TANKA: ‘POWER’
THE HIDDEN POWER OF INDIGENOUS KNOWLEDGE
Oh, Mount Chincogan
Women’s ancient dreaming site
Dearest sacred place
Aboriginal power
Hidden in Songlines of land
Background explainer
Mount Chincogan is a 308m mountain overlooking the Australian hinterland town of Mullumbimby in northern New South Wales, Australia. It is the central volcanic cone of a massive extinct caldera that was first covered in sclerophyll, then in rain forest.
The sacred mount then experienced heavy commercial logging before privately-owned hobby farms were set up by incomers to the region. It is now heavily covered with camphor laurel trees, a Chinese tree import which is the scourge of the wider area.
Mount Chincogan lies in the Arakwal lands of the Bundjalung Aboriginal nation. For Indigenous people, it is a sacred, women’s site, the sister mountain to the nearby sacred, man’s site of Mount Wollumbin (which ‘the white fella’ calls Mount Warning).
The Songlines are an ancient Aboriginal memory code. They are long, indigenous cultural ‘Creation’ stories that have been handed down in families belonging to a particular Aboriginal ‘country’. They are integral to Aboriginal spirituality because they trace the journeys of ancestral spirits as they created the land, animals and their…
