Naosheyrvaan Nasir, Student at The University of Sydney
In Kakadu, Northern Australia, the physicist Dr Derek Muller faces the camera and tells his viewers of his documentary that “this ancient land is home to the Indigenous Australians, the oldest continuous culture on Earth.” He goes on to say, those Indigenous Australians believed that at the time of creation, a spirit being, a great reptile, had gone underground, where it still slept and must not be disturbed.
His documentary, Uranium – Twisting the Dragon’s Tail, is a science documentary on uranium and how its use in nuclear energy and nuclear weaponry makes it a powerful element (https://ihavenotv.com/part-1-uranium-twisting-the-dragons-tail). Dr Muller then continues to say that “now, we know that beneath this [Australian] soil lie some of the richest deposits of uranium anywhere on Earth. And uranium is like a sleeping dragon. It’s a beast of mythical power. Now, the traditional owners of this land say that if you disturb this place, you will awaken that sleeping spirit and unleash disaster.”
While the documentary is strictly scientific, the Indigenous mythology of a sleeping dragon that should not be awoken could not be more of an accurate indicator of the state of the world today. The war in Ukraine has demonstrated that deploying nuclear weapons is entirely possible and plausible, and the consequences would be beyond our imagination.
In my view, it could also be a possible indication that the Indigenous people, who up until colonisation in the late 1700s, stayed mostly to themselves for around 60,000 years (https://aiatsis.gov.au/explore/australias-first-peoples), may have been vouchsaved some wisdom and warned against mining the land and thereby, awakening the dragon, which we now understand could refer to uranium. Could it also be an indicator of their belief in spirituality and creation and that God’s message had reached all civilisations no matter how remote they are or how far back into the past they go?
In his book, Revelation, Rationality, Knowledge and Truth, Hazrat Khalifatul Masih IVrh dedicates an entire section to Australia’s Indigenous people, saying they believe in a Supreme Being and that the colonial Christian British observers who described Indigenous beliefs as primitive did so out of their ego and prejudice. Revelation, Rationality, Knowledge and Truth reads:
“[…] the simple question which any [colonial] sociologist must have addressed was: how could a primitive society, like that of the Aborigines, which was split into hundreds of sub-tribes with no means of communication among them, conceive the same idea of One Supreme Eternal Being independently?” Huzoorrh observed their belief in “High Gods”, synonymous with Allah or God, is eternal and everlasting and that such beliefs existed well before the arrival of Christian missionaries in the late 1700s and 1800s. He also clarified that the term “High Gods” was singular but was pluralised in Indigenous terminology out of respect for the high status of God. This demonstrates that Indigenous Australians have received Divine revelation and that God has guided their civilisation, which makes logical sense given they have been around for about 60,000 years. (www.alislam.org/library/books/revelation/part_3_section_2.html)
So, while the world edges ever closer to nuclear war, could it be possible that Australia’s Indigenous people received Divine warnings thousands of years ago about the unearthing of this “dragon”? Whatever the case, if the rest of the world does not pay heed now and mitigate the risks of an all-out nuclear war, we will suffer the ultimate consequence and the “dragon” will unleash its wrath.