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With endless thanks to Lizzie Orley.

CW: racism, colonialism, genocide, incarceration, rape, bigoted slurs.

“Karmer ungga.”— The Watiwati clan’s response to the Tyntynder colonists( trans.: “we will spear you”).

1

In the groundbreaking study of Aboriginal agriculture Dark Emu, Koori historian Bruce Pascoe relates an anecdote which would function as a synecdoche for Australia’s colonial history. Pascoe writes about an 1843 expedition by grazier Peter Beveridge and his companion to occupy the lower Murray River, where he encountered members of the Watiwati clan. Shortly thereafter, the colonists witnessed the agricultural infrastructure of the Watiwati, an agrarian marvel encompassing “substantial weirs built all through the river system,” engineered to “[dam] the stream behind large earthen platforms into which channels were let, in order to direct fish as required.” Upon seeing the efficacious and resourceful fishing methods of the Watiwati, which involved a line-and-noose based mechanism that fish would dart into and whose force “threw the fish over the head” of the farmer, Kirby remarked only that “I have often heard of the indolence of the blacks and soon came to the conclusion after watching a blackfellow catch fish in such a lazy way, that what I heard was perfectly true.” When Beveridge’s brother was found raping Watiwati women, Watiwati warriors apprehended the man, and had him “isolated and speared, and his body symbolically daubed with ochre.” Beveridge and Kirby giddily launched a war on the clan over the execution of one European rapist, accelerating the inherent violence of settlement to its natural conclusion of cavalier massacre.

Countless walks of life have been distorted by the imperialist narratives these slaughters help to fortify. Aboriginal peoples have experienced centuries of genocide, forced relocation, mass incarceration, and environmental exploitation. The last of these crimes must be understood as an extension of the first. Aboriginal cultures have a ubiquitous and shared relationship to the Australian landscape. The Watiwati’s aforementioned extremely antiquated accomplishments in agriculture, irrigation, and fishing (environmental scientist A. P. Kershaw estimates that “people have been on the Australian continent for at least 140,000 years”) are the tip of the iceberg. What European colonists viewed as a primitive and twee apparatus is in truth millennia-old infrastructure that has fed more than one and a half billion people for over 65,000 years. Bruce Pascoe writes that 30,000-year-old grindstones discovered at Cuddie Springs in New South Wales demonstrated that its inhabitants were “the world’s oldest bakers by almost 15,000 years, as the Egyptians, the next earliest, didn’t bake until 17,000 B.C.” This is to say nothing of the agricultural use of fire, the extensive houses built by Aboriginal peoples, and the sheer diversity of groups and cultures found on the Australian continent. To dismiss this system of cultures and peoples as primitive, and just as noxiously to confine them to the past or antiquity at the expense of the thousands of Traditional Owners (Aboriginal peoples and Torres Strait Islanders) is to be complicit in genocide.

Cultivating land is a matter of physical sustenance, but for Aboriginal peoples it is also crucial to mental and social health. Across the spectrum of Aboriginal clans, there are patterns of establishing harmony with one’s ancestors and land for a sense of belonging. Dreaming, or “Dreamings,” as there are many, are the paths of those who make peace with what comes before and after them. Lizzie Orley, a Kamilaroi broadcaster, explains “our direct spirituality comes from our connectedness to the land. Then that’s how the landcare management comes into play. And it goes from there — so definitely ethnic cleansing and environmental destruction would go hand-in-hand.”

Lizzie further explains that the Dreaming one follows is largely determined by “what country or nation you’re on or from and the belief systems within those… So for Kamilaroi (my mob), we believe Baimi is our creator and we’re connected to the sky spirits. We’re particularly connected to the ‘emu in the sky’ constellation and story. So we’d look at the shadows to make the shapes, and not stars to make shapes. That’s how you’d see the emu. That’s how we would know what was going on in terms of seasons and what was happening with the flora and fauna.” Accordingly, destroying a person’s environment is “to be disconnected from your spirituality or ‘Dreamings’... Incarceration and suicide rates are high because people are both disconnected from culture and are living in a racist and racially violent country.” She curtly adds “the statistics are disgusting.”

The statistics are indeed disgusting. Between 1991 and June 2020, 437 Traditional Owners died in police custody. Of those deaths, 58% were attributed to natural causes, while 32% came from hangings. And this is hardly a recent trend. Predating the carceral state, disease, government-backed “Native Police,” mass poisoning, forcible removal from homelands, and massacres staggeringly culled the Aboriginal population. Mining companies have spent decades desecrating sacred sites. Structural racism and ecological exploitation not only walk side-by-side but hail from the same set of capitalist, white supremacist instincts. The forces bringing about climate change and pumping fossil fuels from the earth choose their targets according to who can be conveniently removed first.

“Karmer ungga.” “We will spear you.” Beveridge and Kirby would have earned it.

2

At long last we arrive at “The Dreaming,” a landmark Kate Bush song whose minutiae and complexities would merit a small book on their own. Such a book nearly got written, although Ann Power’s tragically aborted 33 ⅓ volume on The Dreaming wouldn’t have been a full-length study of the title track. “The Dreaming” sits on more sociocultural intersections than perhaps all other Bush songs save “Wuthering Heights,” “Running Up That Hill,” and possibly  “This Woman’s Work.” Its reach is both expansive and myopic, humanitarian yet bigoted. “The Dreaming” walks alongside numerous cultural trends and events while failing to quite connect with the forces that generate them. Consequently it exists in a space of its own, a haze of cognitive and aesthetic dissonance whose shambolic existence documents more stories than Kate Bush could have anticipated.

Bush’s relationship with Australia is well-documented. As a six-year-old, she was clearly affected by a long-term family visit to Australia and New Zealand. She had revisited the continent since for professional purposes and as a vacation spot. Fundamentally Bush has a tourist’s relationship with Australia, albeit one with some warmth and emotional significance, as well as attentiveness to the continent’s politics. In an interview with music zine Pop Pix, she expounded on corporate and national ethnic cleansing campaigns against the Traditional Owners and their lands, decrying the way they were “being wiped out by man’s greed for uranium. Digging up their sacred grounds, just to get plutonium, and eventually make weapons out of it.”

Bush is only partly right here. Australia has been a massive supplier of uranium since the early 20th century. In the decade leading up to 2017, Australia exported 64,488 metric tons in uranium.  And for much of Australia’s colonial history, Aboriginal sacred sites have been devastated by mining companies. This year alone, over 100 Aboriginal sites in Western Australia are at risk of being destroyed by mining companies. For a self-declared apolitical person, Bush was hardly apolitical in how she kept tabs on this news.

She gets some things wrong, though. Australia has not historically been a great supplier of plutonium, and her assertion of the mineral as a component of colonialist animus in the region is incorrect. Which is basically fine — sometimes people just get things wrong in interviews. The real problem with the interview is that Bush repeatedly refers to the Aboriginal people as “Aborigines,” a term that is now regarded as a slur, which she uses throughout multiple interviews and, most distressingly, several times in “The Dreaming.” It could be fairly argued that the word’s offensiveness is only a recent revelation to much of the world, which is fair enough. White supremacy’s nature is such that discussions of racism often get buried — verbal and systemic violence towards the Traditional Owners remains ubiquitous. Bush is expressing her white privilege through ignorance rather than malice.  Yet that line of thought only waves away Kate Bush’s perceived intentions. While she expresses clear and abject horror at the mass murder of the Traditional Owners, her ways of expressing that are seriously flawed. Regardless of personal malice, a white woman’s use of an ethnic slur is still a white woman engaging in racist behavior.

Attitudes and intentions matter, but the latter only goes so far. A crucial anecdote relates how EMI released promotional 7” copies of “The Dreaming” titled “The Abo Song,” using a flagrant racist slur against Traditional Owners, before realizing the offensiveness of the title and promptly recalling the 7” records for retitling. “Bush meant well” means less than “Bush fucked up and corrected herself.” That choice indicates a willingness to learn and ameliorate her failures. There’s no doubt Bush wrote, recorded, and produced the song in good faith. Whether she adequately listened to a demographic she expressed compassion for is another matter.

Even if we give Bush the benefit of the doubt and conclude that “The Dreaming” uses “aborigine” out of ignorance (and to be clear, I don’t doubt for a second that Bush was ignorant rather than malicious), she clearly failed to consult any Traditional Owners on the matter. It’s not as if they were impossible to find. The Aboriginal populations have never vanished, and the pop industry encompasses a number of Aboriginal musicians. That’s not to say Bush’s failure to record a “true” Aboriginal song is a problem — a Bush-cut wangga cover (wangga is a Yolngu-originated genre of traditional music) would be vastly worse than what she actually recorded. She manifestly avoids creating a straightforward novelty single. “The Dreaming” dips into myriad traditions and music genres, engaging less with Aboriginal music than what Bush thinks Aboriginal music sounds like while following trends found throughout The Dreaming. The anacrusis’ thudding percussion and syncopated whistling evokes Pink Floyd’s proto-beatboxing “Pow R. Toc H,” a typification of Syd Barrett’s syncretion of Piedmont blues and early psychedelia. Ambient reverberation, an unremitting loop of gated percussion (“BOOM...clank-clank!”), a Wall of Sound approach with a surfeit of aberrant instrumentation (we’ll get back to that one), some legitimately extraordinary vocal mixes, a smorgasboard of sampling, and the extraordinary quasi-No Wave assault of noise in the last refrain.

“The Dreaming” has a fundamental problem, though, in that its aesthetics are grounded in cultural appropriation and adopting a colonist voice while denouncing colonization. Bush’s decision to sing the song in an Australian accent complexifies things: “BAYNG GOES A-NUH-THUH KAN-GA ON THE BON-NET OF THE VAN-NA” is hardly the panto dialect one adopts to make a statement on colonialism. The United Kingdom’s global prominence makes singing in a mock-Aussie accent messy in its own right. Perhaps Bush is working at historical integrity by outright characterizing the colonizers. This would abate Bush’s long-standing aversion to antagonists and addressing systemic injustice in her work. Bush’s songs have an individualist streak to them that might resonate with a Victorian adventurer — her protagonist’s struggles are their own, and the way to solve them is to take personal responsibility. Bush’s idea of “personal responsibility” is quite radical at times — “The Kick Inside’s” depiction of noble suicide radically threatens orthodox British domesticity, and “Get Out of My House” is a liberation anthem of surviving abuse. Yet Bush’s purview has only occasionally extended to casting light on the perpetrators of material suffering. Bush’s claims of apoliticism are wrong insofar as apolitical persons and actions don’t exist, but her music has been largely apolitical in the literal sense of refusing to acknowledge material politics.

In this way, “The Dreaming” improves on many of Bush’s earlier songs. Perhaps Bush was taking after Peter Gabriel and other white pop stars who were tackling Apartheid and other civil rights causes at the time (albeit while promulgating her genuine compassion for the Traditional Owners), but “The Dreaming’s” horror at the colonialist violence against the Aboriginal peoples is polemic in a way that her work has rarely been. The song’s depiction of visceral murder is unflinching in places: “many an Ab*r*g*ne’s mistaken for a tree/’til you hear him on the motorway/and the tree begin to breathe” chillingly infers a vehicular mass slaughter, while “erase the race that claim the place/and say we dig for ore” is clear in its implications (ethnic cleansing and ecological destruction are often concomitant forces, particularly for the Traditional Owners, whose cultures are inextricably linked to Australian geography). At the very least, on the issue of condemning overt settler colonial violence, “The Dreaming” unequivocally objurgated the mass slaughter of the Traditional Owners.

Yet while “The Dreaming” inimically decries the ferocity of genocide, it also tacitly endorses the material and cultural conditions that create it. The Aboriginal peoples are reduced to an aesthetic, a spectral presence that haunts the song. The colonist voice that “bring[s] in the rigging” is the dominant vocal part of the song; the voices of the victims are mere B.V. 's, chanting variations of “see the light ram through the gaps in the land” ad infinitum and occasionally droning a broken, staccato “d-r-e-a-m-t-i-m-e,” stretching out each letter in a rather gross imitation of traditional Aboriginal music, once oddly punctuated by Bush intoning “woomera,” referring either to an Aboriginal spear-throwing device or a village in South Australia. “The Dreaming” essentializes and commodifies Aboriginal peoples, collapsing them into a single entity. Referring to Traditional Owners as “ab*r*g*nes” is merely a symptom of the song’s structural problems, as the word is considered offensive largely because it condenses hundreds of distinct and autonomous cultures into one monolith. Half the spectacle of “The Dreaming” is wholesale robbery of Aboriginal stories and aesthetics. The other half is the prioritization of white outrage and the reduction of anti-racism to an art-pop aesthetic.

3

Cultural appropriation in the name of anti-racism or anti-colonialism is hardly a new trend. It certainly wasn’t in the 1980s — by that point, Talking Heads’ worldbeat-funk LP Remain in Light, Peter Gabriel’s globe-trotting “Melt” and its accompanying single “Biko,” and Brian Eno and David Byrne’s sample-menagerie My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (christened after Nigerian author Amos Tutuolo’s novel of the same name) exemplifies a smattering of “world music,” as the genre is grotesquely deemed. World music (or at least the kind created by white British pop artists) embodied an often reductive approach to international affairs and racial strife, adopting the musical techniques of Third World countries in an attempt to experiment. Of course it was often only to experiment: if a white artist were to burst onstage and play a qanun solo, a Caucasian British or American viewer might consider them innovative and shocking, while people from Central Asian, Middle Eastern, or North African countries where the qanun is more common might respond “who is this dickhead badly playing a qanun?” In other words, world music is only world music to those whose geo-cultural purview is “my country and the rest of planet Earth.”

The racist chauvinism of commodifying “Other” sounds is evident. Even when the tropes of world music are used to nominally condemn racism, there’s still a tokenization and mythologization of POC’s history and culture, bred with a reductivist imperialist narrative of white voices saving the world from itself. The narrative is solipsistic, a blind spot Bush has been known for (indeed, that’s why she was rightly criticized for praising Theresa May). She’s produced a narrative that centers her moral horror as a white lady and experimental barnstorming as a pop artist over a story about colonialism. In this way, Bush becomes a colonist herself, adopting a colonial viewpoint while notionally rebuking colonialism.

There’s a component of theft to this. Regardless of Bush’s egalitarian intentions, she’s functionally a capitalist who’s profiting off the culture of a colonized group. Bush doesn’t seem to have consulted any Aboriginal people while she recorded “The Dreaming.” The song teems with cultural appropriation: its tonal backbone is child rapist Rolf Harris, a white man, playing a didgeridoo. To her credit, Bush has gone to significant lengths to distance herself from Harris since the public revelation of his sexual predation. His vocal contributions to The Dreaming and Aerial were broadly cut on Bush’s 2018 remastering of her entire catalogue. The didgeridoo can’t be as easily lifted from the track because of its salience in the song’s infrastructure, so Harris isn’t completely absent from the remasters, but he’s still embedded in the record’s DNA.

Harris is crucial to “The Dreaming” not only for his didgeridoo-playing but also because of his direct influence on the record. Bush’ interest in the Aboriginal peoples was kickstarted by Harris’ 1960 novelty single “Sun Arise,” a pastiche of traditional Aboriginal music that’s so grotesquely unlistenable I won’t even hyperlink it for you. Bush, however, described “Sun Arise” as “a unique and wonderful song” for its asserted similitude to Traditional Owners’ music insofar as it “exude[d] space, and the feeling of having great contact with the earth,” and postulating in an amazingly not-even-wrong statement that continuing in this tradition was “the perfect way to portray this invasion by white man.”

Certainly Bush staged a white man’s invasion — the didgeridoo is a sacred instrument in Aboriginal cultures. Harris’ didgeridoo (one of several he owned) is effectively a stolen relic. Even the word “didgeridoo” is an onomatopoeia with no approximation of any Aboriginal language — the Yolngu name for the instrument is yiḏaki, and that’s one one of sundry words. Worse still is how misinformed Bush appears to be about the instrument — she wrote a newsletter which claimed that “women are never supposed to play a didjeridu, [sic] according to Aboriginal laws; in fact there is a didjeridu used for special ceremonies, and if this was ever looked upon by a woman before the ceremony could take place, she was taken away and killed, so it’s not surprising the laws were rarely disobeyed.” Obviously this is a bunch of racist nonsense: no such law exists, and many clans encompass women didgeridoo players. “The Dreaming”’s chauvinism not only surfaces painfully on record — it’s grounded in Bush’s complete and utter failure to learn about Aboriginal cultures and history.

Perhaps equally egregious to the yiḏaki debacle is Bush’s use of “Dreaming.” The phrase isn’t widely decried by Traditional Owners as such, unlike its sister term “Dreamtime,” the title of “The Dreaming’s” instrumental version, which assigns ephemerality to a massive sphere of Traditional Owners’ geocultural infrastructure. But Dreaming is at the very least broadly understood. Dreaming, or Alcheringa as the Arrernte people call it, refers to a limitlessly broad sphere of experiences, an external understanding of which can only vaguely function. It encompasses notions of land, ancestry, gods and spirits, and an Aboriginal person’s future as inherently bound together in a state of unified “neverwhen.” “To be disconnected from your spirituality/dreaming(s) fucks with your identity,” says Lizzie Orley. “Ethnic cleansing and environmental destruction would go hand-in-hand.” Bush’s understanding of “dreaming” is a widespread cultural misinterpretation of it as “dreamtime,” a mythical nomenclature encompassing “a magic time before[!] man was man as he is today - when man was an animal and could change shape.” Woof. The use of the Yanyuwa “Aeroplane dance” melody and vocabulary is merely a nail in the coffin.

The cultural appropriation doesn’t end there — the music video utilizes Aboriginal aesthetics and garbs seemingly without permission, causing Bush to profit off a subjugated population. On a Strange Phenomena episode, Lizzie points out that some dances practiced by Bush, Avon-Arnold, and Hurst apes and decontextualizes the Brolga dance. The bodypaint the dancers sport robs “a culture that barely anybody knows about.” “The Dreaming” is rife with samples, particularly in its use of the Fairlight CMI’s ubiquitous Stravinsky “orchestra hit,” piecing together bits of culture for a white, solipsistic statement of “exotica.”

It’s not that “The Dreaming” is unique in its crimes. It’s one culturally appropriative work in a civilization rife with overt colonialist violence and normalized microaggressions. Nor is Bush clearly malicious in intention or deed. She’s merely participating in a culture built around the subjugation of other cultures. “The Dreaming” is Bush’s narrative, but it’s not her story to tell. Nor is it mine. No part of this essay should be viewed as a crass “primer” or introduction to some nebulous monolithic notion of the Traditional Owners and their cultures. Go listen to Lizzie Orley speaking about “The Dreaming” at length, tackling it from her experience as a Kamillaroi woman, the only perspective on the song that fucking matters. Play that interview, and try to explain again why Rolf Harris’ deletion from “The Dreaming” is the apex of political injustice.

(Bush, K.) Personnel: Bush, K. — vocals, piano, Fairlight, production. Elliott — drums. Harris — didgeridoo, spoken vocal (original). Edwards — animals. Bush, P. — bullroarer, B.V.’s. Crowd — Gosfield Goers. Hardiman — engineering. Launay — engineering (backing tracks). Cooper — engineering (cutting). Backing tracks recorded at Townhouse Studios May – Jun ’81. Overdubs at Odyssey Aug – Dec ’81, Jan – Mar ’82. Mixed Mar – May ’82. Issued 26 July 1982.

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