Cafe Society: All welcome to help build bridges

Where there is goodwill there is a way, says indigenous festival founder Ruth Langford.

Cafe Society with Ruth Langford at Sweet Sassafras in North Hobart. Picture: NIKKI DAVIS-JONES

RUTH Langford launched her first festival on Bruny Island a decade ago and since then has seen a profound shift in the way participants engage with one another.

As she gears up for the fifth Nayri Niara (Good Spirit) Festival, to be held at Cloudy Bay next weekend, the indigenous leader, educator and performer anticipates another deepening of connection.

The festival, which brings together indigenous performers and spiritual leaders from Tasmania and around Australia with other first nations guests, is no closed-shop affair. We are all welcome.

“The biggest shift I’ve noticed since the first festival is our own people’s willingness to share stories, and secondly people’s genuine listening and wanting to come and share their stories,” says Ruth when we meet at Sweet Sassafras cafe in North Hobart.

She rejoices in the coming together of indigenous and non-indigenous Tasmanians with mutual respect and understanding, describing it as the only sensible way forward.

Founding and running a festival to help facilitate that process is just one of the encompassing activities Ruth leads in Tasmania. Her next will be activating the Long House co-creative hub at Macquarie Point, and she is working towards hosting a major international first nations festival in the state in 2022.

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If her approach to an outdoor summer festival near one of Bruny’s popular surf beaches sounds deep and meaningful, that’s the idea. She says festivals can play a meaningful role in our search for meaning and belonging.

“There is a deep absence of collective time to come together where we can be our best. We don’t go to church anymore, so festivals are tending to be the place we can come and be open to having the moral conversations as well as to learn and have fun.

“Instead of this notion spirituality must be serious, it can be joyous. Yes, it can break you open and this festival has content that goes into deeper places … I think we need those collective holding places, too.”

She says it means a lot to local indigenous people to have a chance to share ancient wisdom and elements of traditional culture with the broader community while feeling safely held by their own.

“I like that the Aboriginal people within the context of the festival get to feel our knowledges are honoured and we are not a minority and we are not isolated.

“It’s a different way of opening up and it means there can be true welcoming because people aren’t coming to us with a sense that we are inferior.”

Ruth feels she is in a privileged position, given her blood lineage of Aboriginal mother and Australian father, to help build bridges and better understanding of ancient cultural wisdom. After a different approach in her younger years, she has taken her cues from an Aboriginal culture based on sharing and a sense of belonging to put out the welcome mat.

That’s the way forward, she says.

“I think it makes sense. I have seen the dual benefits reciprocity can create. And I’ve also experienced in the past when I have been defensive and very aggressive towards people because of my own wound of pain, how that eats me up and my family up and how I am a nasty person [because] I am so angry at what’s happening.

“I don’t want to have a life like that, I don’t want my children to have a life like that, I don’t want to have interactions like that. I want to be able to find that part of you where we can create things together.”

She welcomes what she sees as a more enlightened, profoundly feminine approach beginning to be valued more in leadership — and expects to see a lot more of it.

“What I see is people are awakening,” she says, “[asking] how do we make sure we are showing consideration and kindness to all people, how do I take myself out of this separate ‘us and them’ mentality, how are we breaking down the otherness.”

Tasmanians, she says, already share a powerful sense of place and belonging. “I have been blessed to travel around the world, but in Tasmania I see there are so many people who have a deep connection and love of country. Tasmanians are already grounded in this place and what we understand to be true — that country is alive, it has spirit, and that there is a deep connection and belonging that is a human birthright.”

Interested in unpacking some of that together next weekend?

Adult tickets for the three-day Nayri Niara (Good Spirit) Festival, from March 9-11, are $195 and include camping. Children under 16 are free and there are concessions for indigenous guests, pension holders and Bruny Islanders. A special walking country experience on Friday, March 8, costs $55. All tickets, www.nayriniaragoodspirit.com