The art of place-making on Wurundjeri Country today

• Main Author: Foley, Angela V.
• Other Authors: Western Sydney University, Centre for Educational Research (Host institution)
• Format: Thesis
• Language: English
• Published: 2020
• Subjects: Wurundjeri (Australian people); Aboriginal Australians; art; Aboriginal Australian; social life and customs; Thesis (Ph.D. (Ed.)) > Western Sydney University; 2020; Ochre; First Nations
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/1959.7/uws:63343

This thesis moves through an old stony part of south-east Australia where Merri Creek trickles along a crack in the hardened urbanised lava flow of Melbourne’s north. I connect as a non- Indigenous woman with the First Nations Wurundjeri people here. Together we acknowledge Wurundjeri Country in the thesis through its fragmented grasslands, valleys and the remnants of indigenous plants and animals including reedy Phragmites and elusive Golden Sun Moths. In Australia, ‘Country’ with a capital ‘C’, doesn’t simply refer to creeks, rocky outcrops, or hills in ‘landscape’ terms. Rather, ‘Country’ describes Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples’ family origins and associations with particular places and embraces spiritual, physical, social and cultural connections. The thesis began in the contemporary contact zone from relationships between Merri Creek Management Committee where I work, and Wurundjeri Tribe Land Compensation and Cultural Heritage Council. This thesis was planned with the Wurundjeri people I worked with. Noticing the lack of published work about Wurundjeri Country today motivated some of us who were working together to shape the necessary intercultural agreements so I could address the issues carefully in this academic context. We designed the thesis as a storying of the things we saw, did and made that connected us to Wurundjeri Country. The overarching research question between us became: ‘How do we see, feel and identify Wurundjeri Country in a contact zone of cultural differences, in a largely urbanised place?’ The formal study positioned me as researcher and therefore created a different relationship for Wurundjeri people and me. As researcher, I had to sharpen my attention to colonisation, my non-Indigeneity, and concerns regarding representation and the risks involved, such as the production of deficit narratives of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. Within the developing thesis, I began to recognise how layers of volatility contained unexpected possibilities in a contact zone of differences, boundaries, and responsibilities. I have used a relational, emergent and decolonising approach to read the materiality of Country and its objects, creatures, rocks, bark, feathers, plants and ochre. The product is a ‘deep map’ of Wurundjeri Country that includes our various ‘makings’, including necklaces, bouquets, shields and skirts, and two recorded conversations with two Wurundjeri leaders. This is all expressed alongside my etchings, letter writing, and journaling. The emergent deep map is ‘a/r/tographic’ in the sense that it combines art, research, teaching, writing, talking, making, feeling, and learning (Springgay et al., 2005). The concept of ‘the art of place-making’ produces this contemporary deep map of Wurundjeri Country with its intercultural volatilities as well as the unpredictable qualities of making, talking, and remembering. Findings unfolded by constantly going to and fro with people, ideas, places, materials and sharing draft versions of the text. A commitment to motion and a multiplicity of methods is shown to be a vital part of ethical practice in the contact zone, a momentum which built rich exchanges here and is applicable to knowing Country at the cultural interface elsewhere in Australia. In all these ways, ‘antiphonal calling’ has become the signature of this thesis. While antiphonal calling ordinarily refers to vocalising between birds or interacting choirs, here, antiphonal calling lies within intercultural encounters, and with Country. My antiphonal methodology is relational geologically, ancestrally, archivally, contemporarily, and seasonally. The antiphonal prism calls between intercultural spaces to connect in multiple ways with the crying, singing, and feeling that continues to make Wurundjeri Country knowable today.