This was evident on my return to my normal world when I began to perform medicine healings on my friends and others who were ill. At one point, she writes: I was given the medicine and power of a ngungkari and felt myself enter into a higher state of being. I call it the Road to Eldership.”Įlsewhere, she describes artwork depicting “the story of the Wandjina Ancestor of the Ngunnawal people from the land where Canberra Australia’s capital now sits” in the South Eastern part of Australia as well revelatory dreams that connected her to the timeless narratives of her ancestors-which she refers to as Tjukurpa, a term from the central and western deserts. I knew then it was the track I had to take to study our Eldership as sacred leadership. The Wandjina sang into the Songlines as they travelled, and we continue to sing the songs of our Ancestors reminding us of who we are and why we are here. In her 2018 PhD thesis, titled in part, The Road to Eldership: How Aboriginal Culture Creates Sacred and Visionary Leaders, the academic made similar claims: The Wandjina are our Leaders, Our Ancestors, Our Elders-the beings who brought us Our Laws, Values, Principles and ways of being, knowing and doing. More unsettling than the presentation of such self-proclaimed truths in an academic context was the apparent credulity of the non-Indigenous academics in the audience. The academic, Tjanara Goreng Goreng, responded by saying that she spoke “the truth,” and she knew it to be true because it was traditional knowledge handed down from her mother, who had learned it from her mother. In the subsequent discussion, it was pointed out that belief in the Wandjina was a regional (and comparatively recent) phenomenon, confined to Western Australia’s remote northern areas and so it was unclear how the Wandjina could be the forebears of all other older, ancestral beings. Wandjina-themed rock art in the Kimberley region of Western Australia. These original beings, she proclaimed, were the cloud and rain spirits known as Wandjina.

Central to her presentation was the claim that Uluru, the large sandstone formation in the middle of the country (once known as Ayers Rock), was the foundational hearth of all Aboriginal spirituality, and the site from which all ancestral beings emanated before spreading across Australia. Several years ago, an Aboriginal academic from Queensland who was a staff member at the University of Tasmania (UTAS) presented a seminar on Aboriginal spirituality.

Marcia langton bruce pascoe