How did didg and I find each other?

Time in Fiji as a teenager had a big impact on me. There was something about their culture that hit a chord. What made them so chilled and connected as a mob? I remember at 14 in 1977 walking the back streets of a town by myself and being waved to, and invited to join an extended family on a verandah who were hanging out. In a heart beat, welcomed, and part of something somehow, not separate or different. The culture of contemporary Australian nuclear family back home had issues. Something was missing.

Interest in indigenous cultures grew in my 20’s. A city kid who loved the bush and at every opportunity was in the bush or by the coast. When I was cut off from nature, I would read books on nature & cultures and in the absence of knowing my roots and how to connect with local mob, I found myself going to alternative gatherings like Down To Earth Confest(conference festival), where I felt more at home somehow. Back home I started a mens group, and we would meet on a mountain, a powerful place that was a meeting place for Bunerong mob (part of Melbourne area) and we explored what it was to be men. Where I lived there was no mob visible, and it was a time where there seemed no space for a meeting up, a natural waving to each other. Without realising it that experience at 14 left me looking for that flow again in Oz, and for so many years I couldn’t find it.

Artist not known.

If something was missing, something that I knew was meant to be, in the absence of being held in a functional culture I would clunkily step into that place in good heart and find a way to bring it in to my life and my community. As a man I felt the call, it wasn’t a heady ego thing, more in my bones.

The first foray into facilitating a rite of passage for a young man, came when I was near 30 and I remember the men I did it with and the profound time we shared. After we had hiked into wilderness and then sent this young man out for 24 hours overnight by himself, away from us, we looked at each other, bemused; none of us had any conscious initiation, we were uninitiated. We were left with the question, ‘what the hell are we doing, what can we do for this young man?’

We sat together and agonised over this, and decided to one at a time share about where we had been mentored, and also where we had been neglected as men, even if non intentionally. We gave thanks for the good, and we grieved over the ways we had not been met, or supported as young men. We named our holes, what we missed and what we needed, before the person that had shared would leave the circle and take space from the others. The rest of us that were left in the circle, then yarned about that man and his sharing, his needs; and when we had a picture of what we needed to do, we brought him back and we did stuff so to speak; we went somewhere, somehow, though word and action and simple ceremony, to respect him, honour him, and empower him, so that his holes as a man were lessened. We took turns and over a day we did our work and showed up for each man, one at a time. We did this all before we brought the 18 year old young man back into the circle. We were able to be there for him now, for we had shown up for our self and each other. We had taken another step consciously into our manhood.

Fire Art

Local men’s group.

This was one of a few steps I took, to prepare me for the responsibility that came with didg. Life to date laid a foundation for when that wave I spoke of finally came. Interestingly too until now, I hadn’t realised it was organic type connecting, that I had been looking for. I somehow had learnt that connecting was never about forcing something, willing something. It either happened naturally or was not meant to be.

An indigenous man, played didg and sold pottery and didg, at a local market in an area I’d moved to with my family. I went monthly and listened to him play. After a few months I decided to buy a didg and later on a second one. I played every day and as the months went by I’d play with him a little to at the market and we became friends on our monthly meet ups. One day he invited me bush and I can never forget that day when we pulled up on a dirt road and he got out, walked up to a tree, cut it down, shook out the nest and straight away starting playing it. Words do no justice. Nothing was the same after that. It started me off into didg making, I loved it; I was at home and it became what I did in my spare time. In time I had more didgs than I needed to play but I loved having the variety and I always had a bunch on me when travelling or going to a festival. I was at a festival one day and I mentioned to a friend who had a stall at the festival, that I had more didgs than I needed; he said “put some on the stall” and I did and they all sold. It was like the wave again, one of those things that just happen.

For a few years, I’d play didg, and after a day building farm sheds, I’d potter in my backyard shed making whenever I could. Didgeridoo making was a part time gig, attending festivals and selling a bunch a few times a year, but one day I jumped in. I knew it was what I was meant to do. It had become my life in so many ways and committing to it, was just getting aligned with reality and so Heartland Didgeridoos was born. Finding hollow logs and making them into instruments became how I supported our family. My partner and I had two beautiful daughters, life was full. Heartland had to be sustainable and successful and yet it was always guided by a wholistic approach. To only make 3400 didgs which is about 2 a week over all those years, reflects the desire to do it right. It’s always been about quality and care first. Since the beginning the ethos has been “Heartland Didgeridoos ~ Specialising in the rare and individual with culture and the land at heart.”

Raising a family on hollow logs, was not easy, a 6 day a week gig, I worked hard! It’s honest work in its physicalness, and how it constantly challenges me to know self, and to question over and over again what is presence, alignment, connection and community.

One could say that our world is not in great shape. We are effectively going through a collective global rite of passage. A rite of passage has stages, that includes leaving community, coming into a different form of community, the challenge stage, understanding and celebrating the gems discovered, returning back to community anew. If so globally we are right in the midst of the challenge stage where we have been taken out of community away from our comfort zones and are at sea trying to assimilate what has been, what is going on and where we now are moving. We are yet to return and what we return to will not be solid for some time. For there to be a new way, we need the courage, the clarity, and the wisdom, to dream anew and a certain wildness and tenacity to do what’s needed. For many the survival job, the TV and the smart phone are the dummy and the drip feed, and most folk are not willing to wake up to how our modern world is bit by bit crumbling  and needing a makeover. Didg for me as a focus somehow has always helped keep me awake or snap me back into presence.

We individually and collective make a difference. It’s in little imperceptible ways we build a new world. I’m grateful that making didgeridoos allows me to meet with client after client who in some way is at a crossroad, a strengthening or a deepening in their life and didg is calling them in. I get to hear their stories and effectively support them in their inner and outer change. This has progressively drawn me into mens work and has been a big part of my life for over 3 decades.

Men’s walkabout and ceremony to mark the prep and choice  of a man to be married. In a place known for mens work, deep into time.

For the last quarter decade, once or twice a year I and others, take a group men walkabout where we take time in the bush to do our work. The didg and clapsticks are tools that get used in this space as always was. It was never about the didg and the player as central, didgeridoos are a conduit for the energy of the work being done and help us drop in. They are also are fun around the fire for funs sake too.

Didgeridoos also help me face ancestral pain in my body, my story,  in this land and in others including my first nations brothers and sisters.

Didg bros ~Brian and I

We all have history of trauma somewhere in our past. For first nations it is so extra raw and recent. When we no longer avoid it, we all sit in circle, and hear, we all start to heal. If we do so, we act integrally and no one can make promises that are empty. Our modern culture is needing this level of wake up and first nations deserve that level of being met.

It’s a life thing to work out how to give back for all that is received. Life is like breathing, there is an outpouring, a giving and a receiving in. It is constant and each balances the other. In our modern world we are actively taught about the in breath the focus on self and we are somewhat taught about service and giving back but less so. Responsibility for self, family, culture, country is multi faceted. This man by the fire with me, taught me a lot about giving and presence, a man always in service to family and country. A man complicated like us all by the history carried but humble beyond measure.  We met as fellow didg makers  taking our kids to learn local mob dance. Bush time together we did countless times over decades, finding didgs together, under the stars and on the search,  pondering the meaning of life and laughing at it all too. In this pic, flames fire upwards from a hollow log, a mutual heart forming in the top of the flames.

We each swing on the pendulum towards the other. The didg has taught me so much about the swinging and polarity. I once was a festival goer teacher of didg in a big way, these days I am more of a hermit or contained exploring the  simpler or inner worlds. The didg as polarity has the phallic masculine nature so easily seen and yet easily  we can miss the feminine in the hole, the unseen, the sound and the vibration. Polarity  and unity is all around us. The didg is a conduit for so much and the further down the path of life I get, the more complex is the nature of polarities and the questions they offer. I even notice the polarity of how to some my work is of goodness that is helping lead to healing and connection or to another this is another way culture is taken from and disempowered. By being white by appearances this can be part of what I agreed to, in taking on this work, and, like the saying goes, nothing is ever back or white really. The question I now ask is am I a white fella doing seemingly black work or is there black culture in my convict past, or am I a black fella back in a white body, or am I a white fella justifying his existence. Maybe I am all of those.

My ancestry like for so many is but a mystery. I like many are redefining through the collective rite of passage we are all going through, the building blocks of new ways of being human. There are signs of the path ahead, in how you first nations mobs lived and live. There are signs we first nations and all humans are slowly rewilding ourselves anew.  I hazard a guess, there are also signs we can only unravel in the chaos of change. We are all in this together. Some times finding our way and other times at sea, damn lost.

Back from 4 days Walkabout. Cold dip in the river & pies in town!

Bush and didg finding, regularly calls, as does climbing a mens mountain more than once yearly with a group of men, opening to wisdom from local mob and country.  Roots now taken hold in bones, drinking in  wisdom from local mob and trusting the land and the knowing in all living things, that speak to us all. So much has been lost and yet ultimately nothing is lost!  It all  remains alive to be breathed in again anew, the memory is in the land, the ancestors guide our way, to suit today and the mystery that is our tomorrow.

Yidaki, didgeridoo, you are a friend along the way, I am only just getting to know you. There is a long way to travel and I’m excited what is still ahead.

Some snapshots  to GLIMPSE FURTHER INTO HEARTLAND