A Seed of Love in Rocky Soil
During my recent stay at Meherabad in November, 2019 I borrowed a book from the Meher Pilgrim Retreat reading room to help pass the time during the long afternoons. It was Jan Morris’s Journeys. Morris is an internationally acclaimed travel writer who is both engaging and humorous, and not afraid to show, warts and all, how she sees a place and its people. The book was first published in 1984 and the copy I borrowed was stamped on the inside cover: Don’t Worry Be Happy Pilgrim Library. I first visited this library in the 70’s when I stayed in Ahmednagar either at the Dawlat Lodge or Meher Colony (Akbar Press) about five kilometres from Meherabad. The library consisted of a small room off an open passageway behind where Eruch Jessawalla (one of Meher Baba’s close mandali) sat in the Trust Office at Meher Nazar. The library was filled with books that pilgrims had left behind and it was always interesting to see what my fellow refugees from the world were reading. Now this book had made its own pilgrimage to Meherabad and into my hands.
Morris’s first chapter, written in the early 80s, “Over the Bridge: An Australian Story,” is about Sydney, the jewel in the crown of our island cities. She writes: “Nearly all Australia is empty. Emptiness is part of the Australian state of things, and it reaches out of that wilderness deep into the heart of Sydney itself, giving a hauntingly absent sense to the city . . .”[1] To my mind there is something in this. Many writers have shared this same view. Francis Brabazon, for instance, in his short poetic biography saw Glenrowan, where he grew up as a boy, in a similar way: “The township was a sprawl of loneliness: / eight houses without flowers to cover / their nakedness . . .”[2]
And about the same time as Francis was working on his farmer’s farm at Glenrowan, D. H. Lawrence was writing his novel Kangaroo in which he described this same emptiness permeating and shaping the Australian mindset: “The bulk of Australians don’t care about Australia . . . because they care about nothing at all, neither in earth below or heaven above. They just blankly don’t care about anything, and they live in defiance . . . If they’ve got one belief left . . . it’s a dull, rock-bottom belief in the obstinately not caring, not caring about anything.”[3]
I remember Eruch telling a story from the Ramayana that affirmed this same idea of a landscape affecting the human psyche. It was the time when Lakshman was in exile wandering with Rama and Sita for fourteen years in the wilderness. At one period during their wanderings, Lakshman became uncharacteristically silent, withdrawn, and unresponsive to Rama. And as he slowly regained his composure and attentiveness to his Master’s needs he begged Rama’s forgiveness for his uncharacteristic behaviour. Lakshman had no idea what came over him during this time. Then Rama assured him that it was not his fault but it was somehow a quality “in the land itself” which they were passing through that had momentarily entered into him and negatively affected his state of mind.
We have all experienced, I’m sure, that certain places don’t “agree with us”; places that we feel that we just have to leave. And it needs to be added that some places can have a positive effect and uplift our spirits. Certain tourist sites attract people for this reason. And some pilgrimage sites, due to their association with a saintly person, are imbued with a powerful atmosphere that affects people.
For the early British immigrants to this land from 1788 onwards, when the first British prison fleet sailed into Botany Bay, seeing Australia for the first time must have been equivalent to landing on Mars – a strange place with no European imprint to be seen anywhere. And because of their cultural conditioning – making them unable to respond to the landscape – the landscape overcame them with its emptiness. With time, it is easy to understand how this emptiness permeated everything. And it was this that Lawrence sensed in the people living here in the 1920’s and Morris still felt in the early eighties in Sydney. And while I feel this is still present today, I don’t think it is a totally correct assessment for both Morris and Lawrence did not stay long in Australia. If they did they would have seen how Australians do rally round and show courage, compassion, and generosity when needed, especially during times of natural disaster. But it often takes a catastrophic event to bring this out of our nature; it is generally something that lies dormant most of the time.
And just as this empty landscape seeped into our Australian consciousness so did something of the imprint of our early history jump across generations and become woven into the very fabric of what we identify as Australian. Morris makes this point: “Australia was not built by kindness, not even by idealism. Convicts not pilgrims were its Father, and Sydney remains much steelier than it looks. It is not a very sentimental city, and not given much I fear to unrequited kindness. There is a certain kind of Sydney face . . . which at first sight looks straight, square and reliable, but which when examined more carefully . . . reveals a latent meanness or foxiness inherited surely . . . from the thuggery of penal colonies.”[4] I think this applies to all Australia, not just Sydney.
You only have to read The Fatal Shore by Robert Hughes to get a sense of this “thuggery.”[5] Here again, this calls out for qualification but you still sense something of this thuggery in how the First Nation peoples of this land are treated, or people of difference, or those who stand out in any way. It is seen in our popular football codes, in our level of parliamentary discourse, in the callous disregard for people shown by our gutter press, in the sarcastic dialogue on cheap talk-back radio, and in how we treat the environment.
Lawrence in his novel makes the observation: “But Australia feels as if it had never been loved, and never come out into the open. As if man had never loved it, and made it a happy country, a bride country – or a mother country.”[6]This is reflected in the fact that “most Englishmen” saw it as an offspring they didn’t really want, regarding it as “remote and anomalous . . . strange but close, as the unconscious to the conscious mind.”[7] Having to grow up in a place where love was never felt and expressed by the parent country made early Australians feel they were second-rate citizens in the world (illegitimate). And so our sense of culture cringe was born.
To avoid this shame many chose not to identify with Australia at all and saw themselves as being irrevocably English citizens. Francis nicely captures this situation for the early nineteen hundreds:
We were farming Australian soil – virgin
since Creation, but for three generations.
Soil with its own Song locked within it –
waiting for us to listen and express it.
But we were still English. England was home.[8]
Towards the end of her Sydney chapter, Morris dismisses Australia in no uncertain terms: “Short of another world catastrophe, I think, this place has reached its fulfilment. This is it. It will probably get richer, it will certainly get more Asian, but aesthetically, metaphysically, my bones tell me I am already seeing the definitive Sydney, the more or less absolute Australia. A few more tower blocks here, an extra suburb there, a louder Chinatown, more futuristic ferry-boats perhaps – otherwise, this is how Sydney is always going to be. The bland pallor of personality will survive, that seen-through-a-glass quality . . . The strain of shyness, the old streak of the brutal, will be held in balance . . .”[9]
While I strongly disagree with Morris’s prediction, I think this is what many Australians see as okay; that there is no fulfilment beyond what we already have: “beautiful one day, perfect the next.”
For followers of Meher Baba in Australia, or for any members of a group/organisation in this land for that matter, we need to be mindful of those traits that we have acquired as a direct result of where we live and our history. Many of these traits lie deep within us, unconscious even, and have a conditioning influence on how we see ourselves and the world, and can determine our overall attitude to life.
In 1956 this rocky soil was part of the Australian consciousness into which Meher Baba “sowed the seed of Love in this country.”[10] For those who believe in the divinity of Meher Baba, this seed of love is also the seed of our future Australian culture; the beginning of a what Meher Baba calls “true culture”: “the result of spiritual values assimilated into life.”[11]
At times, I can’t help but wonder that much of the turmoil and strife, and indeed suffering, both physical and mental, in this land is this seed bursting through its casing and the beginning seedling pushing its way through our rocky soil; pushing its way upwards towards light. And part of the initial awakening that this seedling brings can already be felt in a new sense of collective responsibility that we see in this land. One aspect of this is a realization that we have to check those traits in us, those rocky deposits, which work against the making of a “true culture” in Australia.
© Ross Keating
[1] Jan Morris, Journeys, Oxford: OUP, 1984, p. 17.
[2] Francis Brabazon, The Wind of the Word, Sydney: Garuda Publications, 1976, p. 6.
[3] D. H. Lawrence, Kangaroo, London: Penguin Books, 1988 (first published 1923), p. 72.
[4] Morris, p. 15.
[5] Robert Hughes, The Fatal Shore: A History of the Transportation of Convicts to Australia, 1787-1868, London: Collins Harvill, 1987.
[6] Lawrence, p. 87.
[7] Hughes, p. 2.
[8] Brabazon, p. 4.
[9] Morris, p. 19.
[10] John A. Grant, Practical Spirituality with Meher Baba, Sydney: Merwan Publications, 1987, p. 24.
[11] Meher Baba, Listen Humanity, narrated and edited by D.E. Stevens, NY: Harper Colophon Books, 1971, p. 180.