Reflexive Ethnographic Practice: Three Generations of Social Researchers in One Place 3030348970, 9783030348977

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Reflexive Ethnographic Practice Three Generations of Social Researchers in One Place Edited by Amanda Kearney John Bradley

Reflexive Ethnographic Practice

Amanda Kearney · John Bradley Editors

Reflexive Ethnographic Practice Three Generations of Social Researchers in One Place

Editors Amanda Kearney Flinders University Adelaide, SA, Australia

John Bradley Monash University Clayton, VIC, Australia

ISBN 978-3-030-34898-4  (eBook) ISBN 978-3-030-34897-7 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34898-4 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover image: Liam M. Brady This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

To our teachers and mentors.

Foreword

Ethnography involves a threefold challenge—to understand others through their own understandings, to live with others in a spirit of mutuality and reciprocity, and to write about others in ways that do them justice. What is so admirable about the essays collected in this volume is how far their authors have come in meeting these challenges. Not only their fieldwork but their writing demonstrates how collaboration and reflexivity offer ways of breaking through some of the intercultural impasses we currently face in Australia. Even as I express this hope (June 2019, senior leaders of several major Australian corporations, including Shell, the National Bank of Australia, The Red Cross, and the Cochlear Company, predict a ‘future of slow decline, economically and socially’ in Australia. Yet, these leaders are apparently oblivious or indifferent to Aboriginal insights into how best to create a sustainable economy and a more equitable society. As the contributors to Reflexive Ethnographic Practice make clear, Indigenous Australians already possess practical skills in environmental management, as well as cultural values (based on genealogical relatedness and kinship) that we would do well to learn from. While it is important to redress historical wrongs, overcome entrenched prejudices and paternalistic attitudes, and address issues of violence and anomie in outback communities, these goals can only be achieved through the long-term commitment and empathic engagement exemplified by the contributors to this volume, all of whom prioritize

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Indigenous initiatives for collaborating with non-Indigenous researchers, government officials, artists, filmmakers, scientists and lawyers. As Kearney and Bradley note, Yanyuwa have cultivated a very sophisticated practice of collaboration, whilst maintaining control over research agendas and benefitting from research outcomes. As with many Indigenous communities in Australia, and in an academic climate which increasing calls for ethical practice and decolonizing methodologies, Yanyuwa determine who they collaborate with and on what themes they choose to dedicate their time and efforts.

This collaborative spirit also informs the chapters of this book. Whether recounting experiences of working with Yanyuwa families on native title claims, the conservation of story places, healing and health, each writer provides edifying and heartening examples of what ethnography, sustained over several ‘three generations in one place’, can accomplish. The history of anthropology in Australia can be seen as a long and painful process of undoing the damage caused by catastrophic failures in the past to collaborate in the creation of a real rather than nominal Commonwealth. All too often, Aboriginal people have been subjects of discussion, and subjected to government policies and interventions, without ever having a voice in their own affairs, let alone in the future of Australia. In the course of fieldwork in Central Australia and on Cape York Peninsular in the 1990s, I would attend Land Council meetings presided over by white lawyers at which Aboriginal people were nonplussed by the ‘hard’ English and irked by the unequal power relationship between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Law. McGinty Salt, a Lama Lama friend who was born and raised at Princess Charlotte Bay, summed up his exasperation as follows: ‘Our land was taken from us in a day; why can’t it be given back to us in a day?’ The essays in Reflexive Ethnographic Practice strike a very different note. Knowledge emerges under conditions of hard-earned trust and genuine familiarity, not through formal data-gathering, interviewing and interrogation. Reading these essays, I was reminded of the Warlpiri spirit of cooperation and complementarity between kirda (the patrilineal custodians of a tract of Country or a Dreaming) and kurdungurlu (uterine kin) who supervise the ‘bosses’ or ‘owners’ that ‘run’ the ritual ‘business’ associated with a particular Dreaming, ensuring that protocols

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are respected and things are done ‘straight’ (junga). Unlike a relationship based on unequal rights or powers, the relationship is one of equality-in-difference in which everything is ‘level’ or ‘square and square’ (jangku-jangku). It goes without saying that ethnographers have not always been ‘straight’ or on the level with the people they have studied, and it is worth exploring the reasons why our ostensibly humanistic methodology has often been ethically and politically flawed. It is always going to be difficult to negotiate a relationship of mutuality between people when the wider socio-political context in which their encounter takes place is riven and vexed by radical structural inequalities. These inequalities not only reflect unfair distributions of resources and chances, but of symbolic capital, making literacy superior to orality, individuality superior to sociality, abstract knowledge superior to direct experience, and, by extension, whites superior to blacks. How is collaboration possible when these biases determine that one party will derive more benefit or satisfaction from a relationship than the other, and when one party will inevitably claim the last word on the meaning of what has transpired in the encounter? From its very beginnings, ethnography has been a fraught and paradoxical methodology, and it is tempting to see in its contradictory ideal of integrating participation (which implies equality and mutuality) with observation (which implies an unequal relationship between observer and observed) an echo of the Great War which both consolidated colonial power and gave birth to revolutionary movements toward egalitarianism. Although Bronislaw Malinowski promoted the idea that the ‘final goal’ of ethnography was ‘to grasp the native’s point of view, his relation to life, to realize his vision of his world’, he also argued that the ‘final goal’ of ethnography is ‘to enrich and deepen our own world’s vision, to understand our own nature and to make it finer, intellectually and artistically’ (Young 2014). It is as if, having set his sights on an empathic understanding of the other, Malinowski doubts its feasibility and shifts to a narcissistic ideal of understanding himself through the other. Thus, when advocating the study of what concerns the other ‘most intimately, that is, the hold which life has on him’, Malinowski (1922: 235, 22, 23) suggests that we cannot grasp subjective states, for these are ‘elusive and shapeless’. We can only apprehend stereotypical ‘manners of thinking and feeling’. These tensions between seeing the other as a person or as a cultural stereotype, and between empathy and egoism, are legacies of the

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European Enlightenment which, while paying lip service to the value and rights of the individual, proceeded to colonize, enslave, and murder in the name of abstractions like God, Reason, or the ‘civilizing mission’. Even as Governor Arthur Phillip declared that Aboriginal people must be well treated, and as he formed a ‘friendship’ with Woollarawarre Bennelong, he proved powerless to stop his officers from alienating large tracts of Indigenous land, or prevent acts of violence toward Iora, or mitigate the effects on them of European diseases like smallpox. The ethnographic project also inherited the Enlightenment tension between two forms of knowledge, the first produced through rational, scientific method, the second through intuition, revelation or personal experience. In Michel Foucault’s terms, social science was therefore bound to vacillate between l’enquête (disinterested inquiry) and l’épreuve (ordeal, direct undergoing), the first assuming that it is possible to neutralize subjective interference, the second recognizing that subjective factors play a significant role in the constitution of all knowledge. That anthropology continues to struggle to resolve this tension between its scientific aims and the personal, ethical and political realities of fieldwork experience is evident in the writing of one of Malinowski’s students, Ralph O’Reilly Piddington, who carried out fieldwork among the Karadjeri in 1930 and 1931. In the first volume of his Introduction to Social Anthropology, Piddington (1952a: 14) observes that, …it is easy enough, on the basis of superficial and one-sided observation, to caricature primitive man as a fiend or as a saint. It requires the discipline of patient scientific observation to see him as a human being not essentially different from ourselves, capable of brutality and kindness, of greed or altruism, of obedience or defiance toward the social order, according to the culture in which he is born, his individual temperament and the particular circumstances in which he finds himself.

This view is reiterated in Piddington’s (1952b: 543) second volume, where he reminds us that ‘the anthropologist in the field is a human being dealing with other human beings, and that the personal relations which he establishes and maintains with his informants are vital’. But instead of advocating closeness and collaboration between ethnographer and informant, Piddington (1952b: 546) suggests that the ‘personal bias and distortion’ entailed by such intimacy should be circumvented by

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‘a thorough training in the scientific methods of social anthropology’. One safeguard, he avers, is to avoid interviews and to place greater emphasis on observation, though there are dangers even here, he adds, for participant observation risks identifying the observer ‘too closely … with a particular social class’, embroiling him in factional disputes, and creating bias in his data. ‘At all costs, the field-worker must retain his objectivity’, Piddington (1952b: 549) concludes, underscoring the power of stranger value to maximize neutrality, maintain distance and guarantee access to restricted knowledge. Despite these caveats, Piddington’s nine month’s fieldwork among the Karadjeri was characterized by a passionate concern for the plight of Aboriginal people and fervent advocacy on their behalf, though he omits any mention of these ‘personal’ preoccupations in his textbook. Some three months after completing his second stint of fieldwork, Piddington did, however, give an interview with a journalist from the Sydney newspaper The World in which he made no bones about the racial discrimination and appalling living conditions that Aboriginal people had to endure in the Kimberleys. ‘The system of employing aborigines on cattle stations in the North and North-west Australia virtually amounts to slavery’, he observed, and he proceeded to give details of ‘trafficking in lubras’ and the flogging and murder of blacks by whites (Piddington 1932a: 1). A few months later, Piddington took his indictment of the police and pastoralists to the London press and, on the editorial page of The World, repeated his polemic against the maltreatment of Aboriginals (Piddington 1932b: 6–7). This time he brought the ire of the Western Australian Chief Protector of Aborigines down on his head. As a member of the committee that had approved Rockefeller funding for Piddington’s fieldwork, the Chief Protector was in a powerful position, and in September 1932, Raymond Firth, then acting-head of the Sydney University Department of Anthropology (following RadcliffeBrown’s departure for Chicago), rebuked Piddington and sought an assurance that he would make no further public statements ‘reflecting against the administration without first giving the administration an opportunity of refuting or investigating these claims’. After weighing his options, Piddington elected to defend and reiterate his views in a detailed statement. The Australian National Research Council (ANRC) immediately terminated his funding, with Elkin, the new head of the Sydney Department, approving the action.

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Piddington’s activism and reflexivity anticipate the collaborative praxis exemplified by Kearney’s and Bradley’s edited volume, and stands in contrast to Malinowski’s more narcissistic reflections. As Michael Young (2014) observes, Malinowski’s diary-keeping was a way of monitoring his moods and managing his moral lapses. Keeping a diary had been an intermittent, decade-long experiment in self-analysis… He wrote his diary to ransack the contents of his mind, to consolidate his character, to remind himself daily who he wanted to be: an efficient, healthy, single-minded and integrated person. But the diary portrays … a hostage to his impulses and passing moods. The pathos of this portrait is redeemed by the author’s unremitting honesty. He has no secrets from himself, and he eventually comes to accept that his quest for a single identity is hopeless, rendered all the more impossible after Freud’s revelations (Young 2014).

For Socrates and Plato, thinking was analogous to talking to oneself. But unless interior monologue is integrated with dialogue with others, thought becomes solipsistic. Stan Grant (2019: 35) adds another compelling observation that dwelling on one’s own experience risks boxing oneself in and becoming preoccupied by one’s own identity, while opening oneself up to others without framing the dialogue in terms of inferior versus superior or victim versus oppressor is an act of love, ‘love beyond any colour’. These days we are less inclined to judge Malinowski for his failure to reflect on his own character than his social failings in the field. Nowadays, we set much greater store by learning local protocols and seeing thought as an intersubjective rather than purely subjective process. Reflexivity finds expression, as Fred Myers (1986: 294) observed in his ethnography of the Pintupi, not just in introspection but in seeing and listening—effectively coming to know the others through attentiveness, patience and observation. This shift from subjectivity to intersubjectivity also informed Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s invocation, during the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings, of the ‘African’ concept of ubuntu, and his argument that reconciliation required a movement from ‘I’ to ‘we’. The psychologist Nomfundo Walaza made a similar point, excoriating the self-indulgent privatizing of feelings (include feelings of guilt) that he associated with capitalism and exhorting people to act together as members of one family, one community,

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and one nation (Krog 1998: 160–161). In short, reflexivity may originate in personal experience, but it is not the imprimatur of individual identity that confers ethical value on this experience, but the imprimatur of a community. The ghastly stories of the Apartheid era in South Africa or of the Stolen Generation of Aboriginal children in Australia have value not in absolving individual guilt but in healing a damaged nation through social justice reforms based on the recognition that we belong to a common world. Although the question remains whether any modern State—at once so politically divided, culturally diverse and bureaucratically organized—can incorporate the responsive intimacy of traditional societies, it is clear from this volume that collaborative and reflexive ethnography can reconcile disparate personal projects and preoccupations with collectively negotiated goals. Michael D. Jackson

Cambridge, MA, USA

References Grant, S. 2019. On Identity. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press. Krog, A. 1998. Country of My Skull. London: Jonathan Cape. Malinowski, B. 1922. Argonauts of the Western Pacific. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Myers, F. 1986. Pintupi Country, Pintupi Self: Sentiment, Place, and Politics Among Western Desert Aborigines. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press. Piddington, R. 1932a. Aborigines on Cattle Stations Are in Slavery: Anthropologist Piddington Backs World’s Probe Demand. The World, January 14, 1. Piddington, R. 1932b. Treatment of Aborigines: World’s Plea for Better Conditions Receives Attention Abroad. The World, July 7, 6–7. Piddington, R. 1952a. An Introduction to Social Anthropology, vol. 1. London: Oliver and Boyd. Piddington, R. 1952b. An Introduction to Social Anthropology, vol. 2. London: Oliver and Boyd. Young, M.W. 2014. Writing His Life Through the Other: The Anthropology of Malinowski. The Public Domain Review, January 1. Available at: https://publicdomainreview.org/2014/01/22/writing-his-life-through-the-other-theanthropology-of-malinowski/. Accessed 20 June 2019.

Acknowledgements

Our gratitude and thanks go to all the Yanyuwa, Marra, Garrwa and Gudanji families with whom we have collaborated over the years. In particular we wish to thank the following people for their enduring support and friendship; Graham Friday, Dinah Norman, Jemima Miller, Mavis Timothy, Ronnie Miller, Ruth Friday, Gloria Friday, Miriam Charlie, Jeanette Charlie, Leonard Norman, Jeffrey Norman, Joanne Miller, Maria Pyro, Nancy McDinny, David Isaac, Samuel Evans, Hazel Shadforth, Brian Hume, Harold Miller, Rex Norman, David Barrett, Anthony Johnston, Fiona Keighran, Damien Pracy, Stanley Allen Junior, Nicholas Fitzpatrick, Sean Fitzpatrick, Bruce King, Sebastian and Sean Evans and the whole team of li-Anthawirrayarra Sea Rangers. For their leadership and intellect, we remember and acknowledge the following people who have passed on, but who remain central to our closest memories, and reflections of time spent learning from and with Yanyuwa; Jerry Brown, Tim Timothy, Johnson Timothy, Ida Ninganga, Mussolini Harvey, Annie Karrakayny, Isaac Isaac, Dinny McDinny, Pyro Dirdiyalma, Steve Johnston, Wylo McKinnon, Don Miller, Eileen McDinny, Roddy Harvey, Amy Friday, Roddy Friday, Billy Miller, Rosie Noble, Thelma Douglas, Leanne Norman and Myra Rory. We offer our heartfelt thanks to Professor Michael D. Jackson of the Harvard Divinity School for writing the Foreword, and for all he has given to anthropology through his inspired and creative contributions. We acknowledge a team of generous and thoughtful peer reviewers who gave of their precious time and keen intellect, including, Heather Burke, xv

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Ute Eickelkamp, Lyn McCredden, Maree Pardy, Rachel Standfield and Sandy Toussaint. To those who attended our session at the American Anthropological Association conference in San Jose, in 2018, we thank you for your enthusiasm and also guidance on how this bigger reflexive project might be enriched and complicated in the form of this book. In particular we extend our thanks to Frances Morphy, Yasmine Musharbash and Narelle Warren. Your questions challenged and inspired us in ways that became extremely valuable as the book project developed. At Palgrave Macmillan, we would like to thank Mary Al-Sayed and Madison Allums for their caring enthusiasm and support for this project from the very beginning. We are grateful for your commitment to ensuring the space for reflexivity in social research and ethnographic practice. Financially we are indebted to those who have supported our research. We acknowledge Flinders University and the College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences for supporting Amanda Kearney, Monash University and the Monash Indigenous Centre for supporting John Bradley, Liam M. Brady and Philip Adgemis. The MIECAT Institute is recognized for supporting Nona Cameron in her research endeavors and Deakin University is acknowledged for providing institutional support to Frances Devlin-Glass. Aspects of this work were made possible through the Australian Research Council and the Discovery Grants DP1093341 (Amanda Kearney, John Bradley, Ian McNiven and Liam M. Brady), DP170101083 (Liam M. Brady, John Bradley and Amanda Kearney), and DP190101522 (Amanda Kearney and John Bradley).

Contents

1 Introduction: The Scene for a Reflexive Practice 1 Amanda Kearney and John Bradley The Start of a Story 1 Our Approach to the Book 9 Collaboration and Change 13 Yanyuwa Families, Country and Law 15 On Becoming Reflexive 26 Overview 30 References 33 2 Writing from the Edge: Writing What Was Never Meant to Be Written 39 John Bradley Introduction 39 Living on the Edge: Suffering and Loss 40 Field Notes and Reflections: Transitioning into the Academy 42 Writing of Knowledge 45 Songs, Stories, and Relationships 50 Knowing Loss and Finding Words 56 Final Thoughts 58 Contributor Response, by Philip Adgemis 61 References 63

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3 Mobility of Mind: Can We Change Our Epistemic Habit Through Sustained Ethnographic Encounters? 65 Amanda Kearney Introduction 65 What Do I Know? 67 How Did This Happen? 69 Mobility of Mind: Epistemic Habit in the Context of Fieldwork Encounters 70 Sustained Ethnographic Encounters as Acts of Testimony and Witnessing 78 Did I Always Know? 85 Why Have Yanyuwa Taught Me? 87 Am I Permitted to Know an Indigenous Epistemology in a Settler-Colonial Context? 88 Final Thoughts 89 Contributor Response, by John Bradley 91 References 93 4 Mapping the Route to the Yanyuwa Atlas 95 Nona Cameron Putting It Down, Giving Voice to Country 95 Changes, Shifts, and Paradoxes 98 Threads, Tracks, and Paths to Yanyuwa Relationships 101 How Getting Lost Offered Us an Atlas 104 Moving In from the Edges 105 Art as Ways of Knowing and Expressing 108 Creased Maps and Field Jottings 111 Sensing a Topography of Rage 115 Moving from Stasis 117 A Final Reflexive Gathering 119 Contributor Response, by Liam M. Brady 120 References 122 5 “Invisible Things in Nature”: A Reflexive Reading of Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria 125 Frances Devlin-Glass Introduction 125 Carpentaria’s Unexpectedness 126

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The Many Strands that Make up Carpentaria 133 Reading Carpentaria in the Light of an Apprenticeship in Yanyuwa Cosmology 135 Reading Wright’s Rainbow Serpent 138 Final Reflection 144 Contributor Response, by Amanda Kearney 145 References 149 6 Encounters with Yanyuwa Rock Art: Reflexivity, Multivocality, and the “Archaeological Record” in Northern Australia’s Southwest Gulf Country 153 Liam M. Brady Introduction 153 Reflexivity in Archaeology Practice 155 Archaeology and the Southwest Gulf Country 157 Research Questions and Entering the Field 159 Looking for a Donkey 160 Kurrmurnnyini and Sorcery Rock Art 164 Yalkawarru and the Power of Place 170 Discussion 172 Contributor Response, by Nona Cameron 174 References 176 7 “So Did You Find Any Culture Up Here Mate?”: Young Men, “Deficit” and Change 181 Philip Adgemis Introduction 181 Realizations and Motivations 182 Discourse and Deficit Framings: “Some People Just Hate Us” 185 Expectations and Intersubjective Connections 189 Change and the Shame in Not Knowing 192 Reflections 202 Contributor Response, By Frances Devlin-Glass 205 References 207 Index 213

Notes

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Contributors

Philip Adgemis is a research fellow at the Monash Indigenous Studies Centre at Monash University. His research explores cross-generational implications of rapid social change experienced by Yanyuwa families in northern Australia. Focusing on dynamism at different generational levels, his work provides insightful analysis of cultural continuities and discontinuities in the enactment of cultural knowledge. Philip has been the recipient of the Minoru Hokari Memorial Fellowship and the Berndt Foundation Postgraduate Research Grant. He is currently working on an oral histories project with Aboriginal families in south-eastern Australia and is an anthropologist at the Aboriginal Areas Protection Authority, in Darwin, northern Australia. John Bradley  is Associate Professor and Deputy Director of the Monash Indigenous Centre, Monash University, Australia. He began research in Borroloola in 1980. He has spent the last four decades bouncing around in boats on the rivers and sea Country of his Yanyuwa mentors. He has acted as Senior Anthropologist on two land claims for Yanyuwa Country, worked on issues associated with language and cultural management with Yanyuwa elders and the li-Anthawiriyarra Sea Ranger Unit. John is the author of the prize winning Singing Saltwater Country (2010) and has completed a two-volume encyclopedia of the Yanyuwa language. Liam M. Brady is Associate Professor in the College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences, at Flinders University, Australia. He is an Australian Research Council Future Fellow. As an archaeologist, he xxi

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has worked alongside Indigenous communities in northern Australia, Canada, and the United States since 2001, on partnership-based research projects aimed at understanding how people used rock art and visual heritage as symbolic modes of communication and exploring contemporary engagements with rock art. He is the author of Pictures, Patterns and Objects: rock-art of the Torres Strait Islands, North Eastern Australia (2010, Australian Scholarly Publishing) and coeditor of Rock Art in the Contemporary World (2016, University Press of Colorado). Nona Cameron is a therapeutic arts practitioner, arts-based researcher and postgraduate educator at the MIECAT Institute in Melbourne, Australia. Her doctoral research was an arts-based inquiry process into the lived experience of everyday grief and loss. The innovative presentation was as a series of intersubjective books that capture the ways that grief was explored in the relational inquiries, capturing the singularity and diversity of grief experiences. She has published on the use of arts as a therapeutic process in hospital, the importance of a reflective arts practice and contributed to a volume on creative arts companioning and meaning making. Frances Devlin-Glass is Honorary Associate Professor in Literary Studies at Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia. Her research interests mediate between cultures, mainly Irish and Australian literatures and she is the coeditor of Joseph Furphy’s The Annotated Such is Life (Oxford University Press and Halstead Press) and Intimate Horizons: The Post-Colonial Sacred in Australian Literature with Bill Ashcroft and Lyn McCredden. She has been the Creative Director of Bloomsday in Melbourne, an annual James Joyce festival for 25 years. She began teaching Indigenous-authored Australian literature in the early 1990s and was part of a team mounting a website of Yanyuwa culture, now archived. Amanda Kearney is Professor of Indigenous Studies and a Matthew Flinders Fellow, at Flinders University, Australia. Her research specialty is cultural wounding, healing and emerging ethnicities. For the last 20 years her research has addressed Indigenous experience, ways of knowing, ethnicity and the emotional geographies that accompany homelands. Her ongoing research has developed in collaboration with Yanyuwa families. Amanda began working on themes of emerging ethnicities and the rise of affirmative action principles in north eastern Brazil in 2008. She continues to interrogate the moral and ethical imperatives of interculturalism and ‘being in better relation’.

List of Figures

Fig. 1.1 Fig. 1.2 Fig. 1.3 Fig. 1.4 Fig. 1.5 Fig. 3.1 Fig. 3.2 Fig. 3.3 Fig. 3.4 Fig. 3.5 Fig. 3.6 Fig. 3.7 Fig. 4.1

Yanyuwa sea Country, southwest Gulf of Carpentaria, northern Australia (Source Authors) Arriving in Borroloola, southwest Gulf of Carpentaria, northern Australia (Source Authors) Timeline of ‘arrivals’ in Borroloola, and the start of collaborations with Yanyuwa families Map of the southwest Gulf of Carpentaria, northern Australia (Source Authors) Close-up map of Yanyuwa Country in the southwest Gulf of Carpentaria, Northern Territory, Australia (Source Authors) Robinson Road, main street of Borroloola (Source Author) Borroloola township (Source Author) North Island, Yanyuwa sea Country, looking south (Source Author) Vanderlin Island, Yanyuwa saltwater Country (Source Author) Yanyuwa housing, Yanyuwa camp, Borroloola (Source Author) View from the verandah of a Yanyuwa house, in the Yanyuwa camp (Source Author) Walking the beach, West Island, Yanyuwa sea Country (Source Author) Close up detail of the Atlas, corresponding with mainland Yanyuwa Country, Robinson River mouth West to Sandy Head (Yanyuwa Families, Bradley and Cameron 2003: 164)

2 4 5 16 17 72 73 73 74 74 75 76 97

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LIST OF FIGURES

Fig. 4.2 Fig. 4.3 Fig. 5.1

Fig. 5.2 Fig. 6.1 Fig. 6.2 Fig. 6.3 Fig. 6.4 Fig. 6.5 Fig. 6.6 Fig. 7.1 Fig. 7.2

Fig. 7.3 Fig. 7.4

Pyro Dirdiyalma holding his copy of the Yanyuwa atlas (Yanyuwa Families, Bradley and Cameron 2003) (Source Amanda Kearney) Vanderlin Island Map, featuring the a-Buluwardi Rock Wallaby on the west coast (Yanyuwa Families, Bradley and Cameron 2003: 51) The first twenty-four verses of the illustrated version of the Tiger Shark Dreaming which demonstrate the minute particulars of how narrative and Country are tightly mapped in the most complex public version of the narrative (Yanyuwa Families, Bradley and Cameron 2003: 306) Linguistic distinctions mapping onto Indigenous groups in the Gulf of Carpentaria (Source Author) Map of the southwestern Gulf of Carpentaria showing sites mentioned in the text (Source Authors) Looking for the donkey motif at Lilardungka (Source Author) Kurrmurnnyini rock art site (Source Author) Painted anthropomorph at Kurrmurnnyini in the distinctive sorcery-style pose (Source Author) Painted crocodile at Kurrmurnnyini used to kill a Yanyuwa man who had a kin-based relationship with the crocodile Ancestral Being (Source Author) Contact-era objects placed on a “shelf” inside the Kurrmurnnyini rock-shelter (Source Author) My five-year-old self, resplendent in the Tsolias A giant groper sighting at Lhuka (Batten Point) in the southwest Gulf of Carpentaria. The Groper is a central Dreaming for one of the four Yanyuwa semi-moieties, the Wuyaliya clan, and its appearance is an example of “an anomalous event” that younger rangers would share with the senior men to seek a Law-based interpretation (Source Author) Sea Ranger Anthony Johnston holding the harpoon (ridiridi) while looking for dugong in the seagrass beds near the mouth of Mule Creek, 2016 (Source Author) A catch of fish from a day patrolling near West Island, 2016 (Source Author)

114 116

132 137 158 161 165 166 167 168 193

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction: The Scene for a Reflexive Practice Amanda Kearney and John Bradley

The Start of a Story This book is a story of relationships. It is a story of intersecting lives and experiences, as they have taken place in a remote township in northern Australia, between local Indigenous residents and a group of researchers who have long visited and collaborated with them. We write here as anthropologists, an artist, archaeologist, and literary scholar, each of us having shared in the documenting of Indigenous people’s lives through the interface of ethnography, relational encounters, and knowledge sharing. Presented as six discrete chapters, this book should be read as a “big story,” revealing the complexities that run through these relationships. It is, at its core, a story of learning and friendship across cultures. Ruth Behar (2003: xvii), an anthropologist, and humanist scholar of substance,

A. Kearney (B) Flinders University, Adelaide, SA, Australia e-mail: [email protected] J. Bradley Monash University, Clayton, VIC, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 A. Kearney and J. Bradley (eds.), Reflexive Ethnographic Practice, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34898-4_1

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whose work inspires much of this book’s intentions and hopes, reminds us that We cannot live without stories. Our need for stories of our lives is so huge, so intense, so fundamental, that we would lose our humanity if we stopped trying to tell stories of who we think we are. And even more important, if we stopped wanting to listen to each other’s stories.

The context for these stories is essential to how the narrative unfolds. The scene is Yanyuwa Country, a remarkable part of northern Australia, located throughout the saltwater limits of the southwest Gulf of Carpentaria (see Figs. 1.1 and 1.4). There is scarcely a creek, a hill, a river, a stretch of sea, a reef, a bay, or peninsula of land in Yanyuwa Country that does not have a name, a story, or even a song. Similarly, there is not a bird, a fish, a mammal, or an insect that does not have a place in the multidimensional mythological and social web that forms the narrative map of relationships between members

Fig. 1.1 Yanyuwa sea Country, southwest Gulf of Carpentaria, northern Australia (Source Authors)

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of this language group and their homelands. “Country” is a term used by many Indigenous Australian language groups to refer to their homelands as made up of land, sea, bodies of water, kin, and resources. It is a holistic term. Rose (2014: 435) describes it further as an “Aboriginal English term,” an area associated with a human social group, and with all the plants, animals, landforms, waters, songlines, and sacred sites within its domain. It is homeland in the mode of kinship: the enduring bonds of solidarity that mark relationships between human and animal kin also mark the relationships between creatures and their Country.

Country is a “nourishing terrain” (Rose 1996: 7). Even now, abused as it might be, by a heavy colonial presence, the land and sea of Yanyuwa Country is thick with knowledge and meanings that are beyond the reach of history and which are undergoing transformation in a new world where young Indigenous people are finding their own pathways toward identity affirmation and cultural strength. This is the world into which we (the contributors), have entered and stretched “the sinews” of our minds, to understand and write of Indigenous experience, and Yanyuwa culture, as academics (Stanner 1968 in Manne 2010: 204). Yet the academic engagement is only one part of the story, made richer by the interspersing of our personal narratives and the relational bonds that have been cultivated, in this place, over decades of collaboration. What we hope to achieve with this book is a generationally nuanced and revealing account of ethnographic fieldwork, set against the distinctive backdrop of this one Indigenous community, in Borroloola, northern Australia (Figs. 1.2, 1.4). Accounting for the generational differences and similarities in how social researchers establish and undertake their ethnographic fieldwork reveals much about how the lives of our collaborators and teachers in the field determine the very nature of the ethnographic encounter. A distinctive feature of the book lies in the fact that each contributor has a long-term connection with this one community and yet offers a different account of ethnography, as aligned with different research commitments, disciplinary backgrounds, and individual identities, as a negotiated and personally rewarding and challenging encounter. Of the contributors to this book, we must write, in particular of how they found their way to Borroloola and into the relational encounter that has become long-term collaborations with Yanyuwa families (see Fig. 1.3).

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Fig. 1.2 Arriving in Borroloola, southwest Gulf of Carpentaria, northern Australia (Source Authors)

It begins with John Bradley, an anthropologist and linguist who arrived in Borroloola in 1980. Entering the scene first as a young school teacher, John has spent his entire adult life living and learning with Yanyuwa, documenting their saltwater culture, and collaborating on language maintenance efforts, land claims and a whole suite of Yanyuwa determined projects including film, and digital animations of Ancestral narratives and songs. He expands on these efforts and the lingering discomfort he feels on matters of translation, translatability, knowledge sharing, and writing in this chapter. He has dedicated his career to working with Yanyuwa and advocating for the need (if not imperative) to be in better relation with other, in this case Indigenous, ways of knowing. Amanda Kearney was introduced to members of the Yanyuwa community in 1999. Never resting in their commitment to safeguard knowledge, and to fight for the rights to their lands and waters Yanyuwa agreed to begin working with her in an effort to document the emotional geography of their Country. Their working with Amanda leads to a Yanyuwa narration of the effects of alienation from Country through the forces

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Philip Adgemis arrives in Borroloola to begin collaborating with Yanyuwa Liam M. Brady begins working with Yanyuwa on rock art recording projects Nona Cameron returns to Borroloola to undertake proofing for the Yanyuwa atlas Amanda Kearney arrives to begin doctoral fieldwork and ongoing collaborations with Yanyuwa Frances Devlin-Glass visits Borroloola to commence work on the Yanyuwa website

John Bradley arrives in Borroloola as a school teacher, and begins ongoing collaborations with Yanyuwa families

1980

Bradley introduces Nona Cameron to Borroloola

1986

1999

2000

2000

2010

2012

Fig. 1.3 Timeline of ‘arrivals’ in Borroloola, and the start of collaborations with Yanyuwa families

of cultural wounding. Recalling the experiences of violence that Yanyuwa and their Country have lived through, has been a step toward redressing the national silence on the prevailing impact of loss of rights to lands and waters for one Indigenous Australian community. Amanda has now spent two decades documenting the generationally nuanced commitment within this community to healing actions in the face of cultural wounding. In Chapter 3 she explores the impact this has had on her “epistemic habit” and reflects on the extent to which we might be challenged and changed through sustained ethnographic encounters. In collaboration with Bradley, she now turns her attention to the Yanyuwa experience of fighting for legislative land rights, an undertaking that now enters its 44th year for this community. Introduced to Borroloola and Yanyuwa families in the mid 1980s as “Bradley’s wife,” Nona Cameron recounts in Chapter 4 her own journey of collaborating and working with Yanyuwa as a visual artist. Her relationships with this place and its people are tied not only to her linkages with John, but also her undertaking to visually document Yanyuwa culture in

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the formidable text, Forget About Flinders: An Indigenous Atlas of the Southwest Gulf of Carpentaria (Yanyuwa Families, Bradley and Cameron 2003). An Indigenous atlas, this work was commissioned by Yanyuwa, to reinforce their linkages to Country above and beyond a white settler colonial presence, namely that inscribed by the British explorer, Matthew Flinders as he circumnavigated Australia from 1801 to 1803. It is a magnificent document that visually presents Yanyuwa Country as a sentient, ancestrally rich and agentic space. Cameron explores the translative efforts and moral/ethical conundrums faced in the course of visually documenting an oral tradition, and elements of powerful Ancestral Law in her chapter. Furthering Yanyuwa campaigns to safeguard their knowledge and to present it to a wider audience, Frances Devlin-Glass, writes of her epic and committed engagements with Indigenous authored texts in Chapter 5. Frances became involved in collaborations with Yanyuwa through her expertise as a literary scholar. She was the driving force behind the design and launch of a Yanyuwa website, a cultural resource that housed and showcased important information on Yanyuwa Country, Law, kinship, ancestors, and land rights. While no longer an active online presence, this website was one of the first Yanyuwa initiatives that involved online presentation of cultural information. In many respects, it was the start of an ongoing and deeply explorative engagement, on the behalf of Yanyuwa, with new ways of presenting Indigenous knowledge. Guided carefully in this undertaking, so as to maintain the integrity of Indigenous knowledge, Yanyuwa and Devlin-Glass were at the coalface of a new era in sharing Yanyuwa knowledge with a white audience. In 2010 Liam M. Brady, an archaeologist and rock art specialist, arrived in Borroloola, with Yanyuwa support, to record the extent and nature of rock art across their sea Country. In the midst of drafting an Indigenous plan of sea/land management, and at the peak time of growth for the local li-Anthawirriyarra Sea Ranger programme, Liam’s arrival offered the community access to new information and culturally rich details that spoke volumes for their immediate purposes. Enhancing details of the region’s cultural significance has given Yanyuwa important grounds on which to argue for the right to safeguard their Country. Liam arrived in Borroloola with a skillset that both intrigued and amused Yanyuwa; “whitefellas” excitedly searching Country for rock art and then engaging an elaborate recording process was not a common occurrence in

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the Gulf of Carpentaria. Having experience with only one other archaeologist working on their Country, Yanyuwa have repeatedly stretched their own ways of knowing to fully engage with and come to know their Country through the narrations of rock art recording. That this journey has been exploratory and revelatory for all involved is assured, and explored by Brady in Chapter 6. The most recent arrival in Borroloola, but the person who perhaps plays the greatest role in documenting Yanyuwa life and experience, in this present moment, and on terms that resonate most powerfully with younger generations, is Philip Adgemis. Arriving in Borroloola to commence his doctoral research in anthropology, in 2012, Philip has operated with an acute sense of empathy and has a great capacity to be with younger men in the Yanyuwa community. The beauty in his work is that it redresses a great lack, within anthropology and social research more broadly, of young people’s own voices. His work, discussed in Chapter 7, provides new insights by framing young people not as “adults in the making” but as active agents in the here and now. He moves artfully to combine the roles of friend, worker, and colleague, confidante and anthropologist, in his account of young men’s, including his own, responses to shame and social change. We have called upon these six contributors to dig a bit deeper for personal and professionally revealing accounts of the challenges and benefits that have come with long-term collaboration, knowledge sharing and ethnographic encounters with Yanyuwa families. All the while we are aware of the desire to “keep quiet,” as both an academic shield we like to hold in place, but also as a caution across disciplines that we refrain from talking too much about our own lives so that the focus on “the other” will not become obscured (Behar 2003: xvii). Australian author, Kim Mahood’s (2000, 2007, 2012, 2016) body of work provides the impetus for reflection on how non-Indigenous people come to learn about or potentially understand Indigenous lived experiences. Told through personal accounts, free narrative and magnificent storytelling, her writing (Mahood 2000, 2012, 2016) gives color and movement to comparatively stilted academic discourse on the same topic. By drawing fully on the substance of relationships while growing up in Central Australia, sharing early years and adult life with Indigenous friends and companions and of lifechanging relationships with the land, Mahood makes vivid the internal language of wanting to be in relation and to know something (better) of our place in the world.

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Academically, some Australian researchers have explored the complexity which runs through relationships in the settler colony, most notably, Gillian Cowlishaw, writing as anthropologist and commentator on disciplinary politics in the Australian context. With the benefit of considerable time and from the position of having spent decades working with Indigenous Australians, Cowlishaw (2017, 2018) engages a reflectivity in stripping back and revealing the conservatism that runs through Australian anthropology and which ultimately, she argues, has limited the scope of ethnographic attention. She identifies a problem, “intrinsic to ethnographies—that is, inscribing the social world of less powerful others in terms they neither create nor assent to, with apparently innocent description and analysis legitimized by powerful academic institutions” (Cowlishaw 2018: 40). How we craft our story matters, as Cowlishaw explains in her 2017 and 2018 contributions articulated around the theme of “Tunnel Vision.” We take her position as encouragement for the reflexive considerations woven throughout this book, and the relationships that inform this story, giving it a distinctive quality in relation to the particularities of Yanyuwa life and experience, and more broadly the human pursuit of “being in better relations” with another. Best we not neglect to open our eyes and look around, keenly aware of the position in which we stand and from which we annunciate our narratives of cultural and social life. In the Australian context, the art of “being in relation” has been taken up also by Hinkson (2018) who presents a “single person-focused ethnography” designed to “grapple with destabilisations” in anthropological production, set “within the context of a long-standing researchrelated friendship.” The theme of friendship winds its way through other recent offerings, by Hinkson and Vincent (2018), and Thorner et al. (2018), and Rademaker (2019), indicating a growing comfort with articulating relational encounters in research that are personal and transformative. Trigger et al. (2012) have also begun their own revelatory voicing as researchers. Drawing upon brief vignettes from research experiences, the authors argue for the methodological significance of memorable events encountered in ethnographic studies (see Jackson’s [2005] work on an anthropology of events). It is given that “researcher’s apprehension of their own subjectivity” is a valuable instrument, “as they negotiate what can be intense and transformative entanglements with the people and settings of the study” (Trigger et al. 2012: 514). Through the experiences recounted, including for example, “being ensorcelled” (that is, having

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sorcery enacted upon the researcher by an Indigenous Australian collaborator), the emotional life of the researcher is given carriage within the research, becoming another logic through which the awkward, painful, unpredictable, and even surprising aspects of fieldwork are made sense of. In addressing the relational production of knowledge, Trigger et al. (2012) are particularly interested in the role of emotion, discomfort and surprise in “fieldwork” as a key part of anthropology. There has always been a desire to tell the stories that run below the surface of ethnography, yet in Australia, these remain, perhaps, if we read Cowlishaw (2018) correctly, the remit of the “trail blazers,” those who stand in a habit of “disciplinary refusal,” seeking to illuminate versions of life in the “gap” between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australia; lives that express complexities across frontiers of difference in a settler colony. Perhaps the refusal contained in this book is “that we will not vacate the relational space of our fieldwork encounters.” Configured otherwise it is the acceptance that, as Jackson (2005: xi) writes (drawing from Sartre) “our humanness is the outcome of a dynamic relationship between circumstances over which we have little control.” Ethnography, relational encounters, and knowledge sharing allow us to live the circumstances of who we are in a variety of ways, and this may go for both sides of the relational encounter—ourselves and our collaborators (Jackson 2005: ix). In recognition of this the contributors to this book further their commitment to reflexivity as a praxis of introspection, an attempt to gather insights from an intersubjective position. The nature of the reflections presented here traverse themes of the tensions that emerge when sharing knowledge, cautions when introducing new knowledge, cognitive traffic jams, narrating Indigenous experience, coming to know in new ways, contested rights to speak, and cultivating an empathic imagination in anthropology and social and creative research more broadly.

Our Approach to the Book This book commits to the guiding three pathways for reflexive engagement, aligning with: (1) personal reflexivity which explores the ways in which our own aspirations, characters, values, philosophies, experiences, political commitments, and social identities shape the research; (2) epistemological reflexivity, whereby we reflect upon the assumptions about the world, and about knowledge that we and our Indigenous collaborators have made in the course of research; and (3) critical reflexivity which takes

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as its focus the political and social constructions that inform our entry into the field, our time spent there and our retreat from that space to produce research outcomes. The book advances several nuanced forms of reflexivity, with approaches, inspired by Finlay and Gough’s (2003) work on reflexivity, including responsive reflexivity, bracketing, introspection, and intersubjective reflection. Responsive reflexivity is explored by Kearney, in Chapter 3, thus configured as a form of primary witnessing, which disrupts our sense of well-being or certainty in what we might know or think. In this instance, the self is examined for its limits, but also potentials. Bracketing we hope to have practiced carefully throughout the book, as a precaution, a way of mitigating the risk of “bending too far back,” that is, indulging too much of the self, in the “bending back upon oneself,” the very definition of reflexivity (see Finlay and Gough 2003: ix). To write these chapters we have, to some extent, set aside our researcher assumptions and fears of what is and is not worthy of documentation, but we also “bracket” to resist the “toppling over” that can come when on the edge of academic/reflexive writing, a place necessarily populated by the self as a player in the crafting of narrative. Emotions can scare us all, and truth be told, it remains unclear, the nature of their place in social research (see Behar 2014: 17–19 for a discomforting account of researchers that “switch gears” too suddenly between academic accounts of life and personal encounters within life itself). Knowing where to begin, and where to stop requires introspection for each writer/scholar, aware that while there is no substitution for experience, there must also be acknowledgment of what we have not experienced, what we have not lived, namely the everyday hardships of Yanyuwa life. These have been ours to know only through Yanyuwa accounts and sharing. This is a lived distance away, and we hear it from a position of good health, and opportunity, as non-Indigenous Australians living in a settler colony. If we have achieved intersubjective reflection, it has been due to dialogue, and interconnectivity with Yanyuwa. By design, social research that takes place at the interface of everyday life, is a reflexive declaration of who we are, calling upon us to sit with, listen to, feel for, and imagine the lives, of others, who happen to be our research collaborators and often, through long-term associations, our friends. By this we mean that the research implicates us centrally in terms of how we find our curiosity for a certain situation, how we might enter that scene and what we do once we are there and once we leave. Whether as an anthropologist, artist, archaeologist, or literary

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scholar, there is nothing accidental about the way we find our research and creative interests. We simply cannot argue against the proposition that our research lives shape and change our personal ones. This is no more vividly conveyed than in the undertaking of ethnographic fieldwork, which occurs as the very interface of our own life/existence and the lives/existence of others. No longer the exclusive remit of anthropology, ethnography informs a vast number of research endeavors, which means that understanding its impact, over the long-game of fieldwork and collaboration, is key to progressing a reflexive agenda in the social sciences. For the purposes of this book, ethnography is engaged as both a methodology and a method. It is an iteration of social life from the perspective of the researcher, done through collaborative participation in experiential life. For Jackson (2009: 241, citing Bourdieu 1996: 22), “the ethnographic method demands not merely an imaginative participation in the life of the other, but a practical and social involvement in the various activities, both ritual and mundane, that contextualize and condition the other’s worldview.” And, “[t]his imposes great demands not only on an ethnographer’s linguistic and conceptual abilities, but on his or her emotional and bodily resources” (Jackson 2009: 241). The ethnographic method thus requires reflection on how we structure our consciousness, and organize and describe our perceptions as they occur in relation to others. Ethnography embraces the person of the researcher as its primary instrument for data gathering and the interface for learning and gathering is an undeniably relational encounter with other people and often other places. As a method employed by the contributors to this book, it has been described through the close-up moments of local contexts, that is, the township of Borroloola, on people’s verandas, in four-wheel drives and boats moving across Country, on the banks of rivers, by fires at night, and in quiet or even lively moments of everyday existence. In more recent years it has also occurred in university offices as Yanyuwa travel to visit us at home, on the telephone and even via social media where Facebook shrinks the vast distance between Borroloola and elsewhere. We have spent time with Yanyuwa families in the hope of better understanding Yanyuwa experience, Law and Country, learning through participation and witnessing, being in steadied non-distraction, that is listening and attending to another in the fullest sense possible. When we embark on ethnography as a form of knowledge sharing, we enter into the scene of other people’s lives, invited we hope, and as a

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result we are changed by the process. We also become part of a whole web of relationships with our teachers, and the people from whom we seek most to learn. This begins a process of dismantling, and rebuilding, a profound change in ourselves as researchers and ultimately witnesses to other people’s lives. In seeing others, we change our self. The openness to change as a disposition that encourages learning is central to intercultural exchanges such as those accounted for in the six chapters of this book. Reflecting upon the nature of change and the implications of changing is the core business of this book. We have chosen to think carefully about our place within the research endeavor, particularly one that involves the lives of some of the most marginalized and disenfranchised people in Australia, that is Indigenous Australians. This approach is a radical commitment to reflexivity, as an open-ended and uncomfortable conversation, which accounts for change in the short term, but also change as a lifelong process, triggered by the realizations that ethnographic fieldwork, intercultural encounters, and knowledge sharing brings. Research collaborations often give birth to complex relational encounters, but the lingering complexity is that we are all in the relational, all of the time, with versions of our self and with others. We craft this book, bearing in mind Jackson’s (2009: 240) contemplations that, Understanding others requires more than an intellectual movement from one’s own position to theirs; it involves physical upheaval, psychological turmoil, and moral confusion. This is why suffering is an inescapable concomitant of understanding – the loss of the illusion that one’s own particular worldview is universally tenable, the pain of seeing in the face and gestures of a stranger the invalidation of oneself. And it is precisely because such hazards and symbolic deaths are the cost of going beyond the borders of the local world that we complacently regard as the measure of the world that most human beings resist seeking to know others as they know themselves.

Certainly, Yanyuwa would never let us shirk the responsibilities that come with this relational profundity, because it goes to the very heart of why our collaborations have been possible. Thus, it warrants our attention because all research is political (see Jackson 2002), all accounts of human life are provocative, and we owe it to our long-term collaborators to reflect on not only our academic and intellectual interventions in the

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social sciences, but also to comment on the sum and substance of the relationships that have facilitated all of these and more.

Collaboration and Change What changes through long-term ethnographic encounters and collaborator relationships? We suggest that a great deal may be transformed. It may start with ourselves and our research, we may be called upon to modify our behavior while in the field, to become better listeners, more flexible characters, and less inclined to judge when faced with things we do not comprehend. Our research might be a washout, and fail to resonate with people’s actual lives, and in turn, it too might be compelled to change. It might be that as relationships grow with our collaborators, that we abandon research agendas and let the scene of everyday life lead us. There is also potential for change in the shifting realities of the local communities, families, and households that are our hosts, these prompted by our presence or our research interventions, compelling us to ask, does our presence get in the way, do we change the rhythm and flow of everyday life, do we belong, are we good students, and have we learned properly? We might also find ourselves asking, when is it time to leave? And when is it time to return? It is a never-ending cycle of self-conscious reflection and response when faced toward the ethnographic scene. As has increasingly come to our attention, our personal lives are also changed through sustained ethnographic encounters. Our relationships at home and our futures can be substantively influenced by the years we spend collaborating with others and learning of their lives in locations away from home. After all, ethnography is, as Jackson (2009: 242) sparingly yet provocatively reminds us, a “personal ordeal.” It often seeps into our private lives and familial existence, informing our politics and ethics. In the case of the book’s contributors, fieldwork has caused us to be absent from births, birthdays, weddings, funerals and countless family occasions. We have missed graduations, abandoned relationships, and skipped out of “grown up” life by hitting the road and heading to Borroloola. Borroloola always brings a degree of escape, and long-term ethnography requires an absenteeism, a signing off, that divests us of responsibility in one life-world and causes us to inherit a suite of obligations in

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another. It brings a sense of freedom from increasingly constrained academic life, the university bureaucracy is suddenly thrown out the car window or excised through gossip and exclamation, as we rapidly approach Borroloola. For some of us, it is cast aside as early as the outer suburbs of Darwin a mere 40 minutes into the long drive, with the quick realization that all the “worries back in the office, simply don’t matter” when you leave town. We write this Introduction with confidence in the fact that each of the contributors to this book has grappled with their existence in two worlds to some extent. There is less certainty in what this might mean for each of them, thus they must narrate their own stories. On the one hand life takes place in that world which is called home, a comfortable, often reasonably financially secure, easy existence surrounded by culturally familiar signs and behaviors, and on the other, a world marked by physical challenges, great uncertainty, and emotional strains that come with being in Borroloola, where life is harder, the challenges more immediate, and the solutions more elusive. In writing that however, we acknowledge that there are no simple binaries of home/away, good/bad, easy/hard, familiar/unfamiliar. At times, we can feel more at home in Borroloola than elsewhere, and more alien in the academy and our intellectual or personal homes than would seem right. It is such that if “one is to actually put oneself in the position of others it is never enough simply to think one’s thoughts by way of theirs; one must, at all costs, access and experience directly the lives that others live in their own place” (Jackson 2009: 241). The fact is, anything and everything might be changed through the relational encounter that is a long-term ethnographic encounter. This we suspect is the very allure of ethnography and what keeps generations of writers reflecting on this nuanced form of engagement with human life. It is also what has drawn the book’s contributors to this very point in their careers, that is, to the challenging moment of reflection and reckoning. This is reflection and reckoning, not in the manner “of plumbing the psychic depths of other minds or achieving empathic understanding; rather, it is focused on one’s relationships with others” (Jackson 2005: 246). There are relationships which inform the words on these pages, relationships that have been elevated to a position of prevailing and primary importance. Why is that? What makes these relational aspects of ethnography so important? The contributors to this book have had to find ways to do research that has relevance to the everyday lives of Yanyuwa families. The research that

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is written of throughout the book has been undertaken with Yanyuwa consent and has been directly facilitated by Yanyuwa, often at their request. Contributor interactions with Yanyuwa, on their Country, have been shaped through several lines of engagement and inquiry, from teaching young people at the local primary school, to assisting with land claims, documenting the region’s emotional geography, grappling with the nature of cultural wounding and healing in this community, generational shame, loss and the enduring effect of coloniality and dispossession, also young people’s lives as they unfold in the present, rock art and the rich palette of Yanyuwa cultural expressions and language over time. The interactions are bound by the prevailing urge or drive, by Yanyuwa, to safeguard their place in the world, to tell their story, and control the means by which this is done. As researchers, our roles have been those of a story teller, cultural intermediary, translator, advocate, and friend. The complexity of these relationships comes through in each chapter. Yet much of this story cannot be told on the page, because it is not easily caught by words that risk appearing a vain indulgence on the behalf of the authors. Nor can the stories be told in the absence of Yanyuwa voices, hence we strive, as much as possible to engage Yanyuwa testimonies throughout this book.

Yanyuwa Families, Country and Law Today most Yanyuwa live in the township of Borroloola, some forty kilometers from the coast, but still within the clan-based range of their Country. There are approximately 200 Yanyuwa people living in and around Borroloola, with the average age in the community being 26 (Australian Bureau of Statistics 2016). It is an exceptionally young population, led by a small yet intensely committed group of elders. Borroloola is also home to other Indigenous language groups, which share a similar social history with Yanyuwa, concerning invasion and theft of their lands and waters by colonial agents, and ongoing threats to their cultural autonomy. These are Marra, Garrwa, and Gudanji families. The terms of Yanyuwa Country are set by the distinction of being liAnthawirriyarra, people whose substance and identity is derived of the sea’s influence. Yanyuwa Country encompasses the delta regions of the McArthur River and the saltwater limits of the McArthur and Wearyan Rivers and the Sir Edward Pellew Islands (see Figs. 1.4 and 1.5). Remarkably, Yanyuwa distinguish the sea and their sea Country as extending

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Fig. 1.4 Map of the southwest Gulf of Carpentaria, northern Australia (Source Authors)

from over forty kilometers out to sea to nearly fifteen kilometers inland, and vast areas of sea Country are named and understood as the embodiments of Ancestral Beings (Kearney and Bradley 2015: 3). By emphasizing themselves as sea people or li-Anthawirrayarra, rather than mainland people, Yanyuwa activate a human to Country relationship that is distinct. This relationship is made vital, and expressed in a number of ways and manifests itself on more historical terms through language, kinship, patterns of settlement and subsistence, song, ceremony, and Ancestral narratives (Bradley and Yanyuwa Families 2010; Bradley with Yanyuwa Families 2016, 2017). Both past and present Yanyuwa relationships with sea Country are illustrative of kincentric ecology. According to a kincentric approach (coined by Salmón 2000), “the world is not one of wonder, but rather familiarity” (Salmón 2000: 1329) and “[l]ife in any environment is viable only when humans view their surroundings as kin; that their mutual roles are essential for survival” (Salmón 2000: 1332). For Yanyuwa, a kincentric ecology functions in accordance with multifarious agents, that extend beyond

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Fig. 1.5 Close-up map of Yanyuwa Country in the southwest Gulf of Carpentaria, Northern Territory, Australia (Source Authors)

human life, thus placing into relationship people with all range of other presences, from places, nonhuman animals and elements, and intangible presences including Ancestral Beings and “old people” (as both the spirits of the deceased and Ancestral Beings). This enlarges the perceptual field of everyday life and the capacity to see nonhuman agents and other presences across Country as of consequence. Yanyuwa assert that all are kin in the context of their saltwater Country and that all aspects of saltwater Country are derived of the Yijan, a time of Ancestral activity and creation (Bradley 1997, 2008). This time is commonly referred to as the Dreaming, by Indigenous people themselves and also non-Indigenous people. Yet the term often misleads, or undermines the very substance of Ancestral presences from an Ancestral time (see Wolfe 1991), as Yanyuwa elder Mussolini Harvey once explained,

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White people ask us all the time, what is Dreaming? This is a hard question because Dreaming is a really big thing for Aboriginal people. In our language, Yanyuwa, we call the Dreaming Yijan. The Dreamings made our Law or narnu-Yuwa. This Law is the way we live, our rules. This Law is our ceremonies, our songs, our stories; all of these things came from the Dreaming. The Dreamings are our ancestors, no matter if they are fish, birds, men, women, animals, wind or rain. It was these Dreamings that made our Law. All things in our Country have Law, they have ceremony and song, and they have people who are related to them… (Bradley 1988: xi–xii)

Throughout this book we attach a number of different expressions to what Mussolini describes here. The terms which are widely used by Yanyuwa themselves, and which have varyingly been taught to each of us throughout the duration of our collaborations are Dreaming, Dreamtime, Dreaming stories, Dreaming Ancestors, Ancestral narratives, Ancestral Beings, and Spirit Beings. Each of the contributors has chosen to stay loyal to the terminology that Yanyuwa have used in the context of their individual learning. These terms are wildly complex and some are considered problematic. The latter relates particularly to the expressions which derive of “Dreaming.” On this, Wolfe’s (1991) work is a reminder of the history of western thinking, dating from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, about what the diminishment of representation of the “Dreamtime” entailed—its pan-Aboriginalism and erasure of multiplicity of Indigenous cultures, “its too-ready (and incorrect) consignment to the past and to magic and primitivism” (see Devlin-Glass, Chapter 5). Other expressions that are mobilized throughout the chapters, to convey the power inherent in Country, are “vital and supervital.” Tamisari and Bradley’s (2005) concept of the vital/supervital is taken up specifically by Bradley in Chapter 2 and Devlin-Glass in Chapter 5. This expression resists the binary oppositions readily contained by nature/culture, human/nonhuman or sacred/profane, aiming to express how boundaries between humans and nonhumans and nonliving things, being inside and outside the social, within and beyond morality are blurred and yet can be endlessly redrawn according to context. This is a process which stresses the extent to which the relationships among people, places and animals are continuously negotiated (Tamisari and Bradley 2005). In Chapter 7, Adgemis recalls an encounter of the vital/supervital kind, a moment of “Dreaming intentionality on Country”, whereby a-Kuridi, a giant groper (fish; Promicrops lanceolatus ) appears before a small group of Yanyuwa sea

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rangers. This is an anomalous event, in which this giant fish transforms from being a living presence on Country to an Ancestral Being, kincentrically bound and supervitally charged. It is something of high importance, to be noticed and responded to. Yanyuwa Law, narna-yuwa, gives ngalki, which is understood as the substance and essence of all things in Country (Bradley and Yanyuwa Families 2010, 2016). The Law that was and remains emplaced in Yanyuwa Country by way of Ancestral activity maps the entirety of that space with a structure of relatedness, namely kinship. Yanyuwa Country is organized according to four clan-based distinctions: Rrumburriya, Mambaliya, Wuyaliya, and Wurdaliya (Bradley and Yanyuwa Families 2010, 2016). Each person traces descent to these four clan groups through their grandparental lines (father’s mother, father’s father, mother’s mother, and mother’s father). People’s primary relationships to Country come from their father’s clan group yet vital relationships also exist between an individual and their mother’s Country. These clan distinctions extend beyond human life and encompass all aspects of Yanyuwa Country, including place, the elements, geological features, nonhuman animals, songlines, and a whole suite of “natural phenomena.” Everything can be ordered by way of the clan system, and thus everything can be placed into a relational order that translates into particular kin-based relations. Once clan identity is known all becomes relatable in ways that mirror relationships between humans. As such, the Brolga—kudarrku, a bird species, can be a person’s most senior paternal grandfather (ja-murimuri) or a place can be considered a person’s ngabuji (father’s mother) Country (Bradley with Yanyuwa Families 2016). With these distinctions come recognition of profound relationality, responsibility, and expectations of conduct. All of this extends across the land and sea, as the place world is understood as agentic, capable of a relational response to human presence. Today, sea Country is often sought out for particular “poetics of fit.” Young men choose to travel over to sea Country and hunt marine mammals, as part of a desire to inhabit their Yanyuwa-ness and develop the skills associated with being a saltwater person (or saltwater cowboy who hunts marine mammals and expertly navigates the sea, see Adgemis 2017, Bradley 1997: 409). Others, both men and women, seek out sea Country and the offshore islands for visits and longer stays because of desires for the health benefits that come from exiting town life, drying out from alcohol consumption, and access to bush foods and bush medicines. Older generations visit their sea Country as part of kincentric responsibility to

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“hold it up” and “make it strong/gleaming” by way of hunting, camping, and instating human presence (Kearney 2017: 69; Bradley 2008: 22). Sea Country remains an essential part of Yanyuwa existence, yet accessing this space has become increasingly difficult over time, for reasons, which are linked to an earlier process of forced alienation and inland centralization by colonial presences and impending structural conditions of hardship and poverty. Describing this experience, Yanyuwa elder Pyro Dirdiyalma, explained, Yes, I am telling you these things, the Aboriginal people who belong to this place Borroloola, we are now low down, the speakers of Yanyuwa, the speakers of Garrwa, the speakers of Gudanji, we are a long way down, the other people such as the Wilangarra and the Binbingka they no longer exist, they are all dead. The white people they are high above us, the language and their ways of acting have climbed up above us and they have smothered our languages and our culture completely, this is the way it now is. (Pyro Dirdiyalma pers. comm. 1988 in Kearney and Bradley 2009)

And the Yanyuwa elder group, li-Wirdiwalangu, also make explicit, that amidst the conditions of coloniality, Yanyuwa Law remains paramount, It is powerful, don’t break it, don’t be ignorant of it, it is from the past, from the old people, our mother’s, mother’s brothers, our father’s fathers, our father’s mothers and our mother’s brothers, they carried this Law, this Law is in the Country and the sea for all time. Listen to it! Remember it! It is for all time. Do not leave it behind as some kind of rubbish. (Dinah Norman and Annie Karrakayny in Bradley et al. 2006: 43)

For younger generations, there remains a sense of the importance of knowledge and Law, yet how this is practiced has its own terms and expressions. In working closely with younger men, Philip Adgemis has documented the wishes of this generation to perform Yanyuwa knowledge and Law on their own terms, as “new intellectuals.” Younger generations grapple with what this might mean as an everyday praxis, but in doing so are resolute that they must still look to their ancestors, and a current generation of elders and middle-aged kin within their community for guidance. Borrowing from Philip’s rich ethnography, one young man determines that “Saltwater people, it’s like in your blood, you can’t take it out of that person, once you been in the saltwater that long it becomes

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a part of you” (Adgemis 2017: 234). In terms of where saltwater knowledge can now be sourced, for younger Yanyuwa, this same young man explains the challenges, Where the generation before only a handful, there’s not much that’s been passed down from the grandparents to the sons and daughters because of alcohol and all the issues there. A bit that’s been passed down to grandsons, we gotta pick it up and teach people. It’s a dying thing to know the sea, the way we did back in the day. Like even today, we know the saltwater really well but we still learn, it’s not easy. (Adgemis 2017: 176)

For some younger Yanyuwa, there has been the opportunity for employment in a local Indigenous sea ranger programme, the li-Anthawirriyarra Sea Rangers, one of the first such initiatives to be established in Australia in 1997. It has developed to become one of the most successful programmes for Indigenous sea management on cultural terms in Australia and a source of great cultural pride for Yanyuwa families. Staffed largely by mid (55-35 years) and younger (34-18 years) generations, both men and women, the Ranger Unit has had a twofold effect on the community (Kearney and Bradley 2015). The programme has reinstated relationships to sea Country that have over time been rendered difficult to enact as a result of people being resident within Borroloola and has inspired community-wide interest in visiting sea Country and participating in its safeguarding. One of the current younger sea rangers explains the importance of this role: As rangers we are researchers, we see things on Country and tell our old people about it. If the Country is sick, we tell our old people and we do everything we can to make it better, we take samples and send the information to the right organisations to help us with it. If we can’t make it better, we do everything we can to manage it. (Adgemis 2017: 227)

Sweeping changes in people’s ability to move across Country and to practice their own Law came with the arrival of the British in 1788. Violent colonial encounters came with settler incursions into the Gulf of Carpentaria, and contact amplified after 1901 with the establishment of the township of Borroloola (Baker 1990, 1999; Roberts 2005). This brought more permanent white settlements in the area, increased land grabs, and establishment of a food rations depot, to which Indigenous people were drawn into relations of dependency and entanglement with white managers and

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institutions. Contemporary experiences of educational and social disadvantage and poverty through powerlessness are vivid indications of enduring cultural wounding, induced by colonization (Kearney 2014). Thefts of land and waters, killings, and frontier violence were all precursors to many of the current hardships this community faces (Kearney 2014). Since 1976 Yanyuwa have embarked upon three arduous legal undertakings in seeking Aboriginal land rights under the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act 1976 (Australian Government 1976). The first case in 1976, the second in 1992 and third in 2000. In each instance, they have presented and re-presented their Law and knowledge of Country for land commissioners, lawyers, barristers, and anthropologists. This translative effort has brought the return of large tracts of Yanyuwa land, but the paradox lies in the failings of current Australian legislative land rights, which continue to deny Aboriginal land title for bodies of water and the sea. In fact in any coastal region no rights can be afforded below the low watermark. For saltwater people, this means that return is never in full (see Kearney 2018). From these experiences people have had to heal and through deliberate action protect their right to prevail as a cultural group. Pressures conspired to bring Yanyuwa into an increased habit of town living in Borroloola by the 1950s and almost permanent town living by the 1970s (Baker 1990, 1999). Relatively speaking this transition represents a somewhat late shift in mobility and residency patterns for the region’s Indigenous groups. Elsewhere across the Country, particularly along the eastern seaboard of Australia, rapid incursions were made into Indigenous people’s lands and waters, thus prompting earlier and major lifestyle changes and dependencies on townships, and fringe living, as a response to greater numbers of permanently based white settlers and frontier administrations. That the sea, which separates vast areas of Yanyuwa island Country from mainland pressures, played a role in buffering Yanyuwa from this violent encounter for some time is undeniable. Yanyuwa have never relinquished their Ancestral and enduring rights to Country, Yeah, my father used to tell me story like I been learn that, look this mob young people, all my grandsons and granddaughters, I teach them. I teach now like today, someone come along and say, where your Country? I teach them. Early you teach them! Cause you don’t know what to come, what gone. I gotta find time to teach my grandchildren. Bring them my father’s

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Country, I gotta stay here, because I love this place, because it’s hard to stay in town. I want to bring my grandson here, cause lotta wrong things going around, that’s why I’m staying here. When I go town, I don’t feel happy, I gotta come back la my Country. It’s like this, so I can see animals, what I got here. I love my Country, it’s true, I like sit down on my kanku [father’s father] Country, sit down and teach them kids here. (Amy Friday pers. comm. April 2002)

Of the continued need to teach younger generations of Yanyuwa about the importance of Country and the authority of their Ancestral Law is described often to young people, in the following manner, I sit here and I look at these young people, all of them, my grandchildren and all these other children, they do not speak Yanyuwa, they do not hear Yanyuwa, they have not seen the ceremonies of the old people, they do not know, they are in ignorance of all these things, some of them know the Country because their parents and grandparents take them, but still they do not know the Law, the Law from the old people. I sit with my grandchildren and I look at the stories (recorded in the Yanyuwa Atlas Forget about Flinders and for the Yanyuwa Animation Project), I am so happy that they are there, I teach my children the Law from the Country, we are talking about the Country and family, maybe, maybe they will learn some of the stories, a little bit of the Law. (Dinah Norman pers. comm. 2011, translated from Yanyuwa into English by John Bradley, in Bradley et al. 2011) Yeah, proper Yanyuwa, we can teach them. Tell them story, they know where they come from, where you come from, where your Country. They listen, sometimes it’s just I think when they get older, they can—they start to remember it’s there. If they watch that movie (digital animations of Yanyuwa songlines and Ancestral narratives), that little movie can help them. Maybe one day when they’re ready or when they quiet’en down a little bit. Then all good to remember just about that song, those old people, what it means, you know. (Dinah Norman pers. comm. June 2013)

The Yanyuwa Animation Project commenced in 2007 (now part of the Wunungu Awara: Animating Indigenous Knowledges project), and has been dedicated to digitally animating a series of Yanyuwa songlines and Ancestral narratives in visual and highly appealing formats for all, in particular younger, generations (see Bradley et al. 2011; Kearney et al. 2012).1 Of the animation project (led by John Bradley with Yanyuwa elders, and

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Amanda Kearney, Liam M. Brady and a team of animators led by Brent McKee), elder and mid-generation Yanyuwa have much to say, Those animations are our Law, Yanyuwa Law; it is not Law for any other group of people in Australia, no one else. Our old people are dying, they have died too quick, so we had to think of ways to teach our kids so they can know something about their Country. We are really happy for these animations, young people, old people we really like them. Let me tell you, people on the outside looking at them, people on the outside, ‘whitefellas or blackfellas’ they have nothing to say, nothing at all, those animations, well, that’s the choice we make, we have to do what we can, we do not want our kids to sit around with nothing. (Graham Friday pers. comm. 2011, in Bradley et al. 2011) You know those animations are really important to us Yanyuwa people, they are helping to keep our Country strong, as kardirdi (mother’s brother) Graham said we are making our own choices about how to teach kids, we have known Bradley for many years and Amanda too we know here, they have worked with the old people, and we know Brent, and his work is really important to us, we make our own choices about these things, I am telling you, no one, not one European or Aboriginal has anything to say about this, we make choices, if they are right or wrong we make them. (Leonard Norman 2011 in Bradley et al. 2011)

Much of the endeavor to safeguard Law and culture, and to transmit it across generations has involved collaborating with non-Indigenous researchers, artists, filmmakers, scientists and lawyers. Yanyuwa have cultivated a very sophisticated practice of collaboration, while maintaining control over research agendas and benefitting from research outcomes. As with many Indigenous communities in Australia, and in an academic climate which increasing calls for ethical practice and decolonizing methodologies, Yanyuwa determine who they collaborate with and on what themes they choose to dedicate their time and efforts. Some of their projects have included a series of films, for example, Kanymarda Yuwa— Two Laws (Borroloola Aboriginal Community 1981), Buwarrala Akarriya—Journey East (Yanyuwa Community 1989), Ka-wayawayama— Aeroplane Dance (Borroloola Aboriginal Community 1992), the construction of the Diwurruwurru—Yanyuwa Message Stick Website (with Frances Devlin-Glass, Yanyuwa Community 2000), the publication of a Yanyuwa visual atlas Forget About Flinders (Yanyuwa Families, Bradley

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and Cameron 2003), and the recording of songs in the award-winning project The Song Peoples’ Sessions (Morris and the Borroloola Songwomen 2013). They have also collaborated to see the production of a two-book encyclopedic dictionary of the Yanyuwa language (with John Bradley 2016, 2017). The drive to collaborate continues today for many Yanyuwa, with the community currently engaged in two major projects, one being a Native Title compensation claim (under the federal Native Title Act 1993) (Australian Government 1993) against the government for loss and degradation of lands and waters. This work, with John Bradley, is complimented by other work around plans to build a Yanyuwa cultural center in the township of Borroloola, for the safe return of Yanyuwa material culture items and the storing and sharing of Yanyuwa stories across generations and also with visitors to the region. This project involves a team of collaborators, from Yanyuwa families, the local school, engineers, architects, John Bradley, Amanda Kearney, and Philip Adgemis. Yanyuwa are masters at determining what their community needs and what their families require to sustain knowledge across generations. They have not shied away from seeking out the partnerships that will allow them to achieve their aims and ends. Writing recently to John Bradley, Maria Pyro, a Yanyuwa/Garrwa woman and also deputy principal of the Borroloola school, expressed her feelings about the lifelong collaboration she has known with John, and of the future for a Yanyuwa cultural center, I will be forever grateful for the amazing work you have done in Borroloola for decades. We are very thankful and appreciate the long hard work that you have done which always had a purpose for the future generations. Now I understand why I used to see you everywhere in Borroloola, haha, under a tree, in the boat, at the lagoon, in the river, driving around, walking, singing, telling stories, listening to stories and sometimes with a very red face, dirty face, sad face, happy face, grumpy face or just tired face but full of enthusiasm. We can make a great future for the next generation in knowing who they are and where they come from. (Maria Pyro pers. comm. 23 February 2019)

Maria captures clearly the experience of collaborating with Yanyuwa families in Borroloola. Oftentimes there is the call to just get in and participate in daily life. In many respects, this is the moment when one is fully available to learning, when knowledge is shared on the fly, or when personal moments give rise to emotion and reflection for both Yanyuwa

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and the researchers. Fieldwork is a form of sharing in day-to-day life. The longer this is the case, the more we are subject to the same interactions as played out between Yanyuwa themselves, slipping into the everydayness of relating. We can and have been laughed at, teased, berated, and ignored. People get cranky with us, and we have all, at one time or another, been corrected or castigated for our failure to learn properly.

On Becoming Reflexive Is there any mystery to how we find ourselves enmeshed in other people’s lives through ethnographic exchanges? It would seem not, given that to arrive at this place, we firstly have to find the desire to go there, we must seek permissions and ethics approvals, we often have to find the funding to support us, and the wherewithal to leave our comfortable lives behind. We must be invited or welcomed in, oriented and then engaged with on a daily basis. Yet surrounding the ethnographic endeavor has long been an air of mystery, a waft of the exotic, a spell-binding nod to the catalogues of museums, and the risky business of going beyond what you know, in places you’ve never been. Anthropology has been shaking the legacy of this for decades, acknowledging that a lot of early ethnography was done under the guise of empire building, frontier mounting and colonial expansion. Making Indigenous peoples captives of the archives was the habit of science and research for centuries, leading to “research” becoming a dirty word for many Indigenous people (see Fourmile 1989; Smith 2012). Some disciplines have worked harder than others to undo the legacy of these shadows over their practice, and in the case of ethnography, practitioners have written exhaustively to ground method, to reveal the person behind the field notes, the perceptual habit behind the gaze, and the participant behind the observation. We do not wish to replicate any sense of exoticism in this book, nor to romanticize the doing of research in remote places with people from different cultures. Nor do we want to suggest there is anything ordinary in the undertaking. Given the backdrop of prevailing settler colonialism, there is nothing ordinary about the educational exchange of an Indigenous person taking the time to teach a white anthropologist, archaeologist, artist, or literary scholar. We are all too aware of the complexity in that exchange, which renders it political, and profound. What we want to do is recast the story of ethnographic fieldwork as one of relationships, in this case, relationships of substance that change us, as researchers and

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persons, over the course of time. Behar (2003, 2018) urges ethnographers to pay attention to intuition, serendipity, and unexpected moments of epiphany in the quest for ethnographic ways of knowing, while encouraging ethnographers to present their findings in a wider variety of literary and artistic genres. We acknowledge that there is something quite incredible about the relationships that underscore the accounts of ethnography that ultimately inform the chapters of this book and our broader commitment to reflexive commentary. It is fortunate for each of us that we found ourselves working in collaboration with Yanyuwa families. It is even more striking that the six of us have collaborated for as long as we have and have often shared in the experience of being in Borroloola, and working with Yanyuwa families. There is now a long-running conversation of critique that has taken as its subject of interrogation, the ethnographic method. This has brought nuanced readings of subjectivity, positionality, the extent of political and practical commitments facilitated by ethnography, accuracy, and representation and authorship (Clifford and Marcus 1986; Geertz 1988). It remains one of the principal research methods in the social sciences (see Brewer 2000) and the thick descriptions of life it generates remain instruments for learning unlike any other. Ethnography, for the most part, now consists of steps whereby the researcher negotiates their role in the production of rhetoric, in that we acknowledge the “…field diary is analogous to talking to oneself” thus requires declarative presence on the behalf of its author and what it documents (Hirschauer 2006: 427). To write of ethnographic encounters and experiences we simultaneously invoke ideas of invention, collaboration, sense-making, and knowledge translation. Our collaborators play a vital role in shaping the imaginative consciousness and potential that informs each step. They mobilize us and our field notes as they see fit, through controlling the terms on which we learn and access their world, as made up of distinct epistemic, ontological, and axiological habits. The decisive quality of ethnographic recording is its potential for decontextualization, one witness, one testimony, one copy, one referent (Hirschauer 2006: 420). Yet we can refrain from separation and keep bound the worlds of experience, writing and reflection, by reflexively committing to mapping and declaring the relational pathways that shape our research. Reflexivity requires a keen understanding of what aspects of the self and also other are the most important filters through which one perceives the world and experiences the topic of study (Behar 2014). It

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does not leave unscrutinized the connection—intellectual and emotional between the observer and the observed. As Behar explores, in her book, The Vulnerable Observer: An Anthropology That Breaks the Heart, “This is more than decorative flourish, not exposure for its own sake, not full of unnecessary guilt or excessive bravado.” It is “[l]eading not to miniature bubbles of navel-gazing but into an enormous sea of serious social issues” (Behar 2014: 13–14). Thus, it is, in this book, we put our imaginations and ultimately ourselves in the spotlight. “Imagination alone enables us to see things in their proper perspective, to be strong enough to put that which is too close at a certain distance,” yet also “to be generous enough to bridge abysses of remoteness until we can see and understand everything that is too far away from us” (Jackson 2009: 238). “Without this kind of imagination, which actually is understanding, we would never be able to take our bearings in the world. It is the only inner compass we have. We are contemporaries only in so far as our understanding reaches” (Arendt 1994: 323 cited in Jackson 2009: 238). We do this not as avowed solipsism, nor to shirk responsibility for the production and outputs of our research. We do it to critically examine how our consciousness of Indigenous lived experience has developed, been challenged, has failed, or been enriched through sustained collaborations with Yanyuwa. Reflexivity is not new. The reflexive turn is a modern movement in cultural anthropology that began in the early seventies, gaining momentum in the early 80s (see Ruby 1986). It was prompted by criticisms of anthropology’s culpability in European colonialism, and the growing awareness of feminist anthropologists about how the person of the anthropologist can affect the ethnographies they write. Several began by experimenting with subjective and objective writing styles, most radically as an act of “writing ourselves in” (see Behar 1990; Crapanzano 1977, 1980; Rabinow 1978; Stoller and Olkes 1987; Rosaldo 2010, 2014), signally a reflexive and creative turn toward events or persons that change the self and our ways of telling stories. Rosaldo (2014) in particular wrote to find new ways of presenting the views of others, through his own authorial voice, with a profound sensitivity to what this representational gesture involves. Behar (1990) encouraged early, and continues to cultivate an anthropological praxis based heavily in the art of storytelling. This is storytelling which combines the “extraordinary and the ordinary; most importantly, it is grounded in a community of listeners on whom the story makes a claim to be remembered” (Behar 1990: 229). The experiential

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nature of ethnography as a relational encounter based in knowledge sharing, is such that we may become part of the extraordinary and ordinary, we can often become, over the long term, the audience of and participant in events. We too then come to recall them, share them, and fold them into our own biographies. This approach to reflexivity asks of us that we not just account for cultural life in the manner of its “what’s and when’s” but that we consider the “how’s and why’s,” that we be with the intensity of “events,” that is life defined as a series of “situations” (Jackson 2005: xxvi, 11). Events are constituted in time (past, present, and future) and space (tangible and intangible) as the “interplay of the singular and the shared, the private and the public, as well as the relationship between personal ‘reasons’ and impersonal ‘causes’” (Jackson 2005: xxvi). Events constitute moments that “quickly and imperceptibly blur into and become stories” (Jackson 2005: 11). We live through events in the course of ethnographic fieldwork, we trigger and remember events, we discuss and relive or reinvent the interplay of forces and we even anticipate future events. Perhaps we too, as the researcher, and the projects we undertake with Yanyuwa families also constitute events. We are events and we compel events, through the interactive and interconnected presence we have in Borroloola and in relation to Yanyuwa Country, Law and knowledge. In which case, do we not play a role in passing along the stories we are told and the stories we might also be a part of? It is important that as learners we understand that we do not exist as individuals. Through events, which are by design educative, experiential, and reflective, we are all connected and in an inescapably intersubjective relationship. Intersubjectivity is the acknowledgment that life is relational, a “constant struggle to sustain and augment our being in relation to the being of others, as well as the nonbeing of the physical and material world” (Jackson 2005: xiv). When we encourage reflexive and reflective thinking we are engaging with our lived experience of others, with texts, with friends, colleagues, and strangers. We are opening up a dialogue which in the first instance is personal, populated with our felt responses. The practice of being reflexive (and writing reflexively) is to stand back and assess aspects of our own identity or being in relation to something. We may, in the context of research collaborations (as but one example of context) ask ourselves, why do I have this opinion? Why do I react in this way? How does my experience or cultural background shape my understanding? How could I understand this better? What is the

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value and usefulness of this knowing in my life? How we learn and how we accept knowledge systems that may differ from our own position are often at the forefront of reflexive discussions, because of the overriding presence of our subject position, particularly in modern life, replete as it is with value attached to the individuated human right. Yet we are not individuated. This form of consciousness-raising evokes feelings—profound ones. And so, to foster heartfelt (or heartful) responses we have had to abandon the expected standard of objective detachment and instead create intense spaces in our lives and our writing (see Ellis 1999). If we let that space be provisional, secure, and explorative, we have found that the unrehearsed, fervent conversations through which we learn, present centrally in our research and our writing. But for this to happen, we have to curb our own conventional academic preoccupations: the expectation that we remain disinterested, and appear all-knowing.

Overview You know what, you mob, you’re easy to work with. You got ears to listen, not like this government, with them you always have to start back in the beginning, no ears, no idea. (Graham Friday, pers. comm. 15 June 2018)

The expressions “to have ears” or “to have the ears to listen” are often used by Yanyuwa elders. In this case Graham’s reference to “having ears” is at first a statement that his audience (made up of the contributors to this book), properly understand what he is talking about. His statement however also speaks to a broader contextual affirmation that this audience has listened for a long time, thus becoming privy to a whole catalogue of events in Yanyuwa life, that weave their way into the bigger story of Yanyuwa people, their Country and their Law. For Yanyuwa, hearing is considered a particularly potent and valued sensory capacity. People often speak of “hearing the Country,” “hearing the old people,” and “hearing properly.” In Yanyuwa the expressions to hear, to listen, and to reach a decision have the same root word (Kearney 2009: 217–218). How do we acquire abilities to hear, hear better, and follow the story? Perhaps to begin we must practice engaged listening, which means seeking to understand knowledge in its fullest capacity. Listening demands that a person becomes conscious of the meaning of particular phenomena, locations, objects, persons, places, and knowledge on a deeper ontological

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level (Hokari 2011). As Bradfield (2018: 35) recently explored through a praxis of cultivating decolonizing consciousness in working with Indigenous artists in Broken Hill, Australia, “[t]o ‘hear’ is to be able to comprehend and contextualise something in relation to its position within a much larger and complex knowledge system.” The importance of being able to “hear” is made so powerfully clear when one reflects momentarily on the emotional register that comes when feeling that they have “not been heard.” How we find ourselves in the “subjective in-between” (see Arendt 1958: 183, in Jackson 2005: xiv) that is relational fieldwork encounters can shape the manner in which we become a listener and how stories are told to us and what we can hear. However, the story is bigger than ourselves, and reflective thought involves getting beyond oneself—thinking of one’s immediate situation from the standpoint of one’s forebears’ and contemporaries, their experiences and understandings. This is not a quest for a transcendent view, but for identifying those factors and forces that lie in the penumbral regions beyond self-centered awareness. Thus, when in the mode of reflexive engagement, we are sifting through relational encounters that are of the past, present, and future. These are the events that have occurred and been inscribed into our field notes and taken into our repository of recollections. They are events occurring in the moment, it is the writing of this book, and plans to visit Borroloola in coming weeks. And they are the events we anticipate or imagine may be yet to come. As will be made clearer throughout the chapters of this book, each contributor has had to grapple with the relational presence of other researchers, including those who introduced them to Borroloola, those who have written before, and those with whom Yanyuwa have shared the same or even different stories. In which case, it becomes vitally important that we acknowledge, engage with, and also listen to one another, or else we undermine the relational profundity of six researchers, of three different generations, encountering the same place, often populated by the same people. This book is therefore highly illustrative of how information becomes storytelling. It is a story shaped by generationally nuanced accounts of ethnographic fieldwork, set against the distinctive backdrop of one Indigenous community in northern Australia. The book has demanded author willingness to offer deeply personal and professionally revealing accounts of the challenges and benefits that have come with long-term collaboration and ethnographic encounters with Indigenous peoples. In taking our reflexive practice further, we

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have invited collaborators to comment on each other’s work. At the end of each chapter, we include a “contributor response,” a short, written reflection on what one reader can gain or learn from the challenge to knowledge and positionality that each chapter provides. A reflexive ethnographic practice surely must show its willingness to be with the accounts of other ethnographers, those who have walked the same streets as ourselves, looked upon the same vistas and horizons, or even felt something of the particular register of emotions that distinguishes ethnography as a challenging mode of knowledge acquisition and sharing. In the chapters that follow, the contributors expand on how they each came to be “in relation” with the remote township of Borroloola, the southwest Gulf of Carpentaria, and Yanyuwa families. These relations have led to life-changing and career-enriching encounters with Indigenous knowledges and Law. The book does not journey toward a concluding chapter. It seems more fitting to leave the reader to begin or fortify strength in their own reflexive journey as encouraged by the text. There is no wrap up, for we all still continue to collaborate with Yanyuwa families in the Gulf of Carpentaria, and plan to do so for as long as we can, as long as we are welcomed, and as long as we have something to offer that is of value for the families themselves. We both start and end the book with a reminder that things are always changing, a condition of movement and shift seems a fitting way to describe the chapters, and the relationships we might have with this text. As we write, some of us are planning trips to Borroloola and exchanging phone calls and emails with friends in Borroloola. Therefore, there is no way to conclude this story, because it is ongoing. What we have written of is already changing. Acknowledgements In writing this book we acknowledge that there are a number of scholars who have worked with Yanyuwa families in the southwest Gulf of Carpentaria, throughout the decades. Their research has contributed valuable information on the region’s social and cultural history, and has been key to documenting Yanyuwa experiences and voices. These scholars include John Avery (1988), Richard Baker (1999), Jason De Santolo (2008), Stephen Johnson (2011, Bradley and Johnson 2014), Jean Kirton (Kirton and Timothy 1977), Elizabeth Mackinlay (1999, 2015), Marie Reay (1962), and Kathryn Seton (Seton and Bradley 2004; Bradley and Seton 2005). The choice of contributors for this edited volume reflects current research being undertaken collaboratively with Yanyuwa and the close research relationships between and among the six authors, John Bradley, Amanda Kearney, Nona Cameron, Frances Devlin-Glass, Liam M. Brady, and Philip Adgemis.

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Note 1. To watch a series of Yanyuwa animations, see the Wunungu Awara: Animating Indigenous Knowledges project, hosted by Monash University (formerly the Monash Countrylines Archive), where, with Yanyuwa permission, these animations are housed and shared online, http://artsonline.monash. edu.au/Countrylines-archive/.

References Adgemis, P. 2017. We Are Yanyuwa: No Matter What—Town Life, Family and Change. PhD diss., Monash University, Melbourne, Australia. Arendt, H. 1958. The Human Condition. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Arendt, H. 1994. Essays in Understanding 1930–1954, ed. J. Kohn. New York: Harcourt Brace & Co. Australian Bureau of Statistics. 2016. Borroloola Census Quickstats. Available at: https://quickstats.censusdata.abs.gov.au/census_services/getproduct/ census/2016/quickstat/SSC70037. Accessed 6 June 2019. Australian Government. 1976. Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act 1976, No. 191. Available at: https://www.legislation.gov.au/Details/ C2019C00117. Accessed 22 July 2019. Australian Government. 1993. Native Title Act 1993, No. 110. Available at: https://www.legislation.gov.au/Details/C2019C00054. Accessed 22 July 2019. Avery, J. 1988. The Law People: History, Society and Initiation in the Borroloola Area of the Northern Territory. Doctoral diss., University of Sydney. Baker, R. 1990. Coming In? The Yanyuwa as a Case Study in the Geography of Contact History. Aboriginal History 14: 25–60. Baker, R. 1999. Land Is Life: Continuity Through Change for the Yanyuwa from the Northern Territory of Australia. Sydney: Allen and Unwin. Behar, R. 1990. Rage and Redemption: Reading the Life Story of a Mexican Marketing Woman. Feminist Studies 16 (2): 223–258. Behar, R. 2003. Ethnography and the Book That Was Lost Ethnography 4 (1): 15–39. Behar, R. 2014. The Vulnerable Observer: Anthropology That Breaks Your Heart. Boston: Beacon Press. Behar, R. 2018. General Anthropology Division Distinguished Lecture. Presented by Ruth Behar, University of Michigan. 117th American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting, San Jose, 16 November. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ySnSNSRjzjw. Accessed 22 May 2019.

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Borroloola Aboriginal Community. 1981. Kanymarda Yuwa—Two Laws [film]. Produced and directed by Carolyn Strachan and Alessandro Cavadini. Red Dirt Films and the Australian Film Commission. Borroloola Aboriginal Community. 1992. Ka-wayawayama—Aeroplane Dance [film]. Produced and directed by Trevor Graham. Film Australia. Bourdieu, P. 1996. Understanding, trans. B. Fowler. Theory, Culture and Society 13 (2): 17–37. Bradfield, A. 2018. Decolonising Consciousness: Art, Identity and Engaging Indigenous Artists in far western New South Wales. Ph.D. thesis, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia. Bradley, J. 1988. Yanyuwa Country: The Yanyuwa People of Borroloola Tell the History of Their Land. Melbourne: Greenhouse Publication. Bradley, J. 1997. Li-Anthawirriyarra, People of the Sea: Yanyuwa Relations with their Maritime Environment. Ph.D. thesis, Northern Territory University, Australia. Bradley, J. 2008. Singing Through the Sea: Song, Sea and Emotion. In Deep Blue: Critical Reflections on Nature, Religion and Water, ed. S. Shaw and A. Francis, 17–32. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge. Bradley, J., G. Friday, A. Kearney, and L. Norman. 2011. That’s the Choices We Make: Animating Saltwater Country. Screening the Past 31. Available at: http://www.screeningthepast.com/?p=1030. Accessed 22 May 2019. Bradley, J., M. Holmes, D. Norman, A. Isaac, J. Miller, and I. Ninganga. 2006. Yumbulyumbulmantha ki-awarawu (All kinds of things from Country) Yanyuwa Ethnobiological Classification. Ngulaig Monograph, St Lucia: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Unit, University of Queensland. Bradley, J., and K. Seton. 2005. Self-Determination or ‘Deep Colonising’: Land Claims, Colonial Authority and Indigenous Representation. In Unfinished Constitutional Business, ed. Barbara Hocking, 32–46. Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press. Bradley, J., and S. Johnson. 2014. We Sing Our Law, Is That Still TEK? Traditional Ecological Knowledge and Can the West Come to Know? PAN: Philosophy Activism Nature 11: 1443–6124. Bradley, J., and Yanyuwa Families. 2010. Singing Saltwater Country. Sydney: Allen & Unwin. Bradley, J. with Yanyuwa Families. 2016. Wuka nya- nganunga li- Yanyuwa liAnthawirriyarra: Language for Us, the Yanyuwa Saltwater People, vol. 1. Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing. Bradley, J. with Yanyuwa Families. 2017. Wuka nya- nganunga li- Yanyuwa liAnthawirriyarra: Language for Us, the Yanyuwa Saltwater People, vol. 2. Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, Brewer, J. 2000. Ethnography. Buckingham, Philadelphia: Open University Press.

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Clifford, J., and G.E. Marcus (eds.). 1986. Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Berkeley: University of California Press. Crapanzano, V. 1977. On the Writing of Ethnography. Dialectical Anthropology 2 (1): 69–73. Crapanzano, V. 1980. Tuhami: Portrait of a Moroccan. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Cowlishaw, G. 2017. ‘Tunnel Vision’: Part One—Resisting Postcolonialism in Australian Anthropology. The Australian Journal of Anthropology 28: 324– 341. Cowlishaw, G. 2018. ‘Tunnel Vision’: Part Two—Explaining Australian Anthropology’s Conservatism. The Australian Journal of Anthropology 29: 35–52. De Santolo, J. 2008. Two Laws Still: Notes on Resonance. Studies in Documentary Film 2 (2): 185–189. Ellis, C. 1999. Heartful Autoethnography. Qualitative Health Research 9 (5): 669–683. Finlay, L., and B. Gough (eds.). 2003. Reflexivity: A Practical Guide for Researchers in Health and Social Sciences. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. Fourmile, H. 1989. Who Owns the Past? Aborigines as Captives of the Archives. Aboriginal History 13 (1/2): 1–8. Geertz, C. 1988. Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Hinkson, M. 2018. In and Out of Place: Ethnography as ‘Journeying with’ Between Central and South Australia. Oceania 88 (3): 254–268. Hinkson, M., and E. Vincent. 2018. Shifting Indigenous Australian Realities: Dispersal, Damage and Resurgence. Special issue, Oceania 88 (3): 240–253. Hirschauer, S. 2006. Putting Things into Words: Ethnographic Description and the Silence of the Social. Human Studies 29 (4):413–441. Hokari, M. 2011. Gurindji Journey: A Japanese Historian in the Outback. Sydney: University of New South Wales Press. Jackson, M. 2002. The Politics of Storytelling: Violence, Transgressions, and Intersubjectivity. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press. Jackson, M. 2005. Existential Anthropology: Events, Exigencies and Effects. New York, Oxford: Berghahn. Jackson, M. 2009. Where Thought Belongs: An Anthropological Critique of the Project of Philosophy. Anthropological Theory 9: 235–252. Johnson, S., 2011. Barra bawuji marrirru, Lhaba anymaya, anyngkarriyia kiawarawu! Stop! Be Quiet! Listen to Country! A Yanyuwa Informed and Critical Reflection on Place, Belonging, Culture and Sustainable Futures. Doctoral diss., University of Queensland. Kearney, A. 2009. Before the Old People and Still Today: Yanyuwa Places and Narratives of Engagement. Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing.

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Kearney, A. 2014. Cultural Wounding, Healing and Emerging Ethnicities. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Kearney, A. 2017. Violence in Place: Cultural and Environmental Wounding. Abingdon, Oxfordshire: Routledge. Kearney, A. 2018. Returning to That Which Was Never Lost: Indigenous Australian Saltwater Identities, a History of Australian Claims and the Paradox of Return. History and Anthropology 29 (2): 184–203. Kearney, A., and J. Bradley. 2009. Manankurra: What’s in a Name, Place Names and Emotional Geographies. In Aboriginal Placenames Old and New: Discovering, Interpreting and Restoring Indigenous Nomenclature for the Australian Landscape, ed. H. Koch and L. Hercus. Canberra: ANU E-Press and Aboriginal History Inc. Kearney, A., and J. Bradley. 2015. When a Long Way in a Bark Canoe Becomes a Quick Trip in a Boat: Changing to Sea Country and Yanyuwa Watercraft Technology. Quaternary International 385: 166–176. Kearney, A. with J. Bradley, B. McKee, and T. Chandler. 2012. Representing Indigenous Cultural Expressions Through Animation: The Yanyuwa Animation Project. Animation Journal 20: 4–29. Kirton, J., and N. Timothy. 1977. Yanyuwa Concepts Relating to ‘Skin’. Oceania 47 (4): 320–322. Mackinlay, E. 1999. Music for Dreaming: Aboriginal Lullabies in the Yanyuwa Community at Borroloola, Northern Territory. British Journal of Ethnomusicology 8 (1): 97–111. Mackinlay, E. 2015. Blurring Boundaries Between Restricted and Unrestricted Performance: A Case Study of the Ngadirdji of Yanyuwa Women in Borroloola. Perfect Beat 4 (4): 73–84. Mahood, K. 2000. Craft for a Dry Lake. Sydney, NSW: Penguin. Mahood, K. 2007. Blow-ins on the Cold Desert Wind. Griffith Review. Available at: https://griffithreview.com/articles/blow-ins-on-the-cold-desertwind/. Accessed 6 June 2019. Mahood, K. 2012. Kartiya Are Like Toyotas—White Workers on Australia’s Cultural Frontier. Griffith Review. Available at: https://griffithreview.com/ articles/kartiya-are-like-toyotas/. Accessed 6 June 2019. Mahood, K. 2016. Position Doubtful: Mapping Memories and Landscapes. Brunswick, VIC: Scribe. Manne, R. 2010. W.E.H Stanner: The Dreaming and Other Essays, with an Introduction by Robert Manne. Collingwood, VIC: Black Inc. Agenda. Morris, S. and the Borroloola Songwomen. 2013. Song Peoples Sessions— Ngambala Wiji Li-Wunungu—Together We Are Strong [sound recording]. Executive produce Patrick McCloskey. Universal Music Australia. Rademaker, L. 2019. White Grief, Happy Friendship: Jane Goodale and Emotional Anthropological. History and Anthropology 30 (3): 313–330.

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Rabinow, P. 1978. Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco. Berkeley: University of California Press. Reay, M. 1962. Subsections at Borroloola. Oceania 33: 90–115. Roberts, T. 2005. Frontier Justice: A History of the Gulf Country to 1900. St Lucia, QLD: University of Queensland Press. Rosaldo, R. 2010. How I Write—Renato Rosaldo Bio. Stanford University, 11 December. Available at: http://web.stanford.edu/group/howiwrite/Bios/ renatorosaldo/index.html. Acccessed 10 June 2019. Rosaldo, R. 2014. The Day of Shelly’s Death: The Poetry and Ethnography of Grief. Durham: Duke University Press. Rose, D.B. 1996. Nourishing Terrains: Australian Aboriginal Views of Landscape and Wilderness. Canberra: Commonwealth of Australia. Rose, D.B. 2014. Arts of Flow: Poetics of ‘fit’ in Aboriginal Australia. Dialectical Anthropology 38 (4): 431–445. Ruby, J. (ed.). 1986. Crack in the Mirror: Reflexive Perspectives in Anthropology. Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press. Salmón, E. 2000. Kincentric Ecology: Indigenous Perceptions of the HumanNature. Ecological Applications 10 (5): 1327–1332. Seton, K., and J. Bradley. 2004. ‘When You Have No Law You Are Nothing’: Cane Toads, Social Consequences and Management Issues. The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology 5 (3): 205–225. Smith, L.T. 2012. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. New York: Palgrave. Stanner, W.E.H. 1968. The Boyer Lectures: Black and White Australia—An Anthropologist’s View. Sydney: Australian Broadcasting Commission. Stoller, P., and C. Olkes. 1987. In Sorcery’s Shadow: A Memoir of Apprenticeship Among the Songhay of Niger. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Tamisari, F., and J. Bradley. 2005. To Have and to Give the Law: Animal Names, Place and Event. In Animal Names, ed. G. Ortalli, A. Minelli, and G. Sanga, 419–438. Venice: Instituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti, Plazzo Loredan, Campo Santo Stefano. Thorner, S., F. Edmonds, M. Clarke, and P. Balla. 2018. Maree’s Backyard: Intercultural Collaborations for Indigenous Sovereignty in Melbourne. Oceania 88 (3): 269–291. Trigger, D., M. Forsey, and C. Meurk. 2012. Revelatory Moments in Fieldwork. Qualitative Research 12 (5): 513–527. Wolfe, P. 1991. On Being Woken Up: The Dreamtime in Anthropology and in Australian Settler Culture. Comparative Studies in Society and History 33 (2): 197–224. Wunungu Awara: Animating Indigenous Knowledges (formerly Monash Countrylines Archive). n.d. Available at: http://artsonline.monash.edu.au/ Countrylines-archive/. Accessed 22 May 2019.

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Yanyuwa Community. 1989. Buwarrala Akarriya—Journey East [film]. Produced by Debbie Sonnenberg. Marndaa Productions. Yanyuwa Community. 2000. Diwurruwurru—Message Stick Website. Archived website: Originally hosted by Deakin University. Yanyuwa Families, J. Bradley, and N. Cameron. 2003. Forget About Flinders: An Indigenous Atlas of the Southwest Gulf of Carpentaria. Canberra, NSW: Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies.

CHAPTER 2

Writing from the Edge: Writing What Was Never Meant to Be Written John Bradley

Introduction I arrived in Borroloola in early January 1980. In the space of 24 hours, I had traveled 3148 kilometers north by air, from Melbourne in Victoria and another 713 kilometers by light aircraft in a southeasterly direction from Darwin to Borroloola. The plane landed on an ochre colored airstrip in the midst of a monsoonal downpour. I had never in my life seen rain like it. I was 20 years old and at that moment a Midrash on the book of Genesis came into my mind; kol hat’khalot kashot —all beginnings are difficult (Mekhilta Yitro BaChodesh 2 and Mekhilta Shemot 19, see Lauterbach 2004), to which perhaps, in retrospect I would add, especially those when one begins feeling so alone. On that day, I had no idea that this was going to be the beginning of a nearly forty-year journey where I have lived, travelled, and written with and for Yanyuwa families. In this chapter, writing in a reflective manner, I have come to realize that over these four decades and the older I get, this business of writing makes me uncomfortable, but I am content to stay

J. Bradley (B) Monash University, Clayton, VIC, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 A. Kearney and J. Bradley (eds.), Reflexive Ethnographic Practice, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34898-4_2

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with this discomfort. I continue to write under a complex constellation of obligations that are familial, and sometimes imposed by the academy. This imposition I find is caught in some kind of racism that prevents even progressive scholarship from engaging with Indigenous knowledges, with honesty and passion. I am lead to question then if there is for the academy some kind of ideological blockage? Or is it rather that the very recognition that easy connection between knowledges are false and that incommensurability can and does exist. To radically pursue these matters challenges the academy’s rock bottom assumption that truth is about a kind of freedom. The reality is that, as I have learned in my time working with Yanyuwa families, it is only praxis and reflection that allows one to come to know. I find increasingly that my writing seeks more and more to shield the privacy of the families that have taught me and mentored me since I arrived at Borroloola as a young 20-year-old. I work and research with people whose lives do not come from some institutional archive or set of data, but rather from what are sometimes very fragile, historically embedded, and contemporary lives, both individual and collective. In the decades during which I have worked in this part of Australia I constantly observe and feel the struggle of people who seek to articulate themselves in the middle of fierce material and political circumstances. This act of keeping things private is not as easy as it might seem, violence for example is, in a place like Borroloola, so distressingly normal, as are illnesses such as diabetes and addictions to drugs and alcohol. It is a place where death has become so normative that young children mourn as if they were born to the practice. So how does one write to stories that sometimes I am a part of but many times I am not. Yet I am drawn in to be an active listener as I know all the families, and with the old people, at least, I do not need English for these conversations. Honest reportage of camp life is in conflict with my desire not to write, of the gossip, the “jealousing” and complex domestic conversations that arise when I sit and talk quietly with people, following the rules of what is inside private knowledge and outside, public knowledge and the source of much rumor and innuendo. How does one write and not deny the complexity of the lives of Yanyuwa families in the Gulf of Carpentaria?

Living on the Edge: Suffering and Loss How do I make sense of the world if I cannot make sense of the places that I might arrive in? How do I come to understand my place and task in places that appear at first to be nothing like the one I left behind? I

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write from a place of seeing, to use a Yanyuwa phrase, “a world that has grown small.” That is, too many people of all ages have died, families are split apart due to work and ill-health. There are now very few speakers of Yanyuwa language, and the Borroloola I knew forty years ago is a memory. This, I would suggest, is the powerful role that reflectivity and reflexivity play in our research, as practices they prompt us to ask such questions. There are deeper questions to be asked also that lead to how is it possible to fulfill the desires of life—a life for oneself and a life with and for others? Understanding the power of relationships and of finding connectivities to the struggles that Indigenous people such as the Yanyuwa have faced, understanding their processes of resistance, and understanding how it is predicated on times that are long past are part of a much larger learning that each of us in this book embarks upon. As Frankl (1963) writes, any kind of suffering presents me with a challenge, a context in which perhaps to define the quality and purpose of my own life. If I am totally honest about my time in Borroloola, it is often the case that fieldwork is not about pleasant things, but in being exposed to the unpleasant I have been given a freedom to see, given an opportunity to understand how, on a daily basis, cruel institutionalized injustices are ever-present. A single example at this point might suffice. In Australia, the Aboriginal Land Rights Act (1976) Northern Territory (Australian Government) is seen to be an act of social justice, whereby through a western system of justice, Indigenous people, such as the Yanyuwa, can give evidence to a judge that may convince him or her that they are indeed to true owners of the land and sea under discussion. On the surface, this is an important process and Yanyuwa people have engaged with this three times, over four decades, but careful observation and engagement with the process reveal the deep colonial issues at work (Bradley and Seton 2005). Issues associated with the desire for traditional lands, for Governments and mining companies to understand the issues that loss of the home creates, on a daily basis, cause a pervasive suffering that is physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual. What looms large for me in all of this is the specter of accompanying suffering of impotence, that is reflected in people who have become tired, exhausted at having to explain over and over why these things are important to them. There is, for me, a double bind here as an academic. As Marx (cited in West 1990: 6) has suggested “philosophers have only interpreted the world. The point, however is to change it.” As an academic, there is an expectation that I will engage with theory, with literature, and that this

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will become my standard practice. Yet I would argue, this theorizing can become a place of radical hesitation in the face of one’s own confusion about the place that I might find myself in, what stories I have to tell and what telling them might mean. This double bind, the dilemma of why we do what we do and with what impact we act, puts anyone that has worked for long periods of time in Indigenous communities in a difficult place. As an anthropologist, I would suggest it is not my place either socially or ethically to change other people’s worlds, however at the same time, the issues that bring and cause deep distress to Indigenous people are manifestations of long term systematized injustice. When I think like this the webs of the relational become patently clear, in ways that my Yanyuwa teachers and mentors have taught me in regard to a world premised on a kincentric ecology. This brings the realization that I too am part of the system. To suggest that I can live outside of it is to do violence to myself as a human being, to become a so-called objective observer, one step removed from the people I know so well. I might wish to see myself as a moral and ethical person, yet to remain passive in the face of overwhelming evidence of injustices and everyday violence means I too become a contributor in violence against other human beings. In regard to these thoughts I owe much to a good friend Dr. Deborah Bird Rose, who wrote far more eloquently that I in regard to these matters (see Rose 2004). Following on from her I see how life with others is inherently tangled in responsibility and indifference to or justification of suffering of others is actually the root of immorality. As Rose (2004: 14) says, “Our Australian context presses us to consider not only the justification of others’ pain but the denial of it as well.”

Field Notes and Reflections: Transitioning into the Academy The best I can do is to write carefully and spaciously enough that somehow the whole gamut of Yanyuwa experiences and the experiences we have shared over several decades of collaboration, might be in attendance. The acts of generosity that define fieldwork, from the flaming anger, the fun and shrieks of laughter, the beauty of nights filled with singing, the hot days of doing nothing much and the long drives through early morning and late afternoon light through the savannah Country, and the open feeling of being in a boat traveling down serpentine river systems and

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moving between islands, all move me to write and reflect. There are multiple stories and experiences that flow from my pen into my battered notebooks. So perhaps it is then, for me at least, that reflexive-reflective writing is, following on from Turner (1982) a liminal space that exists between structure and situation. I attempt to understand things as I experience them (for all things in their own way have a structure, and they have place) and then it is in an afterwards space, alone with a pen and notebook, that the greatest invention is created. The invention of our own discovery and creativity, channeled through reflection that comes to the fore, if we allow it, to be our greatest site of learning. Following on too from Bakhtin (1981) who notes that the liminal space of reflective creating allows us to defy what is considered normal and offers new and different connections between ourselves, places, and the people we collaborate with. The images I create with my writing that are derived both from my own internal literary and academic drive is a highly symbolic form of writing that is, without certain knowledge, difficult to interpret. This is often because I flatten my experiences, I create a smooth transition from fieldwork to article and book in the name of a particular kind of academic rigor, so often what is missing are my own interwoven personal narratives that come about the longer I remain in the field (see Sousanis 2015 for an exploration of “unflattening”). These narratives develop with increasing complexity and nuance, and create a web, a systematic literary story line in which so many details are captured and yet so few reach the printed page. Everything I do, all I experience, tends to be added to this web of meaning that is cast upon the phenomenal world in which I operate. There are times, when I am able to put down the pen, or still my fingers on the keyboard that we use to compose these narratives—and I am able to listen to one of the most common devices in our work, our reflexive, reflective mind. This is a mind of personal and special relationships, experiences of color, taste, sensation, and comparison, recollections of fear, grief, surprise, and anger. This is perhaps the anthropology of the mind at work, the mind of planning: how do I write to be accepted, to be published, and so often it is to write myself and others out of our own experiences. When I am allowed to write in a way that is less of an object, an artifact, I come back to an experience, and there is in this sometimes a sense of relief, a supporting ease and perhaps also contentment in that

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I am writing from a deeper sense of knowing, but also a dread, what will my family, my friends, my peers think? Academically though, I become defined through the use of my language that I present outwardly to an audience. So often in the flattening of my field work experiences I create a testimony of who perhaps I would like to be, who I envision myself as and the particular way I interpret the world around me. My language is a tapestry of meaning, one that I both consciously and unconsciously weave together as a particular kind of lived history and the events that created that history. In and of themselves these products are derived from my individual relationship with language, they are often works of art that capture how I conceive what I can allow myself to be, and what perhaps I must keep at bay. My writing is both my hell and my safe harbor, my anchoring point, or my wilderness, perhaps this is why I do not fly off into a manic subconscious world, or perhaps my words confine me to knowable modalities of being that provide me with the footholds for the experiences of life. Whatever the case might be, and I suspect it is most likely a combination of all of the above, at differing points in time, my academic language reduces all of this. I create a prison, it becomes like a thief, it becomes like an unreliable friend whom I continue to trust even though he or she will continue to disappoint. For somehow, I still struggle to be allowed to describe the joys of relationships I have nurtured and which are real, the pain of loss, the experiences of the deaths of people close to us that we have lived and worked with and to describe their feelings about the loss of things important to them. It is not often in the academic world that we can remain in one place, to rest in being vulnerable and insecure and to wonder why it is we have come to know what it is we do, or perhaps to even allow ourselves the room to wonder what it is we might even believe. What else do we neglect, or even worse choose to neglect? How often do we shut down our curiosity with the logic that coming to some kind of certainty is only the place for the “real professors,” the “real academics”? Seldom then do we take the time to dissect what we have within us. Language with its structural intricacies, its variegated forms, and its potential to transform, often acts as a buttress in relation to our habitual referential reactions. It allows for and instills comparison, creating an endless system of distinctions, a literary color wheel. Language runs the risk of pinning everything around us down, leaving us with perhaps a particular sense of knowing, and yet, I wonder where and when does this knowing intersect with our being, with the quiet awareness that is at the heart of the reflexive and

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reflective journey? What is the real nature of their relationships within us? What is the difference between discerned knowledge and knowledge that is born from being in the moment and reflecting on that? Any research and subsequent writing inevitably is a reflection of all of the above and of my own experiences as the writer. While I may bring particular questions to my research, I hope that my own perspectives do, in a tangible way, reflect what I have learned from my teachers and mentors in the field, most of whom are Yanyuwa. One of the greatest risks I have taken in my writing is to presume that there is a smooth process of transformation between a dominant oral form and knowledge into a print text academic tradition. The risk begins in the process of translating an oral tradition into printed form but also as a translation. One becomes aware that the full functioning of an oral tradition is rather more like a journey, not just something to be repeated on demand. Of course, memory is essential to the process but it is not the essential means by which it works. When working with old Yanyuwa men who could sing hundreds of verses of songlines that traversed many kilometers of land and sea, creating a geography of sound, it was possible to hear and experience that an oral tradition is always more than just what is being heard. It is a journey of the self, of the people singing, of the intersubjective commentary with place and ancestry. Thus, by listening one enters a doorway that leads into other worlds that live besides, and behind, or perhaps in front of our own. There are questions about how one captures the details, the complex nature of knowledge and then attempt to place it onto paper. What gets lost in the smoothing out? It is perhaps as Rosaldo (1993: 39) reflects, a “daunting task” that is open to conversation and experimentation.

Writing of Knowledge It has been their knowledge of the sea that has distinguished Yanyuwa from other groups in the southwest Gulf of Carpentaria and they have cherished the status that goes with it. This knowledge may be of the practical, pragmatic kind but it also enters into the realm of poetics, of song poems composed by men and women. The “old people” as their deceased kin are now called, also invested much time and effort into remembering the ceremony songs, the songlines that were considered to have brought their Country into being. There are still storytellers and singers at Borroloola, and they have allowed their voices to cross the boundary into

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written form, that both reveals and silences at the same time. Other chapters in this book, by Frances Devlin-Glass and Nona Cameron highlight these undertakings in greater detail. My more recent research and writing has concentrated on trying to make things available for younger Yanyuwa men and women, who ask, “What did our old people know?” Hopefully my halting transcriptions and translations may provide opportunities to future generations of Yanyuwa men and women to inform and sustain them. So much of my work is about stories and songs, some of which reach outside of human time into a deeper ancestral moment. As with so much that makes an oral tradition vibrant and work it is not the continued telling of the stories that makes what they contain real, but rather that their continuing reality is what leads them to be told and sung. One of the issues in doing transcription and translation from Yanyuwa to English, from oral to written form, is that I must, for the sake of the story or the song refrain from imposing a western logic onto both its knowledge and form. We live and work in a time in which rational thinking and logic are cherished, but do we sometimes just kid ourselves that we want things to be so logical? And whose logic is being preferenced? Yanyuwa has a logic that is not the same as what the West might uphold and yet there are times when we are exposed to an alternative logic that something quite “magic” happens. I wish to briefly acknowledge my use of the term “West” in this chapter. Ever since Edward Said’s Orientalism was published in 1978, it has become somewhat irresponsible to utilize terms such as “East” and “West” without acknowledging their constructed nature and historical configurations of power that have generated and policed these artificial categorizations. Nevertheless, these terms have remained in use, perhaps largely for their apparent utility in describing vast groups of people and geographic areas. Acknowledging this I will however continue to use the term West and western in this chapter because this is the realm of the “whitefella” world that people such as the Yanyuwa so often have to contest. Magic is perhaps a strange word to use here, in reference to Yanyuwa logic, but I am referring to when a deeper understanding of things occurs, when disparate things come together forming a larger, dynamic narrative. There is a part of us that becomes happy, replete with another way to think and know things. And yet, logic is not necessarily the natural way of being; we are taught to be skeptical about the ways of other peoples’ logic, of their “magic.” We become proud of our skepticism; the sea snake can never be a wave and vice-a-versa. This is scientific rationalism writ

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large. It is because of skepticism that the power and force of so much we might learn from land, sea, and water and the Indigenous people that hold it, cannot be conceived of by what really are quite narrow rational minds. The logocentric notion of reason, does not really do us any favors when we work, talk and move through places saturated with other ways to know and be (see Jackson 2005: xxviii). The desire for logic, for an explanation through western reason becomes like a leash that keeps us safe in the zone of continual western ways of knowing, unable to break out. And in this safe zone Yanyuwa or other epistemologies that have their own logic and reason, are deemed unnatural, incorrect, and lesser. Of course, within the academy there is a growing trend of self-reflexive ethnographic writing and a growing awareness that cultural and historical truths are only ever partial, as well as being systematically exclusive (see Mignolo 2008; Plumwood 2002; Rose 1992; Vasquez 2011). Among all the terms the academy likes to work with, structuralism, poststructuralism, postmodernism, feminism, whiteness studies, historiography, and postcolonial studies their aim, with the best of intent, has to been to “dislodge the ground from which persons and groups securely represent other” (Clifford 1988: 22) and to unpack the limits of representation. Yet it is not hard to feel and see that within the academy this self-reflexive bent is still viewed with some suspicion, and to write and speak toward an understanding of its value still risks discomfort. One becomes more aware of such discomfort when Yanyuwa elder, Graham Friday spoke to me after a meeting to discuss “land management” with exasperation he said, “Where do whitefellas learn this stuff they talk, is that what you do inside that university, when will whitefellas grows ears and learn to listen to us, to help us tell our real story?” Graham speaks to issues of how his logic, his rational thinking, his way of needing to be have little place in a world increasingly dominated by academics, lawyers and policy writers who have little time for his “magic.” Much of what I write about here might not in the first instance be called research, and there is much here that others from outside the orbit of Yanyuwa families might contest and say I have no right to put into words. There are times when my writing reflects what Yanyuwa people might really want to say, to “give whitefellas an idea” of why things are the way they are. There is much that the old men and women I worked with wanted to record and write down. Nya-yibarraya nungkuburruburrula!—put it in the book, they would say and I have many such books. Unlike much of my academic writing, in these other contexts their

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stories have not been flattened. In particular the fine details of political relationships that exist in regard to the management of Country and sea where a kincentric view is the point that must be driven home. One soon learns that there is nothing apolitical about the day-to-day management of Country and the kin who own it. My battered notes books that sit in my possession, and the words that they contain are the product of relationships at work, the efforts, and ideas of many people. This is especially true for myself in regard to where and what I research or attempt to understand. My drive and motivation to learn and write has originated from a growing concern among older Yanyuwa men and women as well as a middle-aged group of Yanyuwa educators, that their voices are being left out of the written history of the southwest Gulf of Carpentaria, and out of Australia’s story. Increasingly this is reflecting a conviction that both settler descendant communities, as well the younger people who identify as Indigenous need to hear or read these voices, particularly the voices of the Gulf’s Indigenous peoples. And yet such an undertaking is not as easy as it first may appear. It is not a simple case of just writing it all down. There are decisions to be made about who the writing is for. Is it going back to the families who have requested it, it is for a government report, a plan of management for land and sea, is it for land claim or an academic article. All require different responses and different decisions in regard to what might need to be silenced or what might need to be heard. In the discussions that take place about the stories of the Gulf, it is the old people who talk about the continuing importance of words and language. They insist that contemporary generations still need to make use of longstanding traditions that guide the way Yanyuwa think about life. They know that oral traditions, are not simple story telling devices that are easily amenable to translation into languages that have become so dependent on print as a way of knowing. Oral traditions do not simply tell us about the past, they continue to provide guidelines for the present and lay a foundation for the future. The second point that increasingly is being raised by the older people is the continuing importance of things, the tangible, material heritage that has and is visibly vanishing over time. Old people and increasingly younger people want to talk about bark and dugout canoes, spears and spear throwers, harpoons, harpoon ropes spun from bark, harpoon points made from wood, water carriers made from wood, bark and shells, hand spun and knotted fishnets, woven cane armlets, human hair, and possum fur string. They are keen to hear stories of hunting and the many strategies people used to provide for a life based

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on coastal, island, and maritime environments, and the songs that were and are still sung to remind people of this Country and the lives that have been lived on it. If they are not talked about then, for example, a harpoon rope just becomes a rope, easily bought at the local store, useable, and disposable. It comes from another place, a product of industry and it has very little story, and yet in another way, knowing a rope, in its fullest and liveliest sense, can be revealed as a wondrous and super vital thing. Such things as material culture are seen to still have relevance in Borroloola and among Yanyuwa of all ages, because they speak to concrete examples of how life used to be. It is both words and things that have an ongoing role in reproducing an understanding of the past. At the core of this sentiment are matters I have touched on above in regard to the relationship between theory, praxis, and the reflective processes that have allowed me to come to know something. Praxis and reflectivity so often provides the space to recognize the contradictions and paradoxes that one can find oneself living with. Reflective practice then provides such an important and productive place to find a sense of expansiveness and freedom in the first instance, and a coming to understand that reflectivity is and of itself a particular kind of praxis. It is a form of praxis that puts the oftentimes implacable issues of the relationship between theory and practice (thought and action) and their connection to understanding change at the center of any research project. There is the inherent risk of destroying one’s own foundations at every turn. This has become more and more apparent as old people die and younger people find a voice to speak to issues that concern them. Generational expressions of being Yanyuwa are increasingly an important issue. Young people want to know what the old people knew but they want to do it in their own way, a way that will lead them to know without shame being generated from the old people. It is their elders who describe them as a generation that “know nothing.” After nearly 40 years of work with Yanyuwa families, I have accumulated an extensive material culture collection. Unlike similar collection in museums that live in mortuary-like conditions, the objects that sit in storage in my office and throughout my home, are redolent with stories of the people that made them and the moment in which they were made and shared. From the two meter dugout canoe to the finely woven armbands, the collection speaks of family and Country. Young people in the presence of this collection sit in awe and wonder about the world of their grandparents and

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great grandparents. Thus, in the end, my research is not just about gathering words, it is also about how I might give back; the collection will go back home to the Gulf eventually, to a place where future generations can touch, smell, and speak to who they are, in relation to the past. For these young people, I am now an “old man,” a malbu, I saw the “old people” and speak like the “old people.” My space with younger people is a somewhat liminal one. Any research inevitably reflects the experiences of the person who tells the story and the person who actually writes it. In this case it is a deeply relational encounter. While I may bring particular questions to my research, I hope that my perspective is one that reflects what I have learned from my teachers, most of whom are Yanyuwa, but also some Garrwa, Marra, and Gudanji people. Increasingly over the last two decades, the majority of my teachers have also been women. I mentioned above the term “old people,” this is an Aboriginal English word used in the Gulf, and is commonly used, however younger people are increasingly using the term elder. The term elder has no direct parallel in the Indigenous languages of the Gulf. The closest approximation in Yanyuwa would be li-wirdiwalangu, often glossed as “the bosses” however the term is heavily nuanced and carries with it an understanding of senior people who have a responsibility, a right and a desire to teach. It is these people, who gave me the eyes to see their Country, to read it in a way that my “whitefella eyes” and mind could never have done. They have, to use their own words, “put language in my mouth” so I can speak of their Country in a way that does not fracture the knowledge that it holds. In doing this I have learned over the decades to hold knowledge of Yanyuwa Country from multiple angles of perception, and to learn that the site of coming together of different knowledges does not have to be a way of contest and conflict.

Songs, Stories, and Relationships The area is now known as the southwest Gulf of Carpentaria has a history as old as the earth itself. There are many narratives about how this part of the world began, some offered by scientific traditions, others by anthropologists, archaeologists, and historians. Alongside, and predating all of these, are the narratives offered by the Yanyuwa, Marra, Gudanji, and Garrwa people whose oral traditions address similar and often more expansive questions. The stories told by the old people and those told by

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scientists, historians, and other academic traditions have developed differently and depend on different sources, but they all attempt to interpret how things came to be the way they are. These different interpretations of the past give us a sense of the richness of the human story in the Gulf, though there are times when the explanations cannot easily be compared and perhaps nor should they. An inquiry about the past leads us to ask even more basic questions. How do we know what we know? What kinds of evidence do we use? What is evidence anyway? How is our understanding of the world constructed in the first place? In regard to the “old people” with whom I work, and have worked, it is a matter of exploring how oral tradition presents one way of interpreting Yanyuwa understandings of their landscape, climate, and ecology. We may talk about oral and written traditions as if they are the same thing or existing independent of each other but if we reflect on our own lives, though, most of us combine what we learn in texts with what we learn by word of mouth. In some parts of Australia, it is still possible to learn about the world from both written and oral sources. This does not mean, at least for people such as the Yanyuwa that it is a benign process, and in the words of an elder who told me her grandchildren were going to school, “My grandchildren are going to school, now the paper will start talking, it will talk to them, that paper will turn their minds and my words will no longer create intelligence for them, that paper becomes the boss because it is too strong” (Annie Karrakayny personal communication May 1982). Storytelling may be the oldest of arts, every culture on this earth has passed on essential ideas from one generation to the next by word of mouth, through speech and song. However, in many parts of the world, the power of the written word has displaced the power of the spoken word. Indigenous knowledges and western knowledge traditions present very different models for thinking about the world. For example, a scientist, may link information about any point of the earth’s surface to a series of numbers that relate to its longitude, latitude, and altitude. To people who live there and know that place, it may have many further dimensions. People such as the Yanyuwa will give a very different picture of the “supposed” landscape than scientists do. They will speak of how the geography of a place came to be, the events that happened there in the distant past, when animals and humans may have been one and the same thing and then there are the events that occurred thereafter those events and those that move into historical times.

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This location of place is not about numbers on a grid, or a screen, but rather by means of narrative, a story or song. In oral traditions, names instead of numbers are used for locating one place in relation to another. Names belong to the distant past, they were given to the Country by the Dreaming Ancestors. To speak of Dreaming Ancestors is to reach through times past and bring it to the present and learn of their speech and way of being. It is the voice of the Dreamings that brought order into Yanyuwa Country, by the naming of Country, by the giving of names to those who were to be their paternal human kin, by leaving the marks in the Country and then resting in the Country. All of these things conspire to create a powerful vision of a place that people call their home. There is an intersubjective relationship too, in regard to this knowledge, whereby the songs and acts of speech are sung and spoken back into a receptive and waiting Country. This story, part of a much larger whole, as told by Yanyuwa elder Dinah Norman speaks to Country, Dreamings and names. This quote I have translated from my field notes of 1999. Alright that Dingo had come south from a long way and he came to Wunguntha, he was singing his song, singing out into the sea, singing it out to the north west, but that black necked stork at Minyadawiji he heard that song, and he pushed it back he pushed it back from the north, he made that song go around and around in the sea, in one place, so now that song goes from Wunguntha at the mouth of the Wiliyurru (Crooked River), to Wutharila, from Wutharila to Warany, from Warany to Rumalamarlarla, from Rumalamarlarla to Warna from Warna turning back south, south west and then down, down into the middle of the sea to Limalyalarra and then further down at Lilujulhuwa, down, right into the depths of the sea, the Pleiades hold it there now, there at that place.

Oral and western arts and scientific traditions not only speak from different perspectives; they are passed along in different ways. Oral traditions survive by repeated telling, repeated singings and each narrative contains more than one message. The listener is part of the storytelling process too, and is expected to think about and interpret the messages in the story. A skilled listener will bring different life experiences to the story each time they hear it and will learn different things each time. Oral tradition is like a prism, which becomes richer as we improve our ability to view it from a number of angles of perception. It does not try to spell out everything one needs to know, but rather to make the listener think about experiences in new ways. To be able to sing the Country, to sing

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the paths of the Dreaming Ancestors is in a Yanyuwa view the ultimate way to know. In my field notes of 1998 Annie Karrakayny explained the following when visiting me in my office at the university, That songline is everything, it is the only way to know this Country, really deep inside, not like “whitefella” scientist side, they are outside, on the top, they don’t know deep down, feeling you know. We women listen, listen to that song, we know what is there, where it is going, and the old men who sing they are like…like the professors where you work, you know at a university…yes, those old men are the professors.

Such songs push us to the limits, and in many ways, are the peak of where things begin to become incommensurable and push also to the limits of what is translatable and how might it be understood. These songs, of many hundreds of verses, tracking kilometers of Yanyuwa Country is the place that can force us to understand how little in the end we might know and yet, if one pauses the “West is best” button it is possible to see a rich and detailed intellectual and poetic engagement with Country. I have come to see that words really fail here, both for me and the Yanyuwa men and women I have worked with. The words fail because it is as if the very words become physical and manipulate subjects to which they are attached. These songs ultimately destroy the world of the binary and seem to express facets of a single indivisible reality. The following verses from the final moments of the Dingo songline, as referenced by Dinah in her above quote, are presented here from a different angle of perception. The following example of a songline (see Bradley with Yanyuwa Families 2010: 280–282) is a good place to review what I have written above in regard to logic, writing of things that in some ways make little sense when they stand alone and exist in a language that is ill-suited to ground them in the way they need to be understood. How does someone without too much knowing, understand these verses? What is required to see them, as Annie suggests above, as the ultimate way to know Country? Are they poetry, song, statements of ownership, reflections of a kincentric ecology and politics? Or are they indeed all of these things combined? The sun rises, it is daybreak over the Country of the Dingo

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The sun rises, it is daybreak, it is early morning; the sun floats in the east, on the horizon, in Wuyaliya sea Country. Lone male dugong travels in his own Country Lone male dugong surfaces to breathe Black necked stork feels strong in his own Country Black Necked Stork in the Country of his spirit The Dingo named Wurrundurla His Law goes into the sea The Dingo names himself Mangkiwarra His Law goes into the sea The song circles in the water At Liwujulhuwa The song circles and Then moves deeper down The song is traveling deep in the water Windbreaks of the Pleiades, they guard the cockle shells The Pleiades swing low in the eastern sky They shine brightly in the early morning The Pleiades gather together, in the depths of their home Deep down the song travels, deep into the sea at Lilujulhuwa Deep down the song travels deep into the sea at Lilujulhuwa it rests deep in the sea

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Deep down the song travels deep in the sea at Lilujulhuwa it rests now with the Pleiades.

Here then is the tension, it may seem completely contradictory to go-to books, for examples of oral traditions, however Yanyuwa men and women in the southwest Gulf of Carpentaria recognize the power of the written word and have spent considerable time and effort recording and transcribing stories and songs. This has been at the insistence of old men and women, and increasingly young men and women have a need to know what their old people knew. Thus, the oral traditions have become a part of a body of literature and yet no matter how carefully recorded, this format often takes away aspects of knowing that are be embedded within them. Further on from this is a western education system, which is based, on a western perception of knowledge. This is one that has a history of making sharp distinctions between the “arts” (for example, language, literature, and history) and “sciences” (for example, mathematics, biology, physics, and chemistry). It is perhaps worth remembering that western knowledge was not always organized in this way, and for people such as Yanyuwa elders these distinctions appear quite pointless and artificial. Often when people see their knowledge represented in translation and on paper, they will exclaim, “We don’t talk like that, we don’t think like that” (Mavis Timothy personal communication June 2016). This statement by Mavis speaks to the core issues of translation, how does one effectively find a voice or words in English, a language that is, perhaps like so many other print tradition, ill-equipped to make the leap into a vastly different set of epistemological premises. In the two examples of translated Yanyuwa language and cognition, we could simply equate the two versions of the Dingo Dreaming as raw data, as ethnography in process. Yet both texts are also highly political and ecological as they stand. The importance of place names and ancestral presence speak to particular social structures. It provides a basis for maintaining continuity in the ownership of the coastal fringe and the sea. In which case, they are expressions of a jural basis for claims of continuous ownership of sea and nonhuman kin by successors, who see themselves as the same people through time. Yet despite the contemporary pressures of life, the domination of western control of land and sea by systems of management, these stories persist and people want them to be cared for. The questions that come from this, in discussing oral narratives of which song

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is a part, is not whether it is true or not, but rather relate to the logic and structure that informs these narratives and what ideological ends they are serving and how best the might be written of and inscribed for younger generations to access. One last comment here in regard to the sung forms of orality. There is sometimes a tendency for the western traditions of philosophy, literary studies, anthropology, history, geography, law, and ecological sciences to refer to these songs with mixed fascination, sometimes contempt. I know contempt is a strong word, but I have students and peers in the academy who constantly want to know why any of this knowledge is important, often using terms such as use, logic, need or at times suggesting that is just no place for “superstition” in the academy. This results in them sitting somewhere between mysticism and spirituality, but for the cultures that own them, they are a pragmatic aspect of reality. The mystical perception is only “mystical” if reality is limited to what can be measured by an intellectual tradition. I return here to my comments on logic and skepticism above for often when we can’t understand something there is a tendency to label knowledge a “mystical.” Under such a label it is then free to travel into the western repository of knowledge. What the West might call magic or mystical can actually speak, if allowed, to a deeper underlying philosophy of knowing, a deep instrument of thought that perhaps for the West is a place of provocation in regard to time, objects, place, and a human and nonhuman capacity to coexist.

Knowing Loss and Finding Words So much of what I write of here is easily conveyed in Yanyuwa, the language that comes from the Country itself. However, Yanyuwa is a language that is on the brink of loss. There are three old women who carry the weight of being the last fluent speakers, those that can, to use a Yanyuwa expression, “speak the language all the way through.” People do carry with them a sadness, a grief for sounds, and words that will no longer be heard. As old people look at their Country, children and grandchildren with an understanding of their increasing sense of alienation there is an urgency to find a way of looking at the world that does no violence to these kinds of understandings. This calls for a type of openness, a unity, or something of a bond to create an epistemological bridge between the two worlds, that is Yanyuwa and the West. Or at the least

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the call is to find a place where both ways can view each other without judgment. Such an understanding at least is not about rejecting the sorting, classifying or the contemplation, but rather is directed toward paying attention to multiple possibilities. There are no easy fixes to creating this bridge, though teaching based on praxis, history learned well and the hard “bits” not being ignored are perhaps a good start. The issue is that when analytic thought is applied to the actual experience, something belonging to another way of knowing and being and expressed in other words, at its worst is killed. This is the resultant epistemic violence that makes vivid ways of knowing null and void or changed. So much of Indigenous knowledge is made unappreciable by the West due in part to the way that Indigenous knowledge details specificity in place and in the relational. The West’s ideal of knowledge is that it can be generalized into abstractions, constituted beyond intersubjective agreement. That the point of learning is the achievement of logical conclusions for functional purposes removes the possibility of learning being an experience of the process or the responsibilities inherent in it. So, the questions remain for the old people and the younger people in a township like Borroloola and in other communities like them: can the linguistic act of speaking and writing English ever capture what we might call the linguistic ecologies of preinvasion time? Can it express and capture the quality of this Country’s particular original immanence? For me, there is another pressing and related concern, and this is whether it is really possible to translate particular cultural knowledges when histories of dislocation and alien imposition have created such a broad and at times beguiling and seductive blanket. It is the original languages that comes, when they can still be heard, to speak a part of the Country’s truths. There is something very profound about places of intense suffering, they are reminders of impermanence, places of provocation in which our very identity might feel threatened. These are places of honesty, of direct cutting away of our own elaboration and we are free of the way we have dressed ourselves up. This means not taking our academic credentials too seriously, there is always something for us to learn, there are things to unlearn, to unknow so as to allow another way of knowing to exist. These places, while scary, can be liberating in terms of where they can lead one in understanding how people think and feel about their place in their Country and by extension can provide us with space to understand who we are also. The old people I work with, the last speakers of their language, live in a place of daily hardship, and yet they lift up their Country

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through their continued acts of speech. Lifting is another way of speaking of an emotional engagement with Country and kin. Through the actions of speaking and singing Yanyuwa draws threads from the past to the place of now. The origin of language itself is Country. Language is Country and knowledge through language is created and recreated in movement through Country. There are a mobility and a lightness of seeing as opposed to the “all-seeing” gaze of settler colonialism. The glimpses, the partial, momentary, intensely local view that is a Yanyuwa view, cultivated over repeated visits to Country, invites one to consider patterns and connections that shift and change over extended periods of time. As I have learnt the language of engagement, such glimpses have encouraged me to reconsider these connections and often my approach, my way of moving, seeing and being. There is, through the language, an awakening to a certain immanence where everything, the language, the Law, the very essence of being is to be found in the ground beneath one’s feet, and in a Yanyuwa sense also in the saltwater that wets us and laps our feet on the beach Country of the islands.

Final Thoughts I reflect on the feeling of saltwater and sand, the pull of the tide as the sand swirls around my toes and feet and think about what it is I have sought to say here. I am wanting to be attentive to alternative ways of knowing, of other knowledges and perhaps as well, my own inability or an imposed inability to overcome the epistemology that I was born to and reared in. I have come to learn other languages, Australian languages that provide other ways of saying and thinking about things. These constitute, in their own right, a way of knowing and being. However, there is still a power that the West holds, regardless of how much I acknowledge that there indeed are other ways to know, and this power is embedded in the ways we read and study, which presupposes that knowledge is somehow neutral, democratic and can be easily archived. The academy sees this view of knowledge as patently self-evident. It is in fact, a site of violence of ongoing coloniality that runs so counter to the epistemologies, ontologies and axiologies of the very people, including Yanyuwa, who have been marginalized by a western view of what constitutes knowledge. Butt (2010) makes a comment that the university’s position is one as a

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default holder of all knowledge. It comes about as an expression of practices that are not at all universal but relate to a highly specific European cultural view. The institutions, libraries, and archives that have been built to store and transmit that knowledge, based on their terms, so remove certain people and their ways of knowing. Such people are placed as outside the category of having knowledge. I would hasten here that I do not consider the above writing to be a polemic on what the West has done, rather it stands, with careful reflection to be self-evident. When I reflect on the subjects I have discussed above there are two words that stand out for me in regard to the 40 years of observations and relationships I have experienced with Yanyuwa families on their own Country. These two words are voice and storytelling. Voice is vitally important in this context, as it is orality that distinguishes a Yanyuwa way of knowing. In times, not so long ago the sound of old women singing the social history of their Country, or the old men singing songlines that describe the movements of Ancestral Beings were a voice of the Law, of sociality and relationality. Even if the voice is of one person, or one group of people, they have voices that all come from a place that pours deep sentiments across the land and sea; a voice that coalesces, forming a people’s strength. It is a voice too that speaks to themselves, and of those that live outside of Borroloola, perhaps to family members or groups of Indigenous people more widely. Nevertheless, it is a voice that reflects back upon and expresses historical memory. These memories though are frequently censured, and among these censures come questions, why can’t you be just like us? We have given you so much and yet you still complain, can’t you be thankful? What does it tell us that Yanyuwa, living in their own land still encounter such censures? Why would people with such a long history still have to show gratitude for the benevolence of others? I think about this quite often. At what point in time did the “other,” that is, the academy, the legal, health and education professionals, the government, become such masters in the lives of Indigenous families. This is something one deals with all the time, on visits to Borroloola, with phone calls that might come daily or weekly, and as the Yanyuwa themselves say, one “needs to grow ears,” to listen properly and in doing so one comes to know. One comes to know the whole story, the two sides, the three sides, the multiple sides to any one story, and in that there is a complexity, not just a right or wrong, but rather a coming together of many events. Storytelling is a means by which colonized people such as the Yanyuwa affirm their own existence, their own status, and history. When anything

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happens on their own Country, storytelling can also change fearful, distressing events in everyday lives into something experienced, bestowing those events with a story that people can remember. It is these stories that become the point of daily strength because they are not the ones delivered in a monologue by those that do not really know. It is here I would like to mention the work of a co-author in this book. Kearney’s (2014, 2017) long term interest in cultural wounding has led her to engage, reflect and discuss how Indigenous people such as the Yanyuwa, attempt to speak, discuss and confront the history of their forced displacement by voices and stories that speak to distance, fear and alienation. Such writing disrupts the more commonly held view of deep affective relationships with the land and speak to what I consider to be a category of more truthful and completely understandable set of emotional investments that are held within knowledge of the land and sea. Yanyuwa knowledge is held through sex, gender, relationships, and power, and so often is geographically determined by the place where one is standing or sitting at any one time. Yanyuwa men and women, even children understand this, they know that the sharing of their knowledge with non-Yanyuwa people will create cognitive traffic jams in the minds of these visitors. They know well that the students of the West have been taught to know in radically different ways. In the case of this chapter, reflective writing demands a space that means standing on the edge; to be reflexive in the face of that which the West so often seeks to deny and, then to reflect on our positioning in relation to this. As for myself there are times when my senses still burn with outrage given the historical and daily issues that people like the Yanyuwa have to deal with, assaults on their integrity are common place. For me reflexive writing and thinking at its best allows us to see our biases and the story behind them, it supports us in the pursuit of identifying our obstacles, to meet the moment in an unmediated way. It lets us face the place of not-knowing and opens up a much wider horizon than our initial preconceptions could ever afford us and thus the reflexive moment can open the ground for us to see just how much our own social-conditioning can become more visible and knowable. And yet, there is always so much to learn, so much to understand, there is no end to knowing and learning is not finite. Yanyuwa ways of knowing are not bounded and this perhaps is the greatest learning I have received. In regard to the many, many changes I have seen, there is still a sense of continuity in what it might mean to be Yanyuwa, in what it

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might mean for me to have relationships with the children, grand children and great grandchildren of the people that mentored and taught me. There are no real generalizations just complexities that demonstrate the constancy of the fact that things are always going to, and will change.

Contributor Response, by Philip Adgemis Although 32 years separate our respective beginnings with Yanyuwa families, much of my own experience and my learnings as a researcher have been characterized by the legacy of John Bradley’s relationships. In his chapter, I see resonance between our reflexive processes, yet also distinctiveness that reflects the contrasts in generational positioning we inhabit in Borroloola and, also in ourselves. Bradley has worked most closely with senior Yanyuwa, accumulating a vast catalog of language, Law, and song, during a time where such things were relatively synonymous with daily life. In many ways, the world inhabited by younger Yanyuwa is not compatible with that characterized by this earlier time of Yanyuwa life. Indeed, many younger Yanyuwa view such things with trepidation, a sense of shame, or frustration born of a hyper-consciousness that, as one young Yanyuwa man said to me in 2014, “we are not the same as the people from 100 years ago.” This comment raises important questions regarding how we engage with past ethnographic works in contexts of rapid change. To relegate earlier accounts of Yanyuwa sociality and Law to a historical record is to write senior Yanyuwa out of existence. An act of “temporal bracketing” this would deny the complexities of change and the dedication of such elders to maintaining culture and sharing it with younger generations. Similarly, to render young people as “failed Law people” implies that sociality is static and unchanging. This denies the dramatic shifts to life’s praxis that come with prevailing coloniality and social change more broadly. It is in the combined presence and company of early and current ethnographies, such as Bradley’s that we might more fully access and appreciate generational experiences, intergenerational tensions and cross-generational dialogue and collaboration. Relationships with senior Yanyuwa give one an immense appreciation of their capacity for cognitive elasticity and dynamism as they endeavor to imbue younger family members with a sense of Country and belonging that defined their own formative socialization. Closeness with younger Yanyuwa encourages an

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appreciation of how uncertainty regarding this ancestral legacy can juxtapose with pride in the complexity of their Law. Adding to the generationally nuanced space that is “being Yanyuwa” is also a middle generation, those who were raised by “Law people,” and socialized during periods of intense change in life circumstances within this community. Each generation has its own story to tell, yet none of these generational groups represents a bounded entity and each is engaged in their own way with communal dialogue and knowledge sharing. In his chapter, Bradley describes a growing inclination toward shielding the privacy of the families that have taught him while endeavoring to convey the complexity and gravity of Yanyuwa socio-cultural realities. This is a consideration I share. It underpins moments of my own introspection, an existential dissonance that ultimately guides what I choose to write or the writing I choose to share with particular audiences. For both myself and Bradley, wanting to respect the privacy of Yanyuwa families goes beyond that of “best practice” in relation to “research collaborators.” It is a case of safeguarding the intimacy of friendships. What we do not often write of are the moments when Yanyuwa families cease to be collaborators and become friends who we share thoughts and feelings with, either in the settings of day-to-day social life or in instances of political intensity, death, illness, loss and shame. As we strive to respect these relationships we ironically may find ourselves passing all too quickly over their realities in text. Coloniality brings further fear to the act of narrating these relationships into the world. This fear is magnified when portraying confronting realities, which, when in the hands of unforgiving audiences in a settler-colonial/white space, might be mobilized to further justify the denial of agency for Indigenous Australians. Yet if our writing is devoid of intimacy and accounts of life as it “actually is,” we have steered well away from the commitments and responsibilities of doing ethnography. A balancing act is required, one of both depicting and masking the real, between conveying generality and reportage of personal and raw emotional realities replete with fine detail and grit. Perhaps both are necessary for the production of highly localized ethnographic accounts that are intellectual and objectively critical whie being poignant enough to cultivate humanistic empathy in a reader. I have found, in my own practice, and in reflecting on Bradley’s chapter that reflexivity partly emolliates these challenges, providing an essential measure of introspection and social critique. In my experience, reflexivity informs an awareness of when and how to refrain when we commit

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to the translative undertaking that is ethnography. When considering the intimacy of relationships and events that I may wish to write about, an important moderator has been reflecting on how the sharing of comparable aspects of my own life in text would feel. I ask myself, should I not feel comfortable sharing more of myself than any “other”? As this mode of imaginative empathic projection brings me to the limits of my own comfort concerning personal disclosure, I see value in the exercise. At the very least it reaffirms the coexistence of the researcher and collaborator in the telling of the story. If we are not willing to reveal much about ourselves in the ethnographic present then how can we ask others to do so?

References Australian Government. 1976. Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act 1976. Available at: https://www.legislation.gov.au/Details/C2016C00111. Accessed 22 May 2019. Bakhtin, M. 1981. The Dialogic Imagination, trans. C. Emerson and M. Holquist. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Bradley, J., and K. Seton. 2005. Self-Determination or “Deep Colonising.” In Unfinished Constitutional Business, ed. Barbara Hocking, 32–46. Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press. Bradley, J., with Yanyuwa Families. 2010. Singing Saltwater Country. Sydney: Allen & Unwin. Butt, D. 2010. Whose Knowledge? Reflexivity and “Knowledge Transfer” in Postcolonial Practice-Based Research. Keynote address to On Making: Integrating Approaches in Practice-Led Research in Art and Design Symposium, Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture, University of Johannesburg, 15th October 2009. Available at: http://www.dannybutt.net/acp/ 2009/10/20/whose-knowledge-reflexivity-and-knowledge-transfer-in-post colonial-practice-based-research/. Accessed 16 April 2019. Clifford, J. 1988. The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth Century Ethnography, Literature and Art. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Frankl, V. 1963. Man’s Search for Meaning. New York: Pocket Books. Jackson, M. 2005. Existential Anthropology: Events, Exigencies and Effects. New York and Oxford: Berghahn. Kearney, A. 2014. Cultural Wounding, Healing and Emerging Ethnicities. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Kearney, A. 2017. Violence in Place: Cultural and Environmental Wounding. Abingdon, Oxfordshire: Routledge.

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Lauterbach, J. 2004. Mekhilta de-Rabbi Ishmael. Nebraska: Edward E. Elson Classic Series, University of Nebraska Press. Mignolo, W. 2008. Racism as We Sense It Today. Modern Language Association 123 (5): 1737–1742. Plumwood, V. 2002. Environmental Culture: The Ecological Crisis of Reason. London: Routledge. Rosaldo, R. 1993. Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis. Boston: Beacon Press. Rose, D.B. 1992. Dingo Makes Us Human, Life and Land in and Aboriginal Australian Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rose, D.B. 2004. Reports from a Wild Country: Ethics for Decolonization. Sydney: University of New South Wales Press. Said, E. 1978. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon Books. Sousanis, N. 2015. Unflattening. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Turner, V. 1982. Performing Ethnography. The Drama Review 26: 33–35. Vasquez, R. 2011. Translation as Erasure: Thoughts on Modernity’s Epistemic Violence. Journal of Historical Sociology 24 (1): 27–44. West, C. 1990. The Ethical Dimensions of Marxist Thought. New York: Monthly Review Press.

CHAPTER 3

Mobility of Mind: Can We Change Our Epistemic Habit Through Sustained Ethnographic Encounters? Amanda Kearney

Introduction This chapter is inspired by two seemingly disparate but inseverable things. The first a series of questions posed to me by a senior academic colleague, with regard to my research, and the second is twenty years of collaboration and ethnographic fieldwork I have undertaken with Indigenous families in northern Australia. The latter has defined my career, and many aspects of my life, and my ethics. The former, brought a lot of that into question, and has challenged me to think truthfully about what I have learnt in this time. Yanyuwa Country in the Gulf of Carpentaria is the ethnographic context for the reflexive considerations I present here. Experiences with Yanyuwa and their Country are woven through my intellectual life and folded into my personal biography. Thus, it is that the academic scrutiny struck such a cord with me and has tracked me ever since. The questions

A. Kearney (B) Flinders University, Adelaide, SA, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 A. Kearney and J. Bradley (eds.), Reflexive Ethnographic Practice, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34898-4_3

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came about during a discussion of an article I had written on kincentric ecology and Indigenous understandings of place as an agent, capable of communicative exchange with human kin. I had written this piece in the 18th year of ethnographic fieldwork with Yanyuwa families. It was put to me, and I paraphrase, you write about kincentricity, but does this mean that you, as a researcher, really believe place is a sentient agent? Or does it mean that you study the experiences of people who use such an epistemological approach without indeed subscribing to it? These questions, pertaining to my research praxis and “belief” in a kincentric ecology, have become the catalyst for a reflexive pulling apart of my own learning and broader reflection on what has happened to me, and more broadly then what happens to the anthropologist, as person, researcher, and collaborator, through the process of sustained ethnographic encounters. Not uncommonly raised in academic debate in anthropology, the matter of “belief” and the question of proximity to our research collaborators and contexts has prompted me to consider some of the taken for granted dispositions and orientations that I have cultivated in relation to my Yanyuwa collaborators, their knowledges and ways of being in the world. Up to this point I had not yet taken these thoughts on in a manner that, when more radically acknowledged, might begin to reveal and even adjust my professional practice. What becomes the pivot for this discussion is the process I have undertaken to understand what it is I do believe. This has awakened a reflexive consciousness in me, compelling me to consider my way of seeing the world, to what extent this is attributable to my Yanyuwa teachers and also how I am in relation to Indigenous experience, knowledge and Law in Australia. What is it that I do know, relative to what I do not? And are their limits to what I might ever understand that come from the determinants of who I am? First, I need to begin with a declaration of how I understand the questions raised here by my academic colleague. I am being asked about my “experience” or “belief” in relation to intercultural encounters with Indigenous knowledge, and Ancestral Law as told to me by Yanyuwa. More specifically this is in relation to my “belief” in the presence of old people and Ancestral Beings in place and thus the existence of an agentic nonhuman world—the foundational premise of Yanyuwa life and Law. Inching toward a response requires me to consider the extent of my own learning, and my availability to this knowledge, asking, “do I subscribe to this epistemological approach?”, one which is governing and absolute in a context where I am a guest. The sentiency of Country is an absolute reality in the Yanyuwa context, and this is what informs constructs

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of Law, which in turn shape epistemic habit more specifically. What is at stake here is the question of my own epistemic habit, not the validity of a Yanyuwa way of knowing, being, and valuing the world. After some reflection, I have committed to addressing this query by reflexively engaging with my experiences of learning with and from Indigenous Australians. I do this, in order to shed light on my own professional life, and hopefully to enrich it with some clarity of purpose and possibility into the future, and to also raise the matter of how our professional lives educate us in ways that hugely benefit our personal lives. At the very center of this, for me, is a desire to be in better relation with other ways of knowing, through genuinely intercultural encounters. The latter being a consideration that I find myself returning to often as I reside within the settler colony that is Australia and seek to more fully comprehend what plurality and interculturalism might mean as a praxis in my own life.

What Do I Know? I have spent much time learning from Yanyuwa, about their relationships to the land and sea. This has been shaped as research into Yanyuwa ontology and epistemology, emotional geography, cultural wounding and healing and in more recent years, land restitution and the urgent patience that is fighting for Aboriginal land rights. Writing through an Indigenous epistemology in relation to these themes, has tested me in my capacity to comprehend a series of vital concepts. Central to these ways of knowing is appreciating and apprehending a kincentric ordering of the world, where all are in relation and all have a rightful place within Country. I have found that a commitment to long-term ethnography has been key to settling me into any sense of being able to say “I believe” and “I know this to be,” not for fear of judgment from my Yanyuwa teachers, rather from a disciplinary judgment and from the scrutiny this invites from other audiences. I can say that I believe place is a sentient co-presence; I believe that communicative exchanges happen between people, place, and the geography and elements around us. I have experienced and witnessed these in the southwest Gulf of Carpentaria. When asked of how I have come to know that Ancestral Beings exist in the land and sea, I have to seriously organize my thoughts and carefully consider my words. It is through repeated assertions by Yanyuwa that this be the case, that I have come to know. It is through a series of events and encounters no other way explainable than as the actions and agency of old people, and

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ancestors, that their presence has been reinforced. It is availing oneself to the possibility that something indeed “might be something,” a principle powerfully conveyed early on in my learnings, through the reading of Povinelli’s (1993) work, in collaboration with the Belyuen women, on a language of indeterminacy. This language, known to regularly account for events in and around Borroloola that sound of ancestral intervention, or place agency, speaks to the relational quality of human presences in Country and also to the pervasive vitality and power that resides in all elements of life; from kin, Country, Law, Ancestors, and the natural elements and phenomena that make up Country. As Povinelli (1993: 693) notes, being observant of behavioral nuances and the ability to detect subtle meanings and thus generate “a meaning- claim based on a longstanding experience of the social and cultural landscape is a particularly persuasive strategy that holds the hegemonic higher ground” in Indigenous communities. When this is the daily way of things, it is not difficult to become convinced of the reality that exists for Yanyuwa and for this to begin to inform your own translation of meaning from events that do not appear to be of the ordinary nature of things. Hokari (2011: 16, 19) writes, that even if we cannot take our mind to the point of believing what we hear, then at the very least we must ask ourselves “why not,” when pressed to consider the merit of a culturally prescribed account of life. It is the practice of hearing the unfamiliar while allowing this unfamiliarity to reshape our vision of what is possible in the world. In which case, I need not be Yanyuwa to listen to Yanyuwa accounts of ancestral activity and sentiency in place, and I should not feel that such knowledge competes with my own ontological leanings. Rather I accept in full a Yanyuwa view of the world, and counter any uncertainty with “why not”…. In learning from Yanyuwa I have had the opportunity to listen to a substantive recollection of the world and through that I am confident that Ancestral Beings exist in the land and sea that is Country. I understand this as a “poetics of fit” that is the natural world and ancestral origins (Rose 2014). I cannot claim this knowledge as my own, but I accept this testimony in full and attempt to exist in relation with it respectfully. I enact my role as an attentive witness and commit to being changed by this experience; otherwise I am only a spectator. It is important to acknowledge however that my being white keeps me in the “gap”—the gap between what I know and experience and what Yanyuwa know and experience (see Hokari 2011). This is not merely a caution of political correctness and the disclaimer of stating my positionality does not diffuse it in ways that I can then ignore it, but is a genuine

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statement of my partiality in being with another epistemic habit, primarily because of the language in which this habit has been shaped and formed (that is Yanyuwa language). I will never become Yanyuwa, but none-theless I am not what I used to be, that is the person who first arrived in Borroloola in 2000. Is that not the transformative nature of learning? I have shifted my habit, that is I know the world, inhabit that world, and value it differently to before, as a result of ethnographic and witnessing encounters. Although, I admit to being uncertain of how to articulate this, more often as a self-conscious overhang born of disciplinary critique. Reflexively this maps onto a tendency to “hint at” this knowledge, rather than declare it.

How Did This Happen? Reflexivity and a narrative styling to ethnographic accounts first presented to me as a doctoral student, as I met the writings of anthropologists Ruth Behar (The Vulnerable Observer 1996), Michael Jackson (Existential Anthropology 2005), Eric Michaels (Unbecoming 1990), Renato Rosaldo (Grief and a Head Hunter’s Rage 1993, and later, The Day of Shelley’s Death 2013) and Michael Taussig (Shamanism, Colonialism and the Wild Man 1986, and later I Swear I Saw This 2011). Illuminating to begin with, and stylistically far from anything the Australian scene was offering me at the time, these texts have only but grown in my estimation as they have enacted their greatest impact on me in recent years. This may be part of a maturation in my professional life, or perhaps it is having the opportunity to carve out the intellectual space to be with them more committedly at this time in my career (buoyed by a degree of mid-career security and sense that I am allowed to be a scholar). Either way, these authors and their texts inspire the courage to reflect on the last two decades and where they have taken me. In Australia, reflexivity has not presented as a normative disciplinary practice within anthropology, although there are some who have gifted us with their reflections time and again in the hope of telling “another kind of story” (see Bradley with Yanyuwa Families 2010; Cowlishaw 1999, 2004, 2009, 2017, 2018; Mahood 2000, 2016; Rose 2000, 2011). These have had to operate against the pressure of disciplinary self-consciousness, that flirts with reflexivity, backing away at any sign it may transmute into “vanity ethnography” (Van Maanen 1988) or disrupt the structuralist apple-cart. The desire to avoid re-centring the

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angst of the researcher, in a context shaped by the politics of settler colonialism and decolonizing methodologies, as much of Australian anthropology is, seems to have outweighed the willingness to claim moments of shared experience between the researcher and Aboriginal collaborators, whereby empathy enters the scene as a worthy pathway to learning with and from our collaborators and teachers. The caution seems to have taken as its lead, skepticism of the 1990s, which had many asking, is the claim to empathy an impossible vanity? In this chapter, I commit to arguing the case for no. I do so by exploring my own reflexive and epistemic conundrum, and making a case for ethnography as a form of testimony, which in some contexts calls for and facilitates primary witnessing as responsive reflexivity, in order for us to get closer to the story of other people’s lives. I make the case that we can change (and dare I say, should change) our epistemic habits through sustained ethnographic encounters that are built on such terms, and attempt to illustrate this by way of my own apprehension of Yanyuwa life and Law. But I will also declare that there are limits to this shift in epistemic habit, which distinguishes it as bound to context and relationships in potentially immovable and immobile ways. It is in this regard that I expose my anxieties, which come with being a non-Indigenous researcher who moves between the two worlds of ethnographic learning with Aboriginal families, and academic functioning whereby privilege and rights to speak take on powerful presences. I have learned to tread carefully and take as a daily practice thinking about when to speak and attending to silence if unsure. By way of a tentative first step in this argument, I propose that it is a combination of empathy and responsive reflexivity that supports a mobility of mind as changes in the way we think and comprehend the world, but that this is heavily localized in its ability to form, be expressed, and also validated. In other words, shifts in our epistemic habit and perceptual capacity are dependent on particular spaces and times, that is, they exist in moments but not lifetimes.

Mobility of Mind: Epistemic Habit in the Context of Fieldwork Encounters Mobility of mind is treated as being with and accepting another story or knowledge habit, critical intimacy as an ethical way of coming to know something, and hearing and seeing another in its epistemological, ontological, and axiological richness. Phenomenological introspection guides

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this discussion, as a combination of personal, epistemological, and critical reflexivity. Phenomenological introspection can be attention both to my surroundings and to my experience as idiosyncratic and generalized (Breyer and Gutland 2016: 12–14; Gutland 2018: 1). Introspection is the dedication of resources, or attention, to the task of arriving at a judgment about my current, or very recently past, conscious experience, attempting to use some capacities that are unique to the first-person case. This means I must frame my current understandings and the pathways that lead to these by reflecting on the first-hand encounters I have had and shared with others. With this in mind, I acknowledge that not only has my professional life been shaped through collaborations with Yanyuwa, but that the relationships at the center of these collaborations have been of profound importance to me personally. Mobility of mind is treated also as the ability to extend one’s perceptual capacity and thus epistemic habit. From a phenomenological perspective, perception is more than a sensory stimulation. It is an action that involves a construction of meaning; that is, something (a meaningful object) is seen by somebody (a perceptual subject) (Merleau-Ponty 1962). Thus, what we perceive is relational, relational to ourselves as the perceptual subject (the seer) and relational to other meaningful presences (that which is seen and also sees us). Perception is achieved by means of the active habitual relation of the body to its environment (Merleau-Ponty 1962), thus the body provides the fundamental mediation point between our thoughts and the world. There is no more an embodied encounter than that of ethnographic fieldwork, and no more are we bodily present than when we are given to the context of fieldwork, self-consciously aware of who we are in every manner—our voice, our appearance, our minds, our histories, our intentions, our limits, and our potentials. It is here that I might slow briefly to explain how I understand the relationship between epistemology and ontology, in the context of this discussion. In order to appreciate a Yanyuwa kincentric ontology, that is a way of being in and of the world that orients toward relational encounters, one must also appreciate the epistemology that constitutes Yanyuwa existence. How forms of knowledge find their expression through action and subjectivity tells of the tight bond that is epistemology and ontology. Our way of being in the world is part of the epistemic process, thus to write of a kincentric ecology is to equally write of behaviors, actions, and orientations as it is to write of Yanyuwa configurations of the world and how it comes to be known that kinship is a (or the) prevailing structure of life.

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For twenty years my body has been mediating Borroloola and the surrounding Gulf region (see Figs. 3.1, 3.2, 3.3, 3.4, 3.5, 3.6, and 3.7). This has been a tremendous experience, from the anticipatory fear of boat travel in open seas, a vastness of blue ocean blurring into equally blue sky in ways I had never seen in my life, to standing on beaches with a beauty that could literally make you cry. Seeing this Country from a helicopter brought an altogether other worldly quality to the region, and a breathtaking sense of my smallness as I hovered over the river mouth and rushed toward nothing but blue glare and ocean below. And yet I’ve also been drawn to tears in the township of Borroloola for wholly different reasons, grappling with the hardship of people’s lives expressed in the form of inadequate housing, sick and injured dogs, premature deaths, and illness. I’ve sat on the verandahs of these same inadequate houses, playing cards or shooing away the dogs, all the while feeling nothing but deep admiration and love for the residents, the senior women who have taught me so much. My body has mediated this as the first port of call, without any headnotes from my earlier life. My body has been my primary mode of translation, and I have relished the opportunity to be out of place and compelled to try to understand the scene I have been dropped into each time I arrive in Borroloola and the Gulf of Carpentaria, into Yanyuwa homes and lives. The mind now tries to make sense of what the body has met.

Fig. 3.1 Robinson Road, main street of Borroloola (Source Author)

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Fig. 3.2 Borroloola township (Source Author)

Fig. 3.3 North Island, Yanyuwa sea Country, looking south (Source Author)

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Fig. 3.4 Vanderlin Island, Yanyuwa saltwater Country (Source Author)

Fig. 3.5 Yanyuwa housing, Yanyuwa camp, Borroloola (Source Author)

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Fig. 3.6 View from the verandah of a Yanyuwa house, in the Yanyuwa camp (Source Author)

It is into this context that I have traveled with my perceptual capacity as an existing structure for meaning but also as made up of the limits and gaps in my ways of knowing. This is revealed in the emotional responses I have had to my surroundings, the fear I mention, and yet also the joy, the freedom, and the uncertainty. An epistemic habit—that is the habit we acquire in how we understand and approach the world, is at once central to our existence in some contexts and an obstacle to our fitting into another. It is all we have, and then yet it is, in these instances a far cry from being enough. Hence the often-unsettling nature of ethnographic fieldwork and the feeling of being equally present and absent, where some of our past is relevant but it is the knowledge we are acquiring at the moment that we need most. Epistemic habit is what also aligns us with epistemic communities. These are varied for any one of us and multiple for many. There is the epistemic community of settler-colonial Australia, there is the community that distinguishes anthropology (and

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Fig. 3.7 Walking the beach, West Island, Yanyuwa sea Country (Source Author)

its subdisciplines), and then there are the communities we encounter in ethnographic contexts. We are thus at once capable of being a member, resister, invitee, student, and documenter of multiple epistemic communities. However, our role within these communities, our ability to move between them and the consistency with which we are verified as belonging to any one of them is shaped by a range of factors, including how do/did we encounter this community, are we invited in, do we want to participate, have we got the skills and perceptual capacity to participate, and what consequences do we face if we do and what do we face if we don’t? Our belief in new epistemic habits and the communities that sustain them can become a condition of our ongoing relationships and learning. Being with another knowledge habit over sustained periods of ethnography surely increases the likelihood of hearing and seeing another in its epistemological, ontological, and axiological richness. And in turn, this process in some way transforms us. A consequence of long-term ethnographic encounters is that one’s reality or habit shifts in order to receive and be with another’s habit. Hokari (2011: 256, see also Chakrabarty

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2000: 108) writes of this as being in the “gap,” a gap that should not be the end of the story but rather the starting point to “communicate across” deeply plural spaces, while Bradley with Yanyuwa Families (2010: xix) describes the encounter of new knowledge, in this case Yanyuwa, as one in which he is compelled to respond to himself and others, when asked the question, “do I believe” in Yanyuwa knowledge. In this case, the gap, that is the space into which an answer might be offered, is one filled with silence. As they (Bradley with Yanyuwa Families 2010: xix) explain, it is in this silence that something profound occurs, whereby “thoughts, understandings and beliefs are inspired, transform, are superseded and spark anew.” The gap is not some romantic sight of enlightenment or transgressing a former self, it is a moment of realizing a deeper level of complicating the self, an unsettling that can shift toward an ever-increasing openness to potentiality. Epistemic communities need participants and witnesses to their existence. They need expression of a competence that is judged and which facilitates the inclusion of our “selves” in a particular space and time (Haas 1992: 1). This is the performative and embodied nature of membership. This notion of “epistemic community” resembles Haas’ (1992) distinction of a “thought collective” and Kuhn’s (1970: 175, 180) broader definition of “an entire constellation of beliefs, values, techniques, shared by members of a given community” and which governs “not a subject matter but a group of practitioners” (Haas 1992: 1). Such epistemic communities depend upon a shared set of normative and principled beliefs, which provide a value-based rationale for action; shared causal beliefs which then serve as the basis for linkages between action and outcome; and shared notions of validity, that is, meaning must be intersubjectively experienced and internally defined (Haas 1992: 3). This is what we meet in an ethnographic context, and during that period of ethnographic presence we exist alongside and within another epistemic community, simultaneously being with its rationale, values, linkages and enterprise, and our own epistemic habits. That resonance is found with this new epistemic habit is possible as imagination is cultivated and empathy grows with and among our collaborators and ourselves. Empathy prepares us better by fostering insight into different perspectives and promotes open-mindedness, discouraging hasty and superficial responses to new ideas. Empathy as it is regarded here is a disposition of openness to others, a high-level relationality that builds as does rapport and respect with another. It facilitates construction of more elaborate and frequently novel insights, discouraging belief

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rigidity and encourages cognitive and personal flexibility (Gallo 1989). In the face of knowing nothing, perhaps it is with empathy, that we are made available to everything? The human interaction that distinguishes the ethnography on which I write (with thanks to Jackson 2005) is an intersubjective mode of being that is responsive and based in a relational fullness which brings about change in both parties. This may be explained as a form of empathy as a sensitivity and togetherness. Learning through empathy, is a profoundly localized experience, so much so that when we leave the scene of the habit, we leave the context and the relationships that verify our existence in relation to ways of knowing and the legitimacy of our participation in this community. This is the dilemma of leaving the field, and continuing our working lives often at a distance (physical and cognitive) from the communities in which we have found ourselves immersed, and educated and enriched. It is often what is met and judged in other contexts, and may become a subject of scrutiny and critique in academic and other circles. We may be accused of transgressions, or of “appropriating ways of knowing.” These charges are fierce and encountered heavily in settler-colonial contexts when we move from the remote to urban context, from the field to the political stage of increasingly competitive academic life. What then do we do with what we have learnt and what right do we have to be changed by the encounter?

Sustained Ethnographic Encounters as Acts of Testimony and Witnessing Since 2001 I have collaborated with Yanyuwa families. This research has involved themes of cultural wounding and healing, and the impact of culturally prescribed settler-colonial violence on people and their Country (the lands and waters) that sustain them. I have engaged with Indigenous perspectives and understandings under the guise of kincentric ecology as a guiding methodology, doing so as a non-Indigenous person. I have been guided in my learning through my friend and mentor John Bradley. John introduced me to a group of women from Borroloola in 1998, nearly twenty years after his own arrival in that community. On this first occasion, I met four senior women, Annie Karrakayny, Dinah Norman, Jemima Miller, and Rosie Noble. We met in John’s office at the University of Queensland. The women had flown from Darwin to Brisbane, as they did annually, to assist John in the teaching of Indigenous knowledges, to groups of university students. During this meeting

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we discussed, in brief, life in Borroloola, recent events concerning land claims on their Country and their desire to tell “women’s stories.” It was Annie who said, “we women have our own stories too you know, too long its been men talking to men, and writing down men’s business. But us women have our Law too and we want to write that down.” This was an invitation of sorts, and I promised I’d come visit. As the discussion moved onto my visiting Borroloola and learning about Yanyuwa life, with John as my mentor, it was agreed among the women that John would be “like my dad,” “teaching me properly about Yanyuwa Country, bringing me up proper in a Yanyuwa way” (Annie Karrakayny and Dinah Norman, personal communication 1998). From here I got my first five kinship terms and relationships in Borroloola. John became my kajaja (dad), Annie and Dinah my ngabujis (father’s mothers), Jemima my narna (father’s sister), and Rosie my murruwarra (cross-cousin). I left the office that day buoyed by this rapid extension to my tiny world, one that I would pursue further, with my first trip to Borroloola in the following year. John has, since that day, honored his role, emerging a profound source of insight, both as primary and secondary witness to life and change in Borroloola. John, as a forbearer has been the architect of my introduction into the field as well as my thought development and personal growth in the field. The fact he was entrusted into this role by senior Yanyuwa women says a great deal about his own understanding and ability to apprehend a Yanyuwa world. In many respects, it was John’s own commitment to learning, his vivid display of mobility of mind, that provided me with opportunities to learn. Without a doubt I have learnt differently, in part because of my arrival in Borroloola 20 years after John, with the intervening years marked by huge change in the community. But primarily my learning has been different because I have little to no Yanyuwa language proficiency, unlike John, who is a fluent speaker, having learnt from a generation of senior men and women who spoke fully in Yanyuwa. As John’s chapter attests, this distinction cannot be under-estimated as a shaping aspect of how one learns and accesses a Yanyuwa epistemic habit. In April of 2001, during my second visit to Borroloola, I wrote the following in my field notebook, an embarrassingly self-conscious attempt to come to terms with and write of my worries in the field, In interviews, everyone keeps telling me to ‘ask John Bradley’, saying that ‘we told John Bradley that story, and he been write it all down, we taught

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him proper and he’s got that story now’. I feel like I’ve arrived too late, and there’s nothing left to learn or write down. Either I’ve arrived too late, or the time of big ethnographies is over, or I’ve got to find another way of approaching this project.

Lacking originality and freshness, this field note scribble seems symptomatic of graduate student angst, but actually captures the moment when I began realizing I had to embed myself in the research process more fully and find my way into an experience of learning. It is also the moment in which I realized John’s own capacity to give testimony to Yanyuwa life and experience. I needed to base my research not on what others before me had come to Borroloola to learn, but rather I needed to be led by Yanyuwa in ways that reflected our own terms of relating. I had been asking the same questions as John, because I was not looking upon the scene of daily life yet with my own eyes, or eyes that had been trained to focus, in a way that Yanyuwa wanted and had hoped when the invitation to visit was extended. I still find myself shaky on my feet in this regard, having learned to be comfortable with letting the scene of daily life in Borroloola lead my research. So far, letting the scene lead has helped, in that I must listen to what Yanyuwa are most passionately talking about at any moment, or what matters are contentious in the community, where people’s interests lay and their preoccupations focus. This is how I now gauge the direction for my research. It was John Bradley and also Frances Devlin-Glass, both contributors to this book, who prepared me for fieldwork by sharing their candid and practical experiences of being in Borroloola, personalizing the encounter of everyday life in this remote setting and populating the Borroloola landscape with real people, people of substance and connection. John had already been living and collaborating with Yanyuwa for nearly 20 years at this point, and Frances had recently returned from a lengthy stint of time in Borroloola, working with Yanyuwa to construct their community website. John and Frances gifted this opening up of the ethnographic scene to me ahead of my first fieldtrip. What this foregrounding assured was a staging and preparation for empathy with the people of Borroloola, as a by-product of my care and friendship for and with John and Frances. It populated this community with noteworthy elders and Law experts, with familiar names to put to faces that would assist me in my arrival and adjustment. It also demanded a commitment to behaviors that would not jeopardize the health of existing relationships with Yanyuwa.

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In other words, I couldn’t stuff up, for fear it would impact upon lifelong relationships that John in particular had fostered. I had to conduct myself well and also meet the expectations set by John’s own capacity for learning. Since my first visit to Borroloola, I have traveled back annually, and in recent years undertaken fieldwork with the other contributors to this book, John Bradley, Liam M. Brady, and Philip Adgemis. We have become a regular party of four, each with our own motivations for coming to Borroloola that first time, and then returning. Something of these shared and diverging motivations is revealed throughout the pages of this book. During my time collaborating with Yanyuwa families, I have met many forms of Yanyuwa testimony from speech acts in interviews, daily exchanges in casual conversation and also more formal orations; kinship and familial politics; the use of space and distinguishing of Country and place relations; Ancestral Law; intra-communal politics and interactions with intrusions by the state; body politics and emotional states. The list is long. Yanyuwa enforce their own epistemic habit as they organize and present these testimonies. Familiarity with the expressions of epistemic habit—in the form of language (a fine-tuned insight that John has, but which I do not have), oral tradition, social memory, and individual testimonies, as well as bodily performance, develops over time. It cannot be fast-tracked and becomes something more confidently navigated the longer we remain in the ethnographic mode and intersubjective encounter. Time and familiarity with testimony as reflective of acquiring a new epistemic habit are profoundly linked. I sit comfortably with a view of ethnographic exchanges as acts of “testimony and witnessing” (a proposition upheld by Geertz 1988: 73–101, and also Bautista and Braunlein 2014). Testimony is engaged here as truth expression, rather than verified/verifiable truth content. Appreciating ethnographic encounters as forms of witnessing to the testimony of another has been key to the reflexive consideration of my own epistemic habit for it lends clarity to the relational exchange that defines knowledge acquisition in the context of fieldwork. Life is testimony, a testimony to existence, experience, and expectation. I’ve sat with Yanyuwa testimonies as both personal and collective statements of life, often accounts which embody and express hope or keep at bay fears of disappearance, that is disappearance of stories and language and ways of being that are distinctively Yanyuwa. Set against the backdrop of settler colonialism all Indigenous testimony might be understood as a retrieval and sharing of memories

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and experiences otherwise silenced by coloniality. Thus, they demonstrate the power of speech acts to ground accounts and experiences in real life at this moment. When taught in the context of collaborative research and then written of in publications and other reporting, Yanyuwa are presenting testimony in a manner that might begin the task of dialogic exchange and education, beginning with me as a non-Indigenous Australian and expanding to an ever-growing audience of readers and students. Perhaps the goal of sharing testimony is to bring new language and consciousness to life. Is this my job? I feel uncomfortable asking this, yet I am striving to understand what then do I do with what I have learned? Testimony is truth in its expression, which is distinguished from a statement of truth in content—as being with testimony does not require verification of truth, which can intrude on and interrupt the witnessing mode. As a witness, I am never capable of “seeing and hearing” everything that circulates in Borroloola and in the translation of narratives and accounts of everyday life into English. Furthermore, constraints are placed upon my learning because knowledge is not free and as I enter into ethnographic encounters I am dependent upon the willingness of Yanyuwa to educate me. I do not and could not possibly speak with everyone in Borroloola, and I do not know the inner lives of everyone I do meet. There are some gaps in my relationship field in Borroloola, which grow as the population becomes younger, and as I find my links shrinking due to the passing on of elders. I have tended for the last nearly 20 years to work almost exclusively with a core group of around 5 families and it is they who control what I come to know about Yanyuwa life and Law. Increasingly it is the children of these elders, a core group of middle-aged Yanyuwa who are now my teachers and dear friends. In many respects, we have watched each other’s lives for 20 years, we’ve all gotten a bit older and now share in an understanding of where each of us has come from and ended up at this precise moment in time. As Dussart’s 2004 work with Warlpiri women in central Australia documented, knowledge can be shown but not shared, presented but not proffered. There is much capacity for control and constraint here. Decisions are made in these intercultural exchanges and the limits of what we might know are set by our collaborators, but are also set by the limits of our imagination and the nature of our existing epistemic habit. In which case, we must consider the counterpart of testimony, that is, witnessing, that part of the exchange that lies with ourselves. Here I find a framework for understanding my own role in ethnographic moments and

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the relational contexts and orientations that lend support to empathic engagement and mobility of mind. Witnessing has a suite of accessible lay meanings, some of which resonate with this discussion, including: to “see” something, to have knowledge of something, to have faith in something having occurred, which invokes the element of belief and/or acceptance. Witnessing would seem to involve more than spectatorship. It is also distinguished further in the literature along the lines of primary and secondary witnessing (Cubitt 2011). Primary witnessing demands more than “looking on” and expands into a bodily experience which disrupts our sense of well-being or certainty in what we might know or think (Lustiger Thaler and Knoch 2017). It is this disposition which supports the cultivation of empathy, working to expand our imaginations or imaginative capacities. This need not mean being present at the moment of an event or occurrence but indicates a state of being or disposition when in the presence of the testimony of an occurrence. This disposition is what I refer to as responsive reflexivity. The primary witness is reflexively self-aware. The process of consistently problematizing the self and identity in relation to something or someone else increases the likelihood of seeing and knowing the existences and positions of others. Reflexivity is the process of coming to know and speak/write of our relational proximity and response to the structures of life and the dispositions of others. Secondary witnessing on the other hand involves a disposition more akin to nonresponsive reflexivity. This is inclined to stop at the self and does not so readily expand to include a high level of relational consciousness of other beings, structures, and dispositions of consequence and import (to the point of [dis]comfort). It holds less referential consciousness yet acknowledges occurrence of the testimony. It is engaged at a distance without compelling the need to know more, denoted by the statement, “I am here and you are there” (see Kearney 2017: 194–197). Responsive and unresponsive reflexivity both have roots in axiological practice, revealing information about the perception of worth and sense of value as it is generated within any cultural context or as it is replicated through particular epistemic habits. It relates to what people come to value and how they determine worth as culturally prescribed, thus there are distinctions to be found in the way that people perceive and prioritize aspects of life. Likewise, this reflects the value structure, which underscores habit and which is the thinking map a person uses to reach conclusions about things. Axiology determines perception, behavior, and views,

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and thus shapes our testimonies; it is also what shapes and influences our capacity to and style of witnessing. What then is my capacity to act as a primary witness? Collaborating with Yanyuwa, across their homelands, I am increasingly drawn to not simply add cross-cultural perspectives to understandings of life and the surrounding world but to make my own conceptualizing cross-cultural. It is the idiom “add people and stir” that I believe chases the anthropologist, gaining ground if we do not work on our own conceptualizing. I actually want to be changed by the things that I am learning. I don’t wish to set them aside from how I view the world. Returning to the particular premise of my work on kincentric ecology and sentiency in the place world, my education with Yanyuwa has been sustained to the point of complicating what I now know about place and the likelihood of sentiency and agency in place and within the nonhuman realm. I’d go so far as to say that upon my arrival in Borroloola I had no real epistemic habit for understanding place and wider ancestral presences in place. I had at my disposal high school geography, but nothing of a clue about Ancestral Beings, places enlivened by Spirit Beings, and Law inherent in the land and sea. I also had no profound perceptual habit for faith, belief, or spiritual and ancestral legacy. Having been raised in a household devoid of religion, not as consciously atheist, but rather more so a condition of faith-indifference, or potentially class and the exhaustion of my single mother, organized religion and faith-based directions for life, as a belief in the unseen or intangible, in my life were absent. The possibility of an ecology alive with kinship, agency and communicative potential across the human and nonhuman realms, while a seemingly wild proposition was also entirely reasonable to me. There is no other explanation for the creation of Yanyuwa Country than the lively excursions, and movements of Ancestral Beings that traveled, ate, fought, reproduced, hunted, gathered, burned Country, and more, as they brought this world into existence. This occurred during the Yijan, a time also referred to as the Dreaming, a time beyond the configurations of clocks and numbers. This is a time that always was and remains, for the Law that was etched into Country at that time remains. The Ancestors did not simply do their job and move on, many stayed in Country, and others still move across and through it, actively engaging with and impacting on human life in the present. Their presence can be felt in ephemeral visitations, or as a constant presence at places across the land and sea, it is communicated through environmental phenomena, and feelings of ease or unease

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which take hold at certain locations on Country. Upon meeting this I was struck by the extent to which I craved more than the suburban Gold Coast landscape in which I was raised, a place stamped with the ugliness of fast-paced development, dredged waterways, retained coastlines, housing estates, and high-rise buildings. I had no counterargument for the fact that there is more at play in the world around me, and figured that in the face of knowing nothing, I might as well avail myself to something so richly configured by my Yanyuwa teachers. It was an altogether convincing proposition. Other aspects of my life, which may have seemed obstacles to my coming to understand Yanyuwa life and Law, have ironically proven themselves to be vital to cultivating understanding. It has been the absence of certain lived experiences that has prepared me well and left me open to possibilities, as is the case for kinship. Take for example the fact that I was raised in a very small household, by a grandmother, mother, and sister. This left depth of ancestry an under-conceptualized and underexperienced aspect of my life. I was not a worldly character, and the geographical extent of my single parent, working-class world was small. Any knowledge I had of the complexity of the world, let alone place relations, emotional, and cultural geography had been shaped in my imaginary long before they were shaped through my own real-world encounters. I do believe I entered Borroloola a blank canvas, in two respects, the first: I lacked a perceptual habit in regards to faith, intangible elements, and worldly or ancestral influence. And second, I lacked rigidity, for a lack of habit, in understanding the place world as sentient, complex and communicative. I believe that I was able to be with new epistemic habits simply because my own were rather absent, if only fledgling.

Did I Always Know? No, I most certainly did not. Here I want to launch a case for the merits of unexceptionalism, a quality of one’s existence which may be your best friend in the context of ethnographic encounters. We are all unexceptional, although are often compelled or choose to make a claim to be otherwise. Unexceptionalism is the self-effacing realization of our own ordinariness, a state which avails us to imaginary capaciousness. I consider myself to be “unexceptional,” not in an alarmist, seek me some help kind of way, but in a sense of being raised amidst the conditions

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of a deeply ordinary life, my years unmarked by exceptional or distinctive experiences. My early years were not exceptional, and fit easily into a simple narrative of working-class, white Australian life, the kind of life that is not recorded, rarely interesting enough to make it into the master narratives of Australian storytelling. That said, the principle of unexceptionalism I am referring to here, does not rely solely upon simplicity, banality, or common experience. Instead, it is distinguished by a quality of saturating familiarity, as a kind of habitual insignificance determined by both the self and a wider audience. One can live a life of extreme complexity yet be unexceptional if those you share this life with regard it as unremarkable and expected. One can also live a life of complexity, yet when the qualities that make up this life are disregarded or problematized as strange then this life too can be experienced as unexceptional, as a form of strangeness bordering on un-noteworthiness. Many anthropologists have written of similar themes, mining their own biographies for a sense of reflective motivation for the pathways their lives and careers have taken. Michael Jackson (2005: ix), recalls the realization that, “…hindsight persuades me that my path was decided by a sense that I did not altogether belong in the place where I was raised, and by a growing conviction that in other places, living another life, I might make good what I felt I lacked and somehow come into my own.” Unexceptionalism traveled easily with me as I became a young white female university student in the 1990s, educated largely by white older men in the disciplines of anthropology, and existing as a figure rarely imagined as the form in which knowledge or influence might take its hold. The inheritance of patriarchy is not lost on the academy, certainly it was not during the early years of my studies. On the brink of a new millennium, it may have been promising a change and a loosening of its grip but the entitlement to keep holding on had not shifted entirely. Appreciating the role of unexceptionalism in my ethnographic learning, it has become a point of reflexive introspection for me, rather than one of frustration. I understand unexceptionalism as bringing with it a state of translucence, a form not inclined to take on any particular disposition, not marked as a figure of extraordinary distinction. It allows us to take shape or try on a wider range of possible habits, and move through diverse spaces, being open to the influences of plurality. Exceptionalism, while revered in the academy and across the postmodern technocratic industrial world, and venerated as the exemplar of that which is outstanding, extraordinary, unique, noticeable, and remarkable, serves us little when the only social

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capital we need is a willingness to learn, refrain from intrusion, and an ability to listen and learn. It is a condition of working with people who live with the effects of cultural wounding that the hardships of life demand attentive witnessing. Personal and collective traumas, both of the past and present circulate in the air of daily life in Borroloola. People live with poverty and a degree of powerlessness induced by the structural legacy of coloniality. This is both heart-breaking, and frustrating for a responsive witness. It widens the gulf between Yanyuwa collaborators and myself, and thus I must work harder to be in the gap. Empathy is one instrument I have available to me, and it compels openness and cognitive/personal flexibility. When told of life’s daily challenges, of a past marred by settler-colonial violence, of Ancestral Beings watching us, or when warned of threats from malevolent and lonely spirits, or when the needs and wants of Country are expressed in the health or decline of lands and waters, there is so much I do not know, have not seen, and cannot comprehend. But I have faith in Yanyuwa explanations. This epistemic community is one I deeply value, and I believe what I am told because I work to let it pass into my epistemic habit without diffusing it. I have now spent longer being educated by Yanyuwa families than I spent in mainstream schooling in Australia. I cannot and should not unlearn what I now know thanks to Yanyuwa and their Country. And I am drawn to fold this not only into my academic life but also my personal life, as part of a wider commitment to intercultural praxis. Professionally though my research is tested by the need to systematically peripheralize or add to my existing epistemic habit, and accept as central, an Indigenous epistemology that configures the world in ways that are new to me, including an emphasis placed upon kincentric bonds, nonhuman agents, communicative exchanges between human and nonhuman kin, and sentiency in the place world. By seeking to unlearn and peripheralize what epistemic habit I may have, I have considered three things: What do I now know? Why have Yanyuwa taught me? And am I permitted to know this in a settler-colonial context?

Why Have Yanyuwa Taught Me? First and foremost I believe that Yanyuwa have taught me because John Bradley, the first step in this whole exchange, introduced me to the women from Borroloola. They trusted John. They have taught me

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because I turned up one year to begin my ethnographic fieldwork, and because I have returned every year, and continue to ask questions. Yanyuwa have taught me because I could not exist in Borroloola without “knowing something” and operating with headnotes on everyday life in this community, which ensures I meet everyday expectations and behave in accordance with a kind of local habit. They have taught me because their story matters, because they’ve been telling anthropologists, ethnomusicologists, filmmakers, lawyers, linguists, and other visitors their story for generations. They have taught me hopefully because they like me, that they trust me and what I might do with this story, and that they believe I am capable of not only hearing their words but appreciating and understanding these words and perhaps so that I can see the world in their way. They have taught me so that I can teach others. It might also be that they have taught me because I am a whitefella and their whole lives are based around translating themselves to whitefellas in a settler-colonial Country where Indigenous lives are relentlessly documented, scrutinized, and reported on. Whatever the reason for people agreeing to welcome me time and again in Borroloola and to continue to answer my questions and offer up unsolicited insights and information, surely the core motivation in any educative exchange is that those who teach do so in order to educate and in turn change or enrich the student.

Am I Permitted to Know an Indigenous Epistemology in a Settler-Colonial Context? Why does speaking to and writing of the transformation that is a mobility of mind, make many of us uncomfortable, and our audiences nervous? In the context of Australian anthropology, I suspect it is due to the enduring fear of vanity ethnography, but I also trace it to the nature of the decolonizing agenda that has necessarily swept through academia over the last two and a half decades with varied urgency. There is a heavy politics in saying the anthropologist, as witness to a new epistemic habit, might be changed. Yet, how is our consciousness of Indigenous lived experience developed if we do not change? How do we decolonize without coming to know what we are in relation to, as the colonist? How do we ethically represent these stories, if we do not try? It is the complexity of operating in this particular space that, in my view, defines a key aspect of mobility of mind and shifts in perceptual capacity. If epistemic habit and belonging to an epistemic community

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require witnesses to their existence and validation by other constituents then the experience is likely to be heavily localized. This is because it is a profoundly political statement claiming a new or changed epistemic habit in the context of intercultural ethnographic encounters, no less so in a settler-colonial context. Gate-keepers operate widely in epistemic communities, and in a settler colony these are met at multiple junctions throughout our careers, revealing the enduring legacy of intercultural tension and failed reconciliation. We meet them in the immediate moment of ethnographic encounter where decisions are made as to our capacity and opportunity to learn. We meet them once we retreat from the field and return to our own epistemic communities and try to explain where we have been to a familial audience that often cares little or understands even less. We also meet the epistemic community that is populated by a broader audience of Indigenous Australians, who rightly question the white academic’s right to speak. That our knowledge habit is scrutinized is clear and this constrains our opportunity to be with it or claim it. Once removed from the localized context in which we learn and through which we are validated as permitted to know, we lose confidence in our membership, it is judged and may be presumed an arrogance that befalls the researcher or more specifically a vanity ethnography. This is because any claim “to know” is political, even more so when operating interculturally. This I do not see shifting any time soon, thus in concluding I feel I have to address the immobility of our changed epistemic habit.

Final Thoughts Shifts in epistemic habit and perceptual capacity are entirely dependent on the relational structures that support our learning. Thus, they may not be highly mobile, a challenging reality to face as an anthropologist and author. I have made the case that they exist in moments but not lifetimes because with our retreat from the field we remove ourselves from the value-based rationale that justified and supported our education, and the shared notions of validity and intersubjective experience that is the praxis of knowledge. We are left hinting at what we know, ourselves alive with the translation dilemma. With this in mind, I return to my original conundrum, can we change our epistemic habit through extended periods of ethnographic encounter? Yes, I believe we can. To argue against mobility of mind strikes me as reckless and universalizing. Moreover, this works against the discipline’s

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commitment to reveal the situational politics that make the anthropologist or social researcher an individual and also the maker of rhetoric. We came to terms with the abandonment of neutrality decades ago, with the poetics and politics of ethnography accounted for in Writing Culture (Clifford and Marcus 1986) and Women Writing Culture (Behar and Gordon 1996), but yet face some resistance if we say we are changed or we are capable of knowing the world differently through the sustained educational encounter of ethnographic fieldwork. It is the coalescing of our individual biographies, our unexceptionalism, the generosity of our interlocutors, and the choice or in some cases necessity to operate as a primary witness that defines our ability to accept a new epistemic habit. How far can the anthropologist go when incorporating plurality into their research? Dare I say, perhaps not that far. This is the real challenge because mobility is found in moments, not lifetimes. It may not travel well with us, and its legitimacy is often questioned and doubted. As the audience for our changing epistemic habit grows, our ability to claim it shrinks. This is the challenge when we write of our intercultural learning with Indigenous collaborators, one I have addressed elsewhere by hinting at what I believe and conceptualize of the place world. Here however I have taken the bigger step of truthfully reflecting on what I do believe. My perception of this landscape of transformation is that we reach a stage when we begin to see things differently to that which we first thought, or perceived. Our prior perspective is turned upside down or in the absence of any perspective we find one, guided there by our collaborators and teachers. Within this landscape we may live differently because we have seen another way of looking at the world and have witnessed the others present within the world that we too occupy. This landscape would seem to come about because of a major shift in consciousness and the development of a new worldview rather than just a “me view.” It is not just about having a consciousness of change, or the need to change, but shifting the perspective because of a change in consciousness. This state of transformism potentially names a changed humanity in which we embrace the state of being transformed and becoming, rather than assuming we are fully realized or denying our own complicatedness (Dyson 2007: 45). How we convince others of the legitimacy of this is our greater challenge. However, if I felt this were a challenge beyond me/us, I would not have written this chapter, and would not find myself returning time and again to the question of what do I believe? This chapter has relieved me of any sense that this is an easy task, with caution resonating through my

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claim to unexceptionalism and mobility of mind. But if I do not explore this then I know I am not doing justice to the last 20 years of Yanyuwa teaching I’ve had the privilege to receive.

Contributor Response, by John Bradley Amanda Kearney’s chapter is a challenge to respond to the questions that often sit silently, but sometimes disturbingly at the back of our minds and yet it seems, the force of the Western academy so often does not want a response to the intimacy of these concerns. They are however so often at the core of the questions that concern what do we do with the knowledge we acquire in that is derived from other powerful ontological and epistemological places. Are we even allowed to respond in a way that silences neither the people we learn from nor the things that have become important to us? There are always questions and not all of these questions will be resolved and nor should they, so often our questions, our reflections are works in progress that lead us to place of knowing but never quite a final resolution. At the core of Kearney’s writing there lies a deep sense of what I might call cultural humility. This is practice whereby she reflects and explores the complexity of her own cultural inheritance. Such reflection allows her the space to explore what might have been internalized and embodied from her family of origins, how she grew up, her own cultural traditions, social identity, and life circumstances and socioeconomic background. In this regard, cultural humility is a tool by which she uncovers the ways in which that cultural inheritance impacts on how she relates to the people that she has worked with for the last two decades. In her reflexive practice, it is evident that there is an adult journey of self-awareness and self-reflection. Her chapter points, with nuance and care to how we might explore another culture without any attempt at merging or outright collisions. It is not simply about learning a list of what to say or not to say in mixed groups. While not specifically saying it her chapter points to the issues of good fieldwork, as based in the relational and not just about being “politically correct.” There is just too much to know without being able to constrain and make a proclamation that one now knows all there is to know. Like the work of Ruth Behar, there is a vulnerability in the writing, and yet it is this vulnerability that is also her strength. It gives her the freedom to understand that

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all human beings are multidimensional beings, with overlapping and intersecting identities, with complex values and beliefs. Misunderstandings will occur, and even good intentions can have a negative impact on others. The starting place for cultivating cultural humility, then, is to develop an attitude of inquiry, sensitivity, and active listening. In her writing Kearney raises the specter that so often a Eurocentric view is seen to be superior with little concern for the internalized racism that holds the center of the standardized forms of knowing and being, that for example, can be found in our daily lives and within the academy. The issue as she rightly suggests might be fine for a Western “secular” society but it may not be for a culture such as the Yanyuwa who inhabit a collective in regards to important knowledge. This is particularly in the case of the self, whereas the west so often prizes the strongly individuated and rational persona. When the practice of knowledge construction focuses on the overt processes of individual effort, we can if we are not too careful leave behind the systematic inequities that we know exist and in doing so it reinforces internalized oppression and the wounding created by historic and ongoing racism. These are then misleadingly configured as personal failings rather than as something that should be a collective responsibility. Kearney speaks to a need to hold, to be aware and in the latter part of her chapter she speaks to how we might acquire a mobile mind. Such a statement goes to the core of one of my favorite quotes from the anthropologist W. E. H. Stanner (1968) where he said, “there is stuff in Aboriginal life, culture and society that will stretch the sinews of any mind which tries to understand it.” When we stretch, when we exercise, which is akin to the reflective and later reflexive moments, this is what we are doing, we are considering what has occurred, why it might have occurred and we work with that. We begin the process of stretching the mind so as to resist the rigid structural views of the past, and present, viewing it rather as complex intertwining. This is what then creates the mobility of the mind. This need not be a fearful undertaking but bring awareness of all the things that come together to create these spaces that we find ourselves occupying. This is indeed the challenge. Yet so often we have chosen, at our peril to neglect it and rather have occupied ourselves with ideas of the objective, distant observer.

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References Bautista, J., and P. Braunlein. 2014. Ethnography as an Act of Witnessing: Doing Fieldwork on Passion Rituals in the Philippines. Philippine Studies: Ethnographic and Historical Viewpoints 62 (3–4): 499–523. Behar, R. 1996. The Vulnerable Observer: Anthropology That Breaks Your Heart. Boston: Beacon Press. Behar, R., and D. Gordon (eds.). 1996. Women Writing Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press. Bradley, J., with Yanyuwa Families. 2010. Singing Saltwater Country. Sydney: Allen and Unwin. Breyer, T., and C. Gutland (eds.). 2016. Phenomenology of Thinking: Philosophical Investigations into the Character of Cognitive Experiences. New York: Routledge. Chakrabarty, D. 2000. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Clifford, J., and G.E. Marcus (eds.). 1986. Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Berkeley: University of California Press. Cowlishaw, G. 1999. Rednecks, Eggheads and Blackfellas. St Leonards, NSW: Allen and Unwin. Cowlishaw, G. 2004. Blackfellas, Whitefellas and the Hidden Injuries of Race. Oxford: Blackwell. Cowlishaw, G. 2009. The City’s Outback. Sydney: UNSW Press. Cowlishaw, G. 2017. Tunnel Vision: Part One—Resisting Postcolonialism in Australian Anthropology. The Australian Journal of Anthropology 28: 324– 341. Cowlishaw, G. 2018. Tunnel Vision: Part Two—Explaining Australian Anthropology’s Conservatism. The Australian Journal of Anthropology 29: 35–52. Cubitt, G. 2011. Atrocity Materials and the Representation of Transatlantic Slavery: Problems, Strategies and Reactions. In Representing Enslavement and Abolition in Museums: Ambiguous Engagements, vol. 3, ed. L. Smith, G. Cubitt, R. Wilson, and K. Fouseki, 229–259. Routledge Research in Museum Studies. New York: Routledge. Dussart, F. 2004. 2004 Shown but Not Shared, Presented but Not Proffered: Redefining Ritual Identity Among Warlpiri Ritual Actors (1990–2000). The Australian Journal of Anthropology 15 (3): 272–287. Dyson, M. 2007. My Story in a Profession of Stories: Auto Ethnography—An Empowering Methodology for Educators. Australian Journal of Teacher Education 32 (1): 36–48. Gallo, D. 1989. Educating for Empathy, Reason and Imagination. Journal of Creative Behaviour 23 (2): 98–115. Geertz, C. 1988. Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

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Gutland, C. 2018. Husserlian Phenomenology as a Kind of Introspection. Fronteirs in Psychology 9 (896): 1–14. Haas, P. 1992. Introduction: Epistemic Communities and International Policy Coordination. International Organization 46 (1): 1–35. Hokari, M. 2011. Gurindji Journey: A Japanese Historian in the Outback. Sydney: University of New South Wales Press. Jackson, M. 2005. Existential Anthropology: Events, Exigencies and Effects. New York: Berghahn. Kearney, A. 2017. Violence in Place, Cultural and Environmental Wounding. London: Routledge. Kuhn, T.S. 1970. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lustiger Thaler, H., and H. Knoch (eds.). 2017. Witnessing Unbound: Holocaust Representation and the Origins of Memory. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press. Mahood, K. 2000. Craft for a Dry Lake. Sydney: Random House. Mahood, K. 2016. Position Doubtful: Mapping Landscapes and Memories. Melbourne, VIC: Scribe Publishers. Merleau-Ponty, M. 1962. Phenomenology of Perception, trans. C. Smith. London and New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Michaels, E. 1997. Unbecoming. Durham: Duke University Press. Povinelli, E. 1993. ‘Might Be Something’: The Language of Indeterminacy in Australian Aboriginal Land Use. Man 28 (4): 679–704. Rosaldo, R. 1993. Introduction: Grief and a Head Hunter’s Rage. In Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis. Boston: Beacon Press. Rosaldo, R. 2013. The Day of Shelly’s Death: The Poetry and Ethnography of Grief. Durham: Duke University Press. Rose, D.B. 2000. Dingo Makes Us Human: Life and Land in an Australian Aboriginal Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rose, D.B. 2011. Wild Dog Dreaming: Love and Extinction. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Rose, D.B. 2014. Arts of Flow: Poetics of ‘Fit’ in Aboriginal Australia. Dialectical Anthropology 38 (4): 431–445. Stanner, W.E.H. 1968. The Boyer Lectures: Black and White Australia—An Anthropologist’s View. Sydney: Australian Broadcasting Commission. Taussig, M. 1986. Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Taussig, M. 2011. I Swear I Saw This: Drawing in Fieldwork Notebooks, Namely My Own. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Van Maanen, J. 1988. Tales of the Field. Chicago: University of Chicago press.

CHAPTER 4

Mapping the Route to the Yanyuwa Atlas Nona Cameron

Putting It Down, Giving Voice to Country This reflexive chapter focuses on the creation of Forget About Flinders: A Yanyuwa Atlas of the South West Gulf of Carpentaria (Yanyuwa Families, Bradley and Cameron 2003) and my part in the production of that book that began two decades ago, or three decades if what informed my involvement is included. This chapter begins with personal and domestic accounts of close relationships and intimate stories involving Yanyuwa families, John Bradley, and myself, in working on the atlas project. My position as “Bradley’s wife,” as I was known initially by Yanyuwa men and women, was integral to its creation, with the intimate and unrestricted access I had to John’s work, and the opportunities for close relational engagements with key people from Yanyuwa families. My arts-making background and prior interest in maps and charts assisted this endeavor enormously. Part of this reflexivity involves reconsidering the awkwardness of uncomfortable tensions that existed in the research process. These anxieties and stresses announced the difficult places of paradox and ambiguity present in the making of the atlas. Although voiced at times, I didn’t

N. Cameron (B) The MIECAT Institute, Melbourne, VIC, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 A. Kearney and J. Bradley (eds.), Reflexive Ethnographic Practice, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34898-4_4

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then have the maturity or reflexive lens to grapple with them more meaningfully back then. In re-engaging with the nuanced complexities and contradictions that emerged through the collaborations it is possible now to articulate the events that shaped the atlas and review the motivations, choices, and decisions made then with a clearer voice. Tracking the processes of some of the negotiations highlights how fraught and frustrating this was at times, compounded perhaps by what I didn’t know, and what was not able to be expressed. Through my ignorance and rather an innocent questioning, clarifications emerged, assumptions taken for granted were explicated, and complexities teased out. I was on a steep learning curve. Working with organizing, collating, and transferring the information from multiple sources into cartographic maps brought with it many relational tensions and uncertainties. Virtually every move in approaching these tasks involved choice and decision-making that could be pragmatic or aesthetic but could also have potential political ramifications. The pragmatic and aesthetic choices that had to be made, range from the presentational form of the atlas itself, in selecting the visual imagery of map style, of how to show the Dreaming Ancestors and their movements, down to the size of font and paper to meet the literacy and practical needs of older Yanyuwa people (see Fig. 4.1). Some larger tracts of land on Yanyuwa Country, like Vanderlin Island, were considered crucial to maintain the integrity of each whole area within their own single map, so these were included as a larger format on folded pull-out maps within the book. Where accuracy, consistency, readability, and reliability were required, these issues were taken back to key Yanyuwa people or families for checking and getting feedback. This was an ongoing process. Decisions relating to order and orientation of presentation were responded to by John and myself initially, some of which grew as improvizations or innovations on the fly in response to pragmatic and aesthetic needs. As the atlas was taking shape, our innovations were checked out for acceptability and appropriateness, and most of these navigations were done by John on his trips to Borroloola, when families visited us in Brisbane, or on the trips I made back to Borroloola and Vanderlin Island in 2002. The shape and form of the atlas continued to grow with various inclusions added over the nearly three years of its making. While I created the maps of Country, John worked on the bulk of the other content, which I then further collaborated on, adding color to the visual kujika (songline) verses, and making choices around arrangement of the sections and their

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Fig. 4.1 Close up detail of the Atlas, corresponding with mainland Yanyuwa Country, Robinson River mouth West to Sandy Head (Yanyuwa Families, Bradley and Cameron 2003: 164)

placements. Some of the key decisions regarding the atlas were resolved by responding to greater considerations around how readers might access the knowledge offered. Yanyuwa ways of knowing had customarily emerged relationally, experientially, and accrued incrementally as layers of understanding become deeper and wider. Placing information in a book in this manner was a radical departure from a form of knowledge sharing that had existed as an oral tradition. In response to this shift, there was a sense that as a reader, one should still have to work relationally with the atlas to understand, to feel into the depth of what was being offered. The process of engaging with the work then became an important aspect of how it was to be presented. There were practical restrictions in making something so complex in the early computer era, when what we had access to was simplified word processing, and that meant much other than straight text was needed to be done by hand. Creative solutions were then required in responding to issues as they arose, which is how we came to bend the rules of how an

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atlas might be presented, to ways that felt resonant with what was being imparted.

Changes, Shifts, and Paradoxes Over the time of creating what was to be a fairly simple atlas of maps, this shifted and changed to add other perspectives and layers of knowing to the body of knowledge presented. John would return from trips to Borroloola with new emergent requests to include additions and multiple ways of presenting, interacting, and knowing Country through knowledge systems. Within the pages are visual renditions and textual descriptions of landforms, weather systems, Dreaming narratives with commentaries, kujika (details of song cycles), and post-funeral songs. Selectively chosen stories, and photos also feature that depict layers of life gathered, and all of these facets show complexities of relational engagements between people and Country. These inclusions transformed the atlas to a kind of palimpsest, an encyclopedic corpus of a more extensive Yanyuwa worldview. These are the stories, ontologies, and values that old people wanted us to “put down” to pass on to younger generations. The maps act as gateways or access points to intimate understandings of relational encounters between people and Country: ancestors, kin, sea, and land. Lively and difficult paradoxes were presented as the old place names were reinstated, ancestral Dreaming paths made explicit and the many ways of interacting with Country offered. The atlas carries the richness of the life force and sentiency of Yanyuwa Country alongside a terrible and most pressing sense of loss. With each passing of another elderly Yanyuwa man or woman who were fluent in these old ways, they took with them connections to history, ceremony, Law, knowledge, and language, that the atlas pages were trying to hold together. Behind John’s desire for handing back this repository of information was the imperative to capture what was significant, before access to it disappeared with the key people who held it. John’s response was also very much to that of the remaining old people who intensely grieved this loss every day, keenly aware of what was leaving with them. Imbedded then within the making of the atlas was a real sense of urgency behind a need for committing this knowledge to paper, while it could all be robustly checked, resourced, and corroborated by important parties of people. The project speaks to the tenuous nature of passing such a body of knowledge on that was facing potential risks of much being lost to future generations. Reflecting now that while

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involved in the co-creation of a resource so rich in value and depth of knowing, I recall how there was always an undercurrent of loss that permeated this project and all the decisions around what was included were imbued with this. There was a great loss both in recording or showing through a presentational form by the compromises that this brought and in what cannot be included because of incommensurability with modes of showing. There was a loss also in not making this book, through ignoring or not attending to what was happening with a cost that it could be too late to retrieve the details in depth and breadth in a robust and rigorous way. Tensions coexisted with these navigations particularly in the radical discontinuity of moving from a tradition of oral transmission of knowledge to a fixed presentational form through creating a book. My limited awareness grew exponentially around the complexities of placing this knowledge, of “putting it down on paper” in a way that might concretize it, and freeze it in time and place, on a 2-dimensional surface without voice or its own language. This also involved creating a visual language as Yanyuwa had no visual art form to borrow from, where to create images was viewed with a suspicion of sorcery by older people. Without Yanyuwa to express the cadences of song, of repetition, the spaces, and silences between words, emphases, the time taken, sensually hearing while being on Country, in place with embodied feelings and sensations, with each incremental telling, in relationship, over time—how might this translate through English? Putting all of that experiential process into words and visual forms on paper, in a book that offers open access to anybody and no intermediary, what might all of this do, to a practice and tradition that exists in a form of orality that is deeply rooted in place, and with a politics of place? Is it worth losing so much in order to save what can be recorded? Is that a question I can even ask? Looking back, I know I didn’t or couldn’t fully understand the volume, shape, or size of what these considerations might mean, and in reality, these clumsy questions were not mine to ask, but they hover around all the same. The potential of reducing the diversity of what is essentially a multilayered, multivoiced, and experiential process of knowledge transmission into a single source seemed really precarious. That is not to say it would exist alone without people to interpret or comment on it. But there was cognitive dissonance in what was being proposed, and a background sense of the innate dangers of losing much of what was integral through this translation, though perhaps not knowing exactly what these would be.

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Maybe also a fear of inadvertently adding something “other” lurked as well. At the same time, John and by extension, I, was aware that not to innovate and utilize media at our disposal, even very rudimentary media, felt to have far greater consequences of loss. Once ideas were tried on paper and returned for reviewing, key people gave their approval for such a process. Some of the maps in the atlas are presented in landscape orientation, for example, while others are in portrait form. This fact of having to turn the book in response to engaging the information within it, allowed freedom to change orientation of other aspects that ordinarily would remain in a portrait presentation, such as how texts were placed, photos, cross sections of landscapes, the kujika song verses, and the imagery of ceremonies at the end. Stories were wrapped around the central Dreaming narrative texts that were presented in boxes for instance. Continuity of style was not a required function within the atlas. Information is offered in Yanyuwa, English, and through arts modalities, with all of these speaking to and responding with each other to tell a coherent narrative of Country. Other forms of mapping were also engaged, the kujika were presented as cross sections, as a way for the reader to move through and travel alongside with Country as it is revealed, in response to the way verses of the songs dictate. The shape and perspective of these choices came from a discussion between John and Annie Karrakayny where she shared an important observation. Karrakayny queried why “white people always had maps and were happy to always be looking down on Country,” what would happen, she queried, if “white people learnt to go through Country?” (Bradley, n.d.). The multifaceted ways of presenting the information in the atlas impacted how one interacts with the book taking on a more embodied collaborative process that made it not a static, nor necessarily sequential read, but rather something to open in sections, turning it around, and moving with it in order to engage. It has wider ontological and axiological implications in responding to the function of knowledge transference as an incremental layering, as something one has to work with to understand. This is an essential element to the atlas around the co-created relational engagement with the process of knowledge sharing, whereby the how of what is being presented is crucially being attended to. Amidst the grief of loss, of language rapidly diminishing, with significant ceremonies no longer performed, and ways of life changed so radically as people were living in the township rather than on Country, this atlas was a slice of hope. At the time of its making, from 2000 to 2003

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there were just a dozen or so fluent full-time Yanyuwa speakers remaining, and they were aging. The awareness of what would go with them and not be passed on when they died was pressing. Not knowing what repercussions might follow by breaking the rules of an oral tradition and making a plethora of separate knowledge open to anyone to access, the political fallout from this was unknown. However, the act of recording something of significance to take forward for future generations was a thing on which to pin some optimism and encouragement. How could this not be given a go?

Threads, Tracks, and Paths to Yanyuwa Relationships My introduction to Yanyuwa families was one where I was given a red carpet in-road as John’s “wife”—loosely named, as we were not married at the time. I met John in Darwin, who by then had lived and worked with people from the different language groups at Borroloola for over five years. He had been intensely involved with Yanyuwa, Marra, and Garrwa families through his roles as a primary school and outstation teacher when living at Borroloola and then further as a research officer for the then Aboriginal Sacred Sites Protection Authority, a government organization based in the Northern Territory, responsible for the registering, monitoring, and safeguarding of Aboriginal people’s sacred and ceremonial sites across the region. John was reasonably fluent in Yanyuwa language by the time we met. Trusted relationships developed through my involvement with John, where I was automatically slotted into the Yanyuwa kinship system through him. Many of these relationships were strengthened by intermittent visits we made as a family to Borroloola and the Pellew Islands over the following years. Gaining insights into Yanyuwa ways happened directly through John, and from “knocking around” with people in the course of our lives. My understanding of Yanyuwa language was extremely limited, through bits of phrases, keywords, directional markers, and kinship terms, with a paucity of grammar thrown in. Through extended times of sitting or moving around with the old ladies, I learnt to get the gist of gossip by grabbing a few keywords of context, largely following through body language, stilted phrases, a little bit of English inclusions and names mentioned, and then following up to clarify. It was not unusual though

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to need to be filled on the details of discussions when they were all in Yanyuwa. It was obvious that the old Yanyuwa women truly appreciated the opportunities that John offered by communicating in language, for them to immerse in their own cultural nuances and sensibilities. This was clearly seen and felt by the animated raucously funny conversations had, to the intensely serious, sometimes whispered, discussions around matters of Law, and the everyday ordinary gossip. Perhaps because John was such a prolific learner, they thought I ought to know a lot more than I did, and it often became too much “humbug” (trouble or hassle) or interruption in the conversation to translate everything for me. I would often sit at the edge of interactions, at times fully included, or others fancifully following, or even sometimes completely missing what was going on. This could be quite frustrating when I felt uninvolved and disengaged. It did not escape me then that this was resonant for these women when in non-Yanyuwa company, particularly in urban settings like in the city of Darwin or Brisbane, as they would be at the edge of conversations and not getting the complexities of the English that carried the nuances of urban life. What always truly astounded me on these visits with the old women, listening to the banter in language around a culture so rich and in some ways so foreign, was that this was happening in Australia. In many ways these exchanges are silent, not valued and included in the national conversations, they exist on the edges with all of the losses carried so heavily by those experiencing them largely overlooked by wider Australian communities. There is great sadness around this. When John and I went to Borroloola together for the first time, before we even entered the township, we met a group of women on the side of the main road. This was my first encounter with Amy Friday, Dinah Norman, Jemima Miller, Thelma Douglas, Ida Ninganga, Annie Karrakayny, and Eileen McDinny, who were hunting for goanna. Instructed to put on my sandals when they saw my soft-soled feet, I jumped out of the land cruiser, and raced behind these skillful barefoot hunters, running over the blackened stubble, as I tried to keep up. The women were quite intrigued by Bradley’s wife, giving me such a warm welcome, inviting me in, singing songs, laughing and joking, and offering the tail meat from the hunt. I realized I was in a very privileged position, even when as a young vegetarian lass from the city, I quite ignorantly declined the meat to maintain my own set of values and inadvertently offended theirs.

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Later in that visit, I was let known of my responsibilities in being “married” to John Bradley, when Jerry Brown, a formidable elderly Law man, came and sat opposite to me in the camp. From what had been a scene of rowdy kids, barking dogs, and chatting women, things grew very quiet when Jerry sat down and began to speak. I noticed the women had their heads bowed, and I followed suit. His was not a soft voice, but rather a gravely, loud grating oration, leaving no doubt about how seriously to take the message delivered. He proceeded to proclaim John’s credentials, in matters Yanyuwa, both in ceremonial and Law terms, and how as his “wife,” among other things, I must never “jump the fence,” or “run away wunji” (be unfaithful). Although not actually married, we were considered de facto or “kangaroo married.” He made a cutthroat gesture toward me, and then finished, satisfied that he’d informed me of my responsibilities, he promptly got up and left. All then returned to normal with people chatting though I was left quite shaken, and considering many things, among which was a sense of obligations that ran through relationships that I knew little of, and of how highly John was regarded by significant people. On that visit, with each encounter with key people at Borroloola, I was given new insights into John’s life at this remote part of northern Australia that had been his home for several years and of which I came to realize, I knew nearly nothing. Every time we returned together, the layers of new experiencing continued to form our relationships which in turn incrementally informed ways of our being and knowing place. Ingold (2009: 33) proposes that human existence “unfolds not in places but along paths. Proceeding along a path, every inhabitant lays a trail… these trails are entwined as the life of each becomes bound up with the other.” The paths stretch like threads and tracks, inhabited and described by movement, and as we move along them, they also move through us. Nowhere more did I feel this than on the island Country, as we traveled along routes taken by so many, in different times and dimensions. The ancestral tracks of the kujika (songlines) intertwined with peoples’ movements over the sea Country, with so many stories crisscrossing these paths that were laid down as intricate webs of connection. This was once the center and heart of Yanyuwa life and activity, as this term that people used to refer to themselves strongly states, liYanyuwa, li-Anthawirriyarra, people whose spiritual origins come from the sea. By the 1980s because of a range of government decisions, only pockets of people were living on or visiting outstations, and by the time I returned there in 2000, only a family or two continued to live full time in

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opposition to moving to town. This once noisy Country had such a sense of quiet longing associated with it, longing for it, and from it. The contours and elevations of this longing are also captured in the topography of the maps.

How Getting Lost Offered Us an Atlas The idea of creating an atlas emerged from the convergence of two distinct moments, which occurred in the late 1990s when John was receiving multiple requests from Yanyuwa old people. These “old people” were the men and women with whom John traveled through the savanna grasslands, the escarpments, mangrove forests, sea, and islands of the estates of the Yanyuwa. As they traveled across these terrains over the years and in different contexts, memories, and stories were experientially evoked and shared, and ways in which people had moved through and navigated Country with their parents and grandparents were recounted and recorded. The finest details were captured of fruits in season, how to butcher dugongs, different species of “sugarbag” (wild honey) bees, and what bark to use for what ropes. Kujika were also recorded and notated as songs were elicited from being on Country standing on these paths. These “old people” represented the ways and times that were unencumbered by the dictates of government policies and restrictions, when people moved freely. These records of John’s had effectively become a repository of knowledge that was being accessed more frequently and for various reasons, but many involved the loss of those who had once held this knowledge. One of the moments that led to the atlas emerged from a domestic discussion in our kitchen at home, when John announced what I should do with his two full filing cabinets that were housed in our back room, in the event of his sudden death. These cabinets held accumulated ethnographic data that had been collected for two decades of working with Yanyuwa. According to John, one cabinet was to be discarded and the other lodged at “the Institute” (the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies [AIATSIS] in Canberra). This was a rather outrageous statement that required a much more thorough descriptive account of these legacies, though it flagged something that was weighing heavily on John at the time. The second moment was sometime later as a throw away remark in response to getting lost in Brisbane. The comment was made by Annie

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Karrakayny, an elderly Yanyuwa woman, when she and her sisters were visiting our family from Borroloola. I was driving us all somewhere and I took a wrong turn, rendering us lost in the suburbs. I stopped the car to refer to a Refedex, a paperback street directory, to locate where we were going. Karrakayny asked me what I was doing and when I explained that the book was a map of that Country we were traveling through and it could help us to find our way, she exclaimed, “Why don’t I have a map of my Country?!” This sparked the initial idea of an atlas, thus solving the problem with the filing cabinet and the vast ethnographic record of place names in one go. In essence, John realized that most of what had been gathered were details, nuances, and complexities that at the heart related to peoples’ reciprocal relationships with their Country. Country was always at the center. Much of what was significant in the data collected could be relayed and included in a version of an atlas. This idea grew exponentially from there.

Moving In from the Edges Having access to the lens of John’s gathered work was a privileged position to be in, having extraordinary access and availability to his relational encounters with people and place over decades of interactions, and I learnt so much as I pulled material together for the project. At times, it also pulled my conceptual understandings in ways that stretched me beyond comfort. Challenges to accepted ways of doing things, moved me to loosen my own lens for seeing and understanding, that I realize had incrementally been shifting over the years with visits to Borroloola and through all the conversations at home. Accessing this material through notes was a step removed from interacting directly with people, which was both informative but also at times distancing for me. For pragmatic reasons, much of the checking in with key people happened through John as he went to and from Borroloola for other purposes, where he gathered feedback and emergent requests for the atlas. Although my role was vital in realizing this project, it was John who had the substantive relationships with people. I did get to return to Borroloola and Vanderlin Island on one occasion during this time, which was very valuable, not only for the practicalities of what was needed but also in helping me feel connected to the project in embodied and relational ways with people. It was on this occasion when Steve Johnston corrected an error that I made on the path of the ngabayas (Spirit Being Ancestors), how I had misread where

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they traveled over the south-eastern corner of Vanderlin. Steve said to me I needed to “make them walk on water.” I had them traveling further south and inland, on Country that was not theirs. The finer details of this helped me realize, that where there were clear explanations and directions for corrections, silent nods were given to things that were just fine. Generally, much was met with silence and acceptance, or enthusiastic singing of the tracks that ancestors made. Reflecting on the shifts and changes that happened over time with the project, I recall feeling confident in creating topographic maps and drawing imagery as a means to show the paths of the Dreaming Ancestors in response to specific requests for John’s return of material. It was when the atlas grew to be more than that, when I considered the potential and historical importance of this cultural translation for a community of people, that feelings of intense inadequacy crept in. Mahood’s (2016) title Position Doubtful, holds resonance for me now in reflecting on those times, not in relation to locations of places, but more my place in this position and the doubt about my role in collating all that was becoming and growing into being the atlas project. My own position felt doubtful around the responsibility of making and collaborating this historic piece of work, as it pushed up against what I considered were gross insufficiencies, in the mode and methods to express the complexities of these interactions. As an artist, and arts-based researcher I am a great fan of creative means as ways of showing and expressing, as these modalities offer other dimensions, textures, and qualities that words alone cannot, it was perhaps the means at our disposal not being elaborate or flexible enough. Maybe too, I felt out of my depth somewhat. Although the intention was for returning silenced knowledge to the maps of history, to make them visible again, there was still a feeling of disquieting paradox in fixing knowledge to paper, not unlike the act of early settlers and colonizers. Wood (2010) offers provocations around Indigenous mapping projects being considered as “counter-mapping,” saying that maps have historically been used to wield power as “instruments of the state,” that they are in fact a form of the “invaders” language. He (2010: 141) writes, Whatever maps have they carry with them, no matter who’s doing the mapping. The problem with Indigenous mapping, therefore, is that it’s simultaneously cooptive and reactionary… forcing Indigenous peoples to adopt

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a technology of those who used that very technology to seize Indigenous lands in the first place.

What he highlights here speaks to my discomfort, and the terrible contradiction that this is the language that is most accessible and useful for Yanyuwa people as a carrier of their knowledge, when the old ways are no longer available. Yanyuwa elders were less concerned with the form of mapping having been used in acts of colonization, but rather made pragmatic choices according to their urgent and emergent needs, as a means or utility to carry forward what they considered as vital and necessary. Indeed, through mapping on paper the voices are still silent until place names are read aloud, which is in direct contrast to the ways in which this knowledge has been passed on by song, storytelling and through ceremony, in vibrant embodied relational interactions with others. I acknowledge that this whole atlas undertaking was certainly a decolonializing process, as the agencies of both Country and its people are being restored. However, the ways that this was occurring, the method of fixing knowledge to paper in such a radically different way was a difficult contradiction. In that awkwardness I began to question my place and position, did it matter that I was an urbanite for much of my life, and hadn’t lived remotely when representing this Country? What about me working on the atlas thousands of kilometers away from Yanyuwa Country out on the periphery? For the most part I worked in the suburbs of Brisbane, alongside John’s collection of maps and notes, asking questions of John, raising curiosities, and finding inconsistencies which led to more questions. Perhaps because I was not in direct regular contact with people, I found myself going down a rabbit hole wondering at the efficacy of what I was doing. John’s reflections on the intention of knowledge translation and representation in the academy, are similar to those at the forefront in the making of the atlas. I came back to these in my moments of great doubt. In his article Can My Country Hear English? (Bradley 2017: 68) he reflexively notes, “It worries me that one does violence to the life history of a story by turning it into a disposable commodity of information. There are questions surrounding such information, who is it for? And what purpose is it seeking to achieve?” In my mind, this speaks clearly to the intention of creating the atlas as a cultural encyclopedic opus, even if the modes

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caused consternation and contradictions for me at times. It was abundantly clear that the atlas project was being made for and in collaboration with Yanyuwa families. Recalling the time when I showed the map to Archie Johnston, jungkayi of Vanderlin Island, he remarked, “All the old names are there again. The names that I heard the old people use. We can forget about Flinders, now we can use these” (pers. comm. June 2002).1 The sense of validation and empowerment that was apparent for him on seeing the Yanyuwa place names written on these maps was fantastic to witness. We discussed the importance of the old names and how they are so prevalent across the island, unlike the few names that were inscribed in English. Matthew Flinders circumnavigated Australia for the British government in the early 1800s, where he charted the coastlines and named geographical features as an early colonial act. He traveled around the Yanyuwa homelands in 1802, proclaiming this area as the Sir Edward Pellew Group of islands, named after a captain in the British navy. This colonial act in effect removed the intimate knowledge and historical relationships to place, whiting out the records of Yanyuwa lives and replacing them with either names of English men or innocuous descriptions like “Observation Island” and “Investigation Bay,” names that meant nothing to the people who inhabited these places. What existed for so many generations of Yanyuwa was erased and silenced, at least in the records of the land that were considered important by settlers and became the governing power of the land. The implications of this were profound in the longer term, as was the impact of returning the original names to the owners and guardians of the Country. The atlas’s title, Forget About Flinders arose from this interaction recounted above with Archie Johnston.

Art as Ways of Knowing and Expressing From when I first met John in the mid-1980s, I’ve witnessed him experimenting with different modalities to represent a Yanyuwa worldview. It has been a driving force in him, first as a way to understand the very particular Yanyuwa perspective, and he has done this through embodied ways of making and expressing predominantly with his hands. Then his intention turned to educating those who would listen and pay attention. I was particularly impressed in those early days with his table-sized 3-dimensional depiction of the Pellew Islands that he created as an education aid to draw attention to the relationships between Yanyuwa, island

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and mangrove ecosystems, dugong and sea turtles. In many ways, John’s been mapping sentient landscapes for as long as I’ve known him through pastel drawings of stories (Bradley 1988), scribing on maps, singing song poetry, and depicting songlines (Bradley with Yanyuwa Families 2010). He’s drawn public ceremonial dances, sketched how to butcher dugongs (Bradley with Yanyuwa Families 2016), created delicate line drawings as cross sections of landforms, and made cinematic visual scores showing the journeys of songlines as a precursor to an animations project as part of the Wunungu Awara: Animating Indigenous Knowledges project at Monash University. Up until the acceptance of Yanyuwa Country (Bradley 1988) it had been a complex and somewhat fraught process for John to make images in the manner to which he was used. The Yanyuwa were renowned for their song poetry and dance as their main artistic forms, but there was no tradition of public visual representation other than perhaps body markings and other sculptural forms in ceremonial contexts prior to the 1980s. This is unlike the rich visual art traditions seen in central Australia or northeast Arnhem Land, in the area of the Gulf Country, visual art forms were viewed as suspicious on the whole, with comments like “who do you want to kill?” aimed at the drawer or painter (Brady and Bradley 2016). This is a reference to sorcery-related art practices, narnu-bulabula, where images were used with the intent to cause harm to others for a variety of reasons, it was considered questionable and dangerous that an adult would want to manipulate images other than for malintent. Rock art sites were often considered connected with these practices, as outlined in Brady’s chapter in this book (see Chapter 6). Much shifted over the time since then, when in the late 1980s and 1990s, a community art movement eventually got off the ground in Borroloola. Although there was this shift one still had to be careful about representing visually, being descriptive in stating clear intentions, and care with the content matter. For these concerns and sensitivities, it was considered a good option for a non-Yanyuwa person to take on the project of drawing the maps, the Dreaming stories and the atlas more generally. That is how I came into the research project. I felt comfortable to privilege arts modalities with maps. Ideas of creative potentials of exploring the mapping of Country were fancifully considered initially around novel ways to engage with the complexities that needed expressing, possibly exploring around dimensional layering of knowledge. However, sensibly, we chose to use the understandable

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and reliable topographic maps that were already familiar to a community who were used to engaging with these from working with government agencies and land councils. These were the closest way to descriptively and aesthetically show what might not be captured in text. My interest in topographic maps and charts, came initially from studying coastal navigation and enjoying bushwalking using maps as guides. First copied from topographic charts, I then used watercolor pencils. The result has a bit of an old-world feel, and people were happy with them. They were a bit softer in appearance than the original maps, though I still used the landscape symbols of geographical features, obeying the mapping conventions set out by geographers, as a consistent form of visual language Stylistically the background to the maps followed these conventions, using the color and markings to show landscape systems like grasslands, mangrove forests, river systems, open woodland forests, and the like. And then they were overlaid with images of Dreaming Ancestors. Other innovations developed as the atlas grew in complexity, that responded to a less rigid stance where we bent the rules of presenting an atlas, this was done as artists rather than cartographers and according to our needs of expression (Harmon 2009; Wood 2010). This was purposeful as a way of acknowledging the epistemological divide between what an atlas might carry in a “state sanctioned” cartographic colonial process of mapping Country (Wood 2010), and what a community might make for themselves when the power of decision is their hands. The images of animals, birds, fish, reptiles, insects, and shells to represent Dreaming Ancestors were copied from field guides that show the most descriptive realistic forms of these, not in any attempt at being scientific but rather that the Dreaming stories recount detailed species particular to places. I considered the best way to be communicative around these, would be to make them look accurate with coloring, markings, and shapes of the species. Again, feedback from people was that these were easily recognizable in ways they understood. They were readable, knowable, and translatable. The ngabayas —spirit men and had less information associated with them. John negotiated how these images might be presented with key people over time. A bit frustrated by this, I didn’t particularly like the ways the ngabayas looked, but this was part of the brief that I had to go along with.

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Creased Maps and Field Jottings When I began the process of looking through John’s material for the atlas, I was handed a substantial accumulation of 1:100,000 topographic maps and diaries that were garnered from his many travels made through Country over years. The maps carried scrawled words as detailed traces of interactions in time. They were sometimes laminated as the paper was torn and at risk of disintegrating in the folds of sections, muddied with wear and handprints from use. The place names and Dreaming tracks that were scribed were numerous and looked to be hastily scribbled at the locations as a record of these visits. I could envisage John with the men or women standing around the bonnet of the Landcruiser, on the seat of a boat, squatting on the dry earth, or on beaches, with the cumbersome unwieldy maps flapping like an injured bird, being held down with rocks, marched on by insects as places located were scored in ink over the topographic marks. The Yanyuwa names replaced many English terms where they existed or they coexisted together for ease of navigation, after all, the river systems that were given men’s names were well entrenched in the local vernacular. It was more interesting to note that the Yanyuwa names were often prolific in areas that had been without reference, offering a complex web of interactions previously not seen on the charts’ topographic markings. In cross-checking John’s maps and notes, I noticed some conflicting records emerged between maps that were worked on at different times, around locations or spellings of place names, there was one name with five different spellings. These needed further checking and clarifications before committing to paper and they highlighted for me the responsibility of rigor, of getting things as accurate as possible, something a little daunting in light of these ambiguities. Basso (1996: 57) transparently describes the tensions inherent in working with emergent research methodologies, “Mulling over imperfect field notes, sorting through conflicting intuitions, and beset by a host of unanswered questions, the ethnographer must somehow fashion a written account that adequately conveys his or her understanding of other people’s understandings.” It wasn’t until the year 2000, that the imperative to make an atlas was made explicit and acted on, through engaging me as a coresearcher. My small moments of burden around accuracy and rigor were amplified for John many times over, with regard to returning this Yanyuwa intellectual property. It seemed to me that after his, then, twenty years of collecting data,

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John felt confident that he had sufficiently tested “evidence” to commit this knowledge to paper. It was finding the means with which to do it that had been the sticking point. After many discussions with John, I realized that what his various maps had shown was that he had checked, reviewed, and recorded the most correct versions of place names and Dreaming tracks that were known by the old people still living. My process was to finish the sorting, to harvest the most up to date accounts and consolidate these with consistent spellings and locations that had been agreed upon by key people. I seemed to have more questions and curiosities than solutions, and with the emergent nature of our collaboration, what was going to be included in the book was changing and shifting. Each time John returned from Borroloola, and after visits from elderly Yanyuwa women to our place, another addition for the atlas would emerge. This was reconciled to understand the atlas had grown beyond just maps, to become an encyclopedic showing of what was considered important and significant about Yanyuwa knowledge systems and Law. Photos were chosen to be included to give context, and stories were added to accompany the Dreaming narratives, that ran through the volume. The stories supporting these narratives were as they would be in the telling in person, as with a Yanyuwa sensibility, nothing stands alone. The atlas was becoming a living decolonial document, co-created, and negotiated by many people and Yanyuwa families were contributing enthusiastically. It was becoming multivoiced and multimodal (Devlin-Glass 2005, 2006). Growing up in city suburbs, my understanding of the lay of the land through a geographical lens was somewhat rudimentary, though this perspective was profoundly intriguing to me. My interest in topographic maps and nautical charts assisted in paring back the colonial layers of settlement to see what lay beneath, before being channeled, contained, flattened, and unified. John’s field notebooks, which formed the very cornerstone of the atlas project, are full of raw ethnographic data, of stories and word lists gathered from trips on Country, nouns of plants, animals, waves, rocks, ancestral beings, and verbs describing geographical landforms and ways to butcher animals. The names placed on maps, and the many entries in his field notes are from interactions with old men like Pyro Dirdiyalma, Don Miller, Johnson Timothy, Isaac Isaac, Dinny McDinny, Musso Harvey, Tim Timothy, and others. Tragically, many of these men died in their middle age, from undiagnosed heart conditions as a result from illnesses not picked up in early life. The tellings in John’s notes trace

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histories of these intimate and robust relationships that formed on Country, on ceremony grounds, in the camp, and at important public meetings, with men of singular and collective importance. The maps themselves are historical documents that carry a huge and multifaceted history. The names in these field notes and etched onto these maps represent far more than the sound and form that these words make, they carry with them a storehouse of history, emotions, and belonging of people and kin to Country (Kearney and Bradley 2009). The notated scraps of records in John’s diaries are access points to a multitude of nuanced ways of knowing, inhabiting, and interacting with the land. They denote ancestral geneses, and link to places with powerful songs that amplify the life force of sentiency and kin, that travel along unseen tracks. These songs can be many kilometers long, and their stories, words, and rhythms were committed to memory by the singers that were re-energized through ceremonies (Bradley with Yanyuwa Families 2010). Place names recorded sites of ceremonial or ritual significance, as well as places of gatherings that are rich with resources, history, and sharing. Powerful areas of ritual significance were noted, warning of restrictions, where only select older authoritative men in the right relationship to that Country could travel. Conception sites were sometimes noted as significant places of interest. These names are imbedded with a Yanyuwa sensibility in ways of knowing, reading, and being in relationship to Country, and to the ancestors who created these places and laid down the Law with all that this entails. I find I can write about this with some fluency as it has seeped into my being from years of being around John, although I only witnessed men and women singing and dancing on occasions, not always in their presence, although it always felt formidable with the power that they carried when engaging with their Law. I was at the edge of all of this, looking in and back through John’s work, seeing and sensing a time that was rapidly changing, where ceremonies were dwindling, and no longer performed. The accessibility of the maps and images offers active and immediate engagements by all levels of people, ages, literacies, and knowledge at Borroloola (Kearney 2012). Young people and old alike have engaged with these, though in different ways. As John returned with the initial images of the Dreaming story maps to Borroloola, to gauge reactions, people like Yanyuwa elder Dinny McDinny, Isaac Isaac, and Annie Karrakayny were able to pick out main characters in the imagery immediately, and sing the songline associated with them, tracking their finger as a pointer

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across the Country. Pyro Dirdiyalma, for whom Amanda Kearney delivered the atlas on our behalf, cradled the volume, requesting that she come back the following day, to sit and read properly the “big orange book” all about Yanyuwa Country (see Fig. 4.2). For initially he wanted to privately be with the document and spend time with his Law in quiet. These people had formidable memories where they could travel through song over many kilometers without faltering, evoking the Dreaming Ancestors

Fig. 4.2 Pyro Dirdiyalma holding his copy of the Yanyuwa atlas (Yanyuwa Families, Bradley and Cameron 2003) (Source Amanda Kearney)

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and their travel. This was how the maps were checked, clarified, and validated as being part of a living and vital document, with the blessing to go forward in the shape and form that was emerging. All maps were checked with the senior jungkayi (guardians) and ngimirringki (owners) (Bradley with Yanyuwa Families 2016: 226, 419, see note 1).

Sensing a Topography of Rage The process of mapping Country had unexpectedly changed me also, where I began to see and sense Yanyuwa Country in a different way. In 2002, I went to meet with Steve Johnson and Wilo McKinnon on Vanderlin Island who were senior men for that Country, for us to sit down and review the map illustrations together. As the large mass of Vanderlin Island loomed closer, sitting in the boat I looked across the sea to the escarpment at Wubuwarrarnngu and seeing the jagged rock formations, I had an unexpected visceral response of sensing or envisaging the Rock Wallaby Dreaming, a-Buluwardi, there. I had drawn her on the Vanderlin Island map at this place, and then recalled how she had inhabited the coastline, moving along it, creating its twisted shape with her digging stick, enraged in response to the attempts of Yulungurri, the male Tiger Shark, who was trying to come ashore with his bundle of cycad food (see Fig. 4.3). A-Buluwardi called out, “Go away from here to the south to the mainland, I will stay here by myself, I belong here, I am bitter in my feelings, I am dangerous, I am heated!” (Yanyuwa Families, Bradley and Cameron 2003: 67). The scene seemed to be unfolding before me in a larger than life vision, seeing her in her headpiece of string and feathers, the same style of headdress worn by women in the ceremony, the same also as boys’ dress in initiation, gyrating with rage. When people retell her Dreaming narrative, she is given the voice of an angered woman, and she enacts a ritual movement called jijijirla. This is described as a threatening display used by women prior to combat, stabbing at the ground with a woman’s digging or fighting stick. Perhaps because now I was seeing with new awareness, through a lens from having animated this furious character, her presence seemed to inhabit the place in a very present way for me. I could imagine the Rock Wallaby’s digging stick shaking and stabbing at the rocks and her taut vibrating body warding off the Tiger Shark’s intrusions. Reminded of Basso’s (1996) Wisdom Sits in Places, the Country came alive for me at that moment, seeing it embedded with meaning and power, particular to

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Fig. 4.3 Vanderlin Island Map, featuring the a-Buluwardi Rock Wallaby on the west coast (Yanyuwa Families, Bradley and Cameron 2003: 51)

that very place. “Where places are involved, attendant modes of dwelling are never far behind,” Basso (1996: 58) writes, “…call it, if you like, the ethnography of lived topographies – much remains to be learned. Places and their sensings deserve our close attention.” My attention was piqued, and I was riveted by this experience, so much so that the moment convinced me of the value in the ways of showing through the maps.

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This moment was building on a prior experience I had of witnessing jijijirla on an occasion at Borroloola. At this time, there was a dispute between two clans, where the argument was resolved through ritualized and actual physical conflict resolution. During this time Eileen McDinny performed a ritualized form of controlled violence that showed the enraged enactment that is jijijirla, with digging stick in hand, she performed a tightly contained embodied expression of visceral rage, in all its furious short sharp highly energized vibrational form. It had a singular power to it, the muscular intensity was remarkable and palpable. When I drew the Rock Wallaby warding off the Tiger Shark’s intrusion, I had experiential knowledge of jijijirla, having witnessed this form of rage amidst Eileen’s performance and feeling of it (see Fig. 4.3). I then sensed and felt what was held in that place on Vanderlin Island and in being in proximity to it, my senses became alive to the vibration of that enragement in place. Whether this makes sense to a reader or not I cannot tell, but Casey’s (1996: 19) quote here captures something of it, “…when we perceive places: our immersion in them is not subjection to them, since we may modify their influence even as we submit to it. This influence is as meaningful as it is sensuous. Not only is the sensuous senseful, it is also placeful.”

Moving from Stasis The reason for choosing to make an atlas-encyclopedia stemmed from the indisputable fact that Country was at the heart of virtually all of the ethnographic data that John collected and documented over time. An atlas coalesced all the disparate parts into a meaningful whole. Many pressures and urgencies are highlighted in this chapter that were felt and carried through this undertaking. There was no coincidence in the timing of it occurring when Yanyuwa language was in crisis, at the edge of serious demise with only a dozen or so fluent speakers left alive (Bradley with Yanyuwa Families 2016, 2017). While the project felt really important at the time, I realize now the background urgent momentum that kept it moving, spoke to losses; loss of language, and knowledge, of key figures— many of who have died since—who were the holders of Law, songlines and key responsibilities for Country. In 2019, there are just three people remaining who are considered fluent in Yanyuwa as a first language. The loneliness of this is almost unutterable, for these three people, and for the Country that yearns to hear its language.

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In 2003, when the atlas was completed, further decisions emerged around agency and access to the volume. Seeing it as a whole finished work, it was a significant repository of Yanyuwa Law and identity that felt familial, and with some consideration Yanyuwa families chose not to widely publish but rather keep it within the community of Borroloola. Small print runs were done with large A3 copies made for each family. There was agreement though that the major University libraries in Australia as well as the National Library and AIATSIS would hold a copy. Members of the public have to request permission to access the atlas that is held in situ for viewing and reading. AIATSIS have reported the atlas as a very valuable part of their collection (Travers 2016). How the atlas is used today is perhaps another research topic, but the success of the atlas has links to the animations project, directed through Monash University at the Wunungu Awara: Animating Indigenous Knowledges , where the first few films made were animations of Yanyuwa Dreaming stories as they were recorded in the atlas (see Bradley et al. 2011; Kearney et al. 2012). The principle animator, Brent McKee, utilized the atlas as a vital resource, being an example of what was accepted by Yanyuwa families in visually representing their stories. Our worries of the atlas becoming a document of stasis have been shown to be unsubstantiated, as it continues to have a life of its own 16 years since its publication. I’m aware that numbers of copies are being made regularly for young Yanyuwa men and women who are requesting it to use in different applications within their professional lives at Borroloola. Those who are actively engaging with it are particularly the li-Anthawirriyarra Sea Rangers as a cultural guide to their Country in their fieldwork, and the teachers and deputy Principal of the Borroloola Primary School, who incorporate it as part of their education program. Young people see it as a very important document that has been sanctified by their grandparents and their great grandparents. Having access to the atlas as a Portable document file (Pdf) has made it accessible and transportable as an electronic document that can exist on a USB stick to be printed off easily or accessed on computer. This issue of availability is essential in a community where books may not have longevity in surviving in the tropics and with mobile populations where a book may be borrowed among extended family situations.

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A Final Reflexive Gathering In this chapter, I have described in depth the processes of reflexively working with vast ethnographic data to form an encyclopedic atlas of Yanyuwa Country, knowledge systems, and Law. Through this nuanced reflexivity in sharing what was significant through intimate access to John Bradley’s ethnographic fieldwork, essential contributions from key Yanyuwa families were carried forward through maps, stories, and imaginative ways of showing. In this process of telling, an auto-ethnographic account has emerged. By substantially bracketing myself in, transparently reflecting on my part and responses to researching and collaborating, I foregrounded the complexities and confrontations I encountered through this intersubjective endeavor. Paradoxes and contradictions emerged through preserving in the face of such great loss. What I found so difficult through committing reflections to paper was speaking from the edge of the immensity of losses that ran through all of what was captured. And I only know what I know. Though the atlas had a wonderful reception, it was from tragic circumstances that it was envisaged. This was profound in the reconsidering and retelling, especially thinking of all the old people who have since gone and the rapid changes that have occurred over the time since publication. The overall sense of what stays with me is the silencing of Country and how important it is to counter this in ways available to us. Reinstating the old place names, and making the Dreaming paths visible for future generations, was what we set out to achieve. So much more grew from these, through the courage of peoples’ convictions of engaging front on, the radical discontinuity of knowledge transmission that was occurring. Through approaching the atlas project with an artistic lens, we creatively employed arts-based processes in what was included and how these were shown. This enabled different perspectives to be offered and allowed orientations to these that offer meaningful ways of accessing knowing. Although Yanyuwa culture is relatively new to visual forms of representation, the arts offer ways of knowing and expressing that words cannot. They invite immediate access to modalities of song and movement through Country. In this way the topographies of lived experience could be captured in cartographic processes and then those rules were turned on their heads, so the atlas might be picked up grappled with as a means to imaginatively create new relational engagements with what was important to be passed on. The reciprocity of relationships with Country and

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kin have sustained people for generations, in lively encounters that were held in the ceremony, Law and language. This is much of what the old people insisted on capturing in this multivoiced and multimodal volume to pay forward to generations of Yanyuwa families to come.

Contributor Response, by Liam M. Brady The Yanyuwa atlas is an extraordinary resource, and has played a pivotal role in my archaeological research. I frequently turn to the stories and illustrations to visualize the travels of Ancestral Beings and other spiritual entities responsible for, or related to, the rock art scattered across Yanyuwa Country. In seeing and reading the stories found in the book, I am usually mining them for information to support my attempts to situate Yanyuwa rock art into its proper social and cultural contexts. I’ve always known the atlas is based upon Bradley’s work with the Yanyuwa men and women he collaborates with, yet upon reading Cameron’s chapter I was drawn to consider in more detail two key aspects: first, the complexities surrounding producing such a volume especially in terms of the politics surrounding the knowledge presented and the potential ramifications for getting something wrong, and secondly the role of “visual language” in the way Yanyuwa see and engage with the world. Cameron’s response to the challenges she faced while working on the atlas clearly highlights the important responsibilities of the researcher when working in contexts such as the ones woven through this book. What happens if we get something wrong, such as the path of a songline, miss a node in describing a relational network, intrude on a heavily gendered landscape, or the interpretation of a rock art motif? There can be very real consequences for such mistakes—the implications can be considerable and appear at different scales. People may feel hurt, angry, or upset that their story was not captured correctly and as a result lose trust in a researcher, or there could be legal and political implications in terms of Native Title debates, and ownership. The relative permanence and influence of text-based descriptions and narratives has an important role in western-based courts of Law and once this information is enshrined in articles and books there can oftentimes be a power imbalance in whose stories are considered “correct.” As such, Cameron’s reflections on the process of co-developing and proofing the atlas holds a valuable lesson

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for researchers, one that emphasizes the tenuous nature of holding, presenting and discussing Indigenous knowledge, and a keen awareness to cultural sensitivities. Cameron’s reference to Annie Karrakayny’s query as to why westernoriented maps are always “looking down on country” instead of looking “through country” raises a critical issue for researchers involved in similar projects to the ones discussed here, namely the role of “visual language” in telling stories and reflecting how others see the world around them. This type of query challenges the researcher to consider alternative ways of presenting information beyond standard topographic maps and for that matter, text-based descriptions of various features in the landscape such as mudflats and escarpment country. The examples provided in the atlas reflect this commitment to engaging with this style of knowledge—the cross-section maps are an excellent illustration of this process. Likewise, the digital animations of Yanyuwa songlines from the Monash Country Lines Archive are examples of an effort to use a visual language to communicate knowledge in a way deemed by Elders as appropriate. In describing her experiences, Cameron’s chapter teaches and reminds us that research in Yanyuwa Country, and for that matter any other Indigenous-related context, isn’t solely embedded in academic research questions, but reflects an awareness of the complex process of relational engagement that can sometimes be frustrating, exhilarating, and certainly challenging.

Note 1. Jungkayi are workers, guardians, and policemen who assist the owners of Country, the ngimirringki, and make sure that they perform their rituals and sing their songs correctly. They also make sure that the rules relating to certain parts of Country are enforced and punish those who see fit to break the Law. The jungkayi are children of the women of the patrilineal clan group (see Bradley with Yanyuwa Families 2016: 229). Ngimirringki are owners of particular stretches of Country and associated Dreamings and ceremonies. These people stand in a patrilineal relationship to particular Dreaming Ancestors and their Country. The word is often colloquially translated as “boss for Country” (see Bradley with Yanyuwa Families 2016: 419).

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References Basso, K. 1996. Wisdom Sits in Places: Notes on a Western Apache Landscape. In Senses of Place, ed. S. Feld and K. Basso, 53–90. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press. Bradley, J. 1988. Yanyuwa Country: The Yanyuwa People of Borroloola Tell the History of Their Land. Melbourne: Greenhouse Publications. Bradley, J. 2017. Can My Country Hear English? Reflections on the Relationship of Language to Country. PAN: Philosophy Activism Nature 13: 68–72. Bradley, J. n.d. Singing the Land, Holding the Land. Unpublished Manuscript. Bradley, J., with Yanyuwa Families. 2010. Singing Saltwater Country. Sydney: Allen & Unwin. Bradley, J., with Yanyuwa Families. 2016. Wuka nya-nganunga li-Yanyuwa liAnthawirriyarra: Language for Us, the Yanyuwa Saltwater People, vol. 1. Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing. Bradley, J., with Yanyuwa Families. 2017. Wuka nya-nganunga li-Yanyuwa liAnthawirriyarra: Language for Us, the Yanyuwa Saltwater People, vol. 2. Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing. Bradley, J., G. Friday, A. Kearney, and L. Norman. 2011. That’s the Choices We Make: Animating Saltwater Country. Screening the Past 31. Available at: http://www.screeningthepast.com/?p=1030. Accessed 22 May 2019. Brady, L.M., and J. Bradley. 2016. ‘Who Do You Want to Kill?’ Affectual and Relational Understandings at a Sorcery Rock Art Site in the Southwest Gulf of Carpentaria, Northern Australia. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 22: 884–901. Casey, E. 1996. How to Get from Space to Place in a Fairly Short Stretch of Time: Phenomenological Prolegomena. In Senses of Place, ed. S. Feld and K. Basso, 13–52. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press. Devlin-Glass, F. 2005. An Atlas of the Sacred: Hybridity, Representability and the Myths of Yanyuwa Country. Antipodes 19 (2): 127–140. Devlin-Glass, F. 2006. Western Maps/Yanyuwa Meaning: An Interview with John Bradley. The Australian Journal of Indigenous Education 35: 73–84. Harmon, K. 2009. The Map as Art: Contemporary Artists Explore Cartography. New York: Princeton Architectural Press. Ingold, T. 2009. Against Space: Space, Movement, Knowledge. In Boundless Worlds: An Anthropological Approach to Movement, ed. P. Kirby, 29–44. New York: Berghanhn Books. Kearney, A. 2012. Present Memories: Indigenous Memory Constructs and CrossGenerational Knowledge Exchange in Northern Australia. In Time, Media, Modernity, ed. E. Keightley, 165–183. Hampshire: Palgrave. Kearney, A., and J. Bradley. 2009. Manankurra: What’s in a Name, Place Names and Emotional Geographies. In Aboriginal Placenames Old and New: Discovering, Interpreting and Restoring Indigenous Nomenclature for the Australian

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Landscape, ed. H. Koch and L. Hercus. Canberra: ANU E-Press and Aboriginal History. Kearney, A., J. Bradley, B. McKee, and T. Chandler. 2012. Representing Indigenous Cultural Expressions Through Animation: The Yanyuwa Animation Project. Animation Journal 20: 4–29. Mahood, K. 2016. Position Doubtful: Mapping Landscapes and Memories. Melbourne: Scribe Publications. Travers, P. 2016. NAIDOC 2016: Forget About Flinders Atlas Preserves Yanyuwa Culture and Songlines. ABC News Online, July 8. Available at: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-07-08/forget-about-flindersatlas-preserves-yanyuwa-culture/7572832. Accessed 27 May 2019. Wood, D. 2010. Rethinking the Power of Maps. New York: Guilford Press. Wunungu Awara: Animating Indigenous Knowledges. n.d. Formerly Monash Country Lines Archive. Available at: http://artsonline.monash.edu.au/ Countrylines-archive/. Accessed 22 May 2019. Yanyuwa Families, J. Bradley, and N. Cameron. 2003. Forget About Flinders: An Indigenous Atlas of the Southwest Gulf of Carpentaria. Canberra: Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies.

CHAPTER 5

“Invisible Things in Nature”: A Reflexive Reading of Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria Frances Devlin-Glass

Introduction I began working on Yanyuwa material in the mid-1990s, and was surprised to find that it led to the sharpest and most rancorous encounters, in print and in person, of my academic life. It should not have confounded me as I’d many times at conferences witnessed angry confrontations between politicized (or overly aestheticized) academics and Australian Indigenous writers. I thought I understood where they were each coming from. The print attack came from an unexpected quarter: a white critic implied that white subjectivity (mine and any other critic’s, though her own was apparently an exception) disqualified me from commenting on an Indigenous novel that dealt centrally with sacred knowledge (Ravenscroft 2012). This attempt to silence myself and others stung, and demeaned my engagement with Yanyuwa people, especially as I was accused of not doing precisely what I saw myself as engaged in—emphasizing the novel’s difference in cosmology, attempting to bridge the gaps

F. Devlin-Glass (B) Honorary Associate Professor in Literary Studies, School of Communication and Creative Arts, Deakin University, Burwood Campus, Melbourne, VIC, Australia © The Author(s) 2020 A. Kearney and J. Bradley (eds.), Reflexive Ethnographic Practice, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34898-4_5

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in understanding, and being appropriately provisional about what I did not fully understand, and I certainly did not see myself as seeing it as second rate in a canonical sense.

Carpentaria ’s Unexpectedness Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria exploded on the literary arena in 2006. An ambitious, sprawling novel, it not only dramatizes life on the margins of a remote Australian town in the slipstream of a colonialist mining enterprise, but it also makes eloquent, expressive, and dramatic the traditional matter of the Gulf of Carpentaria. It is, moreover, committed to making those epic mythic stories accessible to mainstream literary readers. Nothing like it had been seen in Indigenous publishing in Australia, and it was in 2006 very difficult to explain how it had come to be. Alexis Wright had published two earlier works, one of which, Plains of Promise (1997), I was then familiar with, but it was not a predictor of what I was looking at, though some of its lineaments, in particular its grasp of “invisible things in nature” (Wright 2006: 77) did presage Carpentaria. Wright herself was then almost unknown as a writer, but the novel quickly shot to literary stardom, an acknowledged masterpiece despite its manifest reading challenges, in Australia and around the world in the years that followed.1 Carpentaria spoke to every fiber of my being as a literary critic with a very eccentric profile of interests, and I rushed to review it and was sufficiently puzzled by it, to continue reading it, writing about it, revising, and refining my responses to it. Why did it matter so much? Why did it mobilize so energetically what I thought I knew about Indigenous culture, and how did it challenge it? What I brought to the task as a scholar and a person inevitably affected my angle of vision as a reader of Carpentaria. With a repertoire of research interests in Irish and Australian Literature, and resistant (feminist) readings of ancient Eastern European mythologies, it was probably inevitable that at some point, I would seek to uncover the ancient mythology/cosmology of Australian Indigenous culture. I had felt let down by the impoverished corpus of Australian Indigenous sacred narratives in mainstream print culture. I do not blame the owners of these stories for this deficit. It has to be said that early anthropologists did not serve Indigenous cosmology well (see Wolfe 1991).2 For instance, the deficits of T. G. H. Strehlow’s Songs of Central Australia I (1971), a key text on the subject of ritual songlines, and its satellite populist text, Bruce

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Chatwin’s The Songlines (1978) have been well documented by Barry Hill in Broken Song: T.G.H. Strehlow and Aboriginal Possession (2002). The Berndts’ (1989) need to conform to western publication practices, results in a collection that is better documented3 than the literary renditions of Roland Robinson (Aboriginal Myths and Legends 1966) or A. W. Reed (Aboriginal Myths, Legends and Fables 1982) and later Dixon and Duwell (The Honey-Ant Men’s Love Song 1990), but they remain at the level of “just-so” myths of origin (that claim to explain how, for instance, a land form came to be), and take the form of atomized short-stories/poems, which inevitably trivializes them as cosmology, though their cosmogonising impetus is discernible. They are limited by the very abstraction of the chapter topics (e.g., Eroticism, Snakes and Rainbows), and by the thematizing modus operandi which the literary versions had pioneered. Ronald and Catherine Berndt (1989: 89) make reference to how the stories gain affect and impact from performance “pauses, gestures, body and facial movements, vocal changes and emotional involvement,” but in an excerpt in Chapter 8 of The Speaking Land, where the narratology is in focus, they tell the narratives they document plainly. Stories are presented in atomized form, general conclusions drawn, complexity noted, but this is taxonomical work, done at the risk of making the stories less engaging for a reader outside the tradition.4 After 1988, the bicentennial of settler culture in Australia, and an attendant efflorescence (perhaps guilt-fuelled?) of Indigenous-authored publications, there was more to work with in designing courses on Indigenous narratives for mainstream non-Indigenous students. Despite some eloquent texts which hinted at epic possibilities and a grander scale, what is lacking is monumentality, the sense of important sacred cosmologies being brokered, of ancient Mediterranean and European myth systems like Inanna (the great Sumerian epic), or the Odyssey, or Táin bó Cuailgne (the key myth of ancient Ireland). Again, this is not to cast Aboriginal culture as lesser, but rather to point to the problematics of representation. In existing literary sources, there is little indication of the complexity of Australian Indigenous mythic narratives: of them as claiming territory in immense and interconnected ways, of clarifying kinship systems, of potentially involving more than one nation and language group, of defining systems of Law and teaching Country, or of demonstrating how they might be “lived” day-to-day; nor do they voice the affect that binds people to these ancient story traditions.

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I had first gone to Borroloola in the late 1990s with a view to better understanding how to teach a Yanyuwa film, Buwarrala Akarriya/Journey East, which had been given to me by a student while I was seeking Aboriginal-authored material for teaching. Made by Yanyuwa people to teach Yanyuwa kujika (mythic narratives/songlines) to their own adolescents, the film confounded Australian students. Its cosmological intentions were opaque to them, and its earthed sacred impenetrable. The initial plan was to supplement the film using CD-Rom technology but that quickly evolved into a website (now archived and superseded) developed with senior Yanyuwa women to explore how these songlines worked at different levels, and their differences from western narratives. The key audiences were Yanyuwa adolescents and Deakin University students. What were we westerners missing? The passion and pride generated by these foundational narratives was obvious on the ground in Borroloola when I observed Yanyuwa elder Annie Karrakayny check bilingual versions of these narratives with me for the Yanyuwa community website, or with a Japanese student translator (who would later illustrate a central Yanyuwa ancestral narratives using Manga-style imagery and be taught to dance songs for a series of women’s land-claim proofing sessions in 2006). There are many explanations one could offer for the lack of affect in twentieth-century-print accounts of songlines, the master narratives of the first Australians, chief among them, the difficulty of rendering orality and, significantly, their incommensurability with existing European print media. How can print render the affect inhering in hearing/seeing narratives enacted in the theater of a landscape impregnated with the signs of Ancestral Beings’ activity? Furthermore, modern secularized society rarely admits the existence of the sacred, much less what might be understood as such in Indigenous epistemology.5 When I was seeking to learn Indigenous cosmology/epistemology as a genre, in the early 1990s and before beginning the process of learning from the women Elders, I had gone for deeper affect not to traditional iterations of these Dreaming narratives, but to the poets and playwrights. Their sense of loss and the trauma was exquisite: practitioners like Jack Davis (1984), Mudrooroo Narogin (1991), and Sam Wagan Watson (2004), conveyed the sense of having inherited broken traditions, deploying hollowed-out remnants of song-cycles—“cheap white-goods at the Dreamtime sale!” (Watson 2004: 56). How tragic is it that these shards elicited stronger emotion than did the stories which remained intact?

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Where more complete versions existed, they were communicated in conversational Kriol (a good example is Paddy Roe’s Gularabulu (Roe 1983), which challenged readers outside the tradition, and provoked thoughts about the necessity of mediation. What seems to have leached away was an expressive linguistic matrix. Was it even possible, perhaps too late, for me to hope for moving, dynamic, literary or even eloquent, fully adult deployments, or translations of song cycles? It was clear that anthropologists had failed to communicate these narratives in any adequate way, and that in fact western print media, despite its sophistication (its multiplicity of genres, registers, its historical self-consciousness, its division into watertight disciplinary compartments), in so many ways was not adequate to convey what the oral tradition held (it has to be said, increasingly less securely with progressive accelerating language loss), in collective memory—supplemented by additional elements of song, dance, and ritual— and it had only familiar western ways of making the Land the key focus, but never the central player. This failure of my own literary tradition, because by then I had begun to lose faith in print media’s ability to represent these specifically Aboriginal sacred stories, and my own fear for the oral tradition, only intensified as my familiarity with one culture, Yanyuwa, increased. At the same time as I was designing curriculum featuring an Indigenous-authored course, I was teaching western mythologies resistantly, looking at how women were silenced or demonized in patriarchal monotheistic mythological texts (e.g., the Bible or Morte D’Arthur and Táin bó Cuailgne), so I was perhaps well primed when I accidentally stumbled in the late 1990s upon the film-text referred to above that puzzled both me and my students, Buwarrala Akarriya/Journey East. Had there not been a variety of (relatively recent) anthropological studies of Yanyuwa contact history, archaeology, language, music and Dreaming narratives, in a variety of media, I might not have arrived at even first base. By that point, I had intuited that that pan-Aboriginalism was an impossible delusion and that intensive focus on one community might open up doors. I had in fact apprehended that the tiny territory of Yanyuwa (some 70 km by 10 km of islands and coastal land beneath the escarpment) entailed a network of several hundred stories, possibly more, not all of which (as a woman and non-initiate) I could expect to know. This inevitably created another vulnerability as my intellectual frameworks taught that knowledge is freely available to all seekers. Some songlines were shared, and linked contiguous Indigenous nations (see Taçon 2008: 165),6 but to be Yanyuwa or Yolngu or

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Waanyi was to be a specialist in a particular narrowly delimited territory, and I understood that this high degree of specialization with Country at its center, and specialization even between genders and moiety holders, was the genius of the longest continuous culture of humankind. Despite what I thought were pure intentions, a simple (?) uncomplicated (?) desire to find out the sustaining narratives of just one community of Aboriginal owners of the land, Yanyuwa, and to make sure our (nonIndigenous) students had some comprehension of how they worked, being permitted to work on these materials was fraught: the film producers initially gave their support but then withdrew it, in the face of opposition from the community and the key anthropologist, John Bradley, whose role had been to broker relationships, language and knowledge between the community and the film producers. This raised questions of ownership of material in quite ugly and illegitimate ways, and questions of motivation. How colonialist, postcolonialist were my intentions? Was I seeking to exploit Yanyuwa people for my own academic purposes and glory (is there much glory in contemporary academe)? I was certainly aware of putting other more institutionally valued projects on hold for many years while, with the cooperation of Yanyuwa Elders, I generated a website of Yanyuwa culture. The decision to do so was motivated by a need to teach Aboriginal-generated literature in an informed decolonizing way. The decision to persist was motivated by a need to teach Aboriginalgenerated literature in an informed decolonizing way. These questions are key, and in some parts of the country, especially where traditional knowledge is held tenuously, and where it has been abused in situations where power is unequal, it is sometimes hard for Indigenous people to trust that other Indigenous people who hold their culture more securely, as Yanyuwa people do, elect to share it, especially with the wider nonIndigenous community: it is important for them to showcase a culture they are intensely proud of, and they see such sharing as an important way to conserve and safeguard it. From the point of view of the Indigenous holders of the knowledge, some knowledge, because of various cultural imperatives, or because of the interests of miners in sacred sites, had to remain unspoken. The questions of who may talk with authority continue to bedevil literary studies and anthropology, as I have discovered to my cost as a writer about Aboriginal-authored texts. Negotiating the gatekeepers has been personally challenging. The Yanyuwa right to be the appropriate owners of a collaborative website about their culture was questioned by an Indigenous professor at my own university in 2000,

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and my right as a non-Waanyi person to publish academic interpretation of Carpentaria was similarly challenged in print by a non-Indigenous scholar, Alison Ravenscroft (2012: 59–80). Eventually, a further vulnerability emerged when it was necessary to archive the website which I had worked on for nearly two decades, in response to changes in the landscape of representation in Borroloola. Working on Buwarrala Akarriya/Journey East, and subsequently documenting and analyzing Bradley’s many attempts in different media to represent Yanyuwa kujika (songlines) (Devlin-Glass 2005), I had glimpsed monumentality in the redacted, longest and most sacred public version of the Tiger Shark Dreaming in Forget About Flinders, an atlas of Yanyuwa Dreaming narratives, which by reading transliterations of Yanyuwa verses alongside the online Yanyuwa dictionary, demonstrated how minutely and precisely every single verse (there are 216 verses in the two sequences Rrumburriya kujika) mapped the cosmogony of the landscape the Tiger Shark traversed (Yanyuwa Families, Bradley and Cameron 2003, see Fig. 5.1). But without wanting to give offense to my dear colleague, the prose was plain. Accuracy trumped literary artistry, which was not in the frame at all (as is proper for foundational research). But in this process, I’d finally come to understand that the genius of the many nations who inhabited this ancient continent of Australia, was their exquisite detailed knowledge and ritual building on relatively small tracts of Country. I had also studied its impact in that community and knew the pride the existence of the Atlas provided (Devlin-Glass 2005, 2006). So, without my knowing it, the building blocks were in place for attempting a reading of Carpentaria: immersion in Yanyuwa culture (though not nearly as immersive as my anthropological colleagues), an orientation toward the sacred in literature (itself a source of vulnerability in a critic working in a largely secular environment),7 and a working knowledge of how writing down orally held narratives can serve to dumb them down, and distort them utterly (feminist resistant readings of the myths of monotheisms had taught me that), a good working knowledge of the Australian literary landscape, and the conviction that Carpentaria was a major disruptor of it. I saw the novel as animating, bringing into the present, and intensely politicizing Indigenous Dreaming narratives. It dramatizes not only the physical land and seascapes that constitute Gulf cultures and how they are thought about by Indigenous people, but also their difficult colonization and the culture’s current agonizing political

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Fig. 5.1 The first twenty-four verses of the illustrated version of the Tiger Shark Dreaming which demonstrate the minute particulars of how narrative and Country are tightly mapped in the most complex public version of the narrative (Yanyuwa Families, Bradley and Cameron 2003: 306)

battles with silver, lead and zinc miners. Though it is not named in the novel, the novel alludes to Waanyi contestation of what at the time was the largest mine in the world, Century Zinc, and it does so in a way that makes clear “invisible things in nature [which make] no sense to Uptown” (Wright 2006: 77), in particular the spirit world that for the Waanyi confers sentience on what we, in shorthand, refer to as Country. I finally had a better grasp of sentience itself, a key notion to which I will return, and what it might mean. If this sounds triumphalist, it was not, and there was much to worry a traditional literary critic with ex-centric heterodox views (Ashcroft et al. 2009) about the sacred, and intense worries about what influences had shaped the author of what I have always seen as a masterpiece.

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The Many Strands that Make up Carpentaria But that still did not make me the ideal reader of Carpentaria. Over time, Wright herself has explained her writing process and her immersion as a child in her grandmother’s Waanyi storytelling practices (Wright 2001, 2002, 2007). These to some extent underpin and anchor this novel in the Gulf Country. It is a remarkable act of preservation that, three generations later, she has stories to transmit: her great grandmother, Opal, as a small child had been pressed into service in the 1880s by a murderous pastoralist called Hann who casually married her to his Chinese cook (see Vernay 2004; Wright 2001). Her grandmother Dolly’s politics of “not forgetting,” one assumes, is helpful in generating a voice in Carpentaria, conveying the important narratives of Country, and the emotion, all of which meld in Wright’s novel to prosecute a narrative that is angrily and powerfully political, but also playful and carnivalesque, historically informed, and which deals centrally in Indigenous knowledge and transmission (Wright 2002: 10). What became manifest (via interviews and autobiographical accounts, and in 2017, her communal biography Tracker, about community activist Tracker Tilmouth) is that this writer has served two complementary apprenticeships: she was blooded in activist Aboriginal organizations like the Carpentaria and Central Land Councils, and the Queensland Aboriginal Legal Service on Mornington Island, and has simultaneously read radical world literature in dazzling breadth. As well as researching history, anthropology, family history, and constitutional law (all required by jobs she has held), Alexis Wright moves on currents powered by local Aboriginal-authored texts, and also in top-drawer global postcolonial, Indigenous and liberationist writers like the Maori author Keri Hulme, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Pablo Neruda, Salman Rushdie, as well as black Americans like Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, Alice Walker, to name just some. She has sought out writers “to speak to me because I could not find the words I was searching for in Australian literature” (Wright 2002: 12). Few literary critics and readers could claim such breadth, and I am narrowly specialized (in Australian, Irish, and Feminist literatures), which immediately handicaps me as a critic of this work. I did, on the basis of some limited reading of magical realist fiction, speculate that a new and special form of Indigenous magical realism might be on offer, one which would necessitate changing the definitions of the genre to accommodate

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Aboriginal cosmology, or even the creation of a new genre. In accounting for the carnivalesque elements of the novel, the deep dark currents of comedy, my correlates were with Herbert’s (2014) Poor Fellow My Country, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s (2000) One Hundred Years of Solitude. Wright has not yet (as far as I am aware) volunteered to say which anthropologists she read while researching Carpentaria, the book she, credibly, claims took her a lifetime to write, but I tentatively suggest that she has. Again, anthropology is a field few literary scholars enter, perhaps intimidated by critiques of its early colonialist impulses prosecuted often by postcolonial theorists. This 50-year double apprenticeship in literature and traditional Law, of course, begins to explain how she has acquired the literary know-how to translate Indigenous cosmology into politicized literary fiction, which she says is “a truer replica of reality … not the actual truth….” (Wright 2002: 13). To say this is to warn the critic, and those anthropologists who might take an interest, that she fully exploits western fictional modes and the freedom they offer to move, persuade, educate, and in time become “time-bombs,” refusing to be silenced. Writing firstly for herself and her people, but also for a wider readership, she knows the power of words to disrupt templates of knowledge in non-Indigenous thinking. I strongly contest that the novel cannot be read by white readers, other than dialogically, as argued by Ravenscroft in Postcolonial Eye (2012). She claims that “Indigenous cultures remain in significant ways profoundly, even bewilderingly, strange and unknowable” (Ravenscroft 2012: 1). Certainly, the novel is demanding, sometimes opaque and interpretable with difficulty. Its cultural difference enjoins the western critic to engage provisionally, but engagement at the level of ideas is clearly intended by Alexis Wright, and engagement at a level beyond the textual is also enjoined, in my view, because of the real-world phenomena (Aboriginal marginalization and poverty, limited ability to participate in the decisions of mining which have impact on the ability to live in the same zone, and the sacred realities that drive the political agenda of Indigenous activists) to which the fiction points. The literary world and I suggest the world of anthropology, can but celebrate the arrival of so powerful a voice.

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Reading Carpentaria in the Light of an Apprenticeship in Yanyuwa Cosmology Carpentaria, more than most fictions, makes the critic vulnerable. Good literary critical methodology is to be provisional, to see any interpretation of a text as approximate, for the simple reason none of us knows what we do not know, especially of another culture, but also even of one’s own. One works in the sure and certain knowledge that readings are replaced by new and often better ones. But provisionality is not always in evidence in literary criticism: as in anthropology, the magisterial, argumentative, combative tone is often, regrettably, heard. That said, there is much in Carpentaria to puzzle and unsettle the mainstream Australian reader, and to require its reader to be tentative in reading it. I have already backed away more than once from earlier readings of this novel, and am probably up to about 10 readings over 12 years. Alexis Wright privileges orality, and has Carpentaria’s main intradiegetic narrator address his or her own community in a vernacular and often jocular idiom, which assumes a cosmology that positions its auditors/readers to laugh at how ridiculously ill-prepared white fellas are to live on Waanyi Country. It assumes an Indigenous reader but it is also simultaneously directed at a wider non-local and non-Indigenous readership (see Rodoreda 2017). What in the text might exclude the reader on this beach8 where cultures might meet? Much. What, for example, • Amounts to prophetic Dreaming, utopian/dystopian predispositions, and what adheres to reality in this imagined Indigenous universe? • What precisely is the intersection between history and literature, Aboriginal epistemology and fiction? • And how much anthropology is needed to cast light on it? How useful is it as a reading technology? • And do I have enough exposure to the culture to claim any knowledge? All of these questions serve to destabilize, make vulnerable, me, the literary critic. Working in a transdisciplinary space, how to negotiate between anthropology’s axioms and literary freedoms exercised beyond the “borders” of that sometimes-prescriptive discipline? Are there claims being made to knowledge by women which formerly, in a more intact cultural

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life, and under a traditional dispensation, would properly belong to men? Does this imply that Waanyi male culture is irretrievably damaged, and might even a modified acknowledgment of that history further weaken male authority? Are these concerns better left unspoken? Is my puzzlement in the face of a complex and demanding text productive or a sign of needing to understand much more? Is writing about it premature? The very setting and structure of the novel demand provisionality and take one immediately into the contentious borderlands of fiction, history, and the Indigenous sacred, and make one vulnerable in epistemological struggles between anthropologists and literary critics. The Country created in her fiction does not adhere to strict traditional boundaries: as a fiction-writer, Alexis Wright gives herself latitude to play with something as fixed in the traditional realm as whether the people she represents are of the escarpment or of the coast.9 Her fictional canvas is broader than Waanyi territory (Wright’s claimed birthright through her grandmother): it includes the escarpment (where the mine is and the boys are buried) but the setting also emphatically coastal—set in estuarine, coastal Ganggalida Country below and north of the escarpment where Waanyi territory10 properly begins, and maybe also references the island Country of Lardil people (see Fig. 5.2). Do I know enough about the connections between Waanyi and Gangalidda, when Wright’s fiction seems intent on erasing borders? May fiction do this when it is pointing to real and urgent political issues where the stakes are very high? In fact, the identity of her characters is never asserted as specifically Waanyi, or for that matter, Ganggalida. Norm and Will are passionate and learned men of the sea, saltwater people of the Gulf of Carpentaria. To bring close anthropological scrutiny to her setting, to limit it to Waanyi, is immediately to read in too literal a fashion, and the littoral is the problem. A major question for me is whether it is reasonable to assume that Indigenous nations who come together ceremonially and share language in contiguous zones share orientations and narratives? In an interview, she refers to her own “traditional land-space,” which she makes clear is stolen Country, an imagined territory which she was never free as a younger woman to visit, walk, care for: That’s where I come from and the place I know best; that country’s in my psyche. When I was a girl my grandmother was talking about a place I couldn’t see. I couldn’t go to, so that created a huge imagination of the place she loved. (Vernay 2004: 120)

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Fig. 5.2 Linguistic distinctions mapping onto Indigenous groups in the Gulf of Carpentaria (Source Author)

Her family’s forced removal from the territory by colonizers makes some sense of the fractious groups depicted in the novel and the schisms about knowledge they exhibit, and also, of course, of the poverty in which the marginalized Pricklebush folk live. Although her female ancestors were removed to stations as servants, the power of communal storytelling in the novel is vivid, and questions of traditional ownership are complex and forefront in the novel, and essentially not resolved. Traditional knowledge even for elders like Norm is represented as on the brink of collapse, but the hope the novel offers is of restoration, rebuilding. The Eastside and Westside communities of Desperance are at odds over their mythic legacy, which is not surprising given the aggregating tendencies of Aboriginal reserves like the infamous Doomadgee, in north Queensland, which brought together under the “care” of Plymouth Brethren, many Indigenous nations in the one small area. Such violent and disruptive colonizing practices give rise to many different ways of being Aboriginal and even “traditional” in her novel: the patriarchal Law man of the

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sea, Normal Phantom, differs radically from his zealot rival Mozzie Fishman who knows the Law but is not averse to action (he masterminds, in concert with a Rainbow Serpent, blowing up the mine), and also at odds with Norm’s son, Will Phantom, a guerrilla of a different sort from Mozzie, who is caught between them, and agonized by what he owes to his family and what he has to learn from his father.11 There is more than a touch of the realist and satirist in Wright’s fiction: other members of this community are not above fabricating Dreaming narratives, and making illegitimate claims for land. At this level, the novel deals with the real and day-to-day which Alexis Wright’s lived experience in Land Councils would have provided. At the level of naturalism, the novel is a brilliant demonstration of the very real schisms in Aboriginal culture, wittingly and unwittingly created by the colonial process of claiming land under the patently illegal rubric terra nullius.12

Reading Wright’s Rainbow Serpent The novel’s anti-mining politics is straightforward, and much less contestable, compared with the mythic substratum which gives Carpentaria’s action motive and meaning. Australian literature (in company with other disciplines) has long been familiar with Rainbow Serpents as the creator spirits of water. In this coastal region of northern Queensland and the Northern Territory, they are more specifically linked with wet-season cyclones, or intense low-pressure systems. The specific conditions under which generative/destructive Rainbows perform in the Gulf are imaginatively represented in Carpentaria, and Wright engineers further postmodern transformations. It is one thing to read about this in the library and quite another to see it performed in the novel imaginatively, and to be invited to contemplate a sacred that is utterly different from the versions available in one’s own culture. I had, for instance, read in many accounts of Country of the notion of the land as sentient and responsive, acting exactly like a person: Rose talks about “country …[as] a living entity with a yesterday, today and tomorrow, with a consciousness, and a will toward life.” (Rose 1996: 7). In Alexis Wright’s novel, the Rainbow Serpent, the main creator force in the Aboriginal “pantheon,” works at many levels and what is created in my imagination’s eye, by a masterly epic writer, puts flesh on the bones of what had previously been an idea, making it dynamic, and profoundly emotional. At a literal level, the Rainbow may take many forms in the Gulf environment: in Yanyuwa

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language, Bujimala (Boojamulla in Waanyi) is a word with many meanings—is the name for the Rainbow Serpent, but also the rainbow, whirlwind, whirlpool, water spout, or in its most dramatic manifestation, a cyclone (Bradley with Yanyuwa Families 2017: 176). Waanyi elders confirm that the Rainbow Serpent Dreaming extends far to the east into the western coast of Cape York, south to Tennant Creek and beyond as well as West along the Gulf and into Arnhem Land (Taçon 2008: 163–176, 165). In its sacred or supervital13 manifestation as the Rainbow Serpent, the cyclone may travel with awesome destructive power (as Bujimala) or remain in the one place (as Kabuji); it may be a phenomenon of high wind or still as the eye of a cyclone; wet (over land or sea), or dry, as in the Whirlwind Walalu, and in the south of the Gulf of Carpentaria, often two low-pressure systems collide creating extremely violent destruction, and renewal. The cyclonic monsoonal rains are lyrically rendered as the action of an immense creative being which has the power to re-route the river: Picture the creative serpent, scoring deep into – scouring down through – the slippery underground of the mudflats, leaving in its wake the thunder of tunnels collapsing to form deep sunken valleys. The sea water following in the serpent’s wake, swarming in a frenzy of tidal waves, soon changed colour from ocean blue to the yellow of mud. The water filled the swirling tracks to form the mighty bending rivers spread across the vast plains of the Gulf Country. The serpent travelled over the marine plains, over the salt flats, through the salt dunes, past the mangrove forests and crawled inland. Then it went back to the sea. And it came out at another spot along the coastline…When it finished creating the many rivers in its wake, it created one last river, no larger or smaller than the others, a river which offers no apologies for its discontent with people who do not know it. This is where the giant serpent continues to live deep down under the ground in a vast network of limestone aquifers. They say its being is porous; it permeates everything. It is all around in the atmosphere and is attached to the lives of the river people like skin. (Wright 2006: 1–2)

Why does it matter to register the linguistic variations for cyclones and weather events?

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• It matters because one of Wright’s main projects is to establish how thousands of years of close observation of their environment (including weather events), encoded/expressed as it is in Dreaming narratives, gives Indigenous people a claim to knowledge that is “scientify” (Aboriginal creole for “scientific”), antecedent and perhaps superior to, white environmental knowledge (e.g., emanating from meteorologists), a claim usually not conceded by the (arrogant) settler culture (Norm knows by sea, star and animal behaviour what the tumultuous forces of colliding weather systems will do); • It matters because close familiarity knows that a river is capable of rerouting itself to render the settlers’ port redundant and the entire town of Desperance radically impermanent; • It matters because Wright intends to make a case that mining in such a labile physical environment (where viable floating islands can be formed from debris wrenched from the land) poses threats to the viability of the entire ecosystem; • It matters because Wright belongs to a largely voiceless group and her eco-poetics may speak more eloquently and to a wider audience than other voices saying the same thing in the form of political or environmental protest. Being aware that Dreaming narratives function as multivalent symbols, sometimes occupying the domain of the naturalistic and sometimes that of the supervital (as more-than-natural mythic creator beings), opened up for this reader the possibility of many other avatars of Rainbow Serpents, which become at some level the main protagonists in the novel. Associated with every element, it may take the form of “black serpent clouds” and lightning (p. 44), a fiery dry season willy-willy (“whirly wind”) (p. 411), may utter “hostile growls” in the murmuring earth caves of the escarpment where it resides in the dry season—a “living atmosphere. Its body stretched from horizon to horizon, covering each point of a compass, and encasing them all” (p. 202). The flood after the cyclone has many features of a Rainbow Serpent, “moving, rolling, changing appearance” (p. 492) and creating new shapes in its wake. At a crucial point in the narrative, the guerrilla activist of the narrative, Will Phantom, himself embodies the Rainbow Serpent. Will Phantom, a man of the sea which gives birth to the Cyclones before they make landfall, bears the “ancestral, hard-faced warrior demons” on his back (p. 203) and “moves lightly through the bush to the beat of the muddied and cracked dancing

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feet of a million ancestors” (p. 161). He is represented as “carrying the tide in his body” and feelings its rhythms even when far away from the sea (p. 401). The cyclone’s most spectacular final clinching manifestation is as a dry willy-willy which reignites with a pizza carton a flagging fuel flame: The fire was just sitting, smouldering, not knowing where to go next because the wind was not blowing strong enough to fan it in the right direction. Our men looking from the hills continued staring at the little flame flickering there, fizzing out. What could they do? It looked like defeat was imminent. And, that same old defeated look, two centuries full of it, began creeping back onto their faces… …The unbelievable miracle came flying by. A whirly wind, mind you nobody had seen one for days, just as a matter of fact sprung up from the hills themselves. It swirled straight through from behind those mens, picking up their wish and plucking the baseball caps which came flying off their heads, together with all the loose balls of spinifex flying with the dust …. It happened so fast when the fiery whirlwind shot into the bowsers and momentarily, lit them up like candles. Well! It might even have been the old Pizza Hut box someone had left on top of one of those bowsers that added that little bit of extra fuel, you never know, for the extra spark, or would have happened anyway, but the wick was truly lit. (Wright 2006: 410–411)

Wright’s carnivalesque, vernacular prose style, which here has more to do with desired outcomes than history, need not distract us from what I take to be the main game, the invitation to understand a cosmogony—the anger and revenge, the power and the triumph, of the Rainbow Serpent in his most destructive manifestation. The Rainbow Serpent is a bridge to understanding the anti-mine politics. What Will rebels against is the denial by global capitalism of the eco-centric and eco-dependent condition of all human life. His rage, and by extension that of the Rainbow Serpent, is stirred up when the physical matrix that gives him his very existence is threatened by the mine’s profiteering at the expense of the environment. Will’s relationship with the fire and the willy-willy is reciprocal, and full of power: he is kin to the Rainbow in its most powerful destructive deployment of power. And am I as a white commentator, and a woman, entitled to speak about such phenomena as Rainbow Serpents? One critic would deny me

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this, arguing that Aboriginal-authored works are radically different and “strange,” and for white readers to critique them is to engage in neoimperialism. She argues the novel is written in such a way as to deliberately “[estrange]… its white readers,” that the only possible reading posture is “radical uncertainty,” “an aesthetics of uncertainty” because the traditions are inherently unbridgeable.14 In this account, to write about such works is to illegitimately “resolve or translate one representational system into another”—the novel is “undecidable” (Ravenscroft 2012: 59–80, but especially 63, 65–66, 70, 75–79). To which I would reply, why would Wright write the novel that took 50 years to gestate, and strenuously seek mainstream publication, if not to communicate to multiple readerships? How does the critic know the difference she asserts so confidently? What makes this white critic the gatekeeper of such matters? Why set up such dualities, when the invitation is to inhabit the ground between cultures that do not understand one another? And why is the literary world so taken by storm by this novel? While I would enjoin provisionality as a necessary reading posture of this dense novel, I am morally impelled to take up the novel’s invitation to understand a cosmology not my own, or to try to understand it, and I would resist the logic of denying anyone outside the culture access to it, or the right to talk about it. I have routinely revised my understandings of it since 2006. In this iteration, I make another (necessarily self-revisionist) attempt. Is this weakness, vulnerability, or the sign of a novel that is progressively in successive readings alerting me to new possibilities of interpretation and dialogue? Greg Dening (1998: 37) comments on how difficult it is in crosscultural encounters to write about religion and to “take believers as they see themselves.” Two episodes dealing with funerals in the novel may indicate the profoundly (but fictionalized) take on sacred realities that Wright’s Carpentaria exemplifies, and give pointers to why the novel is so pre-eminent in the Aboriginal canon and speaking so powerfully to readers outside its culture,15 and why it invites the wider evolving context that postcolonial anthropology can offer. There are two ceremonial funerals at high points in the narrative, the burial of Elias at sea by Norm, and that of the boy prisoners in the limestone caves by Mozzie, which convey Indigenous men’s sense of ecstasy in acts of living eco-centrically and in full harmony with their community’s sense of the sacred. Wright commits two long chapters (Chapters 6 and 7) of eco-poetry to establishing Norm as a man of the sea,16 with the ancient groper as his totem.

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Norm who had, until then, turned his back on the sea, experiences “exuberance,” the sense of being “alive” again, in “Paradise” (Wright 2006: 252) as he consigns his friend to the care of the gropers in their “palaces” in the “olive seagrass fields waving in folds of currents” in “quivering gardens” (Wright 2006: 256) full of solace for soul as much as body. Every layer of this world was covered in sea gardens of coral, coloured all shades of red and pink, and glistening green sea vegetables, amidst olive seagrass fields waving in folds in the currents. A fish lives far better off than a dry old blackfella from Desperance, Norm Phantom considered, looking at this spectacle…. … he looked over the water and saw the big tank fish – gropers swimming together in congregations of fifty or more like dark clouds arriving from the distance. As each group moved upwards, they surfaced loudly in volumes of water, raising their bodies high out of the sea, which were splashing down like waterfalls behind them. The creatures did not stop when they reached the highest level they could before falling back into the sea. Norm wiped their salty spray from his face, as he studied them swimming through the ocean of air, to ascend into the sky world of the Milky Way. (Wright 2006: 257)17

What Wright appears to be dramatizing here is an Indigenous cosmology in which deep-sea fish and stars are interrelated in an ecstasy of exchange between sea and air, sea and stars, animals and humans. Elias, the white refugee from the sea, who compensates for his memory loss by taking on Norm’s childhood identity and sharing his identification with the Gropers (in their supervital manifestation), is earlier in the novel imaged as a harbinger of the cyclone (Wright 2006: 81),18 and certainly as bringing to a head the political differences between Uptown and the Pricklebush. Norm, who has previously turned away from his family and life as a saltwater man, is empowered by his need to return Elias to his adopted totem, the Groper, to reconnect with his family and teach his grandson Bala the wisdom of his ancestors, a responsibility he had resiled from before the need to bury Elias at sea. The second funeral is darker and more invested in emotion, and less connected to the everyday life of Indigenous Australians, though its emotional impetus and symbolism in the novel need to be credited. The journey into the limestone caves, which are to be the boys’ final resting place is represented as “a descent into the depths of the creature of the underworld’s belly, into the people’s past” (Wright 2006: 437). The caves are

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another manifestation of the Rainbow Serpent itself, being the springfed source of the river so monumental in its sinuous path at the start of the novel. Several canoes “[rock] steady like cradles” as they navigate “the routes to the spirit world, across the sea” (Wright 2006: 439–440). Wright’s eco-poetic, indeed romantic, evocation of this intimate private interment is designed to offer solace, especially when the tenderness of the men is contrasted with the brutalization the children had experienced in the police cells in Desperance, but it bears little relation to actual burial practices, secret and sacred rituals, in the lower Gulf (pers. comm. John Bradley, May 2019). Does this novel have to be faithful in detail to Dreaming rituals, or is this Wright’s “truer replica of reality … not the actual truth…”? (Wright in 2002: 13).

Final Reflection Wright, carrying the literary greats of 50 years of postcolonial writing in her head, knows that the heart has to be enchanted rather than the mind be preached at; she also knows the power of comedy to laugh at western pretention to know and the presumption to “develop” an unknown and ecologically complex land. In fiction that mobilizes satire, Indigenous cosmology, and eco-poetry, she argues that the Rainbow Serpent is a power formidable enough to challenge the operations of global capitalism, and that Indigenous knowledge of environment needs to be given credence. Having been positioned on the back foot as a westerner who has colluded in and profited from global capitalism, the reader of this magnificent epic novel is invited to critique the limitations of western epistemology and to enter a dialogue with Indigenous people about important things like development and despoliation of a unique environment. Literature has the power to move, to open up such transcultural in-between spaces for minds and hearts to engage, even in the face of immense cultural difference. My experience suggests that anthropology and ethnography (as time spent in close proximity learning with and from Yanyuwa) have been useful in unpacking this rich multifaceted text, and the very dialogue between the creative artist and the reader and the anthropologist about sacredness in northern Australia might not only serve to build understandings between Indigenes and white readers, but also initiate conversations about Indigenous knowledge that the trauma of colonialism has threatened and continued to erase.

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Contributor Response, by Amanda Kearney When I first sat down to read the novel Carpentaria, by Alexis Wright (and the topic of Devlin-Glass’ chapter), I was sitting on the veranda of a small and run-down “donga” (demountable house) at the McArthur River Caravan Park in Borroloola. I had brought the book in early 2007, as I set off for a stint of fieldwork with Yanyuwa families. It seemed a reading experience befitting my return to the remote Aboriginal township, following a period of absence. I saw it as assisting my full immersion back into the ethnographic scene of Aboriginal life in the Gulf of Carpentaria. I honestly thought I was going to love the book. Instead, I found I could barely sit with it. I had no idea how to read it. My only way to read the text was to create visual references for the characters, the places and elements on the page. The visual code I relied upon was what I saw all around me in Borroloola. I imagined the fictional fringe camp of Desperance, as down on the road by the Borroloola cemetery, and the book’s characters took on the faces of the people I was spending my days with. I did as Devlin-Glass herself had done, that is I drew upon my knowledge of Yanyuwa people, Country and Law to access the book. Even still though I struggled and eventually gave up. Devlin-Glass’ chapter has done two things for me, the first of which I briefly outline here, the second I want to dedicate my time to. On the one hand, her chapter has introduced me to the epic nature of Indigenous literary traditions, teaching me something of the possible modes for Indigenous storytelling, with orality and literary practices at two ends of a spectrum. On the other hand, her chapter has reassured me that all scholars are vulnerable to critique and that sometimes a single critique can weave its way through years of intellectual engagement, as we seek to better understand the locus from where it emerged, and the reason for its enunciation. In the absence of answers, we are often left alone with the questions and must seek responses from within. This is the discomforting nature of critical self-awareness and reflexivity. Indeed, I see in this regard a shared theme between my own chapter, and that of Devlin-Glass. What she describes as one of the “most rancorous encounters” of her academic life (a critic’s response to her work), reminds me, in as much as it was a “questioning,” of the questions I too have faced pertaining to “my belief in Yanyuwa epistemology.” In order to take insight from Devlin-Glass’ experience, I have returned to her original writing on Carpentaria, I have read Wright’s Carpentaria and have considered the critic’s response

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(Ravenscroft 2010). The essence of this critic’s position (at the time) is that in reading Aboriginal-authored texts (as non-Indigenous readers), “our efforts at translation must always fail” (Ravenscroft 2012: 215). This is counter to Devlin-Glass’ position that we can (as non-Indigenous readers) be with, and in relation to Aboriginal-authored texts in considered and reflective ways. The reason that this is possible for DevlinGlass, is that she has cultivated meaningful relationships with the contexts and the people she is trying to understand and from whom she draws insight, namely Yanyuwa. Devlin-Glass proposes to make linkages between Indigenous cultures across the Gulf of Carpentaria (including the real lives of Yanyuwa and Waanyi and the fictional lives of those living in Desperance) in order to more fully comprehend an Indigenous cosmology. She is attempting to bridge a gap, between herself and the text, and also her Yanyuwa teachers. Is this attempt at bridging a problem? I don’t believe it is. What I find most unhealthy though is the habit of reinstating a gap, as an insurmountable distance, between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people who collaborate with one another and share knowledge. What do we benefit from denying relationships, and limiting our capacity to be careful listeners, witnesses and possibly educated beings in the presence of another way of knowing the world? The claim is not that we lose our differences but surely there is scope for us to change within the realm of what we already are, to reach for some newer potentials in our perceptual habit. Devlin-Glass once remarked to me, in a discussion of Carpentaria, “I am not the ideal reader for this book.” I still find myself asking, if not you, then who is? There is a heavy tone of ironic deconstruction in her chapter, where a “babble of voices” come together to fill the scene of being with and learning from/with Aboriginal-authored texts (see Finlay and Gough 2003: 14–15). In this instance, the voices include those of the Aboriginal author, the reader, those who teach the reader, and then those who critique the reader. Out of this busy space, for me, comes the realization that there is always ambiguity in what we write, read, know, and claim. No single comfortable interpretation of the world is available to any of us, and rather than seek this, we should dedicate our time to being with all the voices and cultivating better relations between and among them. In which case, I would say that Devlin-Glass is actually the ideal reader for this book, she is “the” reader. Her deep attentiveness to her role as an audience, as a witness, her admittance of partiality, and bringing all she can to the text, while simultaneously honoring what Yanyuwa

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have taught her seems, to me, a very respectful mode of being with other knowledges. What her reflexive engagement has left me holding on to is the thought that in intercultural encounters and in moments of learning ethnographically what we should be doing is looking for bridges, rather than standing safely across on our side of the gap calling out, “sorry, I can’t hear you over here.”

Notes 1. Carpentaria won the Miles Franklin Literary Award 2007; the Australian Literature Society Gold Medal 2007 (under the auspices of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature [ASAL]); the Queensland Premier’s Literary Awards (Best Fiction Book) 2007; the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards (Vance Palmer Prize for Fiction) 2007; the Australian Book Industry Awards (ABIA) (Australian Literary Fiction Book of the Year) 2007; the New South Wales Premier’s Literary Awards (Christina Stead Prize for Fiction) 2007; the Age Book of the Year Award (Fiction Prize) 2007; and the Commonwealth Writers Prize (South East Asia and South Pacific Region, Best Book) 2007; and the Vision Australia Braille Book of the Year Award (2010) (for a fuller list of awards, see Alexis Wright, Awards, AustLit (https://www.austlit.edu.au), St Lucia: The University of Queensland, 2002– [Retrieved 24 September 2018]). Alexis Wright is also an Honorary Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. 2. Wolfe’s (1991) work is a sobering reminder of the history of western thinking, dating from the time of Gillen and Spencer, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, about what the diminishment of representation of the ‘Dreamtime’ entailed—its pan-Aboriginalism and erasure of multiplicity of Indigenous cultures, its too-ready (and incorrect) consignment to the past and to magic and primitivism, rather than to cosmogony and cosmology. 3. The scholarly apparatus of this volume at least provides lists of storytellers, their language, maps, and maps which enable the reader to locate them (Berndt and Berndt 1989: xiv–xxiv). 4. It is interesting to note that the chapter organization in The Speaking Land (Berndt and Berndt 1989) bears some traces of the taxonomies in use in the earlier literary anthologies by Robinson and A. W. Reed, which were thematic and hierarchically contra-distinguished myths from legends and fables, distinctions that are western impositions on Indigenous cosmology, print conventions which the anthropologist did not need to observe, but has done so. 5. Gelder and Jacobs (1998: xi) make some very provocative claims about Australian law having had to accommodate Aboriginal claims to sacred

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6.

7. 8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

sites, but also allude to the ongoing contestation of these significant but small gains. Archaeologist Taçon (2008) provides a map of the extent of major Dreaming tracks which extend up the west coast of Cape York, and the western shores of the Gulf of Carpentaria, and south to central Northern Territory. See Ashcroft et al.(2009) and especially Chapter 6, pp. 205–241. Dening’s (1998: 85, 86, 189–190) metaphor of the beach and “beaches of the mind” as a “space-in-between” where members of different cultures might meet for resolution of difference/otherness, whether by understanding or violence, is usefully applied to this novel. In discussing where her fiction is set, she playfully alludes in this interview to Yann Martel’s magic realist fiction, The Life of Pi, as being written by “a man living with a tiger in an apartment in New York” (which of course, was a fanciful recreation of the making of Martel’s novel). The fictional Gurrfurrit mine in Carpentaria is taken to stand for the Century Mine located in Waanyi Country on the escarpment. A short online history of the Garawa/Waanyi traditional lands (see Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research, Australian National University, n.d.) gives some indication of the problems of settlement in the region and the disruptive nature of colonialist practices in alienating nations from their land and aggregating communities in reserves like Doomadgee, Robinson River and the open town of Borroloola. In 1996–1997 the Waanyi, through the Carpentaria Land Council (whose spokesperson was Murandoo Yanner) challenged Century Zinc in the High Court, using the Native Title Act 1993. The mine went ahead after a highly divisive 12 to 11 votes in the community (see Parliament of Australia and Cook, n.d.). The scenario in Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria, involving as it does a wish-fulfillment fantasy very different from the historical reality of Yanner’s unsuccessful struggle against, and eventual partial reconciliation with, Century Zinc, nonetheless addresses realistically the ongoing challenges of Indigenous politics: divisions within families and communities, concerns about pollution and loss of resources, and loss of control of Country and culture. The history of ambivalence to the mine within the Waanyi community is explained in detail in Scambary’s (2013) My Country, Mine Country Indigenous People, Mining and Development Contestation in Remote Australia (see also Mead 2013: 31–46, 40–41). The mine reopened in August 2018. The Mabo decision (passed into legislation as the Native Title Act of 1993) (Australian Government 1993), taken in the High Court of Australia, overturned the doctrine of terra nullius, the notion that the land belonged to no-one, in recognising the rights to land of Meriam people of the Torres Strait under strict conditions. See https://aiatsis.gov. au/sites/default/files/docs/research-and-guides/native-title-research/

5

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14.

15.

16.

17.

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overturning-doctrine-terra%20nullius-the-mabo-case.pdf, accessed 13 February 2019. Tamisari and Bradley’s (2005) concept of the vital/supervital provides a useful lens for reading Wright’s novel; it also serves to amplify notions of the “earthed sacred.” Vital organisms and phenomena in the natural world (e.g., plants, animals, rocks, weather phenomena) may be reclassified at will (usually by negotiation) and according to circumstance as supervital (having sacred power) if named as such, or if they have a proper name applied to them. The semiotic charge of such organisms/phenomena may oscillate between the “vital” and the “supervital,” but the two states are always folded within each other rather than functioning as binaries (Tamisari and Bradley 2005: 419–438 and especially p. 422). Maxwell and Kelada (2013: 1) castigate Ravenscroft for assuming “an unbridgeable and permanent hiatus separating the Aboriginal and white worlds” and the assumption that “interpretations by white critics” invariably and inevitably “reinscribe imperialist structures of knowledge,” work unwittingly appropriatively and thereby “repeat the relations of colonialism.” Ravenscroft does not countenance the notion that whiteness might “undergo some sort of reconfiguration” in response to Indigenous texts. Jane Perlez, reviewing the novel in the New York Times of 18 November 2008, noted that just one year after publication it was in its sixth printing and had far exceeded sales for literary fiction having sold 25,000, rather than the usual literary fiction print run of. The sea similarly had also welcomed Will’s return: “The breeze had come down from the sea, passing inconspicuously over the noisy motor cars on the Gulf road, touching Will in a gentle caress, as though the ocean seemed pleased to know its son had returned” (Carpentaria, p. 164). The somatic nature of this exchange is worth noting. The Groper Dreaming is a shared Dreaming story with Yanyuwa, and for the similarity with traditional Yanyuwa storying (see Yanyuwa Families et al. 2012). The Groper hails from Ganggalida Country and returns there, and a point of detail similarly links the Milky Way and the Groper. This is manifest in Elias’s response to the Morning Glory and the warning he issues to Uptown who is unwilling to hear or understand it (Wright 2006: 81).

References Ashcroft, B., F. Devlin-Glass, and L. McCredden. 2009. Intimate Horizons: The Post-Colonial Sacred in Australian Literature. Adelaide: ATF Press. Australian Government. 1993. Native Title Act 1993, No. 110. Available at: https://www.legislation.gov.au/Details/C2019C00054. Accessed 22 July 2019. Berndt, R.M., and C.H. Berndt. 1989. The Speaking Land: Myth and Story in Aboriginal Australia. Ringwood: Penguin.

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Bradley, J., with Yanyuwa Families. 2017. Wuka nya-nganunga li-Yanyuwa liAnthawirriyarra: Language for Us, the Yanyuwa Saltwater People, Vol. 2. Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing. Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research, Australian National University. n.d. Waanyi/Garawa: Traditional Owners and Area of Operation. Available at: http://caepr.cass.anu.edu.au/poc/project-partners/waanyigarawatraditional-owners-and-area-operation. Accessed 21 September 2018. Chatwin, B. 1978. The Songlines. London: Pan. Davis, J. 1984. Kullark (Home) & the Dreamers. Sydney: Currency Press. Dening, G. 1998. Readings/Writings. Carlton: Melbourne University Press. Devlin-Glass, F. 2005. An Atlas of the Sacred: Hybridity, Representability and the Myths of Yanyuwa Country. Antipodes 19 (2): 127–140. Devlin-Glass, F. 2006. Western Maps/Yanyuwa Meaning: An Interview with John Bradley. The Australian Journal of Indigenous Education 35: 73–84. Dixon, R.M.W., and M. Duwell. 1990. The Honey-Ant Men’s Love Song and Other Aboriginal Song Poems. Brisbane: University of Queensland Press. Finlay, L., and B. Gough (eds.). 2003. Reflexivity: A Practical Guide for Researchers in Health and Social Sciences. Oxford: Blackwell. Garcia Marquez, G. 2000. One Hundred Years of Solitude, trans. G. Rabassa. London: Penguin Classics. Gelder, K., and J. Jacobs. 1998. Uncanny Australia: Sacredness and Identity in a Postcolonial Nation. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press. Herbert, X. 2014. Poor Fellow My Country. Melbourne, VIC: Harper Collins. Hill, B. 2002. Broken Song: T.G.H. Strehlow and Aboriginal Possession. Sydney: Alfred A. Knopf. Martel, Y. 2001. Life of Pi. New York: Knopf Canada. Maxwell, A., and O. Kelada. 2013. Falling from View: Whiteness, Appropriation and the Complicities of Desire in the Postcolonial Eye. Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature 12 (3): 1–8. Mead, P. 2013. Indigenous Literature and the Extractive Industries. Australian Literary Studies 28 (4): 31–46. Mudrooroo, N. 1991. Master of the Ghost Dreaming. Sydney: Angus & Robertson. Parliament of Australia, and F. Cook. n.d. Sale of the Century Zinc Project. Current Issues Brief 19, 1996–1997. Available at: https://www.aph.gov.au/ sitecore/content/Home/About_Parliament/Parliamentary_Departments/ Parliamentary_Library/Publications_Archive/CIB/CIB9697/97cib19. Accessed 21 September 2018. Perlez, J. 2008. Aboriginal Lit. New York Times, 18 November, p. 731. Ravenscroft, A. 2010. Dreaming of Others: Carpentaria and Its Critics. Cultural Studies Review 16 (2): 194–224.

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Ravenscroft, A. 2012. The Postcolonial Eye: White Australian Desire and the Visual Field of Race. Farnham: Ashgate. Reed, A.W. 1982. Aboriginal Myths, Legends and Fables. Wellington, New Zealand: A. W. Reed. Robinson, R. 1966. Aboriginal Myths and Legends. Melbourne: Sun Books. Rodoreda, G. 2017. Orality and Narrative: Invention in Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria. Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature 16 (2). Available at: https://openjournals.library.sydney.edu.au/index.php/ JASAL/article/view/11005/10804. Accessed 21 September 2018. Roe, P. 1983. Gularabulu: Stories of the West Kimberley, ed. Stephen Muecke. Fremantle: Fremantle Arts Centre Press. Rose, D.B. 1996. Nourishing Terrains: Australian Aboriginal View of Landscape and Wilderness. Canberra: Australian Heritage Commission. Scambary, B. 2013. My Country, Mine Country Indigenous People, Mining and Development Contestation in Remote Australia. Canberra Research Monograph No. 33. Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research, College of Arts and Social Sciences, The Australian National University. Strehlow, T.G.H. 1971. Songs of Central Australia. Sydney: Angus & Robertson. Taçon, P. 2008. Rainbow Colour and Power Among the Waanyi of Northwest Queensland. Cambridge Archaeological Journal 18 (2): 163–176. Tamisari, F., and J. Bradley. 2005. To Have and to Give the Law: Animal Names, Place and Event. In Animal Names, ed. G. Ortalli, A. Minelli, and G. Sanga, 419–438. Venice: Instituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti, Plazzo Loredan, Campo Santo Stefano. Vernay, J.F. 2004. An Interview with Alexis Wright. Antipodes 18 (2): 119–120. Watson, S. 2004. Smoke Encrypted Whispers. Brisbane: University of Queensland Press. Wolfe, P. 1991. On Being Woken Up: The Dreamtime in Anthropology and in Australian Settler Culture. Comparative Studies in Society and History 33 (2): 197–244. Wright, A. 1997. Plains of Promise. Brisbane: University of Queensland Press. Wright, A. 2001. A Document. In Storykeepers, ed. M. Halligan, 223–238. Sydney: Duffy & Snellgrove. Wright, A. 2002. Politics of Writing. Southerly 62 (2): 10–20. Wright, A. 2006. Carpentaria. Artarmon, NSW: Giramondo. Wright, A. 2007. Gulf Music. Weekend Australian, 9 June. Wright, A. 2017. Tracker: Stories of Tracker Tilmouth. Artarmon, NSW: Giramondo. Yanyuwa Community. 1989. Buwarrala Akarriya/Journey East. Film produced by Debbie Sonnenberg. Marndaa Productions. Yanyuwa Families, J. Bradley, and N. Cameron. 2003. ‘Forget About Flinders’: A Yanyuwa Atlas of the South West Gulf of Carpentaria, privately published.

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Yanyuwa Families, B. McKee, J. Bradley, T. Chandler, S. Faulkhead, A. Kearney, L. Brady, and I. McNiven. 2012. The Groper (a-Kuridi). Clayton: Monash Country Lines Archive, Digital Animation Project. Available at: http://artsonline.monash.edu.au/countrylines-archive/the-groper-akuridi/. Accessed 21 September 2018.

CHAPTER 6

Encounters with Yanyuwa Rock Art: Reflexivity, Multivocality, and the “Archaeological Record” in Northern Australia’s Southwest Gulf Country Liam M. Brady

Introduction Archaeologists are inextricably linked to learning and communicating about the human past. Yet, within discussions of what archaeology is, what it does, its value, and its shortcomings is the increasing recognition that the voice and role of the archaeologist in this process is just as important as the narratives we construct. In this chapter, I present a story about my reflexive journey investigating the archaeology of Yanyuwa Country through its rock art record. Reflexivity in this chapter is framed in the experiential nature of archaeological fieldwork and analysis, and is

L. M. Brady (B) College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, Flinders University, Bedford Park, SA, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 A. Kearney and J. Bradley (eds.), Reflexive Ethnographic Practice, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34898-4_6

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concerned with my personal and revelatory moments involving the landscapes, objects and images encountered during fieldwork, and conversations with Yanyuwa Family members. While the experiences I present here can in one sense be considered “personal transformative moments,” they also have the potential to reveal new insights into what is often referred to as the “archaeological record.” By thinking reflexively, archaeologists are well-positioned to engage with other ways of approaching the past that draw on Indigenous worldviews, but how does this process impact the archaeologist? What are the reactions and responses we have to the places, images, and objects we encounter, record, and analyze? What structures and influences them, and furthermore, why do we have them? Reflexivity in archaeological fieldwork can also generate emotional and affectual responses—apprehension, fear, shock, unease, excitement, thrill, etc.—all of which represent critical features of the reflexive process. Yet, as Clarke (1994: 106) points out, archaeologists oftentimes “seek to disentangle and separate out personal experiences from measurable archaeological facts and observations.” However, rather than separating them, what if these personal experiences are used as interpretive material for understanding the archaeological record? Much like academics across the social sciences and humanities, archaeologists have reactions—the reflex— to what we encounter, record, and analyze, and then we reflect on why we felt that way. What I am interested in with this chapter is exploring what a reflexive encounter in an Indigenous archaeology context looks and feels like, and what its implications might be for the archaeologist and how they construct the past. While I have been a practicing archaeologist for over 15 years in Australia and North America, my journey encountering, recording, and analyzing Yanyuwa rock art is one that has challenged me to further consider ideas of multivocality, sentiency, and the complex cultural and relational contexts that rock art is found in. I have been privileged to listen to Yanyuwa men and women describe their relationships to the places we visited and recorded—a process that has at times challenged my understanding of the role of archaeology when working with Indigenous communities and among Indigenous families. As such, this chapter involves reflecting back on the discipline of archaeology, my training in this field, and posing questions about how archaeology in Indigenous settings is practiced. By exploring these encounters, reactions, and responses I also hope to show how reflexive thinking may further contribute to the decolonizing process in archaeology.

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Reflexivity in Archaeology Practice Reflexivity in archaeology largely emerged as a response to processualism—the scientific objectivity and neutrality of research and interpretation designed to answer questions of “universal scientific value” (Hodder 2005: 645). In the late 1980s and early 1990s, post-processual archaeologists increasingly questioned this objective stance and challenged researchers to consider in more detail ideas of subjectivity, multivocality, agency, ethics, the positionality of the researcher(s), and emic approaches to the production and interpretation of the archaeological record (for a detailed background to reflexive archaeology see for example Berggren 2014; Burke et al. 1994; Castañeda 2008; Edgeworth 2006; Hodder 1997, 2000, 2005; Londoño 2014; Moore 2006). In addition, increasing awareness of issues related to power and control of research agendas in Indigenous settings, led to reflexivity becoming a core theoretical element in research involving Indigenous people and their cultural heritage. Increased reflexive engagement by archaeologists was encouraged to “find an equitable balance between the (at times seemingly incommensurable) objectives of archaeologists and those of descendant communities,” as well as contribute to efforts to decolonize the discipline (Nicholas and Hollowell 2007: 76; see also Atalay 2006; Bruchac et al. 2010; Smith and Wobst 2005; Smith and Jackson 2006). In Australia, calls by Tasmanian Aboriginal people in particular drew considerable attention to the need for archaeologists to reconsider how they practiced archaeology with Indigenous Australians. In turn, this led to significant changes in the way archaeology in Australia is practiced, with a focus on collaborative archaeology frameworks that emphasized partnership approaches where Indigenous communities retain control and ownership of projects (see for example Brady and Crouch 2010; Davidson et al. 1995; McNiven and Russell 2005). While many researchers (see references above) have called for reflexivity to become a part of the archaeologist’s skill set and/or toolbox, Hodder (2005: 650) also notes that reflexive archaeology, “does not so much replace existing approaches but adds to them.” A core feature of reflexive archaeology concerns researcher positionality. Burke et al. (1994: 14) note that: [a] central focus of reflexive archaeology is consideration of how the values of individual researchers enter their research, and attempts to clarify the ways in which these values impose upon the data. Reflexive archaeology

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attempts to answer the questions how and why archaeologists do what they do at each stage of their research and to assess the ways in which researchers are themselves a part of their data.

As such, self-awareness and self-monitoring are essential aspects of how a researcher positions themselves (for example, a non-Indigenous male) in relation to their fieldwork environment(s), their data, and their relationships with others (Indigenous collaborators, other archaeologists). However, Burke et al. (1994: 19) also take researcher positionality to a deeper place: “reflexive archaeology is, in some senses, an archaeology of vulnerability: reflexive methods will be most easily adopted by researchers who are willing to accept the existence of alternative interpretations of their data.” By speaking of vulnerability, Burke et al. draw attention to the idea that reflexive archaeology is also something that can include complex emotional (or other similar) responses on the part of the researcher that can potentially play a critical and influencing role in archaeological practice—from fieldwork to analysis to interpretation. Hodder identifies other core aspects of reflexive archaeology practice that contribute to its usefulness for archaeologists. These aspects include: relationality, where there is an understanding that every site, object, image, etc., is part of a complex network of relationships, each of which has the potential to impact on the other; and multivocality, where the potential exists for a multiplicity of interpretations and reinterpretations of the archaeological record at different points in time and by different groups of people (for example, field archaeologists, Traditional Owners, laboratory specialists). How a reflexive archaeology looks is variable (see Hodder 2000). Some projects with large teams of archaeologists (for example, Hodder’s Çatalhöyük project in Turkey) have introduced group-based, systematized, and obligatory reflexivity methods into their research design in the form of diaries (Mickel 2015), digital and 3D technology (Berggren et al. 2015), and Participant Forms (Members of the Ardnamurchan Transitions Project 2012). At a more individual level, reflexivity emerges through narratives concerning personal experience, where archaeologists describe instances (usually interpretive) that draw attention to alternate ways of viewing the archaeological record oftentimes through multivocal and relational contexts. For example, in the Torres Strait islands (northeastern Australia) Joe Crouch (a fellow archaeologist) and I used a reflexive case study approach to highlight how our experience working within

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a host–guest paradigm with Islander communities shaped the way we approach and practice archaeology (see also Brady 2009). We described how our interpretation of newly discovered rock paintings and a turtle shell mask fragment was initially framed in a western archaeological sense (images and artifacts that historicize aspects of Islander culture), while interpretations by Mualgal and Badulgal community members chose to emphasize the agency of their ancestors who guided us to these places and allowed us to find the images and objects because we followed the correct cultural protocols. By doing so, ancestors were considered by Islanders to be “active and equal participants in the research process” (Brady and Crouch 2010: 413), thus revealing an intimate and highly complex relationship between archaeological features, contemporary Torres Strait Islanders, and their ancestors. While examples of reflexive archaeology are steadily increasing through case studies about the multivocal and relational contexts of archaeological field methods and interpretation, what remains somewhat obscured in these accounts is a deeper interrogation of the archaeologist’s position in these projects and what their personal experiences can potentially contribute to understanding the archaeological record. By this I mean, the nature of the encounter by an archaeologist with an image, object, site, interpretation from Indigenous collaborators, etc.—how did these experiences shape or challenge an archaeologist’s thinking? What role does an emotional response play in how someone practices archaeology? What is the nature of the relationships that archaeologists develop with Indigenous communities, that is, the people who permit us to do our work, who we collaborate with, who censor and guide our movements and the information we share? As Burke et al. noted, reflexivity can highlight vulnerability, but this should not be seen as a negative, instead it is something that can be grasped and integrated into the archaeological process to better understand how we construct and interpret the past. I turn now to two case studies that have played a pivotal role in the way I have approached Yanyuwa rock art, and by extension the Yanyuwa archaeological record.

Archaeology and the Southwest Gulf Country Unlike the deep ethnography carried out by the other contributors to this volume, archaeological research in Yanyuwa Country is much smaller in scale. The only publically available excavation data is from Vanderlin Island (see Fig. 6.1), where a project exploring Holocene occupational

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Fig. 6.1 Map of the southwestern Gulf of Carpentaria showing sites mentioned in the text (Source Authors)

responses and trends to sea-level rises revealed three discreet phases of occupation, with the earliest dating to approximately 8000 BP (Sim and Wallis 2008). In contrast to the excavation data, rock art appears more frequently in the archaeological record and can be divided into two phases of research: an early phase beginning in the early 1960s, where the presence, interpretation, and symbolism of specific motifs were identified and recorded. These recordings were not guided by any specific research questions, although in the case of Bradley they formed part of his broader ethnographic research program (see Brady and Bradley 2014 for a review). The second phase began in 2005 when Yanyuwa Elders invited Bradley, Kearney, and I to undertake a systematic recording project across Yanyuwa Country. The project was originally designed to assist with passing on

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knowledge about the rock art to younger generations, offering conservation advice concerning management of the sites, and to use archaeological techniques to learn more about the rock art assemblages (for example Brady and Bradley 2014; Brady and Kearney 2016; Brady et al. 2016). The extant body of literature about Yanyuwa rock art centers around three key themes: (1) reporting the presence of art, including its classification, and stylistic analysis; (2) identification of meaning and symbolism of imagery; and (3) exploring the affective (fear etc.) and relational (for example, kin-based, affiliation with Ancestral Beings) contexts that motifs are embedded within. Yet what oftentimes remains obscured or kept silent in this writing are descriptions concerning the encounter, reaction, and response the recorder and/or viewer has with the imagery; that is, what is the nature of engagement with the art beyond documenting and classifying motifs and recording interpretations from Yanyuwa Families? What does the researcher’s position reveal about the way sites and motifs are approached, experienced, and interpreted? Below, I share some of my experiences encountering, recording, and classifying rock art to draw attention to the reflexive process, my position as a researcher, and how these have ultimately influenced the way I engage with the “archaeological record.”

Research Questions and Entering the Field When I was invited to visit and record rock art sites in Yanyuwa Country my initial reaction to the invitation centered around two themes: first, exploring a region that was frequently overlooked in discussions of Australia’s past; and second, documenting the interpretive and symbolic dimensions of rock art through an ethnographic lens. As noted above, very little archaeological research has been carried out in the study area and this project represented an opportunity to contribute new data to the story of Australia’s past (Fig. 6.1). At a more specific level I was interested in three questions: • What can Yanyuwa rock art (and the broader graphic system) tell us about communication and exchange networks operating across the broader Gulf region? • How has Yanyuwa rock art helped shape the broader southwest Gulf Country landscape as a socially engaged environment?

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• How do/did Yanyuwa use rock art as a form of symbolic behavior to inscribe seascapes with place markers that reveal how they experienced, constructed, and engaged their maritime world? I considered the second theme as a different type of challenge, one designed to gain insight into questions concerning perceptions and cultural contexts of Yanyuwa rock art. My interest in this area was piqued after reading Bradley’s work (1988, 1997; Yanyuwa Families et al. 2003) where he recorded complex interpretations focusing on rock art as sentient and related to kinship, cosmology, and health and well-being. I was immediately aware of the challenges with this research theme, especially given language barriers, but was keen to build on this area using Bradley’s knowledge to assist in achieving this aim. Thus my position upon entering Yanyuwa Country was twofold: at one level was my relationship with anthropologists, John and Amanda, while at another level I was largely anchored and structured in the archaeological world although with an increasing interest in rock art’s ethnographic dimensions. While I was well aware of the multivocal nature in approaching the archaeological record (see above), I was unprepared for my reactions to encountering and interacting with Yanyuwa rock art.

Looking for a Donkey My first field trip to Yanyuwa Country was in April 2010. Around 15 Yanyuwa men, women, and children, brought Bradley, Kearney, and I to South West Island, where we set up camp and went to rock art sites in the area around Mandarilla and Lilardungka. Our aim with this trip was to visit and record rock art sites with links to the travels of a-Kuridi—the Groper Ancestral Being—as well as places Yanyuwa remembering camping at and for which they knew many associated stories. During the trip, senior Yanyuwa woman Dinah Norman asked us to record a rock-shelter on the northern coast of the island at Lilardungka that she remembered camping at as a young girl. Dinah explained that we would find a painting of a yirrikirri—a donkey—at the site. Dinah’s recollection of the site clearly indicated it was an important place for her, while my first reaction was to also position it as a significant site in an archaeological sense. In my pre-fieldwork review of Yanyuwa rock art literature I had failed to come across any information concerning donkey paintings or, for

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that matter, any contact-themed rock art (European, or Macassans from Sulawesi; see Baker 1999). Since donkeys were introduced into Australia in 1793 (Mitchell 2018: 218), such an image had the potential to deliver at least three strands of important archaeological data: a relative date for the production of rock art in the islands; a symbol of cross-cultural interaction between Yanyuwa and pastoralists in the area; and a record of change and continuity for the Yanyuwa people. During our recording of the site we documented 40 motifs but we were unable to locate the yirrikirri (Fig. 6.2). When we returned to our base camp and told Dinah that the yirrikirri was not there, she stated in Yanyuwa: “li-wankala kalu-wajkirra li-jakarda kalinyamba-mirra wiji bawuji barra,” translated as, “[o]ld people must have taken it away, too many of them have died you know.” A simple sentence in language told first to John and then to me was both exciting and perplexing in the sense that we were able to document an explanation for a motif that couldn’t be found. My reactions to Dinah’s explanation were varied. Initially, I was disappointed at not finding a contact-themed image that could have addressed key archaeological questions. However, soon after, I began to consider the role of conservation in thinking through Dinah’s explanation. Conservation of rock art has, for many years, formed an important pillar of rock art management discourse, oftentimes with references to the potential loss of rock art as a “cultural treasure” (see for example Agnew et al.

Fig. 6.2 Looking for the donkey motif at Lilardungka (Source Author)

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2015). Conservation and handbook manuals, along with various charters concerned with applying appropriate strategies and materials to preserve rock art in the long term, are quite common (for example, Australia ICOMOS 2013; Darvill and Fernandes 2014; Lambert 2007; Loubser 2014; Marshall and Taçon 2014; Rosenfeld 1985). In Australia, conservation of rock art has also been the focus of controversy, such as the repainting debate concerning the distinctive Wanjina Ancestral Being motifs in northwest Australia’s Kimberley region (see Mowaljarlai and Peck 1987; Walsh 1992; Ward 1992). I recalled my first experience working with a highly experienced rock art conservator as he painstakingly removed a termite nest adhered to a panel of culturally significant rock paintings at the island of Dauan in Torres Strait (Brady et al. 2010). I was reminded of the conservator’s explanations of the science behind granular disintegration and microerosion of rock surfaces that impact on the long-term preservation of pigment-based imagery, the chemical characterization, stability and degradation of specific pigments, and the role of humid versus dry environments for rock art preservation. Yet Dinah’s description of why a painting could not be found was not what I had expected based on my knowledge of rock art conservation. In addition, as this was a systematic rock art recording project, do I count it in the official inventory of the site’s motifs, and if so, how? Dinah’s explanation also challenged me to consider a second relational context: the role of rock art in health and well-being. According to Dinah, the absence of the yirrikirri clearly was not related to taphonomic factors but instead focused on the relationship between the agency of the li-wankala, the “old people” (spirits of deceased kin or other spirits), and the health and well-being of the Yanyuwa community. In Indigenous Australia, health and well-being are frequently encountered in the media and scholarly literature but rarely in archaeology (see Brady 2016; see also Godwin and Weiner 2006: 134). In a rock art context, I have since found other examples that highlight the rock art health and well-being conservation relationship from Australia and the USA, see for example, Schaafsma and Tsosie (2009), Schaafsma (2014), Cole (2011); and also Brady (2016). In the Yanyuwa context, Dinah’s explanation references two key points: first, this was a unique insight into a connection involving rock art, the agency of the “old people” and the health and well-being of an Indigenous community; and second, how I and other members of the research team are drawn into this complex network of relationships.

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My understanding of this unique relationship developed further when John recalled some of his experiences in the 1980s and 1990s working with senior Yanyuwa men. He described how the state of Country— the Yanyuwa landscape and seascape—was also implicated in the rock art, health and well-being nexus. For example, upon seeing heavily faded images and broken pieces of painted rock on the ground at Liwarrangka on South West Island, Tom Wambarirri said, “[n]o fucking good, old people are being hard, they are closing this place up, that painting was really bright not long back” (pers. comm. to John Bradley 1992). When Mussolini Harvey observed painted turtle-like motifs at the same site he said, “[t]hey are things that were once alive on these islands that are dead now, too many white people, too many old people been die out” (pers. comm. to John Bradley 1994). At Wulibirra on North Island another senior Yanyuwa man told John the paintings here used to be “really strong and bright” and attributed their fading to the death of senior land owners and the fact that specific ceremonies were no longer performed at the site. In each of these cases rock art played a key role in anchoring people’s interpretations of what was happening to people and Country, and the agency of the “old people.” My experience at Lilardungka triggered a range of questions that referenced the idea that other interpretations of the archaeological record exist. I was challenged to consider the cultural contexts of the conservation and management of rock art, while also learning to appreciate the complex networks that rock art is embedded within according to Yanyuwa worldviews. This experience also led me to better appreciate how rock art is mutable—there are other forces at work that directly challenge the western-based conservation ethos—and can act as a marker of the health and well-being of people and Country. A final concern that emerged from this experience focused on the idea of rock art largely being considered a nonrenewable resource; that is, “in the absence of their original makers, nothing can re-create rock art panels that have been severely damaged or destroyed” (Loubser 2014: 6358). Yet taken in the context of Dinah’s statement, does this mean rock art cannot regenerate itself if Yanyuwa health improves? Will the “old people” deem the painting ready to return to visibility? And who will revive the paintings? Other features in the landscape that are deteriorating are also oftentimes attributed to the health and well-being of Yanyuwa Families. For example, when the freshwater well at another important place, to the west of Yanyuwa Country, Jarrka began increasing in salt content and eventually went dry, Yanyuwa

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explained that this had happened because “too many of the senior men and women associated with this place have died and the Country is sad, it is crying for them” (Yanyuwa Families et al. 2003: 216). Is the process of reviving a painting entirely an activity belonging to the realm of the “old people,” or is there an element of human participation? Whatever the case may be, simple statements about the presence/absence of a single motif can be loaded with complexity and (unintentionally) highlight how interpretations of rock art cannot always be placed into archaeological frameworks.

Kurrmurnnyini and Sorcery Rock Art My encounter with the Kurrmurnnyini rock art site has had a profound impact on the way I view and record rock art. Kurrmurnnyini is a powerful sorcery site that is well-known and feared across the southwest Gulf Country (for a full account of the Kurrmurnnyini sorcery site see Brady and Bradley 2016). The site is located near to Borroloola in adjacent Gudanji Country, however many Yanyuwa (and people from other language groups in the immediate area) have been directly affected by the activities undertaken here (see Fig. 6.3). The site is intimately associated with the King Brown Snake (ngulwa in Yanyuwa and balngarrangarra in Gudanji; Pseudechis australis ) Ancestral Being. In the Ancestral past, the King Brown was woken by a band of noisy Spirit Men Ancestral Beings, and in his anger at being woken he bit into the rocks and infused them with his deadly poison. Individuals with the proper kin relationship to the King Brown Snake are able to harness the power of the poison to use in sorcery. The sorcery associated with Kurrmurnnyini is called narnubulabula and took two forms: a sorcerer would paint pictures on a rock wall here and sing specific songs designed to “attack the life-force (nawurdula) of a selected victim” (Brady and Bradley 2016: 885); the second form involved twirling a stick with a sharpened end, hardened in a fire, onto the rock while calling out the victim’s name. In addition, the artifacts, imagery (see below), and all aspects of the rock-shelter, including its walls, were considered bibiyurru, saturated with poison and not to be touched. As a result, Kurrmurnnyini is a place tied to sorcery and death. Kurrmurnnyini is also intimately linked with a second sorcery site called Nangkuya to the west of Borroloola in Marra Country that I have yet to visit, although John has been here once before but did not visit the actual painting site. In 1985, a senior Law man for the Gulf Country,

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Fig. 6.3 Kurrmurnnyini rock art site (Source Author)

Bruce Joy, told John that Kurrmurnnyini and Nangkuya “…stand looking at each forever: Nangkuya from the west and Kurrmurnnyini from the south. They stand looking at each other. They both have the same Law, same badness” (Brady and Bradley 2016: 892). In 2012, our team was asked by senior Yanyuwa men and women to record the site as part of our research project. We traveled there with Leonard Norman, a senior Yanyuwa man and member of the research team but also someone who has been directly impacted by the power of this place—his maternal uncle had been ensorcelled and killed by a painting here. While this was Leonard’s first visit to the painted rock-shelter, he had traveled with John and senior Yanyuwa, Marra, and Gudanji men to the general area of the site in 1985 but the senior men felt he was too young to see the shelter and painting that killed his uncle and he remained in the car. From an archaeological point of view, the site was spectacular. The walls and roof were covered with monochrome and bichrome (red, yellow, and white pigments) paintings, along with many layers of superimpositions that could be used to develop a relative sequence of the art. A wide

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range of subject matter was found here: anthropomorphs in the distinctive sorcery style known from across northern Australia (twisted or contorted body and limbs, knobbly knees and/or elbows, missing limbs, all to mimic the pain of the intended victim); marine and terrestrial animals, such as dugong, crocodiles, snakes, and goannas; a face; hands (prints and stencils); “track” motifs consisting of bird tracks and macropod tracks; objects such as boomerangs and various abstract and geometric motifs, including concentric circles, ovals, and rectangles (Figs. 6.4 and 6.5). A series of flaked rock surfaces are located on the rear wall, while on the surface of the site are found stone artifacts, including a flat portable grinding base with several grinding stones nearby. Post-European contact objects are also found here: a small metal bowl located down the slope fronting the shelter, while on a small horizontal rock slab intentionally positioned on

Fig. 6.4 Painted anthropomorph at Kurrmurnnyini in the distinctive sorcerystyle pose (Source Author)

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Fig. 6.5 Painted crocodile at Kurrmurnnyini used to kill a Yanyuwa man who had a kin-based relationship with the crocodile Ancestral Being (Source Author)

a rock shelf in the shelter is a collection of rusted metal objects, including an axe-head and gate hinge (Fig. 6.6). Along with the King Brown Snake narrative, each image and object at the site had the potential to play an important role in telling the story of the site—one that could be used to describe how people inscribed and engaged with the landscape, performed specific rituals (sorcery), and the nature of interaction with Europeans. I was already aware Kurrmurnnyini was a sorcery site before our visit. John and I had spoken about it previously, when he described his earlier visit with the senior men and how they responded to it. Suffice it to say I felt prepared to record Kurrmurnnyini’s rock art. What I wasn’t prepared for was my reaction—apprehension and unease—to entering and recording such a place. Upon reflection, it was Leonard’s reaction to the site that influenced the way I approached and viewed Kurrmurnnyini’s art and objects. Leonard’s interaction with Kurrmurnnyini was vastly different to the other sites we had recorded from the islands in previous years. Throughout our project, Leonard had been very involved in the recording process and assisting with photography, motif identifications and describing the significance of motifs and sites. However, at Kurrmurnnyini he appeared nervous and uneasy, standing some distance from

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Fig. 6.6 Contact-era objects placed on a “shelf” inside the Kurrmurnnyini rockshelter (Source Author)

the shelter’s entrance, with only glances to the imagery on the rock walls. He chose not to assist with the recording process and looked relieved when we finally left the site. While he understood why he was there and his role in the broader recording project, Leonard’s demeanor—subdued and quiet—was clearly an indicator of the affect this place and its imagery continues to have on Yanyuwa. This was the first sorcery site I had encountered in my archaeological career. Through anthropological and archaeological literature I had become quite familiar with sorcery rock art in Australian contexts, including its distinctive forms (see above), symbolism, the process of ensorcellment and reversing its effects, and motivation for its use. I’ve also read about the relational responsibilities that Aboriginal people have to these places, especially in terms of their care. Yet after my encounter with Kurrmurnnyini I realized that there is much less in the literature about what it is actually like to be there, to record a sorcery site with people who have intimate knowledge and at times feared relationships with these places and motifs.

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During the recording process I was hesitant and uncomfortable. I was apprehensive with the idea that I would be photographing images that were used to kill people, some of them quite recently and very clearly in the memory of Yanyuwa as seen through Leonard’s reaction. Prior to photography I remember saying quietly to John that I felt uneasy about recording the site and that it didn’t feel right to subject this place to a systematic, archaeologically focused recording project. This was a place with a history of killing people—Yanyuwa and other Aboriginal people from the area—and evil intentions. Senior Yanyuwa women reinforced the evil nature of Kurrmurnnyini when, in 2013, they commented to John in Yanyuwa that it would be better if “they blow the place up, you know got a dynamite. We don’t need that place, too dangerous. Killed my husband’s brother that place,” as well as voicing concerns about the potential for younger people to enter Kurrmurnnyini without knowing its power, and in turn to become sick and die (Brady and Bradley 2016: 894). To destroy a site with such archaeological potential would, on the surface, appear antithetical, but as I noted above, conservation of sites and motifs is much more complex when cultural contexts are considered in greater depth (see also Schaafsma and Tsosie 2009; Schaafsma 2014). Given the setting of the site, I was also unsure of how to approach the motifs and objects, but most importantly, how I could explore the archaeology of such a place when people’s understandings of the motifs had only one meaning—they were killer paintings. An idea that emerged in my mind as I tried to respond to and rationalize my unease was that perhaps the meaning and function of the site had changed over time and that not all paintings were sorcery-related and therefore it was important to record the art as part of future research possibilities. Another idea was that perhaps sorcery shouldn’t always be seen as a negative thing, that is, in some cases sorcery could have different connotations. Kurrmurnnyini need not be seen as something “evil,” but as a place where problems could be solved or dealt with such as breaches or other matters related to Yanyuwa Law. As I contemplated these ideas I began asking myself whether this approach would be a form of epistemic violence? I also began to reconsider my desire to find Nangkuya. In an archaeological sense, finding Nangkuya and recording its art would not only be thrilling but also highly useful in gaining insight into the nature of shared graphic styles between language groups. However, given the reactions of Yanyuwa

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men and women toward Kurrmurnnyini, as well as my own apprehensiveness, I’m no longer sure whether the project team should go looking for it or leave it as simply a reminder of its power and reputation. I have yet to classify Kurrmurnnyini’s motifs according to the classification scheme I have developed to investigate the rock art of the southwest Gulf Country. I’m still hesitant to do so given that all the paintings here are considered by language groups across the region as paintings that kill. In spite of this, I will most likely undertake a classification and analysis exercise because I know it will play an important role in telling the story of how people inscribed the landscape in the past and present, and how style-based patterns can be used to link people across space. While this approach will be an archaeological one, it is carried out knowing that there are other culturally significant interpretations of the art here linked to evil intentions. In considering what I do with Kurrmurnnyini’s “data” I also find myself straddling two epistemic worlds—Indigenous and archaeological. Although this divide may seem, on the surface, to be an incommensurable one, I increasingly find myself comfortable in communicating the story of both worlds. In doing so, I fully recognize and accept that I will never have the knowledge base to delve into the deeper, more esoteric world of Yanyuwa relationships with the site and its meaning. However, the comfort I feel derives from recognizing and appreciating that the story of Kurrmurnnyini is not one-dimensional, and the complexities of the site extend beyond Yanyuwa interaction, to also encompass my positionality and responses.

Yalkawarru and the Power of Place A similar encounter with the power of place occurred when visiting Liwarrangka in 2010. The Liwarrangka landscape consists of a series of low sandstone rock-shelters containing hollow-log coffins where the skeletal remains of recently deceased Yanyuwa were interred, rock art, and other cultural materials such as stone tools and small shell middens. Liwarrangka is also associated with a-Kuridi (Groper Ancestral Being) who sang about, and created the site during her travels in the Ancestral past. As part of our recording project, we were asked by senior Yanyuwa women to document the site although given gender restrictions about visiting the site, only men were allowed to travel there, however the rock art could be viewed by all back in camp. Once again I traveled with John and Leonard (jungkayi for the site), although this time was joined by

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Graham Friday, another senior Yanyuwa man and ngimirringki for the site. That the younger Yanyuwa who camped and visited other rock art sites with us were not invited signaled Liwarrangka held a different form of significance. Hopping into the boat for the short ride across to the site, I knew from my reading that I would be encountering a burial site, one that was deeply entwined with a-Kuridi (Yanyuwa Families et al. 2003: 126). As this was my first experience working on Yanyuwa Country, I remember feeling privileged to be chosen to document the site. At the same, I was mentally reviewing the steps I would take to ensure Liwarrangka’s rock art would be systematically recorded. However, what didn’t enter my mind at that point, was how I would react to being in such a place. Upon our arrival we moved through dense vegetation and emerged in a small clearing where we were surrounded by low rock-shelters. I immediately became aware of log coffins cached in several of the shelters along with brightly colored stencils and paintings covering the roof and rear walls including numerous superimpositions. Graham and John pointed to the rear wall of one shelter and identified the distinctive gridshaped motifs as yalkawarru—designs painted onto wooden posts that were used in the yalkawarru post-funeral ceremony for recently deceased Wuyaliya and Wurdaliya clan members. As I moved through the landscape I could see more rock art—including many yalkawarru designs— and hollow-log coffins, and watched as Leonard and Graham inspected the site, assessing it for damage, and speaking quietly and pointing to various features. Clearly this was a site laden with memories of relatives and powerful ancestral presences. Yet, there was something else with Liwarrangka that set it apart from other sites we visited during our April fieldwork—there was a certain authority associated with this area. Whenever the name Liwarrangka was mentioned among the Yanyuwa community it was instantly recognized as a powerful place, a name that piqued the attention of listener, and a place that people instantly associated with aKuridi, Yanyuwa Law, and the material remains and spirits of recently deceased kin. Unlike Kurrmurnnyini, the Yanyuwa response was not of fear, but respect. This understanding by Yanyuwa men and women of Liwarrangka as a powerful place played an important role in the early stages of my research. Until now, I had largely been considering Yanyuwa rock art using a stylistic lens—categorizing and classifying motifs and drawing relationships between similar motifs at different sites to understand how it was being used to inscribe the landscape. This relational framework approach

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was archaeological in nature and continues to play a key role in my research today (see above). However, what emerged through my site visit was a coalescing of the complex the relational network involving Liwarrangka: the yalkawarru motifs, hollow-log coffins, yalkawarru ceremony, clan and kin affiliations, a-Kuridi, Yanyuwa Law, and the authority and respect the name commanded when mentioned. Yet embedded within this relational network was me and my role as an archaeologist tasked with recording and communicating the significance of the site’s rock art. While my involvement as a non-Indigenous research archaeologist in the Liwarrangka relational nexus at first seemed strange, upon reflection nine years later, this experience has been pivotal in shaping my archaeological practice to one that emphasizes the vital role relationships play in understanding the “rock art record.”

Discussion In one sense, the rock art discussed here sits awkwardly in archaeological discourse since the people who made it and used it were likely not thinking about regional patterning, developing chronologies of production, their style-based design conventions, or the chemical characterization of pigments. The sites, paintings, and associated artifacts are deeply embedded in Yanyuwa ontology and epistemology and as such operate in a space very different to the archaeological world. But does that mean the story I tell about them has no relevance or usefulness to modern-day archaeological research questions? Writing in the early 1990s, Burke et al. (1994: 20) noted that, “some researchers appeared to be uncomfortable with an explicitly reflective archaeology…they voiced a fear (or hope) that it is nothing more than posturing in mirrors,” and that it “might produce no archaeology – that it may cause some kind of disciplinary impasse.” In my project, I have often wondered about the relevance of the quantitative data I collect and analyse. I have occasionally asked myself if Yanyuwa will be interested in knowing that of the 241 motifs recorded at the Kammandaringabaya rock-shelter at Vanderlin Island, there are exactly 139 hand motifs, when Yanyuwa easily and clearly interpret the hands as the work of the Spirit Man Ancestral Being. I have been fortunate in that Yanyuwa Families have been receptive to the results generated from my research as it adds another, western science-based dimension to their cultural history that can be communicated alongside their narratives whenever it is needed. This situation is mirrored in many Indigenous contexts across the

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globe (too numerous to mention in this chapter) where Indigenous people use archaeological data as part of various programs, such as cultural tourism enterprises and in school curriculums. In doing so, this knowledge can be seen in another relational context, that is, the archaeological results generated are folded into a broader narrative of the world Yanyuwa know and operate in. The archaeological data does not replace or compromise existing Yanyuwa knowledge, but finds a place where it can become useful in various contexts that suit the needs of Yanyuwa people. By positioning myself into the research process, I am also embracing methodological openness, where I am responsive to and accepting of Yanyuwa epistemological and ontological understandings in relation to rock art. In doing so, I situate myself in a gap—a space between archaeological and Indigenous conceptualizations of the world (including the “archaeological record”). As Amanda Kearney and I have noted, “[i]t is in this gap that we might be able to better hear the articulations of those with whom we collaborate and those for whom the ‘past’ matters in ways the archaeologist can never conceive of” (Brady and Kearney 2016: 644, and see also Hokari [2011] for a history-based example of a “gap”). As I sit in this gap and listen to Yanyuwa men and women describe their relationships to and understanding of their rock art, I am also interrogating my position, that is, my responses and reactions to these events as a way of better appreciating and recognizing multivocality, agency, and sentiency. My embrace of methodological openness reflects a commitment not only to decolonizing principles in archaeology but also a deeper reflexive engagement with archaeology as a discipline. My journey investigating Yanyuwa rock art has been one of the biggest challenges I have faced in my archaeological career. This journey has made me consider in more depth the relational in archaeological fieldwork and analysis, in particular the role of kinship, affectual and relational understandings of place, and the sentiency of rock art. My primary interests have been, and continue to be, archaeological in nature. However, I have increasingly turned to addressing the emotional, affectual, and relational contexts of Yanyuwa rock art to draw attention to the complexity and mutability of rock art interpretations. As a result of this emerging research interest in the contemporary social dimensions of rock art I have also found that I am beginning to “turn the gaze” upon myself and learn more about the way I engage with and construct the archaeological record— a somewhat confronting exercise that highlights emotions such as unease and apprehensiveness. These experiences, and others not mentioned here,

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speak to some of the challenges and vulnerabilities of archaeologists working in Indigenous contexts. While the ones I have presented here are deeply personal, there is no doubt that others will have faced similar circumstances at some point in time.

Contributor Response, by Nona Cameron Reading Liam M. Brady’s account of the sorcery sites, I was reminded of when I was personally greeted with suspicion, that bordered on animosity, when I shared my first attempt at image making with a senior Yanyuwa woman. This was in the early days of going to Borroloola (around 1986) when a tentative community arts program was up and running. I had joined an informal screen-printing workshop alongside a few young Yanyuwa and Garrwa women who were also using the facilities, and I made a design on a tee-shirt depicting a vignette of two cupped hands holding cycad nuts. It was descriptive with a realistic image of hands, and I thought naively, culturally sensitive, being something locally significant, and relatable. This central panel was surrounded by a repeating pattern of mature cycad palms. Really pleased with the aesthetic outcome, I offered it to Eileen McDinny, a ngimirringki (an Indigenous owner, through lines of paternal descent) for the place of Manankurra, an area of significance in Yanyuwa Country, linked to an ancient grove of cycad palms. It is also the focal site for the very important and powerful Tiger Shark Dreaming Ancestor, of which I had no idea of at the time. I was confused by Eileen’s cool response, initially felt as indifference that soon became accusatory, as I was questioned around what I was doing making this sort of picture, who gave me permission, and why would I want to make such an image? It was my naive attempt at establishing a relationship through sharing a tee-shirt design. Puzzled by these ambiguous and disconcerting responses to my art making, I realized I’d transgressed though how or what I was not sure. Unwittingly I had engaged with imagery connected to an important Dreaming site that added a layer of complexity of which I had no concept at the time. Considering the Gulf’s history around ensorcellment, not only was mark making viewed as a suspicious activity but coupled with a realistic representation, it was viewed as precarious, if not potentially threatening. Fifteen years passed before I again attempted any form of artistic response to Yanyuwa cultural activities. That was when I created the maps for the Yanyuwa Atlas, and where connections between

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the Tiger Shark Ancestor, cycads, and Manankurra were made apparent. And where the image making was supported by senior Yanyuwa men and women. My recollection above triggered an emotional resonance to Brady, where he articulates the ripple effects that occurred through witnessing Leonard’s uneasy nervousness in being in proximity to Kurrmurnnyini. His evocative language in speaking of the evil intent, of walls saturated with poison are both horrifying and alarming, though assist me to put into perspective my sense of Eileen’s disquiet or distaste in what I had offered her, and her warning to me. This retrospective understanding of how art making is a risky and relational business from a Yanyuwa perspective, is one that cannot be taken for granted. Perhaps Brady’s questioning around epistemic violence is where my resonance resides. Taken further, perhaps this is a caution to all interdisciplinary encounters with new knowledge. The message being that care must be taken in approaching another’s epistemology, and that the terms upon which knowledge is built and sustained matter greatly. What then caught my attention from Brady’s chapter was where the art making was situated, the places of these shelters as sites of relationality and potency. Brady’s own reflexive descriptions and responses with these places of significance offers insights that highlight these sites as liminal spaces, as places that are not static but in flux, mutable, potent places of change and transition, with potential for renewal or adversely, of violence and death. It seems to me that in this lies an important lesson for all archaeology, whereby each of the sites referenced are associated with liminal activities or qualities of transition; a restricted burial site of death and renewal where spirits to return to Country; a sorcery site where violent intention causes death; places where the old people interact and intersect with the living. Each of these feels profoundly liminal to me. What I find curious is also that these sites have been represented as lively locations of intersubjectivity, that provoke nuanced and diverse layers of interactions with them by those who go there, the living people and the invisible li-wankala, the old people. This multivocal perspective encompasses complexity in being with the rock-shelters as not just galleries of visual records that offer rich imagery from the past, and they provide a wider focus than the detailed materiality of remnant artifacts. These are places of meeting and interaction, of hiding and revealing. Dinah’s pragmatic description of the old people taking back the donkey image brings this relational engagement to the forefront, which is

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further amplified through Tom’s and Mussolini’s accounts in the dulling down of images. There was a recent occasion told to me, where handprints appeared or were revealed in a rock-shelter on Vanderlin Island that were said to have been made the day before, as the old people knew the visitors were coming (pers. comm. John Bradley 2019) I have a vivid sense of these sites as places of communication, unpredictable but lively and emotional, between the living and human ancestors who reside on Country. I wonder too if what Brady is presenting here is him also being in a liminal place, straddling worldviews that are in contest and tension with each other? I can feel the impact of holding two worldviews that seem so far apart, and no more interesting than the idea of one holding intention of conservation of artwork versus another in conversation with the invisible artmakers who continue to make, dim or remove artwork.

References Agnew, N., J. Deacon, N. Hall, T. Little, S. Sullivan, and P.S.C. Taçon. 2015. Rock Art: A Cultural Treasure at Risk. Los Angles: Getty Conservation Institute. Atalay, S. 2006. Indigenous Archaeology as Decolonizing Practice. American Indian Quarterly 30 (3/4): 280–310. Australia ICOMOS. 2013. The Australia ICOMOS Charter for Places of Cultural Significance. Burwood: Australia ICOMOS Inc. Baker, R. 1999. Land Is Life: From Bush to Town, the Story of the Yanyuwa People. Sydney: Allen & Unwin. Berggren, Å. 2014. Development of Reflexive Approaches in Archaeology. In Global Encyclopaedia of Archaeology, ed. C. Smith, 6249–6257. New York: Springer. Berggren, Å., N. Dell’Unto, M. Forte, S. Haddow, I. Hodder, J. Issavi, N. Lercari, C. Mazzucato, A. Mickel, and J.S. Taylor. 2015. Revisiting Reflexive Archaeology at Çatalhöyük: Integrating Digital and 3D Technologies at the Trowel’s Edge. Antiquity 89: 433–448. Bradley, J. 1988. Yanyuwa Country: The Yanyuwa People of Borroloola Tell the History of Their Land. Richmond: Greenhouse Publications. Bradley, J. 1997. Li-Anthawirrayarra, People of the Sea: Yanyuwa Relations with Their Maritime Environment. Unpublished PhD thesis. Northern Territory University, Darwin. Brady, L.M. 2009. (Re)engaging with the (Un)known: Collaboration, Indigenous Knowledge, and Reaffirming Aboriginal Identity in the Torres Strait Islands, Northeastern Australia. Collaborative Anthropologies 2: 33–64.

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Brady, L.M. 2016. Contemporary Indigenous Relationships to Archaeological Features: Agency, Affect, and the Social Significance of Rock Art. Heritage and Society 9 (1): 3–24. Brady, L.M., and J. Bradley. 2014. Images of Relatedness: Patterning and Cultural Contexts in Yanyuwa Rock Art, Sir Edward Pellew Islands, SW Gulf of Carpentaria, Northern Australia. Rock Art Research 31 (2): 157–176. Brady, L.M., and J. Bradley. 2016. “Who Do You Want to Kill?” Sorcery Rock Art, and Affectual and Relational Understandings at Kurrmurnniyini, Southwest Gulf of Carpentaria, Northern Australia. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 22 (4): 884–901. Brady, L.M., and J. Crouch. 2010. Postcolonial Archaeology with Indigenous Communities: Partnership Research and Ancestral Engagement in Torres Strait, NE Australia. In Handbook to Postcolonialism and Archaeology, ed. J. Lydon and U. Rizvi, 413–428. Walnut Creek: Left Coast Press. Brady, L.M., and A. Kearney. 2016. Sitting in the Gap: Ethnoarchaeology, Rock Art and Methodological Openness. World Archaeology 48 (5): 642–655. Brady, L.M., J.J. Bradley, and A. Kearney. 2016. Negotiating Yanyuwa Rock Art: Relational and Affectual Experiences in the Southwest Gulf of Carpentaria, Northern Australia (+Comments and Reply). Current Anthropology 57 (1): 28–52. Brady, L.M., A. Thorn, I.J. McNiven, and T.A. Evans. 2010. Rock Art Conservation and Termite Management in Torres Strait, NE Australia. Rock Art Research 27 (1): 19–34. Bruchac, M., S.M. Hart, and H.M. Wobst (eds.). 2010. Indigenous Archaeologies: A Reader in Decolonization. Walnut Creek: Left Coast Press. Burke, H., C. Lovell-Jones, and C. Smith. 1994. Beyond the Looking-Glass: Some Thoughts on Sociopolitics and Reflexivity in Australian Archaeology. Australian Archaeology 38: 13–22. Castañeda, Q.E. 2008. The “Ethnographic Turn” in Archaeology: Research Positioning and Reflexivity in Ethnographic Analogies. In Ethnographic Archaeologies: Reflections on Stakeholders and Archaeological Practices, ed. Q.E. Castañeda and C.N. Matthews, 25–62. Lanham: Altamira Press. Clarke, A.F. 1994. Winds of Change: An Archaeology of Contact in the Groote Eylandt Archipelago, Northern Australia. Unpublished PhD thesis. Canberra: Australian National University. Cole, N. 2011. “Rock Paintings Are Stories”—Rock Art and Ethnography in the Laura (Quinkan) Region, Cape York Peninsula. Rock Art Research 28 (1): 107–116. Darvill, T., and A.P.B. Fernandes (eds.). 2014. Open-Air Rock Art Conservation and Management: State of the Art and Future Perspectives. London: Routledge.

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Davidson, I., C. Lovell-Jones, and R. Bancroft (eds.). 1995. Archaeologists and Aborigines Working Together. Armidale: University of New England Press. Edgeworth, M. 2006. Multiple Origins, Development, and Potential of Ethnographies of Archaeology. In Ethnographies of Archaeological Practice: Cultural Encounters, Material Transformations, ed. M. Edgeworth, 1–19. Lanham: Altamira Press. Godwin, L., and J.F. Weiner. 2006. Footprints of the Ancestors: The Convergence of Anthropological and Archaeology Perspectives in Contemporary Aboriginal Heritage Studies. In The Social Archaeology of Australian Indigenous Societies, ed. B. David, B. Barker, and I.J. McNiven, 124–138. Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press. Hodder, I. 1997. “Always Momentary, Fluid and Flexible”: Towards a Reflexive Excavation Methodology. Antiquity 71: 691–700. Hodder, I. (ed.). 2000. Towards Reflexive Method in Archaeology: The Example at Çatalhöyük. Cambridge: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research. Hodder, I. 2005. Reflexive Methods. In Handbook of Archaeological Methods, vol. 1, ed. H.D.G. Maschner and C. Chippindale, 643–669. Lanham: Altamira Press. Hokari, M. 2011. Gurindji Journey: A Japanese Historian in the Outback. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Lambert, D. 2007. Rock Art Conservation Guidelines. Sydney: Department of Environment and Climate Change. Londoño, W. 2014. Reflexivity in Archaeology. In Global Encyclopaedia of Archaeology, ed. C. Smith, 6258–6261. New York: Springer. Loubser, J.H.N. 2014. Rock Art Sites: Management and Conservation. In Global Encyclopaedia of Archaeology, ed. C. Smith, 6357–6362. New York: Springer. Marshall, M., and P.S.C. Taçon. 2014. Past and Present, Traditional and Scientific: The Conservation and Management of Rock Art Sites in Australia. In Open-Air Rock Art Conservation and Management: State of the Art and Future Perspectives, ed. T. Darvill and A.P.B. Fernandes, 214–228. London: Routledge. McNiven, I.J., and L. Russell. 2005. Appropriated Pasts: Indigenous Peoples and the Colonial Culture of Archaeology. Walnut Creek: Altamira Press. Members of the Ardnamurchan Transitions Project. 2012. The Struggle Within: Challenging the Subject/Object Relationship on a Shoestring. In Reconsidering Archaeological Fieldwork: Exploring On-site Relationships Between Theory and Practice, ed. H. Cobb, O.J.T. Harris, C. Jones, and P. Richardson, 113– 130. New York: Springer. Mickel, A. 2015. Reasons for Redundancy in Reflexivity: The Role of Diaries in Archaeological Epistemology. Journal of Field Archaeology 40 (3): 300–309. Mitchell, P. 2018. The Donkey in Human History: An Archaeological Perspective. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Moore, L.E. 2006. Toward a Still and Quiet Conscience: A Study in Reflexive Archaeology. North American Archaeologist 27 (2): 149–174. Mowaljarlai, D., and C. Peck. 1987. Ngarinyin Cultural Continuity: A Project to Teach the Young People the Culture, Including the Re-painting of Wandjina Rock Art Sites. Australian Aboriginal Studies 2: 71–78. Nicholas, G., and J. Hollowell. 2007. Ethical Challenges to a Postcolonial Archaeology: The Legacy of Scientific Colonialism. In Archaeology and Capitalism: From Ethics to Politics, ed. Y. Hamilakis and P. Duke, 59–82. Walnut Creek: Left Coast Press. Rosenfeld, A. 1985. Rock Art Conservation in Australia. Canberra: Australian Government Publishing Service. Schaafsma, P. 2014. Images and Power: Rock Art and Ethics. New York: Springer. Schaafsma, P., and W.B. Tsosie. 2009. Xeroxed on Stone: Times of Origin and the Navajo Holy People in Canyon Landscapes. In Landscapes of Origin in the Americas, ed. J.J. Christie, 15–31. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. Sim, R., and L. Wallis. 2008. Northern Australian Offshore Island Use During the Holocene: The Archaeology of Vanderlin Island, Sir Edward Pellew Group, Gulf of Carpentaria. Australian Archaeology 67: 95–106. Smith, C., and G. Jackson. 2006. Decolonizing Indigenous Archaeology: Developments from Down Under. American Indian Quarterly 30 (3/4): 311–349. Smith, C., and W.M. Wobst. 2005. Indigenous Archaeologies: Decolonising Theory and Practice. London: Routledge. Walsh, G.L. 1992. Rock Art Retouch: Can a Claim of Aboriginal Descent Establish Curation Rights Over Humanity’s Cultural Heritage? In Rock Art and Ethnography, ed. M.J. Morwood and D.R. Hobbs, 47–59. Melbourne: Australian Rock Art Research Association. Ward, G.K. 1992. Ochre and Acrylic: Conflicting Ideologies and Divergent Discourse in the Issue of Repainting Aboriginal Imagery. In Retouch: Maintenance and Conservation of Aboriginal Rock Art Imagery, ed. G.K. Ward, 31–38. Melbourne: Australian Rock Art Research Association. Yanyuwa Families, J. Bradley, and N. Cameron. 2003. Forget About Flinders: A Yanyuwa Atlas of the South West Gulf of Carpentaria. Brisbane: J.M. McGregor Ltd.

CHAPTER 7

“So Did You Find Any Culture Up Here Mate?”: Young Men, “Deficit” and Change Philip Adgemis

Introduction Throughout seven years of working with Yanyuwa families, reflexivity has yielded intellectual and emotional insight, informing my ability to engage sensitively with tensions generated by rapid social change, particularly among young Yanyuwa men. These men are regularly subject to twin deficit framings: an internal sociocultural phenomenon of crossgenerational blame for perceived failings of cultural expectations; and externally imposed tropes of Aboriginality that result in negative presumptions of Aboriginal masculinities and social life. In colonial anthropology, a profound lack of reflexive awareness relative to power imbalances reaffirmed Eurocentric notions of supremacy akin to social evolutionism, existing as a layer of complicity with the colonial enterprise (see Fabian 1983). At worst the absence of reflexive dimensions in more recent anthropology alludes to how the author may unwittingly exploit power imbalances in their endeavor to extract desired

P. Adgemis (B) Monash Indigenous Studies Centre, Monash University, Melbourne, VIC, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 A. Kearney and J. Bradley (eds.), Reflexive Ethnographic Practice, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34898-4_7

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information, ironically perpetuating inequitable social realities that they may otherwise critique or expose (see Reay 1970). The “Reflexive Turn” in anthropology (see the introduction of this volume for a review of seminal literature in this space) and ongoing disciplinary introspection has encouraged reflexivity as a method of developing social critique of power imbalances, intersubjective reflection and insight into the social and cultural world of participants (see Finlay 2003). The implicit argument of this chapter is that honest and rigorous reflexive practice is a necessary component of continuing to decolonize research methodologies that seek to go beyond the hypnotic assimilatory hegemony of settler colonialism (Wolfe 1999), particularly if one desires to conduct themselves in solidarity with Indigenous Australian agency and pursuits of social justice (Land 2015). In the context of some contemporary ethnographic works, however, explicitly articulating the author’s subject position carries the potential to co-opt a narrative intended to feature an “other” and may be perceived as unnecessary egocentric labor. Such an absence of reflexive disclosure requires a relatively detached muting of interpersonal emotional realities, leaving readers to postulate on the implied positioning and experiences of the author. Throughout this chapter, I disclose elements of my own reflexive process in the context of working with Yanyuwa families. I begin by sharing my burgeoning realizations and motivations as I came to consider the realities of colonization and ongoing impacts of discourse that demonizes Aboriginal men. I describe my intersubjective baseline as a young man who works predominantly with young Yanyuwa men. Drawing from my experiences as a third-generation Greek immigrant in Australia, I reflect on the cross-generational dynamics of blame and shame. These emanate from perceived failings around cultural expectations, and lead me toward a practice of cultivating empathic reflexive insight. I then consider the sociocultural complex of blame and shame in the Yanyuwa context, featuring the men of the li-Anthawirriyarra Yanyuwa Sea Ranger Unit who negate potential shame by engaging in ancestral knowledge in fulfillment of familial obligation and broader cultural expectations.

Realizations and Motivations I was in my early 20s when I first began to consider seriously the realities of colonization in Australia, from frontier brutality, wars, and disease, to missionaries, the formation of reserves and trade. You see, it is very easy

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in Australia to miss aspects of this historical and ongoing violence against Aboriginal people, for it has not been widely shared with the Australian public, politicians have continued to deny the impact of colonization and the reality of settler violence and prevailing inequality is not taught well (if at all) in schools. I began to read voraciously and became interested in how discourse (in all its guises) shapes perceptions of the past. I found myself feeling cheated by the way in which I had been educated about Australia’s history. Using the word “settlement” for the invasion and colonization of Australia seemed a quaint label for something gritty and violent. Notions of “settlement” as the “birth of a nation” promote comfortable and at times glorified remembrance for those who are ignorant or in denial of the reality of that which underpins their own positions of privilege as settler and settler descendants (see Curthoys 1999)—European invasion often meant murder and dispossession for Aboriginal people (Broome 2005, 2010; Reynolds 2013; Roberts 2005). I came to appreciate that the events of colonization do not stand in a confined, reconciled, and remote past but exist as a legacy in the present, in the daily lives of many Indigenous Australians (Adgemis 2017; Altman and Hinkson 2007; Austin-Broos 2011; Behrendt 2004). A key revelation for me was the breadth of Indigenous Australian resistance to colonial conquest more broadly (Reynolds 1982) and in southwest Gulf of Carpentaria: strategic battles for the control of resources, violent reprisals enacted on those who committed violence against kin (Bradley 1997) and the raiding of cattle stations (McLaughlin 1977; Roberts 2005), as well as contemporary assertions of rights in lands and seas (Baker 1999; Bradley 2000) and expressions of cultural continuity despite generations of oppression and ongoing assimilatory pressures (Adgemis 2017; Baker 1999). Such representations of Indigenous Australian agency are very different from the traditional accounts of passive victims I was educated about while attending a high school in the southeastern suburbs of Melbourne, Australia. The most prevalent representations of Aboriginal people I can recall from my childhood are the Crocodile Dundee (Cornell and Faiman 1986) movie and derogatory jokes. I vaguely remember that in high school I learnt about the first fleet and the “discovery” of Australia and Indigenous culture as something that existed before this time, in the “Dreamtime” (for a critique of this term see Wolfe 1991; also Green 2012). I experienced a flash of shame when I realized that I could vividly recall the racist “jokes” my father told me when I was a child. One particular “joke” tells

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the story of a truck driver who gets a thrill out of hitting Aboriginal people with his bull bar, making the sound “boong!” with each impact. The truck driver picks up a hitchhiking priest and, being self-conscious about continuing to target Aboriginal people, he attempts to drive past the next Aboriginal man. The priest flicks open his door so it will strike the man— “whack!”—and he turns to the driver and says, “you nearly missed one.” I remember that, as a child, I recited this joke and others to my father’s friends, who responded with laughter. I now wonder whether my father’s friends were laughing because they genuinely found the jokes humorous or at the novelty of hearing them from a child of less than 10 years of age. This prompted me to reflect on what my father had experienced growing up in Australia that led his imbuing of his son with racist attitudes masquerading as facetious comedy. Born of Greek immigrants in Sydney, my father grew up in Melbourne in the 1950s. He had a much darker skin tone than many of the nonIndigenous population. He used to get called “Abo,” and children in his street threw rocks at him, one of which has left a scar between his eyes. As a young adult, at one of his places of employment my father had to wear an orange jacket. He was dubbed “Jaffa” by his co-workers, after the popular confectionary that is orange on the outside and chocolate on the inside. He was given a pewter mug by his co-workers, an “award” engraved with “to Jaffa,” to commemorate their mockery. I remember asking him about this mug as a child and more recently I spoke about this with one of my brothers. In my father’s words, the mug “was given to me by a bunch of racist dickheads”; evidently he did not like being “Jaffa” in the eyes of others. Ironically, he still has the mug and it has had a place in one ornamental display or another in nearly every house he has lived in since. This is a bizarre contradiction to me and it suggests that scarring goes deeper than the rending of skin and flesh, embodied in deep-seated conceptions of the self that are in turn projected in the normalized acts of everyday life. Perhaps these normalized acts are for my father a point of assimilation with those who ridiculed him, his acceptance and belonging subconsciously manifesting in his own unwitting projections of prejudice. As a result, I became a young person with thoughts and attitudes towards Indigenous Australian people that were the product of someone else’s experiences of prejudice and ignorance. I recognize here that connections exist between Australia’s colonial history, the experiences of my father, my own decisions to work with Yanyuwa families and current stereotypes of Aboriginality as survivals of colonization.1

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Discourse and Deficit Framings: “Some People Just Hate Us” Arguably, negative stereotypes of Aboriginality are mostly linked with a broad and relatively anonymous category of those with whom I have worked most closely: Aboriginal men. In broader non-Indigenous public perceptions, Aboriginal men are often reduced to amoral, violent, negligent, dole-bludging drunks, who fight, beat their wives, and molest children. Negative tropes of Aboriginal men are perpetuated in a nonIndigenous public consciousness in various ways, often as an “in between the lines” implication of policy debate regarding wellbeing in remote Indigenous Australian communities and more directly in literature and mass news media by those who perceive themselves as realists who stimulate constructive debate around contentious issues. The 2006 Australian Broadcast Commission reportage of “communities dominated by cliques of violent Aboriginal men” (Smith 2006: para 15), featuring the story of an unchecked paedeophile trading petrol to petrol-sniffing-addicted female children in central Australia’s Mutujulu (Smith 2006), set the tone for a national discourse leading up to the development of Northern Territory National Emergency Response Act 2007 (henceforth the NTER). The NTER was a highly politicized and publicized response from the conservative Howard Liberal Government to the alleged “national emergency confronting Aboriginal children in the Northern Territory” (Vivian and Schokman 2009: 80). Hopes that decisive government action would productively address serious social issues facing remote Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory quickly became anxiety in communities because of a lack of commitment to community consultation, rushed2 and poor policy design and implementation (see Altman and Hinkson 2007). The NTER received widespread criticism from academic commentators, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous (for example Altman 2007; Dodson as cited in Nurs Aust 2007; Mansell 2007; Reid and McCallum 2012; Vivian and Schokman 2009), representatives from Indigenous communities in the Northern Territory (for example Morton as cited in Murdoch 2010; McMullen 2011; KunothMonks as cited in Arena 2012), mainstream and alternative news sources (for example Murdoch 2010; Murphy 2010; Robson 2010), and in hindsight is perceived to have been a failure and waste of resources (for example Clark 2010; Brough as cited in Kervalas 2011; Puszka et al. 2013). Under the guise of “saving the children” from reported sexual abuse,

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the Federal government implemented a broad array of policies that were aligned with a systematic dismantling of Indigenous agency and paving the way for neoliberal development, in the form of extractive resource mining (NTER Act 2007; Altman 2007; Hinkson 2007; Vivian and Schokman 2009). In the context of the NTER and more broadly, public concern over the plight of women and children in remote Aboriginal communities and the perceived moral imperative of interventionist measures exists discursively alongside the construction of the Aboriginal man as the harbinger of despair and violent dysfunction. Nowra’s (2007) Bad Dreaming: Aboriginal Men’s Violence Against Women and Children features similar demonization of Aboriginal men under the guise of constructive social commentary. It is argued throughout Nowra’s (2007) work that acts of Aboriginal male violence are perpetuated by the continuity of Indigenous cultural practices and the lack of responsibility taken by Aboriginal men and Aboriginal communities more broadly. In doing so, Nowra (2007: 90) also takes aim at the judicial system, arguing that customary Law being taken “into consideration as a mitigating circumstance in sentencing” results in a pattern of too much leniency in sentencing Aboriginal offenders. Nowra (2007) begins by confronting the reader with highly graphic descriptions of Aboriginal male violence based on his observation of and limited interactions with both victims and perpetrators during his stay in the Alice Springs Hospital in 2005. As evidence that Aboriginal male violence is a continuity of traditional cultural practices, Nowra (2007) describes acts of Aboriginal male violence that feature in early Australian anthropology (Roth 1984; Spencer and Gillen 1899; Spencer 1914). Nowra (2007) also offers other examples of Aboriginal male violence in the form of events witnessed by various functionaries of colonization (a governor, a ship’s captain, a marine, and various Protectors of Aborigines) from the late 1700s to the mid-1800s. Nowra’s (2007) use of this evidence profoundly lacks any attempt to deconstruct the racist overtones and extreme ethnocentrism of colonial ethnography, nor its complicity with the brutal treatment of Indigenous people by European colonizers during this period. Evidently, Nowra’s (2007) approach to constructive commentary relies on shocking the audience, which he does without adequately substantiating his arguments. Nowra (2007) repeatedly cites reports in newspapers (for example The Australian, Weekend Australian, Sydney Morning Herald, Courier Mail ) as evidence of contemporary Aboriginal male violence. His (2007)

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engagement with contemporary anthropological research is limited and he demonstrates a pattern of selectively citing perspectives of well-known Indigenous Australian commentators that align with his own, while offering no genuine attempt to deconstruct the ongoing effects of colonial violence and dispossession (Behrendt and Watson 2008). Behrendt and Watson (2008) also argue that Nowra (2007) fails to offer perspectives that could constructively support victims of male violence in Aboriginal communities, offer solutions for ongoing issues or discharge his own moral obligation arising from his knowledge of sexual assaults that may or may not have been reported to the police. More recently, in August 2016, a Bill Leak comic depicting Aboriginal men as negligent fathers featured in The Australian newspaper, which at the time of publication had an approximate average readership of 468,000 per print issue (Enhanced Media Metrics Australia 2016). The comic shows a police officer holding a young Aboriginal boy by the collar while talking to an Aboriginal man who is holding a beer, captioned with “You’ll have to sit down and talk to your son about personal responsibility”, to which the man replied “Yeah righto what’s his name then?” (Leak as cited in “Artistic Arse” 2016). Some other examples of Leak’s works equate Aboriginal male violence to Aboriginal cultural continuity (see Leak as cited in “Artistic Arse” 2016), demonstrating similar oversimplification of complex social and cultural issues using highly racialized polemic in the public sphere. The publication of this cartoon sparked a public backlash and an inquiry by the Australian Human Rights Commission. Leak, though, was bewildered by the interpretation that his comic was racist and stated that his motivation was the perceived plight of Aboriginal children due to negligent parenting (Leak as cited in “Artistic Arse” 2016). A deeper discussion of the broader societal context and specific circumstances surrounding the NTER and Leak’s and Nowra’s (2007) works are beyond the scope of this chapter. I draw attention to these examples because the potency of negative stereotypes has been raised on numerous occasions by the young men with whom I have worked. The imposed presumption of wrongdoing is an everyday reality. From subtle manifestations in being avoided, watched, or rebuffed in certain social contexts leading to a realization that others may regard them with distaste, discomfort, or fear. To more direct forms of prejudice like police interrogation at points of sale for alcohol, being denied drinks at a bar or being told “Fuck off, I don’t have any beer, ya black cunt” when saying hello to a non-Indigenous shop owner

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in passing (Adgemis ethnographic fieldnotes 18 June 2016). The experience of personally directed racism for young Aboriginal men in Borroloola is causally linked to popular and political discourse that presupposes the moral bankruptcy of Aboriginal men in their potential to commit wrongdoing: “you do nothing wrong and they still treat you like a dog, some people just hate us” (Adgemis ethnographic fieldnotes 13 July 2015). For young Aboriginal men in Borroloola, lifelong personal experiences with incidental racism imposes certain negative conceptions attached to notions of Aboriginal masculinity. Although young men do not generally self-identify with such conceptions, their identities are constructed relative to their imposition. This imposition can manifest as a negative disposition toward “whitefellas” in positions of power (for example, police, teachers, social workers, health workers). This can lead to the avoidance of sharing social settings with those who they presume will cast judgment upon them or acts of oppositional defiance that sometimes ironically reaffirm a presumption of wrongdoing in the first instance. To some extent, this represents a self-fulfilling cyclical feedback loop, in that the presumption of wrongdoing leads to the galvanizing of peer groups in which avoidance or oppositional behavior is central to a shared identity construct. The polarity of Aboriginal essentialization is an ongoing reality of contemporary Australian public discourse. In the early stages of my research with Yanyuwa families, a friend sent me an image of a group of Aboriginal people sitting among a midden of beer cans with the caption “crackatinni3 tribe” because he knew I would not find it funny. At a later stage I searched for the source of this photograph, to realize that, coincidentally, it was taken at Borroloola and originally featured in a Time magazine South Pacific article entitled “The Demon Drink” (Callinan 2006). Another friend, without a hint of irony, gave me a birthday card of a photo of an anonymous Aboriginal elder wearing only a loincloth and body paint, standing in front of a scenic mountain range backdrop. In mainstream Australian society, such romanticized perceptions of Aboriginality are prevalent; one does not have to look far to find a greeting card depicting an Aboriginal child cuddling a joey, or a stoic Aboriginal elder gazing in the distance, implicitly oozing innocence and spirituality, respectively. It would seem such tokens of childish innocence and deep spirituality hit the market as “quintessentially Australian” while also offering buyers a symbol of their subconsciously perceived deficiencies. Some typecast essentializing projections also frame Aboriginal men in a

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romanticized way; for example, the naturally gifted athlete, the infallible cultural leader or the environmental activist that is one with nature. Within the context of Borroloola, however, tropes that are more negative in valuation are more likely to be imposed on young men than others—a symptom of a particular contemporary cross-cultural interface marred by colonial overtones. Perhaps then the colonial tropes of the “noble savage” and the “savage brute” have been perpetuated in the “living spectre of spirituality and innocence” and the “drunken, violent criminal,” respectively. Johnson (2011) discusses a “postage stamp view of Aboriginality,” an essentialist discourse spawning the rhetoric of the “dying race theory” and the assimilation era. As noted by Johnson (2011), Aboriginal people did not die out and Indigenous values have been maintained through the assimilation era. Similarly, the essentialism of the stereotypes I discuss here are not reflective of the reality they represent; they too are demonstrative of a “postage stamp” or perhaps “greeting card” view of Aboriginality “based on an ethnocentric double standard that was [and is] both ahistorical and ahumanist” (Johnson 2011: 29). When juxtaposed with the experiences that I have had in Borroloola, such discourse is reductionist and destructive. I became increasingly motivated to engage with events in the mainstream media that in some people’s minds would reaffirm negative stereotypes or romantic projections, and to write about them in a way that conveys their uncontested simplicity and potentially damaging social impacts. Thus I arrived at a core motivation for my ongoing anthropological endeavor, to understand and share the perspectives of change and ongoing marginalization as expressed by Yanyuwa families and in particular, young men. I hoped to challenge the simplicity of racialized dehumanization and demonization and argue for empathizing, humanizing and elaborating on the complexity of the sometimes confronting realities and challenges faced by young Aboriginal men in Borroloola.

Expectations and Intersubjective Connections My intersubjective baseline while working with young Yanyuwa men is a broadly shared demographic position of age and gender. I first arrived in Borroloola as a 27-year-old man and I spent most of my time with other young men, many of whom worked for a Yanyuwa ranger unit,

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the li-Anthawirriyarra Sea Rangers. My participation in shared masculinity was generally experienced as camaraderie and a level of uninhibited self-expression. This was particularly pertinent during the time I spent working with the young men of the sea rangers during their workdays, enabling me to participate in gendered daily activities that one ranger lightly referred to as “men’s therapy sessions” (Adgemis ethnographic fieldnotes 12 August 2014). Countless hours of conversation were had while traveling across the Yanyuwa domain of land and sea in cars and boats. Accumulatively, this involved months of time spent “out bush” or “on Country” working and sweating alongside each other while laboring, fishing, hunting, tinkering with pumps, generators and boat engines, retracting anchors, and pushing, and pulling boats in or out of the water in temperatures of 35–40 degrees Celsius. This time together was underpinned by an implicit underlying shared identity construct of being young men, enabling the relaxed disclosure of thoughts and feelings that relate to being a man in general and in the context of Borroloola. Due to the globalizing effect of television and the internet, a shared generational positioning also meant a shared socialization in line with a largely American-influenced popular culture. As a child growing up, influences emanating from American television shows, movies and music made a large contribution to my growing conceptual repertoire of how to behave, what I considered desirable and how I perceived myself. Similarly, one of the rangers told me of a time when “every kid in the Yanyuwa camp wanted to be Bruce Lee” (Adgemis ethnographic fieldnotes 3 September 2014), and that a cousin of his used to pray every night to posters of Bruce Lee and Jean Claude Van Damme. I too grew up watching movies starring Bruce Lee and Jean Claude Van Damme; I too literally idolized Bruce Lee. Particularly with Yanyuwa men in their late 20s and early 30s, there were times when I was surprised at how remarkably similar elements of our childhoods seemed. In contrast, there were moments when our differences were profound. During early fieldwork, I spent six weeks on the northernmost beach of West Island working with the men of the Yanyuwa sea rangers. One afternoon I was talking to a 20-year-old Yanyuwa man named Troy. We were chatting about life in Borroloola, what it’s like being a young man in town, during which Troy asked numerous questions about my life in a “big city.” We got to talking about why I was in Borroloola and at one point he asked a question that prompted me to explain differences

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between archaeology and cultural anthropology. I explained that archaeologists are more so interested in material aspects of people’s lives, while cultural anthropologists, myself included, are more interested in contemporary sociality and concepts of culture, to which he responded—“so did you find any culture up here mate?” At that moment, I realized that although I was referring to culture, as a malleable concept which I had been taught to theorize, apply, and interrogate, Troy was referring to particular forms of knowledge and practices that are known as Yanyuwa Law or Yanyuwa culture. To Troy, culture and specifically Yanyuwa culture is based upon the legacy of his ancestors, the continuity of thousands of years of intergenerational knowledge transmission. Yanyuwa Law-based knowledge is embodied in highly complex Yanyuwa ceremonies, song forms, creation narratives, place names, and skills of strategic subsistence over Yanyuwa ancestral homelands. The essential expression of Yanyuwa Law depends on a proficiency in Yanyuwa language, a deep empirical knowledge based on decades of traveling across Yanyuwa Country and repeated ceremonial praxis. The further implication of Troy asking me if I had “found” any culture is that the intergenerational transmission of Yanyuwa Law has been profoundly impacted by ongoing coloniality. Troy’s grandparents’ were the last generation to spend the formative years living “on Country,” and they also represent some of the last fluent speakers of Yanyuwa language. Troy’s parents’ generation included some of the last to be born “on Country” who experienced the more complex forms of Yanyuwa ceremonial praxis that profoundly link families to each other and to place. I became increasingly aware that younger Yanyuwa were often condemned by their older family members for their perceived lacking of engagement with Law-based knowledge. This seemed paradoxical to me, as pivotal periods of change began decades before any of the young people I work with were born, leading me to feel that blame for declining knowledge transmission disproportionately fell on younger generations due to their relative youth and ignorance compared to those senior to them. The chronology of researchers who have previously worked with Yanyuwa families parallels dramatic contrasts in socialization between young men and previous generations of Yanyuwa. Historically, researchers have generally interacted with those senior people considered most knowledgeable in Yanyuwa Law. Contemporary applied anthropologists who work within legislative frameworks of Indigenous Australian

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land tenure or sacred site protection, also generally engage with senior Yanyuwa people. Throughout my time in Borroloola, some young men expressed resentment of anthropologists bluntly, one stating “anthropologists only talk to old people, they don’t care about us”. Although such comments were rarely directed at me personally (or at the other anthropologists contributing to this book), they did carry implications for how people might perceive me as only interested in the knowledge and experiences of senior generations. I had to acknowledge that although I was primarily interested in learning about the lives and conceptions of self of younger generations in contexts of change, I was drawn to particular individuals and peer groups engaging in certain skills and knowledge that create continuity with previous generations. The realization that I could be contributing to a deficit framing felt by younger Yanyuwa, both generally or for certain peer groups, brought a great deal of personal and professional discomfort. I was prompted to reflect further on the motivations and ironies of my approach to working with young men toward understanding change, and the perceived importance of cultural continuity. What followed was a reflection on my own heritage and experiences with change and cross-generational blame for failing cultural continuity.

Change and the Shame in Not Knowing I am a third-generation Greek immigrant in Australia. Like my older brothers, as a 5-year-old child I was made to model the Tsolias, the traditional Greek soldiers outfit, for my mother’s photoshoot (Fig. 7.1), although I never wore or saw the regalia again. Attending a Catholic primary school with a high percentage of Anglo-Saxon students, I had an early awareness of my own Greek cultural heritage as a point of difference that carried certain implications for exclusion. I nearly never perceived my difference as negative: for the most part it meant that I played with Lego while my peers had religious education. As a teenager I wrestled with identifying as having Greek and Australian ethnicity. On the one hand, the student body at my high school was characterized by ethnic diversity and social groupings based on those who culturally identified with one another. On the other hand, these sociocultural groupings were not fixed and friendships transcended difference in heritage. I was dubbed “the wog” by some of my friends at school, although I was never part of the larger Greek-descendant social sphere among the

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Fig. 7.1 My five-year-old self, resplendent in the Tsolias

students. I had many close friends but I felt somewhat stranded in a liminal identity zone. I did not go to Greek school on weekends and we did not speak Greek at home; I cannot speak Greek today. I was and I am still often lectured by others of Greek descent—predominantly from those of my parents’ and grandparents’ generations—as if not speaking Greek is a personal failing, and at times, although less often, a suggestion that this is a failing of my parents. In response, I often felt mildly

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ashamed, a feeling that was closely followed by resentment for the allocation of blame. I often grew defensive, justifying my “Australianness” owing to the relatively early immigration of my family to Australia in the 1920s. I would also redirect the blame to my parents and the challenges they faced or decisions they made that led to me not being raised in a “culturally Greek” home. Sometimes my defensive justification was not vocalized but rather internally invoked to counteract a pang of guilt or shame I felt when others judged me for lacking “Greekness.” I also came to judge those who judged me as ignorant of my own life experiences regardless of our shared heritage. I understand now that through a set of reactions I was affirming my own belonging with something I perceived as being in opposition to that from which I am descended. As a result of feeling blamed for lacking “Greekness,” I believe there were times when I was less inclined to engage in “being Greek.” I share this here because I believe it imbued me with a perspective, a point of reference to begin relating to change, blame and shame experienced by younger generations of Yanyuwa.4 Younger Yanyuwa are also berated by those of older generations for lacking knowledge that is perceived as essential to being Yanyuwa. Younger Yanyuwa experience reactionary thoughts and feelings to being blamed that include a sense of shame for a perceived failing of cultural expectations. The limits of my empathic understanding lie in the contrast of determinants of change and intergenerational agency. While my own identity reflects my family’s immigration to Australia as the harbinger of rapid generational change, young Indigenous identities in Borroloola reflect the localized events of colonial violence and dispossession, following periods that required degrees of assimilation as an imperative to survival and the contemporary lattice of pressures emanating from colonial hegemony. Nor am I suggesting that our experiences of shame are equivalent5 but, similar to Rosaldo’s (2000) reflection on his own experiences of grief in the context of his own ethnography, that parallel experience of shame is able to provide a window of insight that would have otherwise been unavailable to me. From her work with Aboriginal people in the township of Katherine, approximately 600 kilometres northwest of Borroloola, Toni Bauman (2002: 205) states that “‘Culture,’ ‘tradition,’ ‘laws’ and ‘customs’ are forever in a state of ‘becoming,’ emerging out of the conditions in which they are embedded in an interplay of power and identity construction.” For Yanyuwa families, interplay between power and identity

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construction has led to rapid change within individual lifespans. Senior Yanyuwa express deep concerns regarding the transmission of Law and sadness as they lament the absence of language and Law in the socialization of younger Yanyuwa. Condemnation and reactionary feelings of shame are proportionate to the challenges of reconciling dramatic contrasts in socialization between generations. Bauman (2002: 219) emphasizes the potency of shame in contexts of cultural change or “reproduction”, arising from “the interplay among forces of change, the conditions in which changing practices are embedded and the ‘traditional’ principles and ideals that coexist with, and cause, change”. Despite the contrasting context of her study, sociologist Brene Brown’s (2006) definition of shame, based on descriptions of 215 American women is highly applicable to the Yanyuwa context. Brown (2006: 45) defines shame as a psycho-social-cultural construct, experienced as “[a]n intensely painful feeling or experience of believing we are flawed and therefore unworthy of acceptance and belonging”: The psychological component relates to the participants’ emphasis on the emotions, thoughts, and behaviors of self. The social component relates to the way women [or people] experience shame in an interpersonal context that is inextricably tied to relationships and connection. The cultural component points the very prevalent role of cultural expectations and the relationship between shame and the real or perceived failure of meeting cultural expectations. (Brown 2006: 45)

From his work with Pintupi families in the Western Desert, Myers (1986) exploration of kunta, a Pintupi conception that encompasses the English concepts of shame, embarrassment, shyness and respect, offers valuable contextualization pertaining to shame and Indigenous Australian Law. For Pintupi, shame exists as a contextual aspect of kunta, as an emotional sociopolitical regulator of egotism and selfishness that promotes humility and respect in public presentations of self, particularly when interacting with senior people in formal ceremonial contexts, discussing sexual relationships, or meeting strangers (Myers 1986). Failure of expectations in the realm of the sacred implies “being motivated by private will,” promoting jealousy and representing a subversion of authority held by senior people who are “representatives of the Law” and not themselves (Myers 1986: 122).

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While spending time with senior Yanyuwa, deficit framings of younger people based on perceptions that they were not meeting cultural expectations were frequent. Common refrains I heard were “they got no language,” “they know nothing,” “they got no Law,” “they don’t know their culture,” and “they don’t know their own Country.” The use of such refrains is reflective of day-to-day social interactions that carry the potential to trigger shame emanating from a perceived failing of cultural expectations. A young person observed to be consciously subverting Law as an authoritative construct by speaking out of turn, showing disrespect to a senior person or lacking humility in the public presentation of their knowledge (particularly when seen to be bragging and exaggerating their knowledge, colloquially referred to as “skytin”) are often regarded as having “no shame,” a failing of an expectation to feel ashamed. Brown (2006) discusses “shame triggers” as highly individual but with some collective categories based on social/cultural expectations. The shame triggered by a real or perceived failing of cultural expectations is collective in nature but fundamentally tied to thoughts and feelings about one’s own choices and behavior. Using this framing, shame in not knowing or being aligned with previous generations exists as a deficit framing of one’s own identity construct that is reaffirmed implicitly or directly by relationships and interactions with those who are perceived to have not failed the same sets of expectations. Bauman (2002: 219) writes of individuals who respond to shame by indicating “his or her systemic location” relative to the paradoxical tensions between change and continuity. Some younger Yanyuwa indicate their systemic location by openly stating that the pursuit to learn Law is not relevant in the contemporary setting (Johnson 2011; Adgemis ethnographic fieldnotes 12 July 2014), one young man stating—“old people are old people, us young fellas are our own thing,” a stance that in some contexts I have felt also reflects aspects of shame and resentment for being shamed. Others, while stating that Law, language and ceremony are important, do not engage in any activities pertaining to their continuity, perhaps reflective of a hyperconsciousness that they “are not the same as the people from 100 years ago” (Adgemis ethnographic fieldnotes 29 August 2014). Upon being condemned for lacking knowledge, some younger Yanyuwa grow defensive and direct blame at their parents’ generation—“Those old people are too hard, they say we don’t know culture, but we didn’t have a chance to learn, it was those middle generation mob that dropped the ball.”

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In endeavoring to relate to the predicament of younger Yanyuwa, I realized that although I am episodically motivated to learn and experience the “Greekness” that was central to the identity of my ancestors, my efforts to learn are always fleeting and, in part, this is because I know that Greek language, knowledge and traditions are not endangered, they will be there for me when and if I truly want them. Although there is a vast amount of valuable Yanyuwa cultural knowledge that has been rendered into new mediums to facilitate continuity (see for example Bradley with Yanyuwa families 2016, 2017), senior people are the living embodiment of this knowledge and other, deeper, forms of Yanyuwa Law that defy adaptation into visual, aural and textual forms. Younger people are socialized with the awareness that there are no substitutes for the lifelong experiences necessary to ensuring continuity of deeply complex oral traditions in Yanyuwa language, Law associated with Country, subsistence practices and family, and the profound visceral experiences of grand ceremonial traditions. For younger Yanyuwa, the awareness that they will not experience the equivalent Law-centric socialization that is central to the identities of those in their grandparent’s generation is affirmed in each instance of being positioned as not knowing what one “should.” Among younger Yanyuwa there is a pattern of avoidance of contexts, conversations and people that carry the potential to position them as having failed cultural expectations. This is particularly evident in an avoidance of specific settings such as meetings for the management of Yanyuwa land trusts at the Northern Land Council office in Borroloola that require understanding of descent-group-based authority over specific tracts of land and sea, community events that could require public harvesting and preparation of sea animals considered to carry Law or cultural performance events during which others (mostly senior women and children) participate in song and dance. When it comes to more intimate interactions with senior authorities of Yanyuwa knowledge, the more belligerent they are perceived to be in condemning younger people, the more likely they are to be avoided. In particular, young men I have worked with have shared their fearful anticipation and desire to avoid “getting a growling” from particular knowledgeable senior women. The irony of cross-generational expectations manifesting in blame and shame is that this avoidance entrenches and perpetuates the separation of those who have Law from those who are considered lost without it, leading to a further decline in Law held by younger Yanyuwa. Bauman (2002: 206) similarly discusses patterns of avoidance in the use of sub-section names (or

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what are also termed “skin” names), “[f]earing shame, many Aboriginal people in Katherine no longer employ subsections in daily life, preferring instead to employ other relational terms with broader signifiers”. Despite considerable inhibiting emotional responses that perpetuate tensions born from cross-generational expectations, some young people overcome feelings of powerlessness and ensure continuity of Law-based knowledge and skills. Confronting the potential of shame by publicly displaying knowledge creates moments of cross-generational unification and pride. For example, while watching her daughter’s son dance at a public event, Jemima Miller turned to me and said “see, my grandson, he doesn’t shame!” (Adgemis ethnographic fieldnotes 7 July 2015). Many of the young men who I am closest to work for the Yanyuwa Sea Ranger unit and find ways to negotiate change to forge self-affirmation, cross-generational cohesion, and cultural continuity. The men of the liAnthawirriyarra Sea Ranger Unit, through their day-to-day occupations, are a discernible vanguard of continuity—the contemporary embodiment of fulfilled cultural expectations implicit in being a Yanyuwa saltwater person. The fulfilment of cultural expectations is expressed in sustained presence of “on Country” of rangers with genealogical connections to the Yanyuwa domain of land and sea, and their roles in facilitating the continuity of an empirical skill and Law aligned with a distinctly Yanyuwa ancestral legacy. Continuity is expressed and nurtured by the sea rangers in a number of ways. Although the core working group is predominantly young men, daily consultations with senior middle-aged men and active reporting to the senior women who are now considered the authorities on Yanyuwa Law maintains authoritative constructs of Law and promotes intergenerational transmission of cultural knowledge. Significant environmental events or observations of specific animal species and behaviors while on Country are often filmed or photographed (see Fig. 7.2) and then shared with senior Yanyuwa upon return to town, enabling dissemination of Law-centric interpretations regarding Dreaming intentionality on Country (see Povinelli 1993; Adgemis 2017). The rangers further fulfill cultural expectations as they actively employ ancestral knowledge in hunting and harvesting marine animals that are then distributed among Yanyuwa families, with specific families, relative to the location of the catch, with the senior women often receiving the majority shares. The young male rangers also disseminate kin-based clusters of knowledge within their broader peer group who are relatively close in age. As I was

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Fig. 7.2 A giant groper sighting at Lhuka (Batten Point) in the southwest Gulf of Carpentaria. The Groper is a central Dreaming for one of the four Yanyuwa semi-moieties, the Wuyaliya clan, and its appearance is an example of “an anomalous event” that younger rangers would share with the senior men to seek a Law-based interpretation (Source Author)

told, they all “bring different things to the table” as they have complementary sets of specialized knowledge due to their younger years spent at specific locales “on Country” in the company of senior kin. The rangers are considered experts at fishing, hunting, and boating (see Figs. 7.3 and 7.4) and in the public display of their skill and status, the rangers often perform dugong hunts specifically for community events. Day-to-day, a core task of the sea rangers is to utilize their skills and the resources of the ranger unit to facilitate the visitation of Yanyuwa families to certain areas of Yanyuwa Country. The young male rangers often transport families to their respective outstations and other locations enabling a broader scope of intergenerational knowledge exchange

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Fig. 7.3 Sea Ranger Anthony Johnston holding the harpoon (ridiridi) while looking for dugong in the seagrass beds near the mouth of Mule Creek, 2016 (Source Author)

on Country, a place-specific education in regards to Law and social history. The knowledge required to safely travel across Yanyuwa sea Country includes the location and shape of hundreds of channels that enable access to rivers and creeks and the locations and contours of the main islands, dozens of small islets, reefs, sandbars, seagrass beds, mudflats, bays, and shallow rocky outcrops. It requires a constant awareness of tidal movement and weather conditions. For the young male rangers, their unquestioning responsiveness to requests to access Country and the implicit trust placed in them by Yanyuwa families to safely and quickly transport them across the sea in variable conditions is an affirmation of their skill and status as leaders and role models for younger Yanyuwa people. Despite being a source of unifying pride and social cohesion, the sea rangers positioning as champions of continuity is not without challenges born from cross-generational perceptions and expectations. While transporting Yanyuwa people of different generational groups across Yanyuwa sea Country, the shifting social dynamics of the young male sea rangers

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Fig. 7.4 A catch of fish from a day patrolling near West Island, 2016 (Source Author)

reflects a complex confrontation of the fear of shame. The more senior the passenger, the greater the consciousness of potential shame linked with making a mistake as a failure to meet perceived expectations. Late one evening, young male ranger Stanley Allen Junior and I were talking about this phenomenon, and he adamantly stated “you need to write about this, you understand what we’re feeling because you know us, you feel it too, like, we can talk now but you can write it down, you could put it good way” (Adgemis ethnographic fieldnotes 26 August 2016). Stanley explained that having older middle-aged men “or a bardibardi [old lady] in the boat” makes “everyone serious and professional in a blackfella way” (Adgemis ethnographic fieldnotes 26 August 2016). The usually casual, self-assured confidence punctuated by occasional bravado and light-hearted humor that characterizes a usual trip comprising only young male rangers is replaced by stoic concentration on every task at hand.

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Stanley stated that “back in the day” when people lived and survived on Country, a mistake, “like fucking up and hitting a sandbar or something”, could mean being stuck somewhere without food or water and could be fatal. With the measures that constitute part of the rangers’ work, health, and safety requirements, such a fatal mistake would be unlikely to occur. For Stanley, however, having an older person in the boat carries the perception that the rangers are constantly being assessed and judged by living experts, by those who are both authorities in Law and the skills of navigating Yanyuwa sea Country. Stanley went on to qualify that a senior woman might just laugh at a mistake and state that it’s not a big deal, but the person who made the mistake would have to “carry the shame” (Adgemis ethnographic fieldnotes 26 August 2016). The presence of senior people on a boat operated by young men creates a setting in which the fear of shame implicit in the potential failure to meet cultural expectations is confronted and negotiated. This negates the inhibitive fear of shame triggers, galvanizing the ranger unit as a peer group through shared pride in achieving continuity and the fulfillment of cultural expectations. The sea rangers exist as an example of how some younger Yanyuwa indicate their positioning within systemic change in opposition to cross generational blame and self-perceived failure of cultural expectations. The sea rangers exist as a locus of cross-generationally affirmed identity formation for younger Yanyuwa more broadly, enabling others to continue to find pride in identifying as Yanyuwa, as saltwater people that, as with their ancestors, have knowledge and intimate connections with Yanyuwa sea Country.

Reflections During and after periods of sustained fieldwork I have often reflected on my shifting perceptions of day-to-day life in Borroloola paralleled by the growing depth of relationships enabled by consistency of being present. In many ways this time served to erode many prior conceptions, as ways of thinking and doing that at one time seemed to be alien, perplexing or confronting became normalized, understandable and relatable. In many ways reflexivity, with its paradoxical emphasis on the self as site of learning about the supposed “other,” has informed my own personally transformative experience. Normalized reductionist prejudice toward Aboriginal people was prevalent in my own upbringing, reflective of my father’s experiences of

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racism and colonial discourse that is continued in contemporary representations that demonize Aboriginality and in particular Aboriginal men. Such demonization in broader political debates exists as a social reality for Aboriginal people. Young Aboriginal men with whom I have worked in Borroloola frequently experience incidental racism: the implicit presumption by non-indigenous people of the potential to commit wrongdoing. This presumption of moral bankruptcy has a profound impact, justifying discriminatory policy that compromises agency to the individual and collective experiences of vocal and aggressive acts of racism. Each experience of such discrimination permeates the social in more subtle ways and can ironically manifest as a potential trigger for acts of wrongdoing. Such a “causal” relationship is far beyond the scope of this chapter and begs for further exploration. A reflexive process has enabled me to tease out threads of connection between my own individuality and aspirations as a researcher who has chosen to work with younger Yanyuwa who are subject to imposed deficit framings born of colonial discourse as well as internal sociocultural phenomenon of cross-generational condemnation for perceived failings of cultural expectations. Initial moments of introspection and intersubjective reflection regarding experiences in my own diaspora enabled crucial insight into social and emotional responses to cross-generational condemnation for the perceived failing of cultural expectations. On a more personal note, I feel reflexivity has enabled me to be a more understanding friend to those I have grown to share mutual respect and care. Particular Yanyuwa families, individuals and groups of young men have decided that I am worthy of trust as they chose to spend time with me, to include me in family settings and social groups. They share with me personal and sensitive aspects of their own lives and experiences while nurturing my existence and challenging my ignorance as a relative outsider in the Yanyuwa social domain. My scope of intersubjective insight is also inherently limited due to the fact that my experience of social change and cultural shift is not directly related to settler colonialism. Another important limitation to acknowledge is that the condemnation and reactionary shame that I experience is mostly due to interactions with others of Greek descent to whom I am not related and whom I do not know well personally. For young Yanyuwa people in Borroloola, condemnation and reactionary shame often comes from close family and revered and respected elders whom they have known for the entirety of their lives. The realization

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that the cross-generational tensions of blame and shame can be deeply personal and intimate in ways to which I cannot relate, in turn enabled greater awareness and avoidance of how I, as an anthropologist in the field and a social agent, may unwittingly represent shame triggers for younger Yanyuwa. Although I endeavored to distance myself from indirectly deficit framing the young as those who are perceived to be lacking knowledge of Yanyuwa Law or culture, the ironies of my positioning remain. Over the last seven years I have worked most closely with the young men of the li-Anthawirriyarra Sea Ranger unit, a peer group of young men who confront shame by dedicated learning and demonstration of ancestral knowledge. The actions, knowledge and skills of young male sea rangers challenge deficit framings of young Aboriginal identities characterized by notions of cultural loss and essentialist notions of social dysfunction, offering a more nuanced account that emphasizes survival and identity formation. I grew to learn that despite their status, knowledge, and skills, they too experience the fear of shame as they oscillate between avoidance of potential shame triggers and negating shame through the demonstration of their skills and knowledge. The depth of trust and friendships that I enjoy are inseparable from open and mutual sharing of experiences, perspectives, similarities, and contrasts regarding the choices we make when confronted by potentially inhibitive emotional dimensions of engaging with the legacy of our respective ancestors. My motivation to engage in “being Greek” now exists in relationship with my insight and understanding of change for Indigenous Australian people who face immense challenges when considering engaging with their own legacy of ancestral knowledge. While conducting an interview with a senior Aboriginal woman named Marg as part of research in another context, conversation turned to her own cultural legacy and the loss of her people’s language in the early 1900s due to government and missionary intervention. When she asked about my own background and I mentioned that my family comes from Greece but I don’t speak Greek she responded with “you should be ashamed of yourself!”. Despite my reactionary oppositional impulse to refuse to carry shame accorded to my not knowing Greek language, I understand that, to those who have been dispossessed of their cultural inheritance, that my lack of engagement may indeed be worthy of shame.

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Contributor Response, By Frances Devlin-Glass When I first went to Borroloola in 1999, I was immediately given the “title” of bardibardi (old woman), the group that is identified in Philip Adgemis’s contribution to this volume as being the most challenging with whom the younger men need to negotiate. I was working with older women like Dinah Norman, Annie Karrakayny, Jemima Miller, and Thelma Douglas, and some younger women at the school, but in my early 50s, I had only a few gray hairs and saw myself as being of a different generation from the Elders. However, I did sometimes feel infantilized and shamed, as the young men felt: much was expected; my lack of facility in Yanyuwa language was frequently lamented, losing a leaf and flower of the bush plum was a reason to be strongly castigated, so I have some inkling of their despondency, but not of the double-punishment of being “not good enough” as Yanyuwa men and as well vilified by the mainstream white culture. These Elders were tough teachers, for example, berating young children for not being able to identify subtle markers of Dreaming sites, and I frequently doubted my ability to shape up. The work my group were doing on the Yanyuwa Diwurruwurru website in the first instance was designed as a living legacy for just the young men whose sons Philip would work with 10 years later. But did I know them? I’d have to say not. Did I realize I was probably being constructed as part of the problem? Regretfully, not. Adgemis’s essay is a useful corrective, which will certainly affect my practice in future encounters, and perhaps force me to confront a natural reticence about leaving my gendered comfort zone, though I wonder if I have a language-currency which would enable such an exchange. I first came to Borroloola to seek permission to teach Yanyuwa cultural material to university students. My constituency was my own students, no older than the young men who were Adgemis’s constituency. Permission was granted on condition that we construct a website that could be used in Borroloola by men alienated from their culture. Philip Adgemis puts a detailed gloss on what such alienation means. In my other culture (Irish), such a sense of alienation from their parents’ generation in 1916 brought 16 mainly young men to a prison execution yard at dawn. The majority were under 30. They hoped thereby to change a political colonialist reality. It’s a cost I consider even now to be unreasonable, and to say that is to speak counter-culturally: the Easter Rising and its “martyrs” are rarely

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criticized for their willingness to go to war for their country’s freedom unprepared. Empirical or qualitative research inevitably narrows focus, forces specialization, and Adgemis’s paper not only alerts me to the partiality of what I know, the blind spots in my knowing, and the tragic marginalization that was in fact staring me in the eye every time I went to the store in Borroloola. I heard the women Elders’ complaints, and understood their grief that their senior men, by being removed from Country in the annual roundup for work on stations since the early twentieth century, had seen male Yanyuwa culture eroding bit by bit, generation by generation, and the blame they set on the shoulders of the late adolescents. But I failed to intuit the affront to a whole class of young men emanating not only from their own culture but from mainstream media which at its racist worst styles them as shiftless, drunken, and violent. It is heartening to grasp the new reality: that these young adults, victims of generations of loss of cultural capital, are now, via the li-Anthawirriyarra Sea Rangers, forging links between generations that were formerly sundered, reclaiming their Dreaming narratives and finding ways of locating their knowledge in the world of science. Most excitingly, that this is happening in the intercultural zone, that their work is authoritative in the mainstream world. Their status in the eyes of the women and their self-esteem as cultural practitioners with deep knowledge hopefully can be recuperated in new and modern ways, and ones that open up conversations. By a “commodious vicus of recirculation,” I return to Alexis Wright’s young warrior in Carpentaria, Will Phantom, with fresh eyes. One understands better the agonizing schism with his father, his resort to militancy, and the frustration that drives him to put his life on the line with the mining corporation. Understanding how difficult the generational schism between the Elders and the men newly coming into their power in Borroloola helps me to rejoice in the power Will (and they too in their turn) ultimately wields in forcing his father Norm to take up his ritual responsibilities again, not only to Elias who shares his totem, but to his grandson Bala who needs his deep environmental knowledge to survive the onslaught of the Rainbow Serpent/cyclone. The solutions are curiously alike: that the Indigenous people of the Gulf have deep environmental knowledge and epic ways of understanding it which the wider culture ignores at its peril.

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Notes 1. The term “survival” was used by early evolutionary anthropologists to describe material, structural or social elements of a cultural group that were perceived to be remnants of previous conceptions or functions (Tylor 1871; McLennan 1998). The concept was later contested by Malinowski (1944), based on the premise of the inherent present relevance of any existing sociocultural element. Malinowski (1944) argued that the retrospective nature of survivals obscured analysis of the present. It is with some irony that I use it here to describe present stereotypes of Aboriginality as extensions of colonial thought while considering that similar early anthropological theories were complicit with the dehumanisation of Aboriginal people during the early stages of colonisation. 2. The NTER, consisting of approximately 480 pages of hastily compiled legislation, was passed through the House of Representatives with the support of the Opposition on the same day it was tabled (Hinkson 2007: 2; Vivian and Schokman 2009). This legislation led to the formulation of policy and an array of measures that were implemented as the enactment of the NTER. The Indigenous Affairs Minister responsible, Mal Brough, later mentioned that it took “just 48 hours to formulate the policy that was the foundation of the measures” (Vivian and Schokman 2009: 80). 3. “Tinni” refers to a can of beer in colloquial Australian vernacular. 4. In a similar vein, Moisseeff (2013: 253) describes her burgeoning “awareness that others may evaluate the way in which I [she] take responsibility for who I am [she is],” due to her having jewish heritage while growing up in France as a point of intersection with the racialized context of identity formation for young Aboriginal people in Port Augusta. 5. Much of the literature and intricacies regarding experiences and impacts of shame in Indigenous Australian contexts is well beyond the scope of this chapter, but for further reading, see Burbank (2011), Moisseeff (2013), Myers (1986), and Robinson (1997).

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Claim (Anthropologist Report on Behalf of the Claimants), ed. J. Avery and D. McLaughlin. Darwin, NT: Northern Land Council. McLennan, J.F. 1998. Primitive Marriage. New York, NY: Routledge/Thoemmes Press. McMullen, J. 2011. Correspondence on the Intervention. Arena Magazine, 29 March. Available at: http://search.informit.com.au/documentSummary;dn= 345252880458064;res=IELHSS. Accessed 29 May 2019. Moisseeff, M. 2013. Invisible and Visible Loyalties in Racialized Contexts: A Systemic Perspective on Aboriginal Youth. In Growing Up in Central Australia: New Anthropological Studies of Aboriginal Childhood and Adolescence, ed. U. Eickelkamp, 239–272. Berghahn Books: New York and Oxford. Murdoch, L. 2010. A Community with Its Own Intervention. Sydney Morning Herald, 13 February. Available at: http://www.smh.com.au/national/ a-community-with-its-own-intervention-20100212-nxmp.html. Accessed 4 June 2019. Murphy, E. 2010. Land Rights, Mining and the NT Intervention. Green Left Weekly, 21 November. Available at: https://www.greenleft.org.au/node/ 46178. Accessed 4 June 2019. Myers, F. 1986. Pintupi Country, Pintup Self: Sentiment, Place and Politics Among Western Desert Aborigines. Washington: Smithsonian Institution. Northern Territory Emergency Response Act 2007 (NT). Available at: http:// www.comlaw.gov.au/Series/C2007A00129. Accessed 4 June 2019. Nowra, L. 2007. Bad Dreaming: Aboriginal Men’s Violence Against Women and Children. North Melbourne, VIC: Pluto Press. Nurs Aust. 2007. Indigenous Leaders Respond to the Federal Government’s Intervention in Northern Territory Indigenous Communities. Nursing Australia 8 (3): 6. Povinelli, E. 1993. ‘Might Be Something’: The Language of Indeterminacy in Australian Aboriginal Land Use. Man 28 (4): 679–704. Puszka, S., J. Greatorex, and G. Williams. 2013. Regulating Responsibilities: Income Management, Community Engagement and Bureaucratic Learning at Mapuru, North East Arnhem Land. Learning Communities 13 (1): 59–73. Reay, M. 1970. Decision as Narrative. In Australian Aboriginal Anthropology: Modern Studies in the Social Anthropology of the Australian Aborigines, ed. R. Berndt, 90–105. Perth, WA: University of Western Australia Press. Reid, H., and K. McCallum. 2012. ‘Weighing in’: The Australian’s Reporting of Child Sexual Abuse in Northern Territory Indigenous Communities. Paper presented at the Refereed Proceedings of the 2012 Australian and New Zealand Communication Association Conference: Communicating Change and Changing Communication in the 21st Century, Adelaide, SA. Reynolds, H. 1982. The Other Side of the Frontier: Aboriginal Resistance to the European Invasion of Australia. Ringwood, VIC: Penguin.

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Index

A Aboriginal, vii, viii, x, xi, xiii, xxi, 18, 20, 22, 24, 50, 67, 70, 92, 101, 104, 127, 129, 130, 133, 134, 137, 138, 142, 145, 146, 155, 168, 169, 181–189, 194, 198, 202–204 Aboriginal Land Rights Act 1976, Northern Territory, 22, 41 a-Buluwardi, 115, 116 Academy, academia, 14, 40, 47, 56, 58, 59, 86, 88, 91, 92, 107, 147 Adgemis, Philip, xvi, 7, 18–21, 25, 32, 81, 183, 198, 205, 206 Agency, 62, 67, 68, 84, 118, 155, 157, 162, 163, 173, 182, 183, 186, 194, 203 Altman, Jon, 183, 185, 186 Ancestors, ancestral, 6, 17–20, 22, 46, 55, 62, 68, 84, 85, 98, 103, 106, 113, 137, 143, 157, 160, 170, 171, 176, 191, 197, 198, 202, 204

Ancestral Beings, 16–18, 59, 66–68, 84, 87, 112, 120, 159, 162, 164, 167, 170, 172 Ancestral Law, 6, 23, 66, 81 Ancestral narrative, 4, 16, 18, 23, 128 Anthropology, viii, x, xi, xv, 7–9, 11, 26, 28, 43, 56, 66, 69, 70, 75, 86, 88, 130, 133–135, 142, 144, 181, 186, 191 Archaeology, 129, 153–157, 162, 169, 172, 173, 175, 191 Arts, visual, xvi, xxii, 5, 23, 51, 52, 55, 96, 98–100, 109, 119, 145, 174, 175, 197 Australia, vii, viii, xi, xiii, xxi, xxii, 1–4, 6, 7, 9, 12, 17, 21, 22, 24, 31, 40, 41, 48, 51, 65–67, 69, 75, 82, 87, 102, 103, 108, 109, 118, 126, 127, 131, 144, 148, 154–156, 159, 161, 162, 166, 182–185, 192, 194 Axiology, 83

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 A. Kearney and J. Bradley (eds.), Reflexive Ethnographic Practice, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34898-4

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INDEX

B Basso, Keith, 111, 115, 116 Bauman, Toni, 194–197 Behar, Ruth, 1, 7, 10, 27, 28, 69, 90, 91 Belief, 66, 76, 77, 83, 84, 92 Belonging, 57, 61, 76, 88, 113, 164, 184, 194, 195 Borroloola, xxi, 3–7, 11, 13–15, 20–22, 25, 27, 29, 31, 32, 39–41, 45, 49, 57, 59, 61, 68, 69, 72–74, 78–82, 84, 85, 87, 88, 96, 98, 101–103, 105, 109, 112, 113, 117, 118, 128, 131, 145, 148, 164, 174, 188–190, 192, 194, 197, 202, 203, 205, 206 Bracketing, 10, 119 Bradley, John, viii, xii, xvi, 4–6, 16–21, 23–25, 32, 41, 53, 61, 62, 69, 77–81, 87, 95, 97, 103, 107, 109, 113–117, 119–121, 130–132, 139, 144, 149, 158–160, 163–165, 169, 176, 183, 197 Brady, Liam M., xvi, 6, 7, 24, 32, 81, 109, 155, 157–159, 162, 164, 165, 169, 173–176 Burke, Heather et al., xv, 155–157, 172 C Cameron, Nona, xvi, 5, 6, 25, 32, 46, 95, 97, 114–116, 120, 121, 131, 132 Carpentaria (the book by Alexis Wright), 126, 145, 206 Change, xxi, 7, 11–13, 26, 28, 42, 49, 58, 60–62, 70, 78, 79, 86, 88–90, 100, 146, 161, 175, 181, 189, 191, 192, 194–196, 198, 202–205

Colonization colonial, ix, 3, 6, 15, 20, 21, 26, 41, 75, 78, 87–89, 108, 110, 112, 138, 181, 183, 184, 186, 187, 189, 194, 203 colonialism, 28, 144 coloniality, 15, 20, 58, 61, 62, 82, 87, 191 settler colonialism, 26, 58, 70, 81, 182, 203 Cosmology, 125–128, 134, 135, 142–144, 146, 147, 160 Country, viii, xxi, 2–7, 11, 15–24, 30, 42, 45, 48–50, 52, 53, 56–61, 65–68, 72, 74, 76, 78, 79, 81, 84, 85, 87, 88, 96, 98–100, 103–115, 117–119, 121, 127, 130, 132, 133, 136, 138, 139, 145, 148, 163, 175, 176, 197, 198, 200, 202, 206 Cowlishaw, Gillian, 8, 9, 69 Creative, xv, xxii, 9, 11, 28, 97, 106, 109, 139, 144 Creativity, 43 Cultural wounding, xxii, 5, 15, 22, 60, 67, 78, 87 Culture, x, xxii, 1, 4, 18, 20, 24–26, 49, 51, 56, 61, 91, 92, 102, 126, 127, 129–131, 135, 136, 138, 140, 142, 146–148, 183, 190, 191, 194, 196, 204–206

D Decolonizing, decolonize, viii, 24, 31, 70, 173 Deficit, 126, 181, 192, 196, 203, 204 Devlin-Glass, Frances, xvi, 6, 18, 24, 32, 46, 80, 112, 131, 145, 146, 148 Dialogue, xii, 10, 29, 61, 62, 144 Dingo, 52, 53, 55

INDEX

Dreaming Ancestor, 96, 106, 110, 114, 174 Dreaming ancestor, 18, 52, 53 Dreaming story, 18, 109, 110, 113, 118 Dreaming, Dreamtime, viii, 17, 18, 52, 55, 84, 98, 100, 111, 112, 115, 119, 128, 129, 131, 132, 135, 138–140, 144, 174, 183, 198, 199, 205, 206

E Education, 55, 59, 82, 84, 89, 108, 118, 192, 200 Elders, xxi, 15, 20, 23, 30, 49, 55, 61, 80, 82, 107, 121, 128, 130, 137, 139, 158, 203, 205, 206 Emic, 155 Emotion, 9, 25, 128, 133, 143 Emotional geography, 4, 15, 67 Empathy, empathic imagination, ix, 7, 9, 62, 70, 77, 78, 80, 83, 87 Epistemic communities, 75–77, 87–89 Epistemic habit, 5, 67, 69–71, 75–77, 79, 81–85, 87–90 Epistemic violence, 57, 175 Epistemology, 58, 67, 71, 87, 128, 144, 172, 175 Ethics, 13, 26, 65, 155 Experience, viii, ix, x, xii, xiii, xxii, 1, 3, 5, 7–11, 14, 20, 22, 25, 27–29, 31, 32, 42–45, 50, 52, 57, 61, 62, 65–68, 70–72, 78, 80–83, 85, 86, 88, 89, 116, 117, 119, 121, 138, 143–145, 154, 156, 157, 159, 162, 163, 171–173, 182, 184, 188, 189, 192, 194, 195, 197, 202–204, 207

215

F Family, xii, 13, 23, 44, 49, 59, 61, 91, 101, 103, 105, 118, 133, 137, 138, 143, 154, 191, 194, 197, 203, 204 Fear, 10, 43, 60, 62, 67, 72, 75, 81, 88, 100, 129, 154, 159, 171, 172, 187, 201, 202, 204 Field note(s), 26, 27, 31, 52, 53, 80, 111–113 Fieldwork, vii, viii, x, xi, 3, 9, 11–13, 26, 29, 31, 41, 42, 65, 66, 71, 75, 80, 81, 88, 90, 145, 153, 154, 156, 171, 173, 190, 202 Film, 4, 128, 130 Finlay, Linda, 10, 146, 182 Flatten/unflatten, 43 Friendship, x, xv, 1, 8, 62, 80, 192, 204 Future, vii, viii, 13, 25, 29, 31, 46, 48, 50, 67, 98, 101, 119, 169, 205

G Ganggalida, 136, 149 Gap, 68, 77, 87, 146, 147, 173 Garrwa, 15, 20, 25, 50, 101, 174 Generation(s), generational, viii, xiii, xxi, 3, 7, 14, 15, 19–21, 23–25, 31, 46, 48–51, 56, 61, 62, 79, 88, 98, 101, 108, 119, 120, 133, 159, 182, 183, 190–197, 200, 202, 205, 206 Geography, 45, 51, 56, 67, 84, 85 Gough, Brendan, 10, 146 Gudanji, xv, 15, 20, 50, 164, 165 Gulf of Carpentaria, southwest Gulf of Carpentaria, 2, 7, 4, 16, 17, 21, 32, 45, 48, 50, 55, 65, 67, 72, 126, 136, 137, 139, 145, 146, 148, 158, 183, 199

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INDEX

H Haas, Peter, 77 Harmon, Katharine, 110 Heritage, xxii, 48, 155, 192, 194, 207 Hinkson, Melinda, 8, 183, 185, 186, 207 Hodder, Ian, 155, 156 Hokari, Minoru, xxi, 31, 68, 76, 173

I Imagery, 96, 100, 106, 113, 128, 159, 162, 164, 168, 174, 175 Indigenous writers, 125 Interculturalism, xxii, 67 Intersubjective/intersubjectivity, xii, xxii, 9, 10, 29, 45, 52, 57, 78, 81, 119, 175, 182, 189, 203 Introspection, xii, 9, 10, 62, 70, 71, 86, 182, 203

J Jackson, Michael, xv, 8, 9, 11–14, 28, 29, 31, 47, 69, 78, 86, 155 Jijijirla – Yanyuwa term, 115, 117 Jungkayi – Yanyuwa term, 108, 115, 121, 170

K Kearney, Amanda, viii, xii, xvi, 4, 10, 16, 20–22, 24, 25, 30, 32, 60, 83, 91, 92, 113, 114, 158–160, 173 Kincentric, 16, 19, 48, 67, 71, 87 Kincentric ecology, 16, 42, 66, 71, 78, 84 Kinship, vii, 3, 6, 16, 19, 71, 79, 81, 84, 85, 101, 127, 160, 173 Knowledge, viii, ix, x, xi, xxi, 1, 3, 4, 6, 7, 9, 11, 12, 20–22, 25, 27, 29–32, 40, 43, 45, 46,

50–52, 55–60, 62, 66, 68–71, 75–77, 81–83, 85, 86, 89, 91, 92, 97–100, 104, 106–109, 112, 113, 117, 119–121, 125, 129–131, 133–135, 137, 140, 144–146, 159, 160, 162, 168, 170, 173, 175, 182, 187, 191, 192, 194, 196–200, 202, 204, 206 Kriol/Creole, 129, 140 Kujika – Yanyuwa term, 96, 98, 100, 103, 104, 128, 131 L Land, viii, x, xxi, 2–7, 15, 19, 21, 22, 41, 45, 47, 48, 55, 59, 60, 67, 68, 79, 84, 96, 98, 102, 108, 110, 112, 113, 127–131, 136, 138–140, 144, 148, 163, 190, 192, 197, 198 Landscape, seascape, 51, 68, 80, 85, 90, 100, 109, 110, 120, 121, 128, 131, 154, 159, 160, 163, 167, 170, 171 Language, xxi, 3, 4, 7, 15, 16, 18, 20, 25, 41, 44, 48, 50, 53, 55–58, 61, 68, 69, 79, 81, 82, 98–102, 106, 107, 110, 117, 120, 121, 127, 129, 130, 136, 139, 160, 161, 164, 169, 170, 175, 191, 195–197, 204, 205 Law, 6, 11, 15, 18–24, 29, 30, 32, 58, 59, 61, 62, 66, 68, 70, 79, 80, 82, 84, 85, 98, 102, 103, 112–114, 117–121, 127, 134, 137, 145, 164, 169, 171, 172, 186, 191, 195–200, 202, 204 Learning, xii, xv, 1, 4, 11–13, 18, 25, 27, 41, 43, 57, 60, 61, 66–68, 70, 76, 78–82, 84, 86, 89–91, 96, 128, 144, 146, 147, 153, 163, 192, 202, 204

INDEX

li-Anthawirriyarra Sea Rangers, 6, 21, 118, 190, 198, 204, 206 Linguistic, 11, 57, 129, 137, 139 Literature, xxii, 41, 55, 83, 126, 130, 131, 133–135, 138, 144, 159, 160, 162, 168, 182, 185 li-Wirdiwalangu – Yanyuwa Elders (Yanyuwa term), 20, 50 Logic, 9, 44, 46, 47, 53, 56, 142 Loss, xxii, 5, 12, 15, 25, 41, 44, 56, 62, 98–100, 104, 117, 119, 128, 129, 143, 161, 204, 206

M Mabo, 148 Mahood, Kim, 7, 69, 106 Maps, 19, 69, 95, 96, 98, 100, 104, 106–113, 115, 116, 119, 121, 147, 174 Marra, xv, 15, 50, 101, 164, 165 Masculinity, 188, 190 Memory, 41, 45, 59, 81, 113, 129, 143, 169 Men, 7, 18–21, 45–48, 53, 55, 59, 60, 79, 86, 95, 104, 108, 110–113, 115, 118, 120, 136, 141, 142, 144, 154, 160, 163–165, 167, 170, 171, 173, 175, 181, 182, 185–190, 198, 199, 201, 203, 205, 206 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 71 Methodological openness, 173 Mining/mine, 41, 86, 99, 120, 125, 132, 134, 136, 138, 140, 148, 186, 206 Mobility of mind, 70, 71, 83, 88, 89, 91 Multivocality, 154, 156, 173 Myers, Fred, xii, 195 Mythology, 126

217

N Narnu-yuwa (Yanyuwa term), 18 Narrative, 2, 3, 7, 8, 43, 46, 50, 52, 55, 56, 69, 82, 86, 98, 100, 112, 115, 120, 126–133, 138, 140, 142, 153, 156, 167, 172, 173, 182, 191, 206 Native Title Act 1993, 25 Ngabaya, 105, 110 Ngimirringki – Yanyuwa term, 115, 121, 171, 174 Nowra, Louis, 186, 187 O Observer, ix, xi, 28, 42, 92 Old people, 17, 20, 21, 23, 24, 40, 45, 48–51, 56, 57, 66, 67, 98, 104, 112, 119, 120, 162–164, 175, 176, 192, 196 Ontology, 67, 71, 172 Oral tradition, orality, ix, 6, 45, 46, 48, 50–52, 55, 81, 97, 99, 101, 128, 129, 135, 145, 197 P Past, viii, 16, 18, 20, 29, 31, 41, 48–52, 58, 61, 71, 75, 87, 92, 139, 147, 153, 154, 157, 159, 164, 170, 173, 183, 184 Place, viii, ix, 1–3, 5, 7, 10–12, 14, 15, 17–20, 23, 26, 30, 31, 40–45, 47–53, 55–60, 66–68, 72, 81, 84–87, 90–92, 95, 98, 99, 103, 105–108, 110–113, 115–117, 119, 131, 136, 139, 143, 145, 154, 156, 157, 160, 163–165, 167–171, 173–176, 184, 191 Plumwood, Val, 47 Plurality, 67, 86, 90 Poetics of fit, 19, 68

218

INDEX

Positionality, 27, 32, 68, 155, 156, 170 Postcolonial, 47, 133, 134 Povinelli, Elizabeth, 68, 198 Praxis, xii, 9, 28, 31, 40, 49, 57, 61, 66, 67, 87, 89, 191

R Racist, racism, 40, 92, 183, 184, 186–188, 203, 206 Rainbow Serpent, 138–141, 144, 206 Reflective, xxii, 29, 31, 39, 43, 49, 60, 81, 86, 92, 146, 172, 189, 196, 202 Reflexive turn, 28, 182 Reflexivity, reflexive, vii, ix, xii, xiii, xvi, xxii, 8–12, 27–32, 41, 43, 44, 47, 60–62, 65, 66, 69–71, 81, 83, 86, 91, 92, 95, 96, 119, 145, 147, 153–157, 159, 173, 175, 181, 182, 202, 203 Relation, relational, 1, 3, 4, 7–9, 11, 12, 14, 19, 27, 29, 31, 32, 42, 44, 50, 52, 57, 60, 62, 66–68, 71, 78, 81, 83, 88, 89, 91, 95, 96, 98, 100, 105–107, 119–121, 144, 146, 154, 156, 157, 159, 162, 168, 171–173, 175, 198 Relationships, viii, ix, 1–3, 5, 7–9, 12–19, 21, 26, 27, 29, 32, 41, 43–45, 48–50, 52, 59–63, 67, 70, 71, 76, 78–82, 95, 99, 101, 103, 105, 108, 113, 119, 121, 130, 141, 146, 154, 156, 157, 160, 162–164, 167, 168, 170–174, 195, 196, 202–204 Research, viii, xvi, xxi, xxii, 3, 7–14, 24, 26–30, 32, 40, 41, 45–50, 62, 65–67, 78, 80, 82, 87, 90, 95, 101, 109, 111, 118, 120, 121, 126, 131, 155–160, 162,

165, 169, 171–173, 182, 187, 188, 204, 206 Responsive reflexivity, 10, 70, 83 Rock art, xxii, 6, 7, 15, 120, 153, 154, 157–165, 167, 168, 170–173 Rosaldo, Renato, 28, 45, 69, 194 Rose, Deborah Bird, 42 Rrumburriya, Mambaliya, Wuyaliya, and Wurdaliya – clan names (Yanyuwa terms), 19 S Said, Edward, 46 Salmón, Enrique, 16 Science, scientific, x, xi, 26, 46, 50, 52, 55, 56, 110, 140, 155, 162, 206 Sea, saltwater, island, 136 Sentient, sentiency, 6, 66–68, 84, 85, 87, 98, 109, 113, 138, 154, 160, 173 Seton, K., 32, 41 Shame, 7, 15, 49, 61, 62, 182, 183, 194–198, 201–204, 207 Silent, silence, 5, 70, 77, 102, 106, 107, 125, 159 Social research, 7, 10 Songlines, 3, 19, 23, 45, 59, 103, 109, 117, 121, 126, 128, 129, 131 Sorcery, 9, 99, 164, 166–169, 174, 175 Sousanis, Nick, 43 Spirit Beings, 18, 84 Stereotypes, 184, 185, 187, 189 Stories, xiii, 2, 9, 14, 15, 18, 23, 25, 28, 29, 31, 40, 42, 43, 46, 48–50, 55, 60, 79, 81, 88, 95, 98, 100, 103, 104, 109, 112, 113, 118–121, 126–129, 133, 160 Survivals, 184

INDEX

T Taçon, Paul, 129, 139, 148, 162 Teachers, 3, 12, 42, 45, 50, 66, 67, 70, 82, 85, 90, 118, 146, 188, 205 Testimony/witness, 27, 44, 68, 70, 80–83 Tiger Shark Dreaming, 131, 174 Torres Strait Islands, 156 Tradition, 45, 55, 56, 99, 109, 127, 129, 194 Transformation, transformism, 3, 45, 88, 90, 138 Translation, 4, 27, 45, 46, 48, 55, 68, 72, 82, 89, 99, 106, 107, 129 U Unexceptionalism, 85, 86, 90, 91 University, 11, 14, 47, 53, 58, 78, 86, 118, 130, 205 Unresponsive reflexivity, 83 V Vanderlin Island, 96, 105, 108, 115–117, 157, 172, 176 Vanity ethnography, 69, 88, 89 Violence, vii, x, 5, 22, 40, 42, 56, 58, 78, 87, 107, 117, 148, 175, 183, 186, 187, 194 Vital and Supervital, 18 Vulnerability, 91, 129, 131, 142, 156, 157 W Waanyi, 130, 132, 133, 135, 136, 139, 146, 148 Western, West, xi, 2, 4, 18, 41, 45–48, 50–52, 55–60, 76, 91, 92, 97,

219

116, 127–129, 134, 139, 144, 147, 148, 157, 158, 163–165, 172, 190, 201 Wolfe, Patrick, 17, 18, 126, 147, 182, 183 Wood, Denis, 106, 110 Wright, Alexis, 126, 132–136, 138–144 Wunungu Awara – Animating Indigenous Knowledge animations, 23, 33, 109, 118

Y Yanyuwa, viii, xv, xxi, xxii, 2–8, 10–12, 14–33, 40–42, 45–53, 55, 56, 58–62, 65–82, 84, 85, 87, 88, 91, 92, 95–105, 107–109, 111–114, 117–121, 125, 128–131, 138, 144–146, 154, 157–165, 167–175, 181, 182, 184, 188–192, 194–200, 202–206 Yanyuwa Atlas, Forget About Flinders (2003), 23 Yanyuwa Country, xxi, 2, 3, 6, 15, 17, 19, 29, 50, 52, 53, 65, 79, 84, 96–98, 107, 114, 115, 119–121, 153, 157–160, 163, 171, 174, 191, 199 Yijan, 17, 18, 84 Yolngu, 129 Young men, 7, 19–21, 55, 182, 187–192, 196–198, 202–206 Young, younger, 3, 4, 7, 15, 20–24, 40, 46, 48–50, 56, 57, 61, 82, 86, 98, 102, 113, 118, 136, 159, 160, 165, 169, 171, 174, 181, 182, 184, 187–189, 191, 192, 194–207