Wholly personal

In the 1970s, this was said:

“…Recently Ginsberg, an American contemporary poet with profound influence among the young, heard something of the song cycles of the Pitjantjatjara people of the Centre. He commented that these song cycles formed part of the last surviving oral epic traditions, comparable in quality and importance with the Greek epics recorded by Homer. He urged that we Australians have an opportunity and an obligation to protect and develop this tradition as a living component of the culture of our own society. It was a society in which social obligations were accepted in a wholly personal way. No man, woman or child within it was alone, without support, or without mutual obligations. Even in its degradation, on the fringes of our own towns and cities,there is a certain refuge for the outcast, where judgments are not passed and where acceptance can be relied on. It is a society, in essence, to which the material values of our own are utterly alien: which does not value possessions; which plans not for the future: which links the present with the dreamtime, which all men share with their ancestors and inheritors.”

https://openresearch-repository.anu.edu.au/bitstream/1885/114974/2/b11187669.pdf

Posted on Friday, January 15th, 2021