The social practice of walkabout by one of the world’s oldest indigenous cultures serves many purposes, one of which is acquiring perspective through the literal travel through time and space at a pace that allows continuous connectivity to one’s environs, dreams, ancestors, and sense of place. Traveling slow, for those of us severed from our ancestral roots by time and space, is one technique for initiating access to storehouses of knowledge imprisoned by imaginative taboos and excluded by fast relocation–providing a terrestrial means of getting one’s mind around ideas new to us but old to others.
Walking around an idea or cosmology as an ancient practice has now merged with digital technology in the form of aboriginal knowledge centres where oral histories, visual landscapes, and three-D conceptual artistry combine the attributes of modern library and information science with the dreamtime culture. Learning houses that simultaneously nurture the intellect and the soul, as well as one’s sense of identity, are bridges to the future for us all.
Imagine that.