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I am, in this chapter, approaching three aspects of silence as a way of knowing — in relation to Yolngu story and storytelling — through one particular Yolngu story which I cannot tell. What I can tell — is why I cannot tell the story, and how pursuing the question of whether I could tell the story, and in what way, led me on a long intriguing journey.
The three aspects I want to deal with, in relation to one Yolngu story, are:
1. protocols of being silent around storytelling — or not telling;
2. inside/outside knowledge, and touching into the silence surrounding,
and in women’s business; and3. embodiment as a silent way of knowing when dancing country.
My approach is a step towards Yolngu ways of being and telling as far as may be possible for a non-Indigenous non-Yolngu storyteller and researcher, and to make the bridging necessary for a similar audience as myself. Yolngu epistemology is part of what I am terming sacred epistemology — a mystical tradition which includes phenomena such as revelation and epiphany, and of being present to the seen, the known, and at the same time, to Mystery, the Unknown, the ‘between’, the ‘ship’ of relating. In this process, being becomes Being, for Yolngu. It is also primarily an experiential approach to knowing, a felt sense in the body, and can not in my view, be met through analytic conceptual frames of reference. According to Greg Dening,[1] story is the only way such a sacred world may be represented. Current experiences are sung and told as contemporary expressions of the Dreaming, the moving from the Wangga to the present. Past and present thus become fused and ensure a future of deep intimacy with all beings.
My way of presentation is to work towards exemplifying such approaches — through personal story (never separate from Yolngu ‘history’ or Dreamtime story) and traditional storytelling, in ways that represent relationship with country, and with all beings, including kin with others of clan and tribe. I weave these storytellings with explanation in the non-Yolngu tradition to make the connections clearer for we who are non-Indigenous readers. Knowing, for Yolngu, is always being approached as an interior experience for the individual, albeit in the context of the tribe’s cultural knowledge — it is as a consequence always done within silence. Outside or exterior experiences will always be parallelling interior internal experiences in symbolic ways, in feeling states and in states of mind. Storytelling is always intending to link each Yolngu to their own country, to plants, to animals, to all the Dreamings, and to each other, in particular kinship interrelationships which are articulated not only through storytelling, but are constantly reinforced through an elaborate and refined ‘opera’ of mark-making, music-making, protocols of relating presented in everyday life and ceremony both. (If you are my mother-in-law for example, there are certain kinds of body language to be presented in your company, and only certain kinds of humour may be displayed with certain family members). So, I am presenting a methodology pointing towards Yolngu ways of knowing at the same time as telling the stories.