This essay is based on a chapter of the book Reefscape: Reflections on the Great Barrier Reef by Rosaleen Love published in Australia by Allen & Unwin Pty Ltd, 2001
Saltwater Spirituality
The two major tourist destinations in Australia are Uluru and the Great Barrier Reef: the world’s largest rock and the world’s largest reef. Once pilgrims traveled from one holy shrine to the next along paths across Europe to Rome and Jerusalem. From Uluru to the reef in a week is a modern secular pilgrimage, from one global natural wonder and tourist icon to the next.
At the visitor’s center at Uluru there is a message from the Anangu, the Aboriginal custodians of the site. It goes like this: “Tourists see the rock and they see it as an exceptionally large rock. But they should look into the rock and if they could do that they would see the spirit that lives there, and they will know about the rock.” In this context “knowing about the rock” is more meaningful that the physical act of conquest in climbing it. Climbing the rock is an ephemeral activity, all too soon over and photographed and done with. Traveling to the rock to “look through the rock” is a spiritual pilgrimage in which the search is for relationship with some kind of meaning beyond the immediate material presence. These could be values conceived as residing in nature or in nature as representative of something still beyond nature, the in-some-way supernatural.
The meaning of pilgrimage, say Victor Turner and Edith Turner, who have made a study of religious pilgrimages in Europe, Mexico, and India, lies in the experience of “flow” it engenders. As in sport, play, diving, or playing a musical, there is in a pilgrimage that same merging of action and awareness as crucial components of the experience. There is the same loss of sense of self, a loss that is experienced in a positive way. The result of this kind of loss is not despair but a state of awareness without being aware one is aware. The self is irrelevant. The pilgrim loses him-self/herself in flow.
The literal application of “flow” to swimming, snorkelling, and diving is immediately apparent. Visiting the reef, whether taking a dive, going for a snorkel, or just looking, is changing dwelling from land to sea. With the dive itself, the journey will not be a long one, at least as measured by the clock or by the air left in the air tank. However swiftly time passes, there is still the sense of sojourn, of staying in a place that is not one’s own, of visiting another country, in this case underwater. The expectation is for something completely different. For the diver who leaves the book on spirituality on the dive boat, perhaps the hope is also for some kind of personal transformation. The reef is more than itself. Travel to the reef is travel to somewhere more than the reef.
There is a paradox, so often the essence of matters spiritual. In one way it is a fairly trivial paradox, yet in another way it sums up the nature of the human condition. Even as they yearn for something more, divers are hopelessly enmeshed with the material objects necessary for the quest. The technology of liberation, while clever, is clunky. The snorkel, flippers, and goggles are definitely material objects, as are the air tank, the regulator, and the buoyancy control device. Definitely materialistic in and of itself, yet it must be accepted as the necessary means to another kind of end. Air thrusts its material status on the diver. Air, the substance that surrounds and supports us, unnoticed for the most part, suddenly becomes the number one material priority. Nitrogen achieves extra-important status in diving. On land it is the inert element that the body can easily cope with, without the brain having to give it a second thought. Under the pressure of as little as the 60 feet of amateur recreational diver’s limit, nitrogen is absorbed into human tissues, and the diver must not rise too quickly. Sufficient time must be allowed, whether below the water or above it between dives, for nitrogen to diffuse into the bloodstream and pass to the lungs to be exhaled. Forget the spiritual connotations of breath, spiritus, soul, or whatever. Air, normally heavy with metaphors is here doubly material object.
Sleep, eat, dive. Sleep, eat, dive, read a book on spirituality. Sleep, eat, dive, meditate. Sleep, eat, dive, photograph something underwater. A certain odd pattern to life is set up on a dive boat. Words are not the recreational diver’s strength. Ask the diver what it is that links both diving and the book on spirituality and the subject is avoided. It is too personal. Searching for deeper meaning in pleasure combines hedonism and spirituality in a heady mix.
To this is added the sense of transience, that life is fleeting, which is contrasted with something that is assumed to be enduring. Over millions of years Uluru will erode and the reef will change. Yet human life is still fleeting in comparison to rock or reef. Intimations of mortality are all around. We are in the presence of sharks, in chains of predator and prey. Instead of being scary it’s actually all rather enticing, energizing, and in Technicolor.
Although I find myself positively vibrating in cosmic sympathy with the ocean, I know in my head that I can’t go down most of the paths of faith I meet along the way. I don’t yet know how much farther I can push the boundaries of my personal beliefs. I grew up a member of the Anglican Church and loved the immersion on faith, myth, ritual, and music. But I ceased belief at about the age of 13 when the Reverend Cornish preached a sermon denouncing Darwin’s pernicious theory of evolution. This must have been in the year 1953 in a church that I later knew had accommodated itself to Darwin’s views some 80 years earlier. Today, I’d quite enjoy hearing a rousing mid-nineteenth-century Anglican sermon denouncing Darwinism in terms of the impossibility of man’s relationship to ape. At the age of 13 my reaction was that this preacher has got it wrong, and I don’t want to listen to him anymore.
What I experienced until age 13 was then called “being religious” in a conventional sense. Now the term “spirituality” is more widely used to encompass both mainstream Western sets of belief and a host of others that would have equally alarmed the reverend Cornish – animism, New Ago syntheses, Neo-Paganism, Buddhism, and other ancient religions, and more. Saltwater spirituality might be seen as selfish retreat, except it is an experience many others share and in that sharing comes a feeling of community with nature and others that takes particular strength from its retreat into beauty. Things could be otherwise, we think. The world doesn’t have to consist of one war after the other. There are possibilities of rich connection between the self, the ocean, humans and earth, the cosmos. The complexity and intricacy of reef life transforms, if only for the moment, the individual who enters into it and experiences the relation of part to whole. New ways of thinking about self and nature and self and culture emerge with others who experience similar strong feelings of interconnectedness.
A phrase from the Brahms Requiem sings into my head under-water: “For here we have no abiding city; we are not at home. From this world we must depart to seek the world of air, the world of daily cares, great and trivial concerns. A requiem written by Brahms on the death of his mother distils yearning, bereavement, knowledge that this world is transient – yet so, also, will be his grief. Requiem acknowledges morality and links the transient to the eternal. There is a similar sense of loss in coming back to daily life from underwater experience. Even as I know I must. Life in air goes on, and underwater existence is possible only in short bursts.
Spirituality, in its minimal meaning, indicates the sense that there is something here that cannot be explained – mysteries, uncertainties, doubts, and also awe and inspiration. There is something that transcends my small experience and knowledge of the world. The thoroughgoing skeptic might look around and say: “Well, of course, it’s all those fish, and sharks are awesome because they’re bigger than you and carnivorous.” But it’s not just your personal relationship to these sharks; it’s the intricate interrelationships of fish to reef, reef to water, water to earth, and all of it to you. Science is one tool to understanding intricacy and complexity, but there comes that urge to ask, “What’s all this underwater intricacy for?”
I looked around for ways in which different people were thinking differently about science and spirituality and found calls from many of the formal religious faiths of the world – Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism – to reexamine their traditions and “green” their faith in the light of recent science. If the wisdom of God is manifest in the works of creation, humans have a duty of care toward the earth. Ins some ways I wanted more, in other ways less, than the greening of traditional belief. I have some trouble in saying God, or Goddess, or even Gaia—no longer imagined as the personal deity but rather a nongendered force gathering energy from everywhere in the universe. I am more inclined to think about the grand sweep of the evolutionary epic both personally and impersonally because I reckon the impersonal definitely counts in this story. I found myself attracted to the way Czech poet Miroslav Holub (1923-1998) thought the issue through. Holub was an immunologist and a poet. He also had difficulty calling himself a religious person, but he did see himself as a unit of something bigger. He hesitated to call it “spirit.” He was much happier with the word “genome.” It is through the genome (that is, the sum total of all the genes in an organism) that the individual partakes of something above the individual experience. It is through the genome that all living things share in the genetic process of the planet. Knowledge, and belief in this process, brought Holub to place himself in the position of a religious individual. He went beyond the “here and now” of his individual life to see it as part of an evolutionary whole that stretches from the past history of life on earth into its future. He talked about the relationship of the part to the whole of life, not in openly religious terms but as a kind of instinct or talent for survival.
In the late nineteenth century scientists tried o pin down the difference between living and nonliving things by talking about a “life force.” With the genome, “life force” is rendered perhaps less mysteriously as “life entity, “the genome or the entity DNA. As genetics becomes more commercialized, genetics studying computer printouts seem to be removing themselves farther from nature daily. Holub rejected their detachment in favor of the desire for a feeling of connection, to experience the relation of part to whole in his life’s work. In a spirit of humility he placed himself before the genetic process of the planet, with the comment “we are not the aim of the process.” This “something bigger,” the genome, is pictured as an entity with which scientists cooperate in extending human understanding.
Miroslav Holub read the DNA that humans share with other organisms as “the logical record of an integrated organism’s evolutionary drama.” In the battle between life and death, a compromise has been reached in which life continues by appropriating its former enemies to its own ends. Genetic takeover is part of the process. In interpreting the history of life on earth in terms of the conquistadorial activities of genomes, Holub found acceptance of the fact that the death of one individual is often necessary for the life of others. He sees tragic death as a precondition of a biological optimism. He imagines a biological or genetic supraconsciousness that is an aspect of the life of planet as a whole and to which the question of the individual is not central. The biologist finds meaning in accepting responsibility for the planet as a whole and as whole viable system.
I find certain pleasure in imagining the genetic process of the planet as something that may lead to the genetic process of the solar system, the galaxy even Either life exists on other worlds o it does not. If it does not, I imagine humans, as they send their emissaries into space in the form of smart, lightweight, self-organizing. Self-repairing space probes, may also be sending some of earth’s bacteria into space along with them. It may not be humans who take the step out into space but universal life in the form of our humblest, but most successful, inhabitants.
My views, while not exactly secular, are not particularly in synch with spirituality as it is commonly understood. Yet I find a fascination in learning about other ways of seeing the reef in which the element of other-worldliness comes through strongly and differently. I greatly enjoy the reef poems of Australian poet Mark O’Connor, infused as they are with his Christian beliefs. The Biblical story of creation as given in the book of Genesis makes no mention of coral reefs; the marine life of tropical seas did not feature in the oral traditions of desert-dwelling peoples. O’Connor takes up the challenge to include them. In the beginning, O’Connor writes, God surveys his creation in the Garden of Eden and finds it good, by and large, but not yet complex enough. Something more intricate than a Babylonian walled garden, as traditionally conceived, seems called for: the tropical oceans and their myriad interdependent inhabitant. Creation must have a small coral cay at its center. God works until on the seventh day he rests but not the traditional fashion:
…and on the seventh he donned mask and snorkel and a pair of bright yellow flippers. And later, the hosts all peered wistfully down through the high safety fence around Heaven and saw God with his favourites finning slowly over the coral in the eternal shape of a gray nurse shark, and they saw that it was very good indeed.
Forget high Romantic angst and Wordsworthian solemnity. The view from the coral cay is that God has a playful if deadly sense of humour.
Core Spiritual Emotion
The sense of coming out of the self to merge with outside things seems to be a core spiritual emotion. The desire to recover a sense of relation to land, sea, and people is a key element in current fascination with the spiritual traditions of Indigenous peoples. In thinking through issues of Indigenous spirituality and the reef, I’ve not personally gone out into the field as an anthropologist. Nor can I really think myself into a mindset in which the world is experienced as someone brought up in Indigenous ways of belief. What follows is my attempt to set down what I understand about the customary sea beliefs of Aboriginal people living beside the reef. In part the surge of interest in customary marine rights and tenure comes from the recognition that industrial societies and their practices have caused considerable harm and that other ways might prove more enduring.
Coastal Aboriginal groups around the coast Northern Australia call themselves the Sandbeach or Saltwater people They believe that the sea as well as the land relates people to their place of origin, their traditional values, resources, stories, and cultural obligations. Reefs and offshore islands contain story places or mythological sites. Anthropologists have mapped the traditional maritime estates of the Sandbeach peoples from Cooktown to Shelbourne Bay, and these maps are available only to some Aboriginal people and the anthropologists involved. Secret knowledge is a core part of Indigenous spirituality. The Sandbeach people of Cape York say that before there were Pama (where Pama means Aboriginal person or people) the fish, animals, and birds were all like human beings, like Pama They were spirit people, called Stories, and they establishes Aboriginal law on the land they themselves created. Stories came to a place and settled down. They changed into rock and other features of the landscape and seascape and are still there as the story places they named for themselves. The Pama today are descended from the Stories who still live on in their own places in the land and sea. The spirits of the ancestors, the Old people, still live in and on the land and sea in their special places. In death, spirit is restored to its place in landscape. The dead live on as spirits in their land and take an interest in what the living are doing. All the creatures, dugong, crayfish, turtle, and snake that are taken for food are not just food but part of a complex web of significance that links people to place to the plants and animals living in that place.
All along the coast there are special places of great cultural significance to Aboriginal people. Dugongs feature in a dugong story place, as does the crayfish, the snake, the diamond stingray, the turtle, each in its own place. Some places are perilous places, dangerous in their links to wind and storm and capable of causing disaster or illness if treated disrespectfully. Humans and animals, land and sea, past and present are woven together, culture intertwined and never separate from nature. It is an animalistic spirituality that provides a moral and ethical code by which to live. Core spiritual values live on in secret knowledge, ceremony, ritual, and initiation practices not open to the outsider.
Between precontact Aboriginal customary practices and the growth of the late-twentieth-century spirituality industry comes the Christian mission enterprises on Cape York Peninsula. The Christian missions were set up to counter the worst excesses of the pearl shell and bêche de mer industries: forced labor, rape, and murder. In countering one set of evils were introduced: the forced removal of groups from traditional sea country to inland missions (often by kidnapping the children so that the adults were forced to follow); a succession of authoritarian mission superintendents who agreed on only one thing – that their charges would become Christian no matter what. “Spirituality loathsome” is a term used by novelists Thea Astley in her award-winning novel The Multiple Effects of Rain Shadow (1996) as she contrasts the physical beauty of an island mission with the horrors that were perpetrated there in the name of doing good. The novel is set on an island she calls Doebin Island, and the events she recounts have parallels with historical events 60 years ago on Palm Island in the Great Barrier Reef, a place to which mainland Aboriginal people were forcibly taken earlier this century.
In recent years Christian beliefs and practices have moved closer to valuing Aboriginal modes of thought much more positively. Elements from both Christian and Indigenous practices and beliefs have come together. The Biblical epic of the Flood of Noah is related to Aboriginal mythic events. The waters of baptism have relevance to initiation rites. The bora or initiation ceremony is said to be “like church.” The crucifix may be worn as an amulet against the actions of sorcerers.
The philosophical traveler to the reef may seek to reimagine the reef by taking onboard some of the ways of knowing the reef, glimpsed, however imperfectly, from indigenous cultures. The European way with myth is to be from something quite different. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, God created Heaven and the earth. European myths settle on archetypal characters and events, stories rich in metaphor and allusion that weave deep meaning from past epics into the activities of everyday life. The myths with which I am familiar from European traditions have certain familiar narrative qualities, but these are not universal. When Cape York Aboriginal people tell family stories, they are about relations, not only among people at this one time and place but also relationships of people to place and to the present, the people into nature. At places where people belong to named moieties or social groupings where exogamy (or marriage outside the group) is practiced, the two moiety divisions may be symbolized by mythic oppositions between different animal species, such as dugong and wallaby stories. Through particular stories of dugong or wallaby, people knew they were relate to particular places.
In my family I can provide a family tree of relations, my grandparents, cousins, and so on, back a few generation and forward. I think of what we mean to each other often in terms given by science – there is a genetic tendency toward blue eyes, fair hair, Irish skin. But I do not go beyond thinking in terms of my affection for my relatives or the physical and genetic similarities that link us. I see my Aunt Isolde in my daughter Amy, the same physical features even down to the bun into which Amy ties her hair as a sign of youthful fashion, while for my Aunt Isolde it was the way she always wore her gray hair into old age. I see I have my mother’s hands and my father’s feet, a quirk I explain by some odd shuffle-around of genetic bits and pieces.
I do not place members of my family in close relation to plants, animals, and country, nor do I conceptualize what we are all up to in terms of Irish myths and legends. If I were to feel around me the presence of the dead, I’d be worried. To see my family relationships can be imagined differently and indeed more richly if different kinds of links are made from the person to the group to the cosmos.
I think this is part of what Aboriginal leader Patrick Dodson means when he says that aspects of Western understanding are “beautifully confounded” by the Aboriginal world view. For non-Aborigines to approach the task of reimagining reefscape, it may be necessary to first acknowledge a state of beautiful confusion and proceed from there.
I come as a tourist to reef places. I do not know half of what I am looking at. I inhabit another place and time. But I can accord these places the same respect my own group expects for cathedrals, shrines, and cemeteries. If I become “beautifully confounded,” that is a good place from which to begin
Sense of the sublime
From “sense of wonder” at the beauty of reef life it is a small step to the notion of the “sense of the sublime,” the sense that here is something so wonderful that it transcends the existence of the individual caught up in this particular time and place. The personal and the cosmic are linked together, big world in the small world, macrocosm in the microcosm, echoes of heavenly places in the underwater world, spiritus with spiritus mundi. For those who translate this awe into religious terms, the sense of wonder has an ultimate ground in belief in a God. For many people the sheer intricacies of reef relationships and the grandeur of the structure as a whole point inevitably to a divine authorship. If we seek to understand ourselves through landscape, says biographer and critic Rosemary Hill, to know what we are by means of what we are not, much depends on whether we believe in a divine creator. If we are not believers in some supreme being, if faith no longer is central to our understanding of the world, and many people today place themselves in the category, there is still the desire to glimpse some kind of something that is other than ourselves. Swimmers and divers of whatever religious persuasions or lack of it do have something in common as they enter the underwater world, and desire “to know what we are by means of what we are not.” There is more to understanding a reef than merely diving it. The beauty of the reef allows the nonbeliever imaginative space to take to notion of “awe” seriously. I think this is where I now must place myself.
For those who find echoes of heavenly places in nature, the “other-worldly” nature of the reef experience is a glimpse of Paradise. Or it can be more down to this earth, a sudden and overwhelming immediate perception of just where one stands on the continuum of life, as if a window suddenly opened onto a hitherto closed part of the mind. The privileged position air dwellers imagine they occupy seems to count for nothing in the watery world. Going underwater is a view from the bottom up.
For humanists, atheists, and religious believers, whatever the ultimate cause, the moral and ethical issues remain. How people ought to live with respect to beauty and intricacy is important no matter what the religious persuasion of lack of it.
In any environmental ethics there are some activities on the reef that have to be ruled out of order, such as the use of coral islands for target practice, as with the Australian Defence Forces at Rattlesnake Island off the coast of Townsville in the Great Barrier Reef; the siting of a nuclear power plant on a reef in Taiwan; the use of Johnston Atoll near Hawaii by the U.S. government for the high-temperature incineration of toxic wastes from chemical weapons; bombing with nuclear devices as with the British tests at Montebello Island off the coast of Western Australia and the French at Muroroa Atoll in the South Pacific. Bombing and dynamiting of reefs is out, as is the use of cyanide of killing fish or stunning them for capture for the live-fish export trade. These are destructive of reef habitats and have destructive potential beyond.
Stories of creation deal with such questions as “How does the world come into existence and for what reason?” Science tells a story of the evolution of corals and reef fish 200 million years ago in the Tethys Ocean. Cape York Indigenous traditions tell it differently, in terms of place and relationships of place to place, of place and spirit, and of living things to people. What will emerge from this in the twenty-first century may be some new sense of responsibility to the sea and reef places of the world. A conservation ethic thought through with respect to land may be extended to “sea country,” a valuable way of seeing and knowing that Indigenous culture has generously provided. The history of the universe, the history of the planet, the geological history of the reef long before humans, the coming of reef life then human life to this place—all these different experiences of significance, purpose, and beauty from the lifeless to the highly evolved may feed into a new way of knowing the reef, a way that I’d like to think will prove vital and necessary for its continued existence.
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Victor Turner and Edith Turner, Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture, Columbia University Press New York, 1979, p 254
John E. Carroll et al. (eds), The Greening of Faith: God, the Environment and the Good Life, University of new England Press, Hanover, 1997
Miroslav Holub, “Jumping to Conclusions” Island, vol 53, 1992, pp 16-21
Mark O’Connor and Neville Coleman, “The Beginning”, Poetry in Pictures: The Great Barrier Reef, Hale & Iremonger, Sydney 1985, p 10
Dermot Smyth, Understanding Country: The Importance of Land and Sea in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Societies, Australian Government Publishing Service, Canberra, 1994 p2
Dermot Smyth, “Aboriginal maritime culture in the far northern section of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park,” Report to the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority, Townsville, 1991, p6
Bruce Rigsby and Athol Chase, “The Sandbeach People and dugong hunters of Eastern Cape York Peninsula. Property in land and sea country”, in Nicolas Peterson and Bruce Rigsby (eds) , Customary Maritime Tenure in Australia, Oceania Monograph 48, University of Sydney, Sydney 1998, p200
As told to Bruce Rigsby and Athol Chase
Dermot Smyth, 1991, p 33
A. K. Chase, “Lazarus at Australia’s gateway: The Christian mission enterprise in Eastern Cape York Peninsula”, in Tony Swain and Deborah Rose (eds), Aboriginal Australians and Christian Missions: Ethnographic and Historical Studies, The Australian Association for the Study of Religions, Bedford Park, S.A. 1988 pp 127 – 139
Bruce Rigsby and Athol Chase p 198
Patrick Dodson, “The land our mother, the church our mother” Compass Theology Review vol 22, 1988, p 1
Rosemary Hill, “On the forest path” Times Literary Supplement, 7 April 1995, pp 3-4
Rosaleen Love completed her doctorate in history and philosophy of science at the University of Melbourne and has been an academic as well as a writer and commentator on science and culture in the general media. Her books include an anthology of Australian science writing If Atoms Could Talk (Greenhouse Press, 1987) and two collection of short fiction with the Women’s Press, The Total Devotion Machine (1989) and Evolution Annie (1993). Rosaleen’s works spring from an abiding interest in the history of ideas, including wrong ideas, from science to future studies.
