Gigigu galiguwaay — To be like water
We’re in a time and space in our collective journey where new paradigms must replace dominant paradigms of capitalism, neoliberalism, and colonialism. But embarking on and navigating through such complexity is tricky in a world of linearity, reductionist thinking, and paternalism. So we must find ways of navigating what is unfolding, awakening, and emerging. And something that keeps resonating is this idea of gali-baa, the time and place of water.
Water teaches many things. She is soft and flexible. She does not require the hammer to split the rock, but instead finds a way around. Her journey is not one of milestones clearly signposted along the way, but a meandering journey of many unknowns. Water does not follow a linear path, or even a circular path, but is ever-changing from gas, to liquid, to solid, in a constant flux. She has no source point and no destination. Her journey goes on without beginning or end. Even for the water of the Murray-Darling Basin, that seemingly begins in the heights of the Great Dividing Range in Queensland, to eventually find her way into the Southern Ocean in South Australia, this is all just water being in the time and place of the Murray-Darling Basin. When she meets the Southern Ocean, baa, she shifts in time and place.
Upon Gamilaraay lands, in the north of the Murray-Darling Basin, water takes many shapes and follows many paths. She meanders through creeks and rivers, at times coming to rest in great ephemeral lakes, like the Dharriwaa, where she sparks explosions of life. She overflows the banks to spread across the plains, bringing nourishment to the grasslands, and resting again in billabongs. She moves in the dark places unseen, through ancient underground rivers; filtering, across aeons, through ancient sedimentary layers, into the Great Artesian Basin. She takes many paths and many shapes as she is exerted upon by outside forces. But even in the darkest depths, under the greatest pressure, water is still good and it always finds its way back into the light.
The journey of water teaches about patience and fluidity – trusting the unseen forces that guide you along your path. These unseen forces have many different names, some of us say Ancestors, some say Creator. Water does not fight against or attempt to exert its influence upon anything, yet she still brings life to all things. In this way, water is the closest thing to the great energy that binds all things together. Water teaches us about being the custodian of life; she teaches about abundance, kindness, and connectedness. She also teaches about quiet strength, resilience, and determination; because water, as soft and accommodating to rock as she is, will over time, carve a path through granite.
This little yarn isn’t about saying we must surrender ourselves without resistance, it’s about saying that when we’re on the right path, and we can read the signals that the Ancestors are sending, then all things will unfold before us. Just like water, we too are moved along our paths. We are shaped according to time and place. We do not have to be submissive, because water also teaches us about being assertive, unyielding, and indomitable. With a shift in baa, water can solidify into great glacial behemoths that can carve their legacies across the landscape. Water can twist itself into furious cyclones and typhoons that remind all things upon this earth to whom this world truly belongs. We cannot underestimate the timeless and boundless power of water, the giver of all life.
We are at a time where many ideas are dissipating into the ether and beginning to coalesce, ready to fall back to earth as tiny drops to feed the wave. Hospicing Modernity (2021) by Latinx professor Vanessa Machado de Oliveira, encourages us to cultivate our inner alchemy, our inner wave, so that we may feed the collective wave of change. Decolonizing Wealth (2018) by Native American philanthropist Edgar Villaneuva, shares the plantation metaphor to help position our purpose. In the plantation, there are field slaves – that’s the majority of us. Then you've got the house slaves – people who have made the paradigm work for them, but who are often born into that privilege. Then you've got the overseers – the sociopaths and psychopaths who maintain the plantation. Then there's the master, the master sets the rules of the game. The field slaves, the house slaves, and the overseer, are pawns in the master’s game.
The plantation is a metaphor used to explain the current paradigm experienced by colonised Indigenous peoples around the globe. In reality, all people live under the dominant paradigm. In The Invisible Doctrine (2024), George Monbiot and Peter Hutchison call it for what it is, “an economic system founded in colonial looting”. American civil rights activist, radical feminist, and poet, Audre Lorde’s metaphor for decolonising the plantation famously stated; "we cannot dismantle the master's house with the same tools the master used to build it" (from her 1984 essay ‘The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House’). Even if a slave might become the master, the system remains designed in favour of a minority, oppressing and exploiting the majority.
The system does not care about race, colour, or creed. It works hard to assimilate heavily colonised demographics while demonising Indigenous peoples who still maintain values of reciprocity, relationality, collectivism, lateral wealth creation, and deep connection with the environment. The rules of the system ensure that it remains forever extractive, exploitative, and colonial. It creates division and subjugates the masses, while it strives in its purpose to concentrate more and more wealth, power, and influence into the hands of the masters.
The point of all this is to say, we cannot expect the masters and overseers to fix the system. The only way things will change for the better is to build a new house, with our own tools, following plans that we have drawn up that reflect our values and worldviews. But how can this be done when we are up against, to paraphrase Monbiot and Hutchison, a wildfire that will consume all things until this planet is left barren and scorched? For this, there is no greater lesson that water shares in this baa than that of a great wave that fills the ephemeral lake beds. Countless individual ripples unified into one insurmountable wave. The wave is the collective efforts of many smaller waves that have gathered into a singular point and purpose in time and space to create a force that has transformative potential. The wave must crash upon the scorched earth, but not with fell intent to raze the master's house; but rather to extinguish the inferno and bring forth a renewal – vibrant, abundant, diverse.
Jacob Birch
Jacob is a Gamilaraay man living on the Sunshine Coast, QLD. His Gamilaraay ancestral lines go back to Mungindi, Boomi, Neeworra, and Hebel, which centre around the Barwon and Balonne Rivers in the Northern Murray-Darling Basin. The freshwater country of the Northern Basin played a significant part in Jacob’s formative experiences. He also honours the influences of his mixed ancestral lineage, particular his rebellious Irish paternal side. Jacob is an academic, currently undertaking a PhD looking at how universities and researchers can better work under the leadership of First Nations communities in the native foods and botanicals space; he is an entrepreneur, founding a native grains processing and milling enterprise that can be replicated across regional, rural and remote communities; and he is an advocate for Indigenous food sovereignty, and food systems revitalisation. Jacob does this work because he believes a good future for all will rely heavily on global re-Indigenisation.