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I am about to run like the wind over a gigantic amount of details in order to tell you a very important story. It is about how one person started a movement that changed the world for Australian indigenous people, the Aborigines. He didn't know how big things would become or what the implications were or how his own life would be forever altered. He just wanted to help a few elders in a village. It is a story about how one very tiny gesture can start a cultural and spiritual revolution.
In the 1970s, Geoffrey Barden was a young art teacher in Australia. He taught art at a few country high schools before taking up a posting in 1971 to teach at the primary school at Papunya, a remote Aboriginal settlement. According to the New York Times,
When Mr. Bardon ... was assigned in 1970 to Papunya, a government barracks for blacks 150 miles west of the railhead of Alice Springs in central Australia, it was, he wrote later, "like a hidden place, unknown on maps, considered by officials as a problem place."
Papunya, established in 1960 as an official "assimilation" center for tribes forced from their traditional lands, was, wrote Mr. Bardon, "a community in distress, oppressed by exile, a place of emotional loss and waste."
At that point, many Aboriginal people (from over 500 tribal groups with over 200 different languages, who were previously semi-nomadic) had been herded up and brought into preconstructed towns to theoretically "mainstream" them into the white Australian way of life. Like the U.S. Native American reservation, it was a tragic, cruel and wretched idea.
The Aboriginal culture is deeply tied to the land. It is the world's longest continual culture and is estimated to be between 35,000 and 70,000 years old. Aborigines -- before this round-up -- lived in family groups and clans. Each clan has a place on their land where their spirits return when they die. They have to protect these places so they won't upset their ancestral beings. For the Aborigine, there are two kinds of time that run simultaneously -- the time that we Westerners know and an infinite, spiritual cycle that runs alongside, called "The Dreamtime."
"The Dreamtime" holds the creation stories of each clan and the story of how the great spirits walked the land, changing it with their adventures and dramas. To a clan member, where one is born is part of a very real tie and obligation to that land. Places are part of the Spirit-Creators. It is a part of a person, inseparable from any part of his or her identity. They are part of the ongoing story of that area. They are of the "Yam Dreaming" or "Kangaroo Dreaming" or whatever sacred story is native to their clan's geography.
The Aboriginal communities exist in a deep spiritual oneness with the land, in a way that is almost impossible to translate into Western thought. There are stories held secret and sacred by a clan and ritual objects tens of thousands of years old, all protected by the clan.
And these people were herded away into villages, their children (in many cases) taken from them and raised by the state. They were called the Stolen Generations.
It was into this world that Barden arrived to teach. He immediately saw more in the amazing dot paintings on people's bodies and the ritual paintings done in sand. They looked like abstract art to him, composed from dots of paint -- as vibrant and wonderful as anything he had ever seen. He encouraged the elders to start painting these designs, taking the patterns from sand and bodies and transferring them to canvas. He bought them paper and paints. He began bringing their dot paintings into larger cities and selling them for the artists.
The art was and is an expression of spirituality. It is done with symbols and dots in order to tell a story or express an image of the Dreaming. It is magical and contains secrets of the Dreaming, camouflaged for the outsider so that the secrets will not be fully revealed.
Things then went crazy for Barden. The authorities didn't like what he was doing. They painted over a huge mural he had encouraged the elders to paint in the village. According to Wikipedia:
Bardon experienced many difficulties in his time in the desert, due to the indifference,
