AR
Copyright © 2006
by Kevin Sharpe. All rights reserved.
In process.
kevin.sharpe@tui.edu
www.ksharpe.com
13 November 2006
Dear
Please find enclosed the proposal for my book, Dreaming Time, Living Passions, which you requested in response to a query from me.
I enclose a SAE and look forward to your response (there is no need to return the proposal, curriculum vitae, and sample chapter). However, because I travel a lot, email is the quickest way to reach me.
If you wish, I can send the full manuscript for your
perusal.
Thank you
for your attention.
Kevin
Sharpe
Encl. Proposal
Chapters
Curriculum Vitae
SAE
Proposal for
by
Kevin Sharpe
About 44,000 words
UK Phone +
Fax and VoiceMail +
ksharpe@ksharpe.com
A hundred feet above a lake no sunlight has ever seen, I squeeze from a slit in the rocks so narrow that my head scrapes against the ceiling and, if I breathe too hard, I’m trapped. With lamp in hand in front of me, I come out to the ledge above the lake: a thin, narrow strip of limestone rock. I lie on my back and shine the light above me. Thousands of finger markings rain down from the rock, mixing with lines engraved with stone tools. I am not the first person here. But it has been many thousands of years since the people who made these marks came deep into Koonalda Cave, climbing in darkness through the same stone landscape, to leave their marks on these walls.
Why did they come and why did they mark?
Dreaming Time, Living
Passion explores the enigma of these line markings and the mystery of why
people, since the dawn of prehistory, have looked to mythology to make meaning.
For
Dreaming Time, Living
Passion is the story of my own coming to knowing. It is the story of the
Nullarbor Plain in Australia, a place so vast and desolate, that its greatest
jewels must lay hidden underground in caves because the harsh climate above
crawls with snakes and spiders, hundred and thirty degree heat, and no water.
Alexander Gallus, the excavator of Koonalda, invited me a
This eleven chapter book follows the tradition of the work of Bruce Chatwin in The Songlines and Robyn Davidson’s Tracks, offering readers both a vision of the wild places and people of Australia, and my own story of my beginning to come to understand, to know, to question. I have structured each chapter around the images of dreams, as dreaming is central both to the human relationship with the Nullarbor and to all human relationships with what motivates them.
I come to this work from a lifetime of experience teaching
and writing on the subjects of prehistoric rock art, science, and spirituality.
My academic explorations began in Mathematics and then bridged to Religious
Studies. I hold Ph.D.s in both and currently supervise doctoral students at the
Union Institute & University. In the past, I have published five books
involving my interdisciplinary interests: Science of God: Truth in the Age of Science (Rowman & Littlefield, 2006), Has Science Displaced the Soul?
Debating Love and Happiness (Rowman
& Littlefield, 2005), Sleuthing
the Divine: The Nexus of Science and Spirit (Fortress Press,
Deep in the caves of
In more detail:
I was born in
One of my interests lies in the relationship between
spiritual thought and science. I have published five books (Science of God: Truth in the Age of Science, Has Science Displaced the Soul?
Debating Love and Happiness, Sleuthing the Divine: The Nexus of Science and
Spirit; David Bohm’s World: New Science and New Religion; and From
Science to an Adequate Mythology), have edited several more, and written
many articles and academic papers. Two books will shortly appear: Love and
Happiness: Spiritual Thought in the Light of Behavioral Genetics and
Neurochemistry and Science of God. Other books in development await
publication: Happier and Spiritual: Theology from the Behavioral Sciences,
Natural Morality: Reaping Our Innate Rewards, Our Ancestors Touch Us: The Writing of
I am an expert on prehistoric line markings, especially
those found in caves. At present, my research activity in this area focuses on
the
My web site www.ksharpe.com provides more details. I also enclose a full curriculum vitae.
For us to change our world for the better requires, among
other attributes, passion. Passion requires inspiration.
Dreaming Time, Living Passion
Chapter
A
Chapter
The Nullarbor feels deadly. An earnest, desolate, and apparently endless plain, its white limestone crops up everywhere and in every direction like dried bones. Did God forsake it?
I drove into the Nullarbor on two
occasions to look at Koonalda.
Chapter
Various
people over the last century have entered and explored the caves that dot the
Nullarbor. Before them, local Aborigines
knew of the caves but refused to enter them. Chapter
The cave explorers looked, for the elusive pot of gold, for meaning in life, or for the necessities of life in the face of such harsh realities as illness, lack of food or drink, need for shelter, and interpersonal conflict. Do the stories of Aborigines and the Nullarbor caves accurately portray Aboriginal beliefs or the writers’ biases (‘I am a White man, intrepid and fearless. You are a Black boy, backward and cowardly.’)? I cannot tell. Maybe, for some reason, the Aborigines were trying to stop the Whites from entering the caves. The indigenous people probably had no need to search the Nullarbor because they had lived there for eons. The motivation of the Whites, on the other hand, moved over the decades further and further from meeting pressing needs toward exploration that satisfies curiosity.
Like the latter White visitors, I too felt excited. The Nullarbor’s emptiness offered me the chance to search for jewels of meaning beneath its hard clay and rock.
‘Sooner than we think, writes Daisy
Bates in
The young Mirning tribespeople left their
traditional areas and gave up their skills and laws in favor of the European
way. They found it hard to adapt to it. The old customs bonded the people
together, gave them ancestral beliefs, the feeling of belonging, and the
self-confidence necessary to learn a new life. White
S. A. White calls the local people of Ooldea, ‘wonderful.’
He wrote in
Tom Brown, an early surveyor of
the Nullarbor, found the Aboriginal people reluctant to set foot on the plain.
Women would cry and men look glum when accompanied to it. They preferred to
skirt the Nullarbor rather than cross it and shorten their walk by many days.
To chase kangaroos or emus, they might venture beyond the edge some
They felt afraid, our interpreters tell us, because they believed that a monstrous and hideous serpent, exceedingly destructive, occupies the country beyond the coastal belt. As big around as a house and of untold length, the magic snake Ganba makes his home under the plain.
Chapter 5 relates the known myths and stories of the Mirning and how they made sense of the plain in all its extremes.
Pieter Nuyts commanded the ship Gulde Zee Paert in which he
voyaged further than anyone in his day. The ship blew off course in
John Eyre in
Yet, W. H. Tietkins in
Aboriginal legend describes the plain as once wonderful and beautiful, a land of perfection. Europeans fixated on the Nullarbor as a pastoralists’ haven: crops would grow in abundance and sheep and cattle would graze. Only a myth could empower the Whites to believe this and try forcing it into a reality. Only a myth could empower them to believe that sufficient quantities of suitable water wait in this wilderness to transform it into fine pasture.
Chapter 6 explores Europeans’ beliefs about the
Nullarbor and their emotional reactions to it.
One meaning for ‘dream,’ the dictionary says, is ‘fond hope or aspiration.’ The word ‘aspire’ comes from the Latin ad + spirare, ‘to breathe.’ The dictionary adds, ‘see SPIRIT.’ To dream a landscape is to aspire for it, a spiritual activity.
My home town is New Plymouth, about halfway up the west
coast of the North Island of New Zealand. I was born there and lived in the
same house at
As with Taranaki, I love the land of the Nullarbor. We can draw on the wisdom of the past – indigenous and imported – and reject its errors. We ought also to look at the land we inhabit. What wisdom does it impart? Further, what do its fauna and flora teach us? What lessons can we draw from its geography, geology, and climate?
This chapter asks such questions of
the Nullarbor and of myself. It also includes a description of
Sandor Gallus and bands of helpers journeyed to
Chapter 8 describes the results of archaeological
excavations in the cave and the controversy surrounding them. It asks about the
psychological-social phenomenon of ingroup-outgroup, and how this relates to
the scholarly community around Koonalda. It also describes some of my
experiences of exclusion –
including reactions to my
At the back of the Upper Chamber of
the cave, covering large expanses of the soft, chalky, limestone walls scrawl
masses of marks, stroked into the receptive medium by human fingertips, or
scratched with sticks or stones. The lines comprise one of the oldest examples
of Aboriginal expression in
Perhaps important members of the
tribe climbed into the cave, lit their
The line making may, like the flint mining, connect with ritual and religion. On the other hand, we may never know the meaning behind the lines. It may only reflect the pleasure the tactile sensation brought the line makers.
In Chapter 9, I thereby seek to
answer the question of why by drawing on Aboriginal artistic practices,
European prehistoric art. I also introduce a new method that my researh partner
and I have devised to look at the lines themselves and how they were created.
This allows us to say how many people were responsible, their age groups, and
their gender.
The local farmers, the Gurneys, invited us to tea, Nullarbor outback
style, one evening toward the end of my second stay at Koonalda.
I spruced myself up with a plunge into the tank
of cave water that a windmill pumped up. I hoped the sheep parasite in the
water wouldn’t infest me. The six of us piled into our Land Cruiser and station
wagon and took off to the homestead and real food.
We entered the Koonalda farmhouse by a welcoming
cockatoo, filed down a dark hallway, and entered the large kitchen. The
Gurney’s daughter stood there, scooping fresh milk out of a basin into s
Mrs. Gurney entered, her face welcoming. She was
short and plump, wore a fashionable dress, and looked young for her forties.
Nearly two hours
later, Cyril Gurney arrived. This signaled the serving of tea. In came Mrs.
Gurney on the first of many trips, with plate upon plate of cakes, large hot
pies, and little hot pasties with ketchup, all of which stayed on the table
untouched for half-an-hour. She brought in a teapot looking like a saucepan
with a spout on it. Goats’ milk accompanied the tea.
Now we could eat.
The
next day, we packed up our camp, bid farewell to the Gurneys, and set off back
to
The passion to know what the lines mean still drives me. My
wife, Leslie Van Gelder, and I spend two weeks twice a year in Rouffignac and
Gargas caves,
Accompanying this proposal are preliminary versions of
Chapters
The book is about 44,000 words long and would not take long to complete once contracted. Photographs and figures could supplement the text if thought appropriate.
Dreaming Time, Living Passion is written in the creative nonfiction style which seems to be showing great success in the current market. Part adventure book in the spirit of a Jon Krakauer or Sebastian Junger, part spiritual reflection infused with literature about the land like the work of Bruce Chatwin or Robyn Davidson, I expect this book to appeal to a wide range of readers. Readers of nature writers, adventure literature, popular science and popular spirituality books will all find a familiar voice in this story. Since people in the US and Europe also seem to have a current love affair with things Australian – as evidenced by Fosters commercials and the enormous success of the Crocodile Hunter – this book will help to fill an empty niche of real life stories from the Australian Outback. Further, the readers of Jean Auel’s successful fictional series on prehistoric life will be able to find a more real-life account of some of the life and history of people living contemporaneously with her characters.
In the recent past, I was publisher of Science & Spirit magazine, which had a circulation of
At present, no books specifically address the topics I raise. Books on Koonalda and the Nullarbor are as sparse as trees on that desert plain and few have been published in the last two decades. Works that address the same market of readers are as follows:
Bruce
Chatwin, The Songlines (London:
Jonathan Cape,
The
Songlines is perhaps Chatwin’s best known book from his nomadic wandering
days. While the blend between fiction and nonfiction has been contested in this
work, Chatwin paves the way for writers to speak of the power of the land in
Robyn Davidson, Tracks: A Woman's Solo Trek Across
Another journey across
Marlo Morgan, Mutant Message Down Under (London:
HarperCollins,
Although Morgan’s factualness has been
disputed, this new age classic was a huge financial success. Morgan claims to
have joined with an Aboriginal tribe while they walked across
Monica Furlong, Flight of the Kingfisher: A Journey among
the Kukatja Aborigines (London
: HarperCollins,
Like Morgan, this book is a sympathetic account of the author’s encounters with the Kukatja Aborigines. Most of the book focuses on Furlong’s attempt to reconcile her own religious background with her discoveries of the traditions of the Aborigines. My book offers a wider range of historical, ecological, and archaeological background regarding the region and its many varied inhabitants, from Aborigines to the Gurneys.
The field of Literature and the Environment grows with each passing year, as more and more people discover the climate for discussion of the natural world and the stories of humans, especially our early ancestors, living in relationship with that world. Equally, the field of Science and Spirituality grows exponentially as people have begun to see the crossovers between those two fields. This book is well positioned to meet both of those markets.
As an educator, writer, lecturer, and book editor, I see
many opportunities for promoting this book. First, I suggest reviews and
advertisements in both environmental literature journals such as ISLE and Nature in Story and Legend. Further, as the setting of this work is
Beyond reviews and advertisements, I will promote the book
in the courses and lectures I give as well as through my position at the Union
Institute & University. On average, I speak at
In the public milieu, I am experienced at radio interviews and would welcome the opportunity to share my ideas with a wider public through television.
As my work in archaeology and the nexus of science and spirit is ongoing, I foresee a continuation of this work in future books that will address finding an adequate mythology for our current age, coupled with the discoveries from our current work in Rouffignac and Gargas Caves.
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The Nullarbor in its openness, its hidden caverns, and its brutal landscape is really only home to one thing: dreams. Dreaming Time, Living Passion follows the dreams that people have storied into and onto the Nullarbor. Some people dream the empty space above the Nullarbor − in the Aboriginal Dreamtime; some the empty space on the Nullarbor − as a pastoralists’ haven; and some the empty space below the Nullarbor − over the significance of our early ancestors’ lines. From the Pope’s vision of a buffer between two aggressive powers, to an ancestral holy place in Koonalda Cave, to European sheep farmers and an Irish woman who went to live among the Aborigines and nurse them in their annihilation, I follow the dreams of and from the Nullarbor, from before antiquity to the present day. This allows us to ask about the consequences of dreaming and to listen to what makes a good dream.