The theme of this year’s John Main Seminar 2020: One Heart, One Hope. Indigenous Wisdom and the Future of Humanity comes at a profoundly important moment in the life of our world. In these times of pandemic, we’re experiencing a profound interconnectedness between the human and the natural worlds, and between people.

Yet at the same time, this crisis is revealing the fractures and the damage we’re doing to our world. We find ourselves alienated from nature and from the deep dimension of our own humanity and from the community we live in.

Indigenous communities are those who have particularly suffered from this alienating colonisation. Sarah Bachelard continues on drawing our attention to the particular case of Australian indigenous communities. Indigenous wisdom can be the well of a more holistic and integrated understanding between the self, community and our natural world. Now more than ever, it is important to re-discover this wisdom.