Copyright Alan Whitehead & Earthschooling: No Part of this book, post, URL, or book excerpt may be shared with anyone who has not paid for these materials.
Alan speaks in a very symbolic and esoteric manner in some parts of his books. Although they can be read anthroposophically, passages speaking of Atlantis, archangels, gods, etc. do not need to be taken literarily to be meaningful. The more you read, the more you will realize he uses many different religions to express ideas in a symbolic manner and not in a religious manner. His writings are not religious. In some places his writings are meant to refer to religious events in a historical way. In some places he is using religious figures (from Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Paganism, Ancient Roman and Greek Religions, etc.) in a symbolic manner. However, at no point is he promoting a specific religion or speaking from a religious point of view.
I have kept the writing as close to one-hundred percent original so you will also find that he speaks of Australia often and some spelling or manners of speaking may be cultural. Any words I have changed are presented like this: <word>.
Also keep in mind that these books are written by a Waldorf teacher with decades of experience who also studied with a Steiner student himself, so he speaks to an audience that is dedicating their lives to the Waldorf method without exception.
Because of this, all of his views are not reflected in the Earthschooling curriculum and not all of them may be ones you want to embrace or are able to use. In all of Alan Whitehead’s writings the opinions are his own and may not align with Earthschooling or Waldorf Books. In some cases, we will be updating some of these chapters in the future with additional and/or updated information.
Ultimately, however, as I read through these passages I find I can distill wisdom from even those paragraphs that do not resonate with me.
We invite you to read with an open mind and heart and with eagerness to learn and discuss…
MAY 26
National Day of Healing
This event was known as National Sorry Day up to 2004 but has been called the National Day of Healing ever since. Whatever the title; this important anniversary has been celebrated right around Australia on May 26 since 1998. It was chosen to celebrate the Bringing Them Home Report handed to the Federal Government on that date in 1997. The report detailed the iniquity of the governments of the past, and others, of removing aboriginal children from their families during much of the 20th century.
Australia is the only continent-country on earth. As such, it is subject, virtually unhindered, to metaphysical influences from the four cardinal points of the compass. These conveniently correspond to Rudolf Steiner’s teachings on the four great epochs prior to our own post-Atlantean “Aryan”. The four are: Polaria in the south, from which there is still considerable influence; Hyperborea from the north, our weakest epochal stream; Lemuria from the west, to which we are subject as no equivalent land mass; and Atlantis from the east, like Hyperborea, also highly diminished. The Australian aborigines, sometimes known as Sons of Cain due to that maligned scriptural figure being exiled “east of Eden”, carry ancient Lemurian impulses into the present day. Hence in their enigmatic Earth Spirit culture, we have a unique window into a distant but hugely important past in terms of human evolution. But oh, how we corrupt and besmirch this wonderful gift, with today’s indigenes being marginalized as no other. Indeed, our former Prime Minister, John Howard, stubbornly refused on behalf of the Australian people to provide a public apology for the legion wrongs done to Australian aborigines since the white “invasion” over 200 years ago. The following personal apology, which appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald January 9, 1998, was your author’s small attempt to keep “sorry” on the national agenda. This of course was just a few months prior to the Bringing Them Home report.
***
So far the “We are sorry” debate has turned up few if any apologies based on personal confessions of actual wrongdoing; this is mine.
The perpetrators of offenses against aboriginal people have been as silent as the grave – so to speak. On the other hand, those who have had little or no contact with indigenous people – hence who are nominally innocent – have been vociferous to gushing in their contrition.
I was raised in a country town in the 1950s, one with a large Koori population. In spite of the numbers, I can only recall two black children actually attending school. Both were teenagers; the boy was a very good sprinter, shades of Cathy Freeman (apt name!), who brought sporting kudos to the school. The other was a girl whose habits and dress were so gentrified that she was permitted to attend our local state high school, circa 1957. She was even gratuitously elected as a prefect, a reward for being ‘as good as a white person’. Mind you, she would never have dared to collar the smokers behind the bike shed, due to inevitably being ‘put back in her place’. Alas, Patricia was a token prefect only.
I apologize for failing to enquire where the rest of the many hundreds of aboriginal children living on the town outskirts were going to school – if at all.
But it gets worse. As a child I made myself available to buy methylated spirits for furtive, shabby aboriginal men to maintain their alcohol-induced haze. Of course, in these pre-equality days they were not allowed in the hotels to join the 6 o’clock swill; that unseemly ritual enjoyed by their white ‘betters’. I sold metho for the sixpence profit I made on each purchase. Naturally this toxic consumption probably shortened the tragic lives of my melancholy customers.
I apologize for thoughtlessly having financially exploited these oppressed people.
As a teenager, a member of a loose gang of louts, I hung around the dimly-lit streets after the pictures. This was primarily to intimidate and threaten the small, cringing groups of aboriginal youths unlucky enough to find themselves in our crosshairs.
We used every defamatory, intimidating term that we could think of with our bankrupt vocabulary; ‘mongrel boong’ being one of the milder.
I apologize for terrorizing these already fear-filled people.
When we were a little older we would stray down late at night to the ‘blacks’ camp’ by the creek to solicit their womenfolk. I am relieved to admit that we were singular failures in this perverted enterprise (as we were with all our lustful pursuits!).
I apologize for attempting to defile a people who had already lost their sense of self-worth. ·
Thankfully, I eventually moved to the city, and away from any aboriginal contact Here I could not perpetuate my inadvertent racism. ‘Inadvertent’? Who to blame then? Primarily of course I am mea culpa!
It was certainly not my parents! My father was, while in Queensland during _the war, one of the few whites the local aborigines would take on walkabout. As such, my very first pen pal was ‘Paddy”, a full-blood from the Iron Range area. His gift of a beautiful boomerang I have to this day.
As a child and adolescent, I eagerly read every Ion L. ldriess book on aborigines I could find; like The Red Chief, One Wet Season and In Crocodile Land. My most heroic image was that of the wild man – a natural evolution of the 19th century ‘noble savage’. I regularly played this out in the bush around my home.
So why the contradiction between what I idealized and what I actually did? Sadly, like most of my contemporaries, I was in the heartless grip of the social milieu of the time, the all-pervading propaganda of the infamous White Australia Policy.
I sinned against the innocent as an unwitting instrument of collective supremacist delusion. It is this sinister social entity of discrimination that is really to blame. I feel however that I have traveled some distance along the path of atonement in raising a daughter who produced the international award-winning film, Black River, an expose on black deaths in custody and the “stolen generation”. This was an important element in the push for a Royal Commission on the subject shortly after.
This was the aforementioned Bringing Them Home Report. For Aanya, thankfully, I have to make no apology. At least in the current generation there is not the entrapment of an unquestioned white supremacist expectation.
I can apologize for my own nefarious conduct – traduce myself to the point of self-loathing even – but only for myself. It requires someone who is a figurehead of this shadowy being called White Australia to apologize for the collective wrongs of the past, or even of the present. The argument for non-apology is that the current generation should not have to feel remorse for the sins of the fathers … What? Am I the last of the guilty!?
I think not. Aboriginal people all over Australia are even currently being victimized on a thousand different levels, including employment, health, housing, and justice.
So, it’s over to you John Howard … but then you were a city kid; you probably never even met an indigenous person! As such, you personally committed no meretricious acts. No guilt, no apology, right? Then do it for those of us who did, John – do it for me.
***
Of course, we all know of and applaud the world-famous Sorry Day Address given by Prime Minister Kevin Rudd on February 13, 2008. As such, history will surely record that, on a moral level at least, this wonderful gesture places him head and shoulders above his predecessor, John Howard, who refused, against all political and other advice to formally apologize.
An even earlier act of atonement than the newspaper piece above was a four-day seminar I convened in the summer of 1980 at Lorien Novalis School titled: Terra Australis de! Espiritu Santo, the Fire Continent – from The Dreamtime to Present-day Consciousness.
Celebrated aboriginal poet, Kath Walker – “Oodgeroo Noonuccal” – revealing some of her beloved Stradbroke Island nature mysteries to your author, Spring, 1980. Below an excerpt from one of her luminous works:
Let no one say the past is dead.
The past is all about us and within.
Haunted by tribal memories, I know
This little now, this accidental present
Is not the all of me …
Let no one tell me the past is wholly gone.
Now is so small a part of time, so small a part
Of all the race years that have molded me.
Leave a Reply