The White Ants Dreaming

A fable

The landscape of this country has a story to tell, but those who can still tell it speak a different language from those who have not yet heard it. Much of the country resembles an ant-colony in the presence of danger, the occupants agitated, unsure of their bearings, somehow ill at ease in their new surroundings.

They have been told repeatedly that theirs is the safest country on earth, so what prevents these frightened ants from feeling safe? Those wishing to acknowledge the work of worthy, honest ants speak of a refusal to acknowledge what was done to other ants, who settled in this country long ago, before the white ants came. But the new ants have no memory of these events. They have been conditioned to forget.

The new ants, having made great progress, have advanced too far to understand what the old ants want, nor do they comprehend what the old ants feel for each other, and for their birthplace. The old ants are, it seems, opposed to change. The new ants are amazed at how the old ants can sit for ages, rapt in contemplation, sunk in the psyche of their continent. The new ants are another breed, they like to cover distance quickly. Getting there is preferable to being here. Theirs is a world of shiny surfaces; they fear the dark.

The new ants have heard rumours of the love the old ants seem to feel for their lands, but they are sceptical of this. Searches of their data bases fail to furnish proof. Meanwhile, new ants buy and sell the land they seized by force, though they don"t own it. Nor does it own them. Some would even say that it disowns them.

But if one day they were to find inside themselves that ancient love that comes before all other loves, their life-patterns would change. The formless agitation would become circles and cryptic lines that contemplate the hidden seams in rock faces, the veins in trees, the secret watercourse beneath the sands, the ways of schooling fish, the flight paths of migratory birds, the formulae in seeds.

Then it would be clear to the new ants why they have felt unsafe. Then the old ants" spirits could lie down in their ancestral places. Then the land would trust the new ants with its mysteries, and take them to its inmost heart, where they have never been.

The new ants would become the old, until such time as the cruel cycle should again commence...

But then perhaps one day, long after, looking far into the future, this ancient land will be returned to the hands of the desert ants, the nomad clans whose forebears roamed this country once...

When the sun begins to wither gardens and all plants except a few resilient native species, and the rains fail, and all the stolen land the white ants colonised becomes a gaunt oasis, scorching under the heat of a cosmic bushfire that burns on and on, then the land will briefly return to the way it was, after the Dreaming, before the white ants came...