Please join the Dominican School of Philosophy & Theology and the Asia Project of GTU for an exciting lecture series!
First Lecture: The Dreaming, Tuesday February 9th, 7:30PM, DSPT Room 1, 2301 Vine St, Berkeley, CA 94708
What is the Dreaming? For an Aboriginal person of Australia their Dreaming is the focus of their entire personal life. Their Dreaming is the place that unites them to the Land, i.e., to their land, to their place in the universe. Their Dreaming relates them to family, to their ancestors. An aboriginal person can say, “Without my Dreaming, I am nothing, Ma kardu. Not a person at all.”
Fr. Martin will help us look into this mystery as far as we can.
Second Lecture: The Land, Tuesday February 16th, 7:30PM, DSPT Room 1, 2301 Vine St, Berkeley, CA 94708
From the beginning of European (whitefellah’s) occupation of the Continent land has been the main bone of contention. For a hunter-gatherer the land with its plants and animals the source of livelihood, for Europeans land and its raw materials is the basis for the whitefellah’s economy. But for an aboriginal person the land is more than a basis for an economy. The Land, their Land given to them by the Ancestors, cannot be bought or sold, it has a religious value.
Fr. Martin will look at the Land and the results of European Intervention.
Third Lecture: Art and Life, Tuesday March 1st, 7:30PM, DSPT Room 1, 2301 Vine St, Berkeley, CA 94708
Aboriginal life is expressed in art. Art may take the form of an ancient painting on rock, on tree bark, an a long swath of cloth or the ritual music of a didgeridoo. Their art is carefully executed, often with a serious religious purpose, but it is not representational in a European sense. It is abstract art, but here abstraction is not based on nature or human interactions, but is dominated by symbolic representations of the land and the Dreaming.
Fr. Martin will review the Aboriginal pieces displayed in the Exhibition.
This event is co-sponsored by the Asia Project
Hilary Martin, OP is a Professor Emeritus of Philosophy & Theology at DSPT. He has spent a number of years in Australia, living with and in aboriginal communities, and hastravelled to Indonesia. He is currently studying and working out the "fundamental narrative" (i.e. the basic symbolic history) found amid the myths and rituals of aboriginal communities of North Central Australia. He collects indigenous art and enjoys living out their ceremonies. He has also taught in Melbourne, Australia at Catholic Theological College (CTC) and at Yarra Theological Union (YTU) focusing on ecumenical councils of reunion and reform, and on new developments in natural law.