Are we ever able to accommodate
or are we only ever
going to grab our chance
to forge a trail of tears?

Did it matter at all that
the Celts were over-run by the Romans
(who am I?)
or that the Cherokees were / are
put out by the new world

We have museums to our dismay.
Museums that tell pithy stories
for children
so that adults don’t need
to grow up.

The stories have to start long,
long ago in paleo days
the longer away the better
so far across time that our
hearts don’t even care
when confronted by the
living museums nestled by
the graves of the survivors
taking a tourist
dollar to keep old craft alive.

So lovely.

The stories have to finish with
the proud image of ones who
made it good in the world
where the tears have all dried up
on sculptured faces near casinos.


For a Treaty

My middle class status, career, wealth, comes from that my grandfather was able to get away from the early 20thC steel mills of Hull, UK and come to Australia where he could pull down a forest and take up farming. The family stories tell that indigenous people’s roamed through that land, they knew the new farmers, and then were picked up by government officers and placed on missions. My life, as it is, is the life created by divesting indigenous people of their land with no agreement or recompense. There are some who believe that they can make this work without attention. I caution against this as the view of disassociation. Perhaps under hypnosis we can cut gouges out of our body and pretend we are ‘okay’, but we will surely become debilitated with the loss of our life force that ebbs from the wounds. To me a treaty is the only healing act, an honouring in financial recompense for the resource we stole, a belated conversation in attempt to come to an agreement about who we are to each other, and what we can be for each other. “Sorry’ was the first step. However there is no true sorry without cleaning up our relationship messes to the satisfaction of those we have distressed.

in Australia we have the benefit of just having to look at a very immediate past and it’s ramifications for the people living today. We can address this immediately and completely, if we choose. Otherwise, all over the world, people are in conflict around deep ancestoral issues because we refuse to entertain the notion taught and stood for, by all the Great Educators1, that some call radical forgiveness2. Even here, though, radical forgiveness can only truly take place when every cruelty is owned and spoken.

Any harm, not resolved, causes an ongoing conflict in the body politic. That will occur many generations after anyone even knows the original harm. LOOK CAREFULLY at the human dynamics that are unleashed with every instance of harm, and you will realise that the major harm been done to the indigenous peoples of Australia, is, right now, both overtly and insidiously, eating away at the possibility for Australians to achieve their greatest potential. It is a disease like having a bacterial infection. Ignore it at peril. Our ‘body’ is ringing alarm bells every day and trying to fight the attack. But, being unsupported by the neglect of “nothing happening here’, the disease encroaches. The burden we carry both spiritually and materially because we haven’t been responsible for the damage, has slowed the whole nation down into a sloth of failure to create or produce. As soon as we waken to that our future is completely founded on our recompense for the harm and theft that we are living off, we will embrace our responsibility with enthusiasm. Not because we are doing something special, but because we will be bringing our body politic into full performance.

1. Great Educators is a broad term for the founders of the major religions who all stood for justice and forgiveness as cornerstones of healthy and progressive societies. Continue reading


Aunty Rae and Reuben Allen (Great Nephew) 2013

Aunty Rae and Reuben Allen (Great Nephew)



Aunty Rae ALLEN 1949





GEORGE & ZOE WARING   Sth Australia












EVELYN LEWIS   Crescent Heads NSW



R & E MULLER  Proserpine, Qld











JONNET PRICE  Gwynedd, Wales



KEVIN HANSEN  Rockhampton  Phone call:






LARRY COLE  Woodstock, Ontario, Canada



MELINDA R TAJINGWA  Rancho Cucamonga, California, USA



Hiro Seki   Saitama, Japan






MEGUMI SUGIHARA   Chiba-shi, Japan



















MICHAEL ALLEN Adelaide, Australia

“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
I lift my lamp beside the golden door.”
― “quote on the Statue of Liberty”

ROBYN BOUBIS (NEE LARKIN)  Melbourne, Australia



Yvonne Rudd (nee Allen)









TIM, Mihoko and Kei LARKIN  Japan







Three qualities I most remember Aunty Rae.











Map of Celtic tribes during Roman Empire

Celtic Tribes during Roman Empire

As I swept the verandah this morning I came to contemplating the ‘Close the Gap’ movement, the history of disenfranchisment of the Australian Aboriginal people, and the significant difficulty Aboriginal youth have in utilising access to the education system in Australia as a means to realise their potential. This contemplation was sparked by a discussion with my son, a teacher who has worked with Aboriginal children and youth. The discussion lead to a sense that there is an observable gap between potential and certain educational and social outcomes. At the extreme end, minors are being arrested and sentenced to juvenile detention. From a health perspective, this is a group already sentenced to chronic disease and mental health disorders.

It is long recognised that the domination of the Aboriginal people across Australia since the turn of the 19th century, by British and Christian Churches supported settlement, lead to the decimation of the population and culture. Especially as Aboriginal culture is a transmitted verbally and in praxis, once a significant number of elders had been removed from tribal environments, culture failed. In the Eastern seaboard of Australia that became home to high numbers of non-Aboriginal people, cultural transmission is very low. In Central and Western Australia cultural transmission continues at a higher level but still with loss of up to 80% of storyline and ceremony.

As I thought about the influence of the more dominant culture that Europe and the United Kingdom brought to the world from the 16th century onward, I found myself thinking about older incursions, especially those of the Roman Empire into the British Isles, and the domination of the Celtic tribes, my own ancestors.

The Celtic tribes of Britain formed through slow migration from Central Europe. Before the Romans invaded ‘Britain’, they covered the territory in clans that had kings, equal status for women, a written language but relied heavily on oral tradition, and had a religion supported by Druids (priests, teachers, healers).  They farmed with ploughs and were known for love of war. There tribalism is thought to have been their downfall, not being able to unify long enough to defend against the Roman Empire.

As the Roman Empire took hold the Celtic lifestyle changed to take advantage of the Roman Highways for trade. Eventually the Roman Empire turned from Paganism to Christianity and bought Christianity to Britain by 600AD especially through St Augustine. Christian minsters travelled throughout Britain teaching in villages and eventually christianity took predominance over the older Celtic religion.

The history of Christianity in Britain, parallels a history of the making of the United Kingdom under one King, and the eventual establishment of Britain as the world’s greatest colonial power ever seen.

My purpose in drawing this connection is to reflect upon the advancement of a people, not through withstanding invasion and change, but in adapting to the invaders style and technologies. Certainly, as Celtic history shows, fighting the intruder was an essentially aspect of their identity. Fighting meant they were not victims. Eventually the Roman empire faltered for other reasons, and, by then, the Celts had taken to Christianity and that adaptation made them the greatest players in the world, for a time.

The Celtic story serves to give us all, even Aboriginal Australians, great hope for the future. We will none of us remain culturally the same. We will even achieve greatness by incorporating styles and technologies and trading capacity with dominant powers. We will achieve greatness by supporting new and invigorating spiritual inspiration. We should certainly endeavour to maintain cultural identity but not at the cost of rejecting all new things. Eventually our conquerers will pass into history, and that which will remain is our larger humanity soaring in spiritual and material power. And, while it may take one or two thousand years to realise that power, nonetheless, history encourages us to take that longer view.

The Evolution of the Global Mind

The argument over the relative virtues of science and religion often revolves around an appreciation (or lack) for the process of evolution. Of the process of evolution, the most misunderstood or poorly communicated aspect is the process of selection. If we take a stroll down that story, we find a straightforward example in the age of the dinosaur. The dinosaurs had the run of the planet for about 150 million years. They were powerful in so very many physical ways. An asteroid slamming into Earth brought their run to a, fairly, sudden end. The insignificant mammal species survived the aftermath of the asteroid impact. They could handle the cold and dark and altered gaseous state of the atmosphere. They were without as many predators. They flourished. They had become selected just as their more powerful predecessors became de-selected.
With the dinosaurs out of the way, the conditions for mammal mutation were so favorable, primates were soon developed and 75 million years later, homo sapien sapien stalked out of Africa.
10,000 years ago very early forms of religion got a hefty boost in form, at the same time that humans discovered cropping. Cropping was aided by religion to form villages. Villages discovered manufacture of things too big to carry like storage pots. Storage pots led to towns. Towns led to embellishments – arts, crafts – and trade. Religion got another boost with the conceptualisation of monotheism and an idea of a huge unified society. Towns became cities. Cities became kingdoms. Kingdoms became empires. Religion received another boost, to either use a host empire to spread it message of a greater unity, as in the case of Christianity; or, as in the case of Islam, destroying the stagnant political barrier to its success. God, it seems, will not be thwarted In populating the planet and in reuniting it.
Once populated, and key empires had been constructed with advanced tools, the globalization of society could develop. Along with the possibility for globalisation, sciences became realised to an extraordinary extent. As the final connections between all the people’s of the planet were being established, Baha’u’llah founded the Baha’i Faith to purposefully assist the final unity of civilisation, a planet wide civilisation, and an extraordinary advancement of humanity.
While science is a key and fantastic tool in that advancement, it should not be confused with the prime motivator for the civilisation to be. It should not also be confused as a self organising organism in itself. The development of that civilisation, and the tools of science, like all previous leaps in human advancement, requires religion. In particular the teachings of Baha’u’llah provide the essential understandings of being that is required for humanity to continue to thrive, and the great leaps forward that will happen with the greater unity of the global mind of humanity.