‘Foreword’

A culture of reading

Cultures with no tradition of writing are not necessarily ‘non-reading’ cultures. On the contrary, the peoples with such cultures, the Aboriginal People, the Kanak People, the Maohi People, those that I mix with, the men and women of these peoples referred to as primitive and, sometimes today, called ‘first peoples and civilisations’, these men and women in fact do read, and read a lot and often and everywhere. And they know how to read that which we, people of modern end even post-modern societies, no longer know how to read.

Nature in its every dimension: the sky and what lies beyond the sky, the earth, on the surface and underneath, vertically and horizontally, visible and invisible including, for the peoples of the sea, the many facets of the ocean; looked at in this way, nature is an inexhaustible reading book, an encyclopaedia, a corpus of knowledge. Not only knowledge about nature itself, but also knowledge of the universal dimension that transcends it. For the Annuga, the people around Uluru, the Great Rock is the first and ultimate encyclopaedia, the all-embracing; everything is written in it, from the origins of the world to the origins of the people, from the way we feed ourselves to the way in which we protect ourselves from harmful animals, from the birth of the mountains to the end of this eventful life. But I'm sure that there is more. Written on this rock, and also on other of nature’s own media, in a way I know not how to read and using an alphabet I am not versed in, is the future of each and every Annuga, and the reason why each person, each human being living on this earth, is present, in the desert, in a vast radius around Uluru.

The Annuga know how to read nature, it is as simple as that, and they have a limitless capacity, a treasure, which we must try and approach more closely by setting out on the path of knowledge and meeting.