It seems like midsummer. The weather is bakingly hot here in Naarm/ Melbourne, and there’s been so little water that my neglected grapefruit tree hasn’t made it through the summer. Yet, at the height of the heat, the days start to shorten. Lammas is the first of the harvest festivals, traditionally giving thanks for the return of plenty after grain stocks were depleted through winter, through spring and the first half of summer.
That, though, was in Europe. While I’m holding a small Lammas gathering this afternoon, I recognise that this cycle of scant and plenty is tied to mono-agriculture, as much as it is tied to the cycles of the seasons. So my first thought, as I get the goddess on and start thinking about this afternoon, is what does it mean to celebrate a festival that seems tied to colonisation and a raping of the land from a feminist, decolonising perspective?
Because Lammas mythology also centres around the Irish god Lugh, a feast of funerary and mourning because his foster mother Tailtiu, who died clearing the Irish lands for agriculture. Alternatively, she was an earth goddess, in my reading of the myth, who had to be killed to bring people to accept the shift from hunting and gathering to agriculture, a shift often associated with a shift from matriarchal to patriarchal religions.
My concern with how to celebrate this season isn’t historical. A bomb was thrown at an Invasion day gathering and loss of life was only prevented by the bomber’s incompetence. It was a dirty bomb of nails and homemade explosive, designed not to kill the maximum number of people, but to inflict the maximum amount of harm. It was thrown as an Elder spoke, on a day of mourning for the First Peoples of this continent. And the near-silence from politicians and media has been deafening. As Daniel James said in the 7am podcast, imagine the outcry if it had been an Aboriginal man throwing a bomb into a gathering.
Yet, I think it is important to acknowledge the seasons and the cycles, to show gratitude for what we have, to bring friends and family together to celebrate on a regular basis and reaffirm that we humans are part of a larger realm of connection and story, reliant on the earth and its bounty, reliant on our networks of friends, and able to retell the stories of our place in the world in generative ways.
So that’s my challenge. Help us retell the story of Lammas, in a way that acknowledges the blink of an eye that continues to be monocrop agriculture, but that opens up the possibility of resurrecting Tailtiu in a new form, while also recognising that her story is part of the Dreaming of a different land, and that we are now part of the Dreaming of the lands on which we live, work and play. And maybe a new story of Tailtiu, in this great Southern land, can be a story which also interacts with, playfully and respectfully, the stories of this place and the First Peoples’ of this nation, a story which can heal and restore both the land and relationship.
