Black-face, White-Face; Spiritual Aboriginality and other White Women’s Bullshit.

“White women are bloody bouncy,” says the guy next to me, in between slurps on his coconut water.

We’re in a broiling tent at a small music festival, watching a group of middle-aged women from the local ‘African’ tribal dance group perform a vigorous tribute to waning oestrogen and headbands. Later, I saw them again, putting on an impromptu performance in the Rock Tent. This time though they looked a bit different. In between chia crackers and bottles of aloe water they’d gotten their faces painted in the ‘traditional aboriginal’ style by the ‘lovely Koori chap near the hot chips caravan’. They danced on unabated, well-nourished limbs flailing about while others veered out of their path.

“I just think it’s so important to embrace a spiritual connection with the land, especially as women,” puffed one of the dancers, explaining her face paint to a friend. The friend mmm’d in agreement and they congratulated one another on finding the time between centering their femininity through African dance (Tuesdays and Thursdays, 3–5 at the Girl Guides Hall) to embrace ‘aboriginal culture’ as well. The white dots on their foreheads complemented their Gaelic-Sharpie arm tattoos nicely.

I’m becoming increasingly aware of a New Agey, nebulous ‘spirituality’ embraced almost entirely by well-heeled white women. It’s a weird melange of Eastern pseudo-religiosity refracted through Judeo Christian notions of humble righteousness. It encompasses everything from yoga to wholefoods to hobby-eco-centrism, where one spends the day ‘embracing nature’ rather than working, while the investment properties and Russell’s shares in Rio Tinto keep the wolf from the door.

Recently I was invited to embrace nature with a group of women like this. The group were planning on climbing a small mountain. Over the crest of the mountain, facing west, is a ‘sacred aboriginal women’s area’, a set of large stones where ceremony has been performed for a long, long time. This bunch of gasping baby boomers had decided that visiting the sacred area would augment their sacred femininity.

Sacred Femininity (the capital letters are mine) is an idea you’re probably familiar with. It claims that women all over the world share a kind of spirituality because they have vaginas.

All women, no matter their ethnicity or background, are imbued with a potent life force that connects them to other women, and to ‘nature’ or ‘the earth’. One’s sacred femininity is best realised through baggy rayon pants and a vacant stare when confronted with an empty printer cartridge.

In other words, it doesn’t matter who you are or where you’re from, your femininity transcends and trivialises manifestations of ‘culture’ bounded by silly, contrived boundaries like sixty thousand years of continuous habitation.

It follows that Aboriginal women’s spirituality is ‘knowable’ to white women.

This is, of course, errant bullshit. Western womanhood is not universal. For starters it’s underpinned by very western ideas about personhood, like the idea that people are individuals, discrete, bounded and embodied. Individuality — the idea that you are an entity separate from other entities like people or ‘nature’ — is central to modern, western feminism. And, for that matter, capitalism.

Obviously I was uneasy about climbing the mountain to visit the sacred rocks. I pointed out that no-one in the walking group was aboriginal. I was assured that the spirituality experienced and renewed by the rocks is available to all women, as long as they’re ‘really open to feeling it’. Their concern was that I wouldn’t adequately appreciate the spiritual connection, not that I might have misgivings about entering the site in the first place.

Back at the Rock Tent, the ‘African’ painted ladies were gearing up for another performance.

As I watched the hypo-allergenic face-paint run in sweaty rivulets into their plucked eyebrows I couldn’t help feeling like I was watching a peculiarly Australian form of blackface.

Their face-paint, like the women on the mountain, is just another New Agey flirtation with ‘aboriginal culture’ that sits somewhere between feeble paternalism and muscular racism.

I feel offended. But should I be? Maybe it’s OK for white women to dance around, unselfconsciously sporting a weird interpretation of aboriginal culture. Maybe this is what sharing culture looks like. And that’s what we want, isn’t it?

The thing is, it doesn’t feel like sharing. Sharing happens between equals. This feels like duress — you must justify your culture to me, in my terms. I must understand it, at least a little, to value it. To appropriate it. To own it.

The women on the mountain talked about ‘understanding’ the ceremonial site but they had no way of knowing what there is to understand, not really. Of course, as they stood there with their eyes closed, their $300 all-terrain walking sandals sinking into the cool mud and claimed that they ‘really feel connected’, the legitimacy of their understanding doesn’t matter. What matters, especially to the aboriginal guide waiting for them back on the track, is that the mountain is now less likely to get bulldozed.

I know it sounds like I’m describing two discrete cultures, the white one colonising or ‘eating’ the indigenous. I’m not, that would be naive. There isn’t a ‘pure’ aboriginal culture that exists separately from mainstream Australian life. Aboriginal culture is mainstream life. It is constantly produced and reproduced by aboriginal people, from country dwelling fishermen to city-dwelling proto-hipsters with iPhones and Instagram accounts. It is current, alive and always changing. Aboriginal culture is intrinsically interconnected with mainstream post-colonial Australian life.

So the question becomes, if we accept that some concept of aboriginal culture implicitly incorporates mainstream, predominantly Anglo Australian culture anyway, is there room for middle-aged, heavily sweating white women to actively participate in making it?

You tell me.