c. 1999 Religion News Service

AMMAN, Jordan _ Kathy Malera-Bandjalan’s spiritual homeland is a mountain of gold. The mountain, nestled in central Australia’s remote bush country, has been the home of her aboriginal tribe for generations, the site of prayer, burial and indigenous religious rituals.

But the mineral rich site has also long been the subject of a land struggle between the tribe and the Australian government, which on various occasions has sought to exploit its rich mineral deposits.

Last weekend, Malera-Bandjalan, who is the traditional custodian of the mountain for her tribe, brought her case to the World Conference on Religion and Peace. Armed with documents and papers detailing her people’s lengthy struggle, she sought recognition for aboriginal religious rights from fellow delegates to the international conference.”I believe I’m on a path, not to save the world but at least to save our own spirituality,”said the short and stocky Malera-Bandjalan, 36, who wears a black T-shirt under her businesslike suit jacket engraved with a black snake, the totem, or symbol, of her clan.”The white Australians see religion as a matter of the sky,”she said, pointing heavenward.”But for us as indigenous people, religion is tied up with the land. When we are at the mountain, we are two hours across the bush by four-wheel drive from the nearest town and four hours from the main road. They can’t get in, so we can feel free spiritually, culturally and emotionally to practice our beliefs. This freedom must be preserved; after all how many places are there left like that in a world?” The woman, who divides her time between her Western-style house in Sydney and a rough shack in the bush country, lives at the crossroads of two worlds. She displays a blend of street-wise smarts combined with a sense of bush country traditionalism and vulnerability.

On her first day in Jordan, for instance, she rented a cab and headed straight for the desert to find a tribe of Bedouin nomads with whom she could exchange gifts and traditional greetings. When one host displayed an interest in her fine wool coat and gold watch she gave them away even though most of her clothes and luggage had been lost at the airport”The Bedouin are the local indigenous people,”she said.”And so I had to go out to greet them upon my arrival and give them gifts, particularly if they show an interest in something that I am wearing. If I hadn’t fulfilled this obligation, my family back home would have been devastated.” Malera-Bandjalan’s tribe, like many aborigines, is matrilineal. Women carry the family lineage and also shoulder the burden of communal responsibilities, including the contemporary pursuit of legal and civil rights for the aborigines.

In some ways her small tribe of just a few dozen people has been relatively lucky, especially in comparison to the fate suffered by many aboriginal groups whose lifestyle was eradicated and whose rituals were forgotten and abandoned after the arrival of the Europeans.

In 1842, the Malera-Bandjalan clan made a pact with a wealthy Scottish immigrant family which recognized the aborigines’ rights to the sacred Bandjalan mountain plateau, whose name quite literally means gold in the aboriginal language. The settlers, in turn, obtained control of cattle pasture in the valleys around the mountain.

Through the Scottish family’s patronage, Malera-Bandjalan’s grandmother learned to read and write while working as a domestic servant in the settlers’ stone castle, a monument to an earlier era and which is now abandoned.

In the 1930s, she said, a sympathetic Australian doctor who lived near the mountain became interested in the tribal language and recorded it. The dialect is thus one of only a few aboriginal languages to have been preserved in written form.

The tribe was so remote that Western missionaries didn’t penetrate their encampments, which was, she said, a blessing since European woes such as alcohol abuse and violence penetrated many aboriginal cultures via the mission outposts.

The Bandjalan mountain’s rich mineral resources were largely ignored by land grabbers and miners until the late 1990s when a rival tribe loosely related to the Malera-Bandjalan made a secret claim on the land and leased it to the government and a private mining concern.

At that time, Malera-Bandjalan herself was already in the midst of a lengthy court battle to win government recognition of her family’s traditional rights on the land following a series of precedent-setting legal decisions that finally opened the way for the aborigines to make legal claims.”That was a terrible time,”she said.”For two years a mining company disturbed the graves of our women and elders in order to get at the gold, which we believe should not be mined.” Finally, last August she was recognized by the courts as the legitimate aborigine custodian of the mountain. Two days after her victory, the private mining company ceased digging on the mountain.

But the fight left the clan with a $60,000 legal bill which it cannot afford to pay.”The claims of indigenous peoples to their traditional land rights has become a big industry for a lot of lawyers and anthropologists,”Malera-Bandjalan said.”But because of our lack of education, a lot of people also are taking advantage of us.” (OPTIONAL TRIM FOLLOWS)

She has learned the hard way, through experiences such as her court struggle, to fight her battle for spiritual survival with Western-style tactics _ lobbying, court action and publicity. But there are some methods she rejects altogether as the leader of her tribe.

To demonstrate, she opens up a few sheets of paper containing a handwritten manifesto authored by some of the male members of her tribe. They asked her to present it to delegates at the conference. But she rejects the angry tone of their language as contrary to her religion’s tradition.”Males, they sometimes can be so full of anger,”she said.”Look, it says here that the wrongdoers will have no redemption. That’s not the kind of people that we are. We are a people that would offer redemption to someone who was sincerely seeking it, even after we had had our guts kicked in. The boys, however, see the hurt and they act in a male way. I’m sure that they didn’t mean it.”DEA END FLETCHER