Steve Wilson

Steve Wilson (1965-) traces his heritage through his grandmother back to the Muruwari tribe (Muruwari (Moo-roo-warri) - meaning 'to fall (warri) with a fighting club (murru) in one's hand')
The Muruwari people were an important group who occupied an area of Australia from about Cunnamulla in south-west Queensland, southward to the northern bank of the Barwon River near Brewarrina, New South Wales.

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Mellifluent Meditation

Way back when I was a little boy and hair grew on my (now bald) head, there was a lyrebird that lived in the thick forests just to the east of our tiny hamlet and this bird mimicked the sound of the sawmill. It was difficult—even impossible—to be sure if the sound was a lyrebird or the huge saw eating the massive eucalyptus trees that covered our mountains; that is, unless the sound happened on a Sunday. If it was Sunday, then we knew it was the lyrebird—simply because the mill didn’t operate on Sunday. The lyrebird—Boolidt’boolidtba—is my totem.

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Aboriginal Medicine Men and Women

The term Aboriginal Medicine Men has something of the flavour of witch doctor about it; yet it is, as Professor A.P. Elkin (anthropologist) put it, a position of elevated education and social standing: Aboriginal Men of High Degree. Medicine is not the sole province of men in Aboriginal society; though it must be said that there was a gender delineation as will be explained further in this brief article. There is one more important explanation and qualification I would wish to express before continuing with this article: it is all too easy for Australians to treat Aboriginal culture as a pre-historic artifact—or at best something dated to the time of early white contact.

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A Great Nation is like A Great Man

A great nation is like a great man:
When he makes a mistake, he realises it.
Having realised it, he admits it.
Having admitted it, he corrects it.
—Lao Tzu, TAO TE CHING

One of the earlier comments written about Aboriginal people after first contact, and repeatedly mentioned in anthropological and ethnographic reports thereafter, is that Aboriginal peoples believed (in significant part) that disease was caused by bad feelings and conflicts between individuals or communities: essentially that disease was the result of psychological (emotional), social, environmental or spiritual problems. This seemed strange, even simplistic to early white settlers who laughed at such notions—after all, they knew that their understandings of miasmatic medicine were correct. (Miasmatic medicine, as it was then understood, was the belief that the air or ether contained vapors that caused sickness.

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Grace Begets Grace — Ageing Gracefully

Ageing gracefully—I don’t know, perhaps I am though there are times I feel more like an old man stumbling and bashing my way through the thick scrub of time. As I age, the scrub gets thicker and meaner. Take yesterday for example, my left knee started aching; it felt like a toothache deep in the very core of my knee. Though if I think about why my knee would start aching, I’d have to confess that I have been eating a couple of things that contain dairy products, and that’s not wise. Dairy is an aggravator of arthritic problems. So, as you can see, the answer to any hope of ageing gracefully is all about looking after your body. But there is more to it than eating the right tucker today: to age gracefully, one must make preparations when one is young. This is what we call preventative medicine.

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Eh, Kev, Listen to This...

Before the coming of White fella to this country, Aboriginal people did pretty well in the health department—particularly on the coastal fringes of this continent and its islands. Just about all reports mentioning the Aboriginal people in the very early period of contact (with the exception of Dampier’s) suggested a robust and healthy people with almost no reports of physiological problems or deformations that might suggest a wretched people struggling to exist. In fact, archaeological evidence suggests a healthy people with long life and a phenomenally wide and healthy diet. At that time of initial contact by white people, Europeans were dying in their millions of epidemic diseases and life expectancy of Europeans was not too flash.

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Eh, what you use this one for?

My wife is cooking and something she is using to flavour a possum stew has been caught by my nose: mountain pepper. We call it Dtjill-aiee in my language—and we drag out the aieeeeee the hotter and more peppery the plant or the berries. Its scientific name is Tasmannia lanceolata and it grows in sub-alpine areas—not too high, and not too low, in the mountains; it likes the cold (like me). If you were to go looking for it, you will find it tucked in amongst the rocks or up against the side of a thick clump of Warrakarntj (snow-gum) because, although it likes the cold, it isn’t all that fond of cold wind (again, sensibly, like me).

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