Lake Mungo - Leadership Retreat
In March, our 2023 Kildare Ministries Leadership Retreat to Lake Mungo finally went ahead. After a long (anxious) night of rain in Mildura, it was a great relief to get the go-ahead to take the coach down Arumpo Road to Lake Mungo where we would spend the next two nights.
It’s difficult for me to characterise exactly what this experience was like, not even withstanding the anticipation. The memories of the trip return to me in episodes but the result of being there lives in me in a completely whole way.
Mungo is special, preserved, ethereally beautiful and ancient. The land tells us a sacred story. You can’t be there and not feel the reverberations of the people who walked there before, and the voices still there are powerful and attractive with the authority of their ancestors.
Vicki Clarke, a proud Mutthi Mutthi woman, invited us warmly and led us generously; her passion, experience and belonging to this place was a privilege for us to witness.
At one stage of the retreat, Vicki lead us on a hypothetical journey on her country of a people pursued and betrayed, asked us to consider how we would have responded as First Nations people, how we might have considered fighting back or passively resisting, or tried to simply retreat and ‘get on’ with our lives as we were. As ‘good’ educators, we instinctively tried to rise to the task of solving the disaster of 200 years ago; how we might fight back as a people, what strategies we might adopt. We walked and talked, and at each new landmark Vicki would present the next stage of the takeover. We realised eventually that in this ‘game’ we could not win and with dismay we came to our (more visceral now) realisation; that history has taught us that the most clever, peace-loving and brave warriors were defeated by the most brutal racism, greed, ignorance and arrogance. The trauma has never gone away, and is often relived in attitudes and commentary today.
The beauty of the landscape in all it’s mysterious shifting light and shadows was breath-taking. In the total silence of the night-time, in the vast starry sky, in the cool still air of sunrises and sunsets, we were silent and humbled under the most enormous sky, tiny beings bowed in prayer and contemplation before an almighty creation and a more almighty God. We were tiny beings standing beside the thousands and thousands of others standing in the same spot, seeing the same thing and feeling the same feeling throughout all known time. Here we stood in renewed reverence for ancient spirituality and humanity.
We meditated on the Two-way Cross composed and painted by Vicki, she led us through the seven sacraments story through her own eyes, through the lens of a First Nations person’s consciousness and she gently opened our eyes to our own faith in a new light. Using this new light we were then invited to create our own crosses and the generosity of this spirit was not lost on us.
We sat, and we talked, we ate, we drank, we laughed, and we prayed. We enjoyed our community, our collegiality, we asked our questions in a safe place and we learned. We sat by the fire and talked about The Voice. We shared and told our stories, we heard more stories – and all the time we were lead gently and invited warmly into conversation and truth-telling.
As Australians we walk all over this magnificent land, we conduct our lives, our learning, and our worship upon her, and very rarely do we stop to consider exactly where we are – who came before us, and how many other hundreds of generations of people were here living their sacred lives.
Mungo is a wonder, a great teaching-place to show us what we are missing as we walk on all the lands where hundreds of generations walked before us. First Nations people are our only means of knowing who we truly are as Australians on this land. As leaders of KM we were offered love, acceptance, deep symbolism, story, wisdom and knowledge, the depths of which we only touched on and which renewed a thirst to understand and which, no doubt, changed us forever.
Renee Oberin
Mission Leader
