OPINION
In 1997, after travelling by bus from Brighton in England to Holyhead in Wales, I caught the ferry to Dublin, Ireland. I checked in to a backpacker’s, paying for the cheapest option which was sharing a dormitory with 19 other people. Bunk beds filled with people around the same age as me, travelling in groups; they seemed intent on impressing each other with stories of how many countries they’d ‘done’. I ended up gravitating towards one of the only other people who was there on their own.
Curled up in a stinky old couch reading, I met Tim from Philadelphia. He was travelling around the United Kingdom with the last couple of hundred pounds he had saved and was keen to experience as much of the country as he could before his visa expired. After chatting over a dinner of two Guinness we decided that the next morning we’d set off together with the aim of travelling as far as we could in the most economical way possible – hitchhiking.
He wanted to hitchhike with a woman because he reckoned people didn’t pick up men travelling on their own and I didn’t want to hitchhike alone for safety reasons. He spoke warmly about his family and friends and how much they would love Dublin. He spoke about his girlfriend who wanted him to move in with her and how she wanted them to get a cat when he returned. He told me how he loved looking at the night stars and his favourite place so far to hitchhike had been Cornwall. Mostly, he didn’t seem like he had anything to prove and he was comfortable with pauses in conversation. From previous experiences I’d learned that this was an important factor when hitchhiking – each person understanding the other’s boundaries of silence and space. At 8am the next morning we met out the front of the hostel, ready for the road.
The main highway headed south out of Dublin was an intense starting point. Cars hooned past, merging tightly to get away from town. After an hour or so of Tim sticking his thumb out and me minding the bags, I decided to have a go at being the ‘thumb person’. Ten minutes later our first car pulled over. Tim jumped in the front seat and I sat in the back with the bags, sussing out the driver, making sure I felt safe. The driver ditched small talk and went straight in for the cult classic: ‘Have you ever heard of the Bahá’í Faith?’ The 90-minute trip to Kilkenny was filled with philosophical conversation around God and politics and what this new-fangled thing was called the ‘internet’.
There was barely one road I walked along in Ireland that didn’t consist of boundaries. Fields and paddocks lined with boulders; stones packed tightly together to delineate parcels of land. The openness I felt when we reached The Cliffs of Moher was a relief to my mind and body. The ride that had got us there was so memorable – we were picked up by a carefree, generous, warm lady who drove some sort of run-down convertible with the Gypsy Kings up loud on the stereo. She didn’t turn down ‘Bamboléo’, but instead spoke-shouted over the top of the music, insisting that it was no problem going out of her way for us. With the broadest of smiles, she dropped us off at the doorstep of the cliffs. Sheets of sunset golden rays stretched across the sky and out to the Atlantic Ocean – boundaries could not be written in waves.
For Indigenous cultures around the world, the concept of boundaries is understood at a bone level.
Source: Supplied
Source: Supplied
Source: Supplied
~ Ko au te whenua, te whenua ko au – I am the land, and the land is me ~
Boundaries are a lived, tribal way of being – they are experiential and known from a collective and balanced way with ritual, ceremony, story and language weaving their shape. The boundaries of my Māori heritage connect to make the Hokianga. It is here that I feel culturally safe, where I know I belong, just as my ancestors have for generation upon generation. My whakapapa line draws me to Te Rarawa which has 23 hapū marae that ripple outward from the Hokianga in Te Tai Tokerau.
Recently, personal boundaries have been something I’ve been working through. Last week, my psychologist suggested that I’m experiencing blurred boundaries as a response to trauma. This definitely makes sense. She offered that this behaviour can often be as a result of life-long patterned learning, i.e., in order for me to realise how dangerous or unhealthy certain things or people are and have been to me, I have had to experience them up close, sort of right up in front of my face, by which time my boundary was already broken. My favourite dreams are those where I’m flying because I can clearly see what’s going on around me from all directions – the safety of perspective. It is this skill I’m working on transferring to my waking hours.
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Colonial boundaries are both physical and metaphorical. The longest boundary in the world exists in so-called Australia. Built over a five-year period and completed in 1885, . Still standing today, it was built to keep native dingos away from imported sheep herds. Boundary sticks were used throughout the 1800s as a weapon of Indigenous exclusion and control and roads named Boundary Street mark maps and suburbs revealing systemic racism and oppression. When Gadigal lands were by pierced by the union jack, the colonisers addiction to conquering and owning land on this continent was the antithesis of ancient and sophisticated protocols whereby Indigenous peoples lived with the land for 80,000 plus years.
The ongoing lust to hammer stakes into the whenua to let people know who owns what slice of land is a compulsion that has . The real estate industry has a thick permanent-marked outline which fewer and fewer people are able to breach. The quest to create one’s own boundary of territory is an inversion of the system of boundaries which Indigenous cultures lived by prior to colonisation. Throughout the 1950s, Australia embraced the white picket fence myth, which reflects in so many ways the colonisers dream. It perpetuates today.
One of the cruellest and most well-functioning modern boundaries is the prison complex system which . This is before even beginning to mention ongoing and dire rates of deaths in custody. It is a similar case with Indigenous populations of colonised countries around the world. We need to have the imagination and courage to re-write boundaries and remember whose Country we have the privilege of living on.
These days, I hitchhike along the boundaries of the page – creating new borders, writing new roads.
“I walk a race line, I walk an identity line, I am who I am. Yet I’ve always been at the borders.”
~ Joy Harjo
belongs to Te Rarawa, Aotearoa and is a poet, weaver, editor, cultural producer and festival director. She currently works as a Senior Project Manager at Red Room Poetry. She lives in Dharawal Country in Wollongong, NSW, Australia.
This article is part of SBS Voices' Straight Up Islander series, showcasing the work of writers with ancestral ties across Oceania. It has been edited by Winnie Dunn, in partnership with Sweatshop Literacy Movement Inc.
