Seeking qualities of pirlirr, liyan, and wirrin in Western culture

In their post Seeing, Feeling, and Hearing the World, guest contributors Kankawa Nagarra Olive Knight, Anne Poelina, and Sandra Wooltorton from the Kimberley in the north of Western Australia tell of the Indigenous experience of Country and Land as relational, animate, living and responsive. They introduce us to words from the Walmatjarri, Nyikina, and Noongar languages, rinyi, pirlirr, liyan, and wirrin, words that suggest an experience of intimacy with an animate, responsive Land, that link ‘people and place, River, the breath, the energy, the being of things.’ They point out that ‘it is very difficult to describe these terms in English, because English is not a relational language. It just doesn’t have the words’. Indeed, Sandra wrote to me in an email:

Since colonisation began in the Kimberley around 145 years ago, there are records of senior Indigenous people explaining to the newcomers how to participate respectfully in ecological communities where humans are integral to but not central to or in charge of life… These are the laws of the land (not of humans); and each Kimberley nation has their own words in their own language to describe these same laws that apply to all beings and species. People who have grown up with philosophies that are not place-based, find these laws and concepts extremely difficult to comprehend.

Sandra had previously quoted an Indigenous Australian man, Muta, a Murinbata man from what is now called the Northern Territory of Australia, who told an anthropologist in the early 20th century:

White man got no dreaming, Him go nother way. White man, him go different. Him got road belong himself.¹

While I was preparing their post for publication in Learning How Land Speaks, I found myself wondering if this was completely true. While respecting authority of the Indigenous Elders in explaining significant aspects of their culture and worldview, and the challenge ‘White man got no dreaming’, might we nevertheless still find important traces of respect for the laws of Land and place-based understandings in the UK, a nation which has few links to its Indigenous, native or place-based past? There are important links within Welsh and Scots communities and languages about which as an Englishman I am not competent to comment.[ii]² There are Druid, Wiccan, and other communities which claim to reach back to, or maybe re-invent, ancient traditions and knowledge; and many of us have reached out to Indigenous teachings from other cultures, like my own engagement with Medicine Wheel, never quite sure if what we were learning was authentic, and in what ways we might be engaged in ‘cultural appropriation’.

So where might these traces be found?

Then I remembered the musician Sam Lee and my experience of Singing with Nightingales. Surely, those of us who walked in silence through the woods, who stood in the dark, enchanted by the Nightingale’s song, surely in some way we were touching, re-discovering, a fleeting yet intimate contact with the place where that bird has sung since time immemorial?  That we touched a sense of the Land as sacred? Artist Sarah Gillespie catches this feeling in her mezzotint A Thousand Goodbyes:

A Thousand goodbyes” Mezzotint engraving ©SarahGillespie 2024 www.sarahgillespie.co.uk

This led me to read carefully the interview with Sam, published by Emergence Magazine, and to transcribe parts of the accompanying video (which I thoroughly commend).

Sam talks about his discovery of folk music, how he switched his interest in pop and jazz and developed an obsession with learning the songs: ‘They had to be inside me’.³ He apprenticed to Stanley Robinson, ‘a Scottish traveller, last of the travellers, of that ancient time and way and people who kept the stories and the ballads going’:

He comes from the great Scottish Traveler balladeer tradition, which is a much mightier, purer, and more psychic and spiritual lineage, immensely mysterious and shrouded in all sorts of ways that we could go into in much depth another time. But he was my great teacher and taught me what that spiritual connection to the songs was and took me to the places, the birth places of the songs.

In the video, Sam talks about the tradition of British Folk Song in terms that I found resonant with the Indigenous descriptions of relationships with a living sentient world:

Old British folk song, like traditional music from all across Europe, carried within it the histories, the stories, and the spirit of the Land. The songs that came from there are deeply intwined with our ancestral relationship with place and all that exists there. And the people who carried these songs, the Scottish and Irish travellers and many others, have always lived close to the Earth, holding that traditional knowledge and honouring this relationship by keeping songs alive. There are still people alive who remember the old ways, the old way of life, living on the land and having inherited a completely different relationship with the land than we have now.

Sam tells how Stanley taught the ‘spirit with which one sings’: for the songs were ‘not inside you, they were all around you… as you go to sing a song, the first thing you do is breath the ballad in’, take a deep breath and tune into the songs that are all around you. You activate the song, and as you do so, you also activate the ancestors, who appear, listen, and hold you to account. What you are invoking is that quality of spiritual connection. So in singing, Sam explains, you are in a practice of devotion which:

allows you to walk a lot deeper in the landscape…  When I listen to folk songs, and when I sing, I feel that ancestral relationship to this Land. The memories, the stories, they come alive, they come into being.

This idea that we are partaking in an act of devotion reflects some of the conversations we have had in the ongoing sentient river inquiry group. There seems to me a strong parallel here with our work with River.

Andrea reflected on learning to pay attention with Tah-la-lu River in Western Canada:

Maybe it's still just about noticing, maybe she's been speaking all along. I expect she has. We're just too busy in our own business to even notice. You know, I don't know that we're provoking the response. I'm imagining always that response is always there, like we're always welcome, we always have been…⁴

While David and Dave comments reflect more directly Sam’s sense of ‘devotion’. David draws on the Quaker tradition:

Worship is the response of the human spirit to the presence of the divine and eternal. Silent worship and the spoken word are both parts of Quaker ministry. The ministry of silence demands a faithful activity of every member of the meeting. As, together, we enter the depths of a living silence we find one another in ‘the things that are eternal’, upholding and strengthening one another. 

David took this Quaker orientation into his encounter with a grove of ancient yew trees:

We sit in silence. We begin to meet. I realise that the tree's roots are all massed together under the ground… that the canopy of the trees meets above me. The trees are holding me within their being.⁵

While Dave frequently drew on and re-purposed religious language as he reflected on our encounters with River:

… a group of people praying together is worshipping. And I suppose we're kind of trying to invent a liturgy together… a co-creative, spiritual practice… The only way I can think about is just steeped in mythic language: Divinity, Prayer, Liminality, Threshold, Worship, Sacred.⁶

I don’t want to claim that Singing with Nightingale and our experiences with River are equivalent to pirlirr, liyan, and wirran, that folks like me that are steeped in the Western materialist and dualist tradition can so easily recover our place-based roots. That would be both absurd and offensive. But maybe ‘White man got no dreaming’ is too damning; if we swallow the indictment whole, then there is no possibility of redemption. The tradition of folk song that Sam Lee has devoted himself to learning, the experience of the living presence of River through our inquiries, are these not glimmers of an old flame that we can, in time, kindle into a new blaze?

1. Stanner, W. E. H. White Man Got No Dreaming: Essays, 1938-1973. Canberra, Australian National University Press, 1979.

2. See for example Meighan, P. J. (2022). Dùthchas, a Scottish Gaelic Methodology to Guide Self-Decolonization and Conceptualize a Kincentric and Relational Approach to Community-Led Research. International journal of qualitative methods, 21, 16094069221142451. https://doi.org/10.1177/16094069221142451

3. Quotes from Sam Lee are taken from both interview and my transcription of the video

4. Learning How Land Speaks, Practices and Protocols

5. Ibid

6. Reason, Peter. "Extending Co-Operative Inquiry Beyond the Human: Ontopoetic Inquiry with Rivers." Action Research  (2023). http://dx.doi.org/ https://doi.org/10.1177/14767503231179562.