Walking a relational path towards Indigenous-led collaborative futures

The Children’s Country: creation of a Goolarabooloo future in North-West Australia co-authored by Stephen Muecke and Aboriginal Elder and Law man Paddy Roe is an important contribution to collaborative scholarship that aims to nourish Indigenous-led collaborative futures in and with Country. Country, in Australia, is an Aboriginal English word for the multiple human and more-than-human beings and agencies that co-become as place/space.¹ Country includes land, waterways, sea, sky, rocks, plants, animals, weather, spirits, humans and so much more. For Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, Country feels, senses, knows and communicates. Country is related with, as one would relate with a person.² Country is also people, people co-become as Country.³ This book offers a powerful example from North-West Australia of how Country continues to open possibilities for connection despite the ongoing epistemological and ontological violences of settler colonialism. The authors do this by sharing stories of Goolarabooloo Country manifest in cultural ceremony and practice; in co-author, Paddy Roe’s, life; and in political strategies and struggles mobilized to protect Goolarabooloo Country.

The book is structured by a dreaming track that is now also known as the Lurujarri Heritage Trail. The heritage trail was established by Paddy Roe and his family in the late 1980s to both share and care for Goolarabooloo Country. The reader is invited to walk along this trail with the authors and to visit different times in Goolarabaloo's past and present to better understand Goolarabooloo ways of knowing and being across the domains of history, law, science, politics, economics and art. These different times are shared through story, author transcripts, travelogue and analysis. Stylistically employing such diverse modalities offers multiple ways for the reader to engage with the friction between Goolarabaloo and Western ways of knowing and being. Muecke and Roe create generous opportunities to encounter the complexity and relevance of Goolarabooloo political-legal-spiritual protocols and Law/Lore and the importance of nourishing these systems today.

I read and engage The Children’s Country: creation of a Goolarabooloo future in North-West Australia from Mulubinbah (Newcastle, NSW) in the unceded lands of the Awabakal and Worimi peoples. On these lands I am an uninvited guest, a white settler and as Muecke grapples with in co-writing this book, I am also trying to learn my responsibilities to the Countries where I live and work, and my relationships with Elders, Custodians and knowledge holders. My responsibilities include being a member of two Indigenous-led, human and more-than-human research collectives, Yandaarra on Gumbaynggirr Country (mid north coast, NSW) and the Gay’wu Group of Women also known as the Bawaka Collective in North-East Arnhem Land (NT). In both research collectives we come together to learn, to share and to care for each other and Country led by the Aboriginal Law/Lore in each of these places. From my own position and place, Muecke’s aim to honour the sharing of Elder and maja, Law boss, Paddy Roe, resonates at both a personal and political level.

In this book forum I am speaking from my place and my relationships. I aim to collaboratively engage with Muecke and Roe’s book around two significant subjects that, for me, create the backbone of their work together – relationships and Country-led epistemological encounters. In conversing around these subjects, I am mindful of Métis/Michif (Woodman via Red River) person and scholar, Max Liboiron’s, call for reciprocity from academics in the face of ‘practices of reading extractively’ and ‘taking words for our own goals’. As Liboiron states:

It is a consumptive mode that uses texts like a resource rather than collaboration with them or being otherwise accountable to the ideas, the authors, the publishers, and other readers. (p 95)⁴

I am also led by Lauren Tynan, trawlwulwuy woman from tebrakunna Country in northeast lutruwita/Tasmania, and Gamilaroi woman Michelle Bishop, raised on Dharawal Country’s invitation to move away from extractive academic practices to take up relational modes of academic engagement. Reflecting on the practice of the literature review, Tynan and Bishop suggest beginning with respect:

Undertaking a literature review from a place of respect is a way of honoring scholars’ work as if they were people you were sitting down with. Imagine if print-based medium, such as a written literature review, was a real-life interaction. We would be sitting down with scholars face-to-face and through our body language, actions, and words (or silences), would be showing respect for their work and knowledge. (p 504)⁵

It is a privilege to sit with the sharing of Paddy Roe and Stephen Muecke though this book forum, to be invited into Roe’s Country on the Dampier Peninsula in North-West Australia through his relationship with Muecke. With this book they share many facets of Goolarabooloo, an Indigenous political and legal order, an ‘inclusive model’, and a ‘working institution, for regional governance based in tradition’ (p xxxii). There is much to learn from their story and this Country, and the friction they recount between Goolarabooloo and Western ways of knowing, being and governing.

Working relationally

Guided by the strength of Goolarabooloo Country itself and the notion of Goolarabaloo as a political entity, the book offers an important example of working relationally to assert Country’s significance. Stephen Muecke and Paddy Roe write this book from a place of relationship with accountability to people and Country. The authors began working together in the 1980s, with Roe sharing story and knowledge and Muecke learning and recording. This book is a testament to the richness of relationships, and to Muecke and Roe’s clear purpose to ensure Goolarabooloo futures and continue Bugarrigarra – the Dreaming. As Muecke explains,

Our writing style … is somewhat different from the usual academic even-handedness, which looks at things from an (imagined) distance, as if the academic has no skin in the game. But we all have skin in one game or another. And if your writing starts with a countryman as co-author and in the midst of trouble … then that intimacy demands a different kind of rationality as it strives to be useful in that struggle. (p xvii)

From this emerges a ‘partisan text’ as they call it, that elevates the importance of Roe’s knowledge of Country, the spirits connected to that Country, and decades of Goolarabooloo activism over fictions of ‘objectivity’. Indeed, as they note in their chapter on science, reliability and relevance are better knowledge values for living ethically and sustainably in more-than-human worlds than objectivity (p 87). Muecke and Roe are led by a relationship and responsibility to Goolarabooloo Country’s systems and to Bugarrigarra – the Dreaming. In the presence of Bugarrigarra throughout the book, Muecke and Roe assert its central importance in creating a co-existent, collaborative future on unceded lands. As they write,

Creation didn’t happen way back then, but is always happening right here with us now, especially when it is reactivated with the clapping ceremonies when the Bugarrigarra – the Dreaming – is vitalised through song and dance. (p 5)

This resonates powerfully with other Aboriginal Custodians and thinkers such as Gumbaynggirr Storyholder Aunty Shaa Smith in mid-north coast New South Wales. Aunty Shaa’s vision as she leads a Gumbaynggirr and Yirrali (white/settler) research collective is to share the relevance of creation stories for today, emphasizing that the creation time is ongoing.⁶ One story she tells is of the Koala Brothers who created a bridge with their gut-strings so that the people could follow it to a new home after the sea had risen.⁷ As Yandaarra write:

The creation time is now. It is imbued with openings and possibilities. We need to continue this creation story, to arrive at the changed landscape as we come off the koala gut-string bridge and rebuild protocols and relationships and come together to create a new story through which we can heal people and Country and learn to belong well. (p 6)⁸

Relational academic work in which Country, story and creation are central is needed to speak back to histories and presents of colonizing research,⁹ and to create the conditions of possibility for collaborative futures that are Indigenous-led. This kind of work requires being accountable to people and Country, shifting research responsibilities and timeframes to span generations. Indigenous researchers already know what it is to be multi-directionally and multi-generationally accountable to community and Country, past-present-future, but this is something that most non-Indigenous researchers, like Muecke and myself, must learn. As Muecke acknowledges of allowing the work with Roe to lapse for a time, ‘[i]t was my fault; I had other concerns … and maybe just not getting it, why this Country was so important’ (p xv). However, Muecke returns to Goolarabooloo decades after their early work together, making this book a testament to the power of Country to call people back, including non-Indigenous people, to their relationships and responsibilities.

As Muecke returns to north-west Australia to write this book, Roe has already passed. This requires a careful rethinking of authorship – both who is listed as author and how the text is written, one that is important in pushing academic boundaries towards more collaborative and relational practices. As Muecke explains, he and Roe co-author the book after Roe’s death in acknowledgement that the idea for the book and its foundations belong to Paddy Roe and his Country. Their co-authorship demonstrates a need to rethink how relational knowledge works across generations and between life and death. Paddy Roe’s knowledge of story, the Law, Country and politics leads the ontological and epistemological encounters theorized in the book across the domains of history, law, science, politics, economies and art. As Muecke revisits these conversations with Paddy Roe in transcripts and memory, and goes back to Roe’s Country, their relationship continues to teach Muecke.

Muecke’s acknowledgement of Roe as co-author resonates with the co-authorship approach of the Gay’wu Group of Women in north-east Arnhem Land. The women continue to include two members of their group who have recently passed in their more-than-human, Bawaka Country-led authorship collective. Their practice is a matter of respecting Yolŋu knowledge sovereignty and protocols. As with Muecke and Roe, the knowledges and guidance of these senior women doesn’t cease with their passing, it continues in dreams, memories, conversations, and in and as Bawaka Country itself.¹⁰ Both instances of co-authorship are important reminders that the past is always in the present¹¹ and that relational responsibilities when it comes to Indigenous and Indigenous-led knowledges don’t have an end point.

Country-led ontological and epistemological encounters

Throughout the book, Muecke and Roe, walk the reader along the dreaming track of the Lurujarri Heritage Trail. In writing this book, Muecke travels this track anew with a fresh group of walkers, creating a Country-centred structure for the book and enabling Country to be visited and heard in each chapter. Yet, the larger focus of the book is with the political impacts of different epistemologies and ontologies interacting, as Paddy and his family work intergenerationally to create a Goolarabooloo future through fraught, and often violent, encounters with invasion, farming, Native Title, mining and shifting political landscapes. In the context of ongoing colonization and ongoing Indigenous presence, encounters between Indigenous and non-Indigenous ways of knowing and being are of clear political concern. This is especially so where the purpose is to collectively shift these encounters to more generative grounds and ensure Indigenous futurities, a term ‘that imbibes the future with what we are doing now to bring about different futures’ (p 23).¹²

Many Aboriginal scholars have conceptualized these interactions across difference from their own Law/Lore and Country, drawing out the generative potential of encounter. The Warlpiri concept of Milpirri, for example, offers one Country-led understanding of different epistemologies and ontologies coming together, interacting, and shifting in both human and more-than-human ways. From his Country in the Tanami Desert, Warlpiri Elder and Indigenous scholar, Wanta Steve Jampijinpa Patrick offers Milpirri as a way of thinking about bringing non-Aboriginal and Aboriginal people together. Milpirri is the cloud that’s formed from the hot air rising and the cold air falling, the clashing of two different knowledges. These two come together, clash and try to adjust to each other, which is not an easy process. However, after the stormcloud forms and the lightening subsides, Jampijinpa Patrick writes that:

the rain rejuvenates the possibilities for two different kinds of knowledge coming to an agreement. A better understanding of each other on both sides occurs; this is the rain and the relief that comes. When it rains, the nourishment of country occurs. (p 122)¹³

Milpirri demonstrates the uneasy, often turbulent, ways in which Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples come together but that these encounters across difference can generate new understandings and nourishing effects, like the rain.

Yet in working with these potentially generative encounters, Martin Nakata reminds us that the meeting of Indigenous and non-Indigenous domains is a power-laden space in which Indigenous peoples’ practices, understandings, and ontologies need to be prioritized in order to enact their decolonizing potential. He conceptualizes this as the ‘cultural interface’, a ‘place of tension that requires constant negotiation’ (p 285) from our different positions and relationships to ongoing colonization and Country.¹⁴ From this place of tension and negotiation, Nakata emphasizes that engagements at the cultural interface need to ‘serve Indigenous interests, in ways that can uphold [their] distinctiveness and special status as First Peoples’ (p 286).

The Children’s Country: creation of a Goolarabooloo future in North-West takes up this task laid out by Nakata and others. The book considers the incompatibilities and the generative potential of Goolarabooloo and Western systems and across different domains. Perhaps it is in the friction between the different laws that the heat is most glaring. Muecke and Roe share some of these legal encounters in the book’s chapter on ‘Law’. They powerfully argue the inflexibilities of Western ‘man made’ Law as it works to colonize, replace and contort Aboriginal Law held in Country itself. Drawing on other Aboriginal scholars such as Anne Poelina and Mary Graham the chapter highlights the deep ways in which Goolarabooloo is bound to a Law of the land with a much broader polity and society than the human-centric Western legal system. As Muecke and Roe write,

Bugarrigarra law was something that had emerged over innumerable generations in its places, on Country, in an organic relationship to Country. (p 53)

and

… restoring Bugarrigarra law would mean that certain spirits, certain trees and certain water sources would have to be given full status as members of a multi-species ‘society’, with due rights. (p 58)

Yet the book also looks for possibilities in the encounters between Goolarabooloo and Western systems and finds generative potential, for example in solidarities forged between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal activists to protect Country (chapter 6), and the two-way learning that is slowly opening up in the realms of science (chapter 5). This happens when Goolarabooloo knowledge is respected on its own terms, rather than being contained or relegated to categories such as the ‘past’ or ‘belief’. To be properly respected and understood, as Muecke and Roe argue with this book, Goolarabooloo and Bugarrigarra must be engaged holistically.

Muecke and Roe work consistently to affirm the integrity of Goolarabooloo Law amid the tensions and frictions that arise from ongoing colonization. Yet, it is in keeping encounters on Country-led and Indigenous terms that I felt I lost the path at points in Muecke and Roe’s book. As the reader traverses the epistemological and ontological frictions between Goolarabooloo and Western ways of knowing, being and doing, Muecke draws heavily on Bruno Latour. Delving into these encounters along the axes of history, law, science, politics, economies and art, while consistently bringing Goolarabooloo Country into dialogue with Latourian concepts, left different paths not taken. In this case, paths that, for me, may have had stronger resonances with Goolarabooloo, such as the work of other Indigenous and Indigenous-led struggles and scholarship.

Decisions on whose thinking and experiences we engage in academic work, raises important questions around citational politics – whom we cite and whom it benefits – and the genealogy of ideas. These considerations are especially pertinent to the post-humanist environmental humanities, which are preceded by millennia of Indigenous thinking.¹⁵ Muecke and Roe’s book powerfully shows the complexity, political sophistication, deep and layered human and more-than-human knowledges of Goolarabooloo Country, engaging with Aboriginal and Indigenous thinkers such as Mary Graham, Aileen Moreton-Robinson, Audra Simpson and Anne Poelina. Yet, Paddy Roe’s generous sharing and Goolarabooloo itself may have been better served by more of these engagements. Situating Latour as a repeated conversant throughout the book missed an opportunity to engage more broadly with Indigenous and Indigenous-led thinking in diverse contexts.

The Children’s Country: Creation of a Goolarabooloo Future in North-West Australia is at its most powerful when Paddy Roe and Goolarabooloo Country are most present – in the Lurujarri trail, the transcripts, the stories and struggle to care for Country and continue Bugarrigarra, the dreaming. The book is an important example of Indigenous survivance and a more-than-human Indigenous political and legal order that continues to invite people into relationship, opening possibilities for reparative and collaborative futures.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Lara Daley

Lara Daley is a research fellow in human geography at the University of Newcastle. Her research engages Indigenous-led geographies and ongoing colonization in urban and semi-urban Indigenous/settler colonial contexts. She is a member of Yandaarra and the Bawaka Collective, two Indigenous-led collaborations with a focus on Indigenous sovereignties and Indigenous-led ways of caring for the Country and addressing socio-environmental change.

Notes

1 Bawaka Country including Sarah Wright, Sandie Suchet-Pearson, Kate Lloyd, Laklak Burarrwanga, Ritjilili Ganambarr, Merrkiyawuy Ganambarr-Stubbs, Banbapuy Ganambarr and Jill Sweeney, ‘Co-Becoming Bawaka: Towards a Relational Understanding of Place/Space’, Progress in Human Geography, 40(4), 2016, pp 455–475.

2 Deborah Bird Rose, Nourishing Terrains: Australian Aboriginal Views of Landscape and Wilderness, Australian Heritage Commission, 1996.

3 Bawaka Country including, Laklak Burarrwanga Ritjilili Ganambarr, Merrkiyawuy Ganambarr-Stubbs Banbapuy Ganambarr, Djawundil Maymuru, Sarah Wright, Sandie Suchet-Pearson, Kate Lloyd and Lara Daley, ‘Gapu, Water, Creates Knowledge and is a Life Force to be Respected’, PLOS Water, 1(4), 2022, p e0000020. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pwat.0000020.

4 Max Liboiron, ‘Exchanging’, in Kat Jungnickel (ed), Transmissions: Critical Tactics for Making and Communicating Research, MIT Press, 2020, pp 89–107.

5 Lauren Tynan and Michelle Bishop, ‘Decolonizing the Literature Review: A Relational Approach’, Qualitative Inquiry, 29(3–4), 2023, pp 498–508.

6 Aunty Shaa Smith, Neeyan Smith, Sarah Wright, Paul Hodge and Lara Daley, ‘Yandaarra is Living Protocol’, Social & Cultural Geography, 21(7), 2020, pp 940–961.

7 Aunty Shaa Smith, Neeyan Smith, Sarah Wright, Lara Daley and Paul Hodge, The Dunggiirr Brothers and the Caring Song of the Whale, Allen & Unwin, 2022.

8 Aunty Shaa Smith, Neeyan Smith, Lara Daley, Sarah Wright and Paul Hodge, ‘Creation, Destruction and COVID: Heeding the Call of Country, Bringing Things into Balance’, Geographical Research, 59(2), 2021, pp 160–168.

9 For examples of calls by Aboriginal scholars to address these colonizing legacies in research see for example Ambelin Kwaymullina, ‘Research, Ethics and Indigenous Peoples: An Australian Indigenous Perspective on Three Threshold Considerations for Respectful Engagement’, AlterNative, 12(4), 2016, pp 437–449; Lester Rigney, ‘Internationalization of an Indigenous Anticolonial Cultural Critique of Research Methodologies: A Guide to Indigenist Research Methodology and Its Principles’, Wicazo SaReview, 14(2), 1999, pp 109–121.

10 Bawaka Country including Laklak Burarrwanga, Ritjilili Ganambarr, Merrkiyawuy Ganambarr-Stubbs, Banbapuy Ganambarr, Djawundil Maymuru, Sarah Wright, Sandie Suchet-Pearson, Kate Lloyd and Lara Daley, ‘Author-ity of/as Bawaka Country’, Australian Archaeology, forthcoming.

11 Lara Daley and Sarah Wright, ‘Unsettling Time(s): Reconstituting the When of Urban Radical Politics’, Political Geography, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2022.102707.

12 Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Eve Tuck and Wayne K. Yang (eds), Indigenous and Decolonizing Studies in Education: Mapping the Long View, Routledge, 2018.

13 Wanta Steve Jampijinpa Patrick, ‘Pulya-ranyi Winds of Change’, Cultural Studies Review, 21(1), 2015, pp 121–131.

14 Martin Nakata, ‘Indigenous Knowledge and the Cultural Interface: Underlying Issues at the Intersection of Knowledge and Information Systems’, IFLA Journal, 28(5–6), 2002, pp 281–291.

15 For discussions around decolonizing posthumanism see for example, Juanita Sundberg, ‘Decolonizing Posthumanist Geographies’, Cultural Geographies, 21(1), 2014, pp 33–47; Zoe Todd, ‘An Indigenous Feminist’s Take on the Ontological Turn: ‘Ontology’ Is Just Another Word for Colonialism’, Journal of Historical Sociology, 29(1), 2016, pp 4–22.