 6.00am doing "Catholica things" but at 2.20 pm haven't yet gotten to do today's lead commentary. Unfortunately my ambitions for what I wanted to do have gotten away with me so instead of preparing our own lead commentary I am referring you to an article in The Global Mail. It is part of what I had originally intended to bring to your attention.

For a long time now I have had deep sympathy for the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples of Australia whose lands and culture were usurped by our European Colonial forebears. I believe they were given a raw deal and while none of us can undo what was done in the past I have a sense all of us who have been later arrivals in this land as colonisers, migrants, refugees, and their descendants, owe something to the original inhabitants and owners of this land for the disruption caused to their culture, their way of life and their deep identification with the land and their entire environment.

In recent months I was invited by priest and archeologist, Fr Eugene Stockton, who has had a life-time with the indigenous people, to explore a closer association between Catholica and the Blue Mountain Education & Research Trust (BMERT). The association might be mutually beneficial in our providing wider publicity to the BMERT and back the other way the people associated with the trust might help provide us with a physical base here in the Blue Mountains. Fr Eugene established the Trust in 2008 and it supports a number of endeavours here in the Blue Mountains to do with spirituality, on-going cultural and archeological research and also inter-religious dialogue.

The BMERT through a number of associated groups including the Blue Mountain Centre for Cultural and Religious Enquiry, the Greater Blue Mountains Aboriginal Studies Forum, the Blue Mountains Interfaith Group, and the Catholic Parish at Lawson, has organised many events in the Blue Mountains in recent years on subjects that I believe might also be of wider interest to readers of Catholica both within Australia as well as internationally.

The foregoing I trust gives some overview of where we're coming from in this. I had been hoping to bring you a commentary today that drew together some threads from a book I've been reading by Fr Eugene and John Merriman on the Aboriginal Heritage and link it into with this article in The Global Mail — which provides a different perspective on how the Aboriginal people managed the Australian landscape before white settlement. I hope in due course we can commission other essays and commentaries exploring this territory. Bill Gamage, the author of this new book spoke at an event sponsored by Fr Eugene a few months ago but unfortunately I missed it. I am in the process of making the book available via the Catholica Spiritual Marketplace. So far the Kindle and Hardback versions have been published a paperback edition only in Australia.

Brian Coyne
[Editor & Publisher]