Death

I was due to visit a welfare reform project up in the Cape York region this week. It would have been an interesting trip on several counts. The project operates in a (mostly) indigenous town called Coen in the northern tip of Queensland, which being over 2,500km from Brisbane is somewhat off the beaten track (see below).

The so called Welfare Reform Trials have had a lot of attention because they set out strong conditionalities in return for welfare payments (e.g. sending children to school and meeting certain tenancy conditions) and an emphasis on family responsibilities. What I was going along to was the ‘Negotiation Table’ which brings together commonwealth, state and local government officials with local leaders and community organisations to discuss issues facing the indigenous community and specifically this time how the welfare reforms were working.

Unfortunately however one of the elders died this weekend and so the whole thing has been called off. I don’t know much about the community in question nor exactly what the meetings would have been like (and unfortunately now won’t) but it did surprise me a little that it’s been called off - and called off indefinitely as the community is entering a mourning period of up to a month. It’s a clear example of cultural differences – in the UK we’d likely go ahead, perhaps doing a minute’s silence or something similar to mark the passing. But we’d go ahead because we’d weigh it up against the now unavoidable costs of chartered flights for officials from Canberra and Brisbane, months of pre-conference work, and potential risk of disruption to the project. I’m not saying one decision is better than the other, but we’d say that the person would have wanted it that way because they loved the community and wanted to see it continue to strive or something similar.

So I decided to find out a little more about what death means in Aboriginal society. For Aborigines, death represents a return of the spirit to the Dreaming and the eternal life-stream. Upon death the spirit returns to its source to await reincarnation. Death rituals vary between Aboriginal groups but I was struck by a few points, some which I’ve seen in other societies and others not:

• It is forbidden in Aboriginal culture to refer in any way to the deceased. Instead the news is passed on indirectly in forms like “X has become one” (where X is the wife/husband). This was evident in e-mails and phone calls earlier where it was unclear who exactly had died.
  
  
• Ritual mourning and burying rituals have to be fully carried out to assist the spirit into the afterlife; without this the spirit will be caught between death and future life. Again this helps explain why it’s unclear if/ when the conference will now happen – with up to one month of mourning being planned everything else is disrupted.
  
  
• The mourning is supposed to be accompanied by high levels of agitation and (sometimes) self-harm like burning oneself with coals or gashing of the forehead. I’ve see a bit of this Hindu society in Nepal, though it was more agitation through intense wailing than active self harm.
  
  
• Relatives, and particularly widows, have to experience food taboos and isolation from the community for up to one year. This seems a particularly harsh feature, although may not be as customary these days.
  
  
• There are a range of burial approaches from burying under rocks to cremation. I presume these days everybody has to be cremated or buried in an official spot though perhaps not in these more remote areas.
  

Clearly then death in Aboriginal society is an intensely mystical, complex and tabooed ritual. Apparently Aborigines also don’t particularly fear for death which if right is a very positive feature of their culture - compared for example with the Catholic faith with its both rather elaborate rituals and instillation of life-long dread and apprehension of death. The psychology (and sociology) of grief and mouring is an interesting topic. From a purest perspective many of the Aboriginal customs wouldn't seem to help the emotional process of grieving and moving on from the death of a loved one - take for instance not being able to name the dead person or having to live in isolation to mourn. Perhaps though when rituals get deeply rooted in culture then the process of following the rules whether or not they 'make sense' itself helps one to move on because you are just doing what everyone else does.