Capertee Weaving and the Water Ceremony

By Alex Wisser

On the 14th of November, a handful of Capertee residents, myself and fellow travellers on the Capertee Weaving Water Project woke at four in the morning and travelled to the top of Dunville Loop in The Capertee Valley.  We were met by traditional custodian Peter Swain and several of his family, and drove in procession along the base of the escarpment to a stream crossing the road where we parked and gathered in a circle.  Ochre was passed around as Peter worked to get the fire going in the Coolamon.  This was our first attempt at a water ceremony along the Capertee River.  Despite a good bit of early morning confusion, it began at the moment of sunrise, as planned.  The sun crested the cliffs to the North, somewhere above the source of the small tributary that flowed across the road as Peter smoked the circle of people gathered and spoke to us of what we were doing here, on this road at this river in this valley. 

 The Water Ceremony, he explained, was originally performed as a collective expression of the various clans that lived along a water course.  They would meet at its source, as we were doing, and throughout the Ceremonial Season, the ceremony would be performed along the river. As the water moved from country to country, the ceremony was reperformed, acknowledging the connection that water made between the peoples that lived along its course, that shared the life it distributed across Nation boundaries.  This was continued until the river reached the sea.  This ceremony would only last one day. As it was the first attempt, it had been decided that we would start small, with the idea that it could be repeated in following years with other clans invited to participate.

A large quartz stone was found and the ceremony began.  The stone was smoked, and then passed around the circle. As each of us held the stone, we were asked to put into it the energy of that which we wished to contribute to the river: a wish, a desire, a hope, a feeling: whatever we would like to send down the river.  After the stone had been passed around the circle, it was lowered into the river where the energy that we had invested in it would be carried away by the flowing water.

This might not sound like a particularly challenging thing to do, but it was also not a simple act. I cannot say how anyone else in the circle felt about what we were doing, but for me, inside the privacy of my own thoughts, there were voices that niggled at the earnestness of what we were doing.  What right did I have to be here?  Wasn’t this some kind of childish pretending?  To put my doubts into words is to formulate them as something more definite than they were but there they were, swirling around in my head as usual, undercutting the world around me with their protective shield of skepticism.  Peter had explained that painting with ochre allowed the ancestors to see you, and so, this kind of self-consciousness was understandable. I let these thoughts do their bit, being old enough to know that they are easily exhausted by their own energy.  The sincerity of what we were doing was enough for me to put aside my reservations and quietly participate.  Into the stone I put not a wish or a desire, and not a hope or a single word of intention, but instead I gave to it only the silence that I had in me.  The river did not want me to tell it what I thought.  I knew this much.

We were also invited to select individual stones that we could put our personal thoughts into and we quietly dropped these into the stream. We repeated the ceremony several times, stopping at two other spots along the river before gathering at Glenn Alice Hall for lunch.  Here we were met by a much larger group of people who ate with us and the ceremony was once again repeated.  The stone was again passed around and smoked and then lowered into the river by another member of the group. 

We continued down the valley, stopping next at The Capertee Water Weaving project, a rambling 21 metre long artwork of woven organic material that traced the contour of a small hillside, made by the Capertee community under the guidance of lead artist Leanne Thompson.  The work, as with the ceremony, is part of our larger project to generate a community wide consideration of the hydrology of the valley, integrating cultural interventions like these ones with the delivery of workshops in Natural Sequence Farming techniques and a scientific understanding of the hydrology of the valley.  The rambling structure of wicker circles, bound together into a crazy fence on the hillside in the middle of the valley had about it an irrepressible energy.  It is rare that a community engaged artwork is able to carry the kind of spontaneity and life that this work projected.  

Again we moved down the valley, and arrived at our final station, at Coorongooba, where Coorongooba creek met the Capertee River.  From here it continued through the mountains to become the Colo River before joining the Hawkesbury on the Eastern Plains and from there flowing out to the sea.  A spot had been chosen and a tree selected.  A carving was made into the tree, in a design based on the meeting of the two waters at Coorongooba. The audience was invited to apply ochre to the design.  We performed another ceremony, circling the tree in a gesture of gratitude. 

A final water ceremony was performed at the meeting of the two waters, at sunset, completing the cycle. The day was finished off around the fire at the campsite above the river.

Thinking back over the day, I found it to be an odd combination of cultures.  In contrast to the reverence of the ceremony, the artwork stood as an exuberant celebration on the hillside. The meaning of the various parts of this day seemed to balance in contrast to one another.  The performance of an ancient ceremony and the construction of a completely new-born thing.  Against the backdrop of the valley, the two can be brought together as the spectrum of culture. The one was the opportunity, so rare in our modern experience, to pay respect to the world of which we are a part, and the other was our capacity, as a part of that world, as a participant of that landscape, to produce life, to express its joyful fleeting energy, its effulgence and fecundity.  The artwork participated in the life of the grass and the expression of the wild flowers that surrounded it, as the ceremony participated in the silent weighted and impenetrable persistence of rocks over which water flows to the sea.

This project was made possible through funding support from the above

Hydrology and Human Understanding

By Alex Wisser

The Capertee Hydrology project continues to roll along at pace and the learning deepens.  Last week we met at the project’s default home ground, The Glen Alice Hall, to listen to presentations by Hydrology experts Allan Nicholson and Andrew Wooldridge.  After tagging along to Stuart Andrew’s Natural Sequence Farming presentation and field day, I was keen to see what scientists would add to or take away from the understanding I was starting to build about how water works in the landscape.  

From the beginning, Andrew and Allen reiterated a number of the principles that Stuart Andrews had shared with us. One of these was that the land’s capacity to absorb water in a rain event depends on biodiversity and organic content in the soil.  Biodiverse ground cover, and soils with rich organic content, are able to absorb large amounts of water very quickly, reducing runoff and erosion and holding water in the soil so that it doesn’t enter the water table. This is what Allen described as “The Door” which permits water to enter the land and limits the rate of absorption. The amount of water that the land can hold, Allen referred to as “The Room”. When the room fills up, the water table rises. Eventually it reaches the surface and this is often when salt deposits are brought with it to cause salinity problems on the land.

I noticed here a divergence in perspective from that presented by Stuart Andrews.  Here hydrology was presented in terms of how it affected salinity.  From what I gathered, salinity becomes an issue when the water tables rise and salt is either flushed or rises from deposits in the land to the surface.  Cleared land, for instance, can suffer from salinity because without the heavy perennial vegetation to draw surface water, this water enters the groundwater, which rises, bringing salt with it. Much of what Andrew and Allen talked about was tied to how you could remove water from the landscape to reduce the rise of saline deposits to the surface. I regret that I didn’t ask whether our ambition to rehydrate the landscape could have any negative effects on salinity.

This question also marked another difference between Stuart’s presentation and those of Allen and Andrew. The former was unified, and compelling while Allen and Andrew’s presentation seemed scattered and left questions unanswered.  This is not to discredit their presentation, which delivered a wealth of fascinating information, but it did so in a manner that made it difficult to grasp. I realised it was a product of their scientific training and their long experience applying that understanding to diverse landscapes across Australia.  The fragmented nature of their delivery was due in part to their awareness that every general principle they employed was limited and contingent to the specific complex conditions of the particular situation to which it is applied. They even said this outright at several points.  The knowledge they presented was fascinating and substantial but if it gave me understanding with one hand, it took away something of the confidence with which I could hold it with the other.

The scientific method is essentially resistant to the kind of exposition that Stuart engages in. Not that Natural Sequence Farming isn’t predicated upon scientific fact. It is, but it also converts it into and mixes it with much that isn’t strictly science. It speaks with a confidence that ignores the partial and contingent nature of all knowledge, it leaps over contradiction and dispels the complexity of detail in order to deliver a cohesive, and convincing body of knowledge. Science must scruple over the partial and contingent nature of all knowledge, it must remind us at every step that what we don’t know is always greater than what we do. It is a powerful method for generating a certain kind of understanding, but at the same time it makes it difficult to communicate that understanding to non-scientists.

These were the thoughts swirling around in my head as I struggled to retain a few of the concepts being thrown at me.  The great thing was that Allan and Andrew were aware of this. They constantly returned from their diagrams and schemata to particular instances. I was fascinated by the way they prevented their own material from cohering into something unified by insisting on the contingent nature of their knowledge.  The power of Stuart’s presentation was the grace of its synthesis, the ease with which it communicated the incomprehensible complexity of a landscape in a way that captured the imagination. This is very powerful, because it renders coherent something that is so complex as to present as chaotic. The two modes can be understood as different scales of perspective - that you can look at something up close, in its minutest detail and you can look at it from far away, in its broadest entirety.  Both perspectives yield understanding, and both produce errors in perception.

It makes me wonder, as we are learning of the importance of biodiversity to a landscape, to the health of its soil and to the health of its ability to capture and retain water, whether another principle might be extrapolated by way of metaphor. It occurs to me that the health of human understanding might be determined by the diversity of ideas that are brought to coexist and conflict, to benefit, to feed, to fight within it. Perhaps the point is not to come to the monoculture of thought which has been the ideal of our philosophical tradition, but to cultivate and encourage the diversity of our thought. Just a thought…