The main image | the background | depicts two temporal orders (conceptions of time). On the left Indigenous (specifically Australian Aboriginal) cyclical and circular. On the right Eurocentric unidirectional and linear. 

The background image | a manual collage of found and manipulated paper | has been overlaid with a transparent timeline of certain events in Australian Indigenous history. And I take a guess as to where they may sit in relation to each temporal order.

The first challenge is how – if at all – the two temporal orders can be reconciled. For time here – is a contested site¹. And Australian Aborigines have long opposed (and successfully defied) European worship of chronological time² and attempts to dispossess them of their Dreaming³. Thereby preventing the extinction of their temporal order. And frustrating those who live in constant pursuit of capital and power and economic growth – the ‘great tomorrow’⁴. However in doing so they have been pathogolized² by the radical imposition of foreign – and to them nonsensical – mechanical time and the ‘meaningless toil’³ it  invokes. Subsequently – in many ways – they have been ‘closed out of the future’³. And in that context time has also become a social justice issue². 

The second challenge is how the two conceptions of time impact human experience – their perception of past events – capacity to live in the present – and the possibilities envisioned for the future. The linear Eurocentric temporality allows events to be ‘strung out like beads through time’⁵. The concentric circles of Australian Indigenous time does not. Instead the narratives of Aboriginal lives move through circles towards and away from the centre where the person is situated². Events that hold more weight sit closer to the centre. Regardless of when they occurred in chronological time. They have knowledge – and a view – of a limitless temporal horizon. For Europeans events – and their weight – disappear along – and often completely off – their linear line of time. The ‘past trails and vanishes like the wake of a ship’⁶. For Australian Aborigines however, the ‘past contains the present, and the present represents the past’⁵. Current time is always and forever imbued with history. What ultimately happens – for example – to a child’s grief when her Mother dies depends on the way your view time². So too perhaps, atrocities like the war known as The Black Line and assimilation policies and practices that led to The Stolen Generation⁶. 

There is also a third challenge. The possibility of a link between Australian Indigenous conceptions of time and that of Chinese Taoism, Indian Buddhism and Japanese Zen. Creating a path on fundamental common ground and an enlightened way forward. One of Sydney’s earliest white settlers once remarked, ‘all savages place happiness in inaction’². He uses the word ‘savage’ to specifically describe Australian Aborigines and the phrase ‘happiness in inaction’ to describe laziness. However this happiness in inaction can be applied / extended to all monks and masters worldwide. For they too agree that there is absolutely nothing to seek – trade time for – grasp at or clutch. Experience all time as one time. And all live life in the ‘everywhen’⁷. As ‘there isn’t anywhere, anywhen, {or any where else} to be’⁶.

NOTES

1. Lattas
2. Renoylds Barre
3. Donaldson
4. Hodkinson
5. Bell
6. Wats
7. Bodle
8. Stanner