In the Austin Powers movies, Dr. Evil would frequently get exasperated with his long lost son, Scott, because Scott failed to grasp the concept of “evil”. Dr. Evil would often say to Scott “you just don’t get it, do you?”
I have had the amazing opportunity to tour The Kimberley this week and be exposed to, among other spectacular things, Indigenous rock art paintings that go back 15,000 years and more.
I first came to Australia in 2002 and moved here 6 years later, so I am a relative newcomer. My general perspective is that, as a white person, I cannot completely understand the indigenous perspective. I do have the sense it is totally different to my “Euro” world view, and I respect and honour that reality.
We viewed some Gwion Gwion rock art the other day and I attended a lecture about the art. European anthropologists have divided the Gwion Gwion paintings into “categories”. When I heard this I kept thinking about Dr. Evil and wanted to say to white Europeans (of which, I accept, I am one): “you just don’t get it”.
As Euros always do, they/we have tried to reduce an ancient, organic and essentially unknowable culture into neat boxes. This “reductionist thinking” SO permeates European academic and professional thought. It is seen so clearly today in the “mental illness’ cottage industry, where we try to take something that is essentially unknowable (the human experience) and reduce it into categories and labels.
A way of experiencing life and connecting to country cannot be put into words, and certainly not into categories. And the effort to do so reflects a culture (European culture) that never seems to grasp that you cannot use a biased and narrow lens to understand something that is so fundamentally different. Once again in the analysis of the rock art, we see that “they just don’t get it”.
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