Digging with Heaney’s Pen.

I am not Seamus Heaney but my words come from the same bog. I am an Irishman and an Aboriginal. I was born with the blarney and the dreaming.

Those who cannot remember the past are bound to repeat it.

George Santayana originally said that, although it is such a part of common parlance that we all claim ownership. If only it were true. Every conflict I have covered throughout the world is rooted in a past we will not forget.

We are haunted by memory. It is a fetid swamp from which we drag our identities. In Australia, “truth-telling” has been raised to the level of holy writ. But of course, there is no truth in history.

The great Ngarinyin poet and mystic, David Mowaljarlai, told us that everything has two witnesses. History like truth is in the eye of the beholder. I cannot believe myself let alone someone else.

In Gaza and Jerusalem; in Moscow and Kyiv; in Washington and Tehran, new memories; new truths are being formed.

Another generation will be raised on a past we remember all too well. Forget the idea that there is healing in history. As T.S. Eliot wrote: “Time is no healer, the victim is no longer here.”

This past weekend, I have sat with the words of a wise man. Someone from a land of too much history. In his quiet words, he told me that truth is not in our words it is in the digging.