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Rites of Passage
23 January 2007
by Mike Lowe
 Just returned from a few days camping with Tom, my oldest son, aged 12. The trip was designed as a 'rite of passage' to mark the end of primary school and start of secondary school. Thanks to some unusual wet and windy weather (and a leaking tent), the trip had the necessary ingredients of overcoming hardship together.
When I grew up, in the UK, we didn't really mark rites of passage in any way. Since moving to Australia I've discovered that indigenous peoples take this kind of thing very seriously. In fact it was the example of a friend who is part Aboriginal that inspired me to do this with Tom.
The majority of encounters between my people (Anglo-Saxon) and Australian indigenous people have not been good. A few months back I was told by an Aboriginal elder, one of the 'stolen generations' who were taken away from their families to be raised in white-run institutions, that he couldn't understand the arrogance which lay behind most of the history of these encounters - an assumption that the Anglo-Saxon culture was so much more advanced than the indigenous culture that we had nothing to learn. It is certainly not what I feel. And as we feel more and more the impact of global warming I sense that we have got a great deal to learn from the world's indigenous peoples about how to live in harmony with the rest of nature.
Mike Lowe is the editor of the global website of Initiatives of Change. His varied career has included teaching English in Poland, running training programs for young leaders in Eastern Europe ( www.f-4-f.org), working in psychiatric hospitals and developing a 'Discover the Other' program. He currently lives in Melbourne Australia. |
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COMMENTS
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I don't have any children. But I have taken part in organizing mountain camps, with climbing experience, for young men. Or rather for boys who became young men before our eyes. And I thought: we are providing a tribal coming-of-age ceremony for a society that has lost all sense of 'rites of passage'. Biology turns girls into women, at least in part. Young men need to learn solidarity and to measure themselves against greater than themselves - in our case nature and mountains and weather.
Andrew Stallybrass, 18 April 2007
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