Stan Grant on leaving the media and returning to his ancestors' Wiradjuri land

Australia Broadcast Center

21-06-2025

The leaves have turned from green to yellow and red and some have fallen already. Soon the branches will be bare, that is when the smoke from the early morning fires will settle over the village that sits beside a stream, all nestled in the valley.
My valley. Here is the land of my ancestors — Wiradjuri land, Wiradjuri Ngurumbang.
Protected, we are. Held. Yes, nature holds us all here and time turns on the seasons not the hands of a clock.
There is an ancient rhythm in this place. Everyone says the same thing, whenever they come here, they say "I feel like time has stopped".
It hasn't, time still works its way into us. Entropy will hasten us to our end. Physicists may debate whether time is real but life is finite. Or rather our lives are finite.
Each of us allotted a number of years, for some tragically so few. For others maybe too long; long enough to grow lonely, left with too many memories.
Every morning I wake in the cold before dawn to walk the hill past the shedding trees, from my house to the graveyard to sit with all the stories of all the people buried here.
All my people because that's what we are. So many stories. One headstone marks the lives of three children, their deaths each separated by a few years and each gone before their first birthday.
They've been dead now for more than a century. I wonder, what pain their parents must have endured. What took their lives?
There are headstones under which wives and husbands rest together for all-time.
There are some plots so old that no marker remains. And others forgotten. No one visits any more.
Here at the graveyard I watch the sun rise every morning. I close my eyes and I feel it warm my body. In the quiet — and there is nothing as quiet as a graveyard — I say a prayer.
This is so far from the world of noise in which I have spent too many years. It is two years now since I walked away from daily journalism. In truth, I stayed too long.
Journalism stopped answering my questions a long time ago. I don't know if it ever did answer them.
It is not that I am ungrateful, or regretful. My career was audacious and unimaginable. A boy like me was not meant to have this life.
My journey took me from Aboriginal missions, to small towns in outback New South Wales, long dark nights in a cramped cold car looking out a foggy window as my family wandered from town to town looking for somewhere we might settle.
We never really did.
I kept moving. Journalism led me to more than 70 countries as I watched the world turn reporting on coups, wars, calamity, disasters of nature and humans.
News doesn't like triumph. It feasts on suffering.
It took its toll on my mind and my soul. There are friends I shared this journey with who are no longer here. The road took them.
There are others I may no longer see but we are bonded forever.
In the end, I don't know that I served journalism as well as it served me and that's probably true of all of us, whatever we do. We are never the equal of our calling.
Maybe I never respected the craft. There is something shallow, ultimately un-serious about it all. Journalists think events determine our world, yet events tell us nothing.
If we follow events we miss what the French call questions d'existence. We miss the meaning of it all.
My yearning has led me to physics, philosophy, theology, accumulating a library of books, completing a PhD, writing books of my own and all of it maybe amounts to less than a falling leaf.
Saint Thomas Aquinas after experiencing the presence of God late in life, said that all he had written was straw.
We do not derive the truth from knowledge or news, we feel it. We participate in God — what Aquinas called ipsum esse, the act of existence — in our repose, in the quiet, in nature and in our mortality, the finality of our existence.
No one reads yesterday's headlines. But we return to the poets. A line of poetry is greater than a mountain of newsprint.
In the period since I have disappeared from our television screens, I have spent more time back here in this valley, in the land of my ancestors.
I still read a newspaper occasionally, quickly and distractedly and sometimes I tune into the television but I don't pay it a lot of mind.
I want to be closer to ipsum esse. I want to wonder at the turning seasons and be attentive to the souls of those with whom I share a breath, the water, the stars and this land.
When I sit in the graveyard I laugh quietly at the silliness of making claims on nature. This land of my people is a land I share with all people.
The souls buried here lived, laughed, cried and loved. Their battles now fought, won or lost. Their trails all at an end.
This is their place. Our place. One day I will rest here with them.
T.S Eliot wrote:
"the point of intersection of the timeless with time, is the occupation of the saint."
For all the distractions of life, the noise of news, for most of us, "there is only the unattended moment, the moment in and out of time."
We are only undefeated because we have gone on trying. We find our rest, our truth, in the ultimate journey of our passing.
We, content at the last
if our temporal reversion nourish
(not too far from the yew-tree)
The life of significant soil.
Stan Grant is a former ABC journalist and global affairs analyst. Compass visited him at his property on Wiradjuri country in the Snowy Mountains. Watch Compass tonight at 6.30pm on ABC TV or ABC iview.