Underneath the City

So as I was walking around what struck me was this feeling of the buildings, some how being sat or forced upon the land. Upon the nature - the natural structures and wildlife of this place. 

It almost felt like the nature - what little of the original trees and plants that were there - were trying to bust their way out. 

as it says on the sign, that although there is an attempt at nature conservation in Brisbane, only a mere 14% of the natural habitat remains......

and as I walked around, I could see attempts to depict the history of the '1st Nation' people and talk about their culture on signs and in museums.......but it felt like lip service......in a way......

these ancient practices and ways - written on signs on the Story bridge - have been lost.

The Aboriginal people developed an understanding of the sun, moon and stars and developed their own astronomy going back 65,000 years, pre-dating the Babylonians and the Greeks

The city has been built on rock that is visible at Kangaroo point. These cliffs are debris of an ash flow from an exploding volcano 220 million years ago....the cliffs first being carved by the river and then quarried in the 1820's..

......the lovely jacaranda trees are actually not native, and arrived in 1864 via ships...

As I walked along the river, I tried to imagine it without the buildings. What it may have been like, long before the convict communities arrived. Before the settlers......

There were lots of these strange sticks or stalagmites pushing up from the ground

In the Museum of Brisbane there was some art work and stories about some of the simple early settlements and their way of life

We build buildings, houses, boxes, taller and larger, shops, restaurants, hotels.......and we call it progress......but progress to what. 

We are snuffing out the nature and crushing our natural ways. 

More natural and simpler ways of living. 

Perhaps happier ways, as described by Aunty Raelene Baker above. They didn't have much, but they were happy.

Many have lost touch with the land and with nature - especially inhabiting a city - amongst the silver and concrete - underneath is the rock and the earth and the plants..........I imagine a future.........perhaps after an apocalypse, when the people have gone. No cars, no planes and buses and trains. No people.

And the trees and plants would slowly creep up and around the buildings. Spreading throngs - taking over - reclaiming their earth.

When I heard the recording  in the museum, of an aboriginal man, it struck a cord with me. It highlighted the way I had been thinking and feeling - even though I was enjoying the city, as it was, I could almost hear the cry of the nature beneath.

I missed the beginning of his talk - He was mentioning about the land, their home. About dream time and the past, the present and the future. - and the end is a little difficult to hear, due to other people in the museum, talking etc. but I have written what I managed to record on video

"…..underneath those buildings lays our cultural laws, our foundation. Even though the buildings went up, it doesn’t change the way we think about that particular part of the land or the way that we connect with that part of the land. We wish it wasn’t there, but times change very quick around here……….

‘ along came the rainbow serpent, large mystical snake, and she got stuck, as she made her way up the dry gully, so she called upon her brothers Yarul the rain and Nelan the cloud; the big storm came. The rain got under her belly, and she was able to wriggle side to side, in order to open up that dry gully, we know that dry gully as the Brisbane river. We know it as ‘mwep’, and that was what we believe the creation of that river is'………."