KIN -Art and Ecology in Western Australia.

Art & Ecology in Western Australia

As

Elders say, this is a regenerative movement from ‘me’ to ‘we’; a collaboration that includes the community of life and people of many nations.

– River Relationships: For the Love of River

Dr Sandra Wooltorton, Dr Anne Poelina, Dr Len Collard

with cultural protocols this essay is temporarily redacted due to the passing of this artist.

condolences.

We respectfully advise Aboriginal peoples and communities that this publication may contain names and images of deceased persons.

DEFINITIONS

The orthography of spelling and words in language has developed over time with different speakers and recorded versions, for instance, in the use of Noongar and Nyungar. These variations are accepted. The term ‘Aboriginal’ within Western Australia is used in preference to ‘Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander’, in recognition that Aboriginal people are the first peoples and original inhabitants of Western Australia. ‘Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander’ may be referred to in the national context. ‘Indigenous’ and ‘First Nations’ are also used interchangeably where quotations and sources prefer this convention.

National Gallery of Victoria,

Felton

© the artists,

/ Copyright Agency, 2024

Ngayarta Kujarra, 2009

Jakayu Biljabu, Yikartu Bumba, May Chapman, Nyanjilpayi Nancy Chapman, Doreen Chapman, Linda James, Donna Loxton, Mulyatingki

Marney, Reena Rogers, Beatrice Simpson, Ronelle Simpson, Muntararr Rosie Williams

Synthetic polymer paint on canvas

300.6 × 500.3 cm

Punmu, Western Australia

Melbourne

Bequest, 2011

Martumili Artists, Newman

Ngayartu Kujarra (Lake Dora), an immense warla (salt lake) of glittering whiteness, has a palpable presence in Punmu community. It looms large in the psyche of Martu people who were taken away from Punmu to Jigalong mission and worked on pastoral stations during the 1960s and have relished the return to their homeland. This warla of blinding whiteness, an eccentricity of natural geography, has inspired twelve Martu women artists of three generations to express viscerally their profound affection for it and the surrounding water sources.The monumental work was collaborative from its inception. - Judith Ryan AM, 2013

See Albrecht, G. (2019). Earth emotions: new words for a new world. Ithaca, Cornell University Press.

Art as InterAction/ Collective Action/ Counter Action in Western Australia

Sharmila Wood

The creative practices highlighted in KIN: Art & Ecology in Western Australia engage with Western Australia (WA), a state occupying one-third of the continent’s land mass, with 11 per cent of its population. This broad, abundant landscape is a source of sustenance, tension and complexity. Here, the impact of harmful land use practices are amplified by the climate crisis which is profoundly and deeply felt in rising temperatures, desertification, bush fires and species teetering on the edge of extinction. Artists are responding with alternate relational frameworks and regenerative practices to change the way we think of nature and our place within it. The community of creative practitioners highlighted in this publication are not necessarily engaged with each other, but connected through their approach, which is often characterised by long-term, iterative and deep engagement with place.

Professor Anne Poelina, a Nyikina Warrwa woman from the Kimberley region of WA is a traditional custodian of Martuwarra, in the lower Fitzroy River area. Professor Poelina’s advocacy for water and critique of extractivist, colonial violence on lands are informed by an epistemology captured in the essay ‘River Relationships: For the Love of Rivers’, co-authored with Professor Sandra Wooltorton and Whadjuk/ Ballardong Nyungar Elder and University of Western Australia Emeritus Professor Len Collard. The collaborative text expresses ways of feeling and thinking about the environment that underpin the central thesis of many artists in this publication: nature as our kin.

‘Solphilia’ is a term conceptualised by philosopher and environmentalist, Glenn Albrecht, Professor of Sustainability at Western Australia’s Murdoch University to describe “love of the interrelated whole” and the solidarity required between all people to take responsibility for the protection of places (Albrecht, 2019). Artists in KIN: Art & Ecology in Western Australia share ethics, values and love for their environs, and invite others to share this love too, through richly visual and sensorial encounters. This book, which includes poems and speculative fiction

See, for example, Val Plumwood “Journey to the Heart of Stone,” in Culture, Creativity and Environment: New Environmentalist Criticism, ed. Fiona Becket and Terry Gifford (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007): 17-35.

by Kathryn Gledhill-Tucker,

Grace

Connors

and Lakshmi Kanchi is not a comprehensive survey of artistic works that respond to ecology, but rather, an invitation for furthur engagement.

Western Australian artists have been exploring place-based approaches for decades, with experimental environmental practices. The members of the art collective Underfoot invite extended conversations on listening, walking, and attuning deeply to place as creative praxis, communicating an understanding of nature through inter-species ecological actions. Dr Perdita Phillips, Dr Annette Nykiel and Dr Nien Schwarz share insights into gathering and making with a group of multidisciplinary creative practitioners some of whom are also activists engaged with the protection of threatened environments. Members are entwined with important legacies of art history in WA, continuing the traditions that began with Edith Cowan University’s (ECU) bush camps in 1987, which took students, staff and artists on field trips to facilitate group arts practices in regional environments.

The Australian philosopher and ecofeminist, Val Plumwood’s book Feminism and the Mastery of Nature (1992) argued against ‘hyper separation’ believing that the creation of division and opposition between human intellect and the natural realm creates the subordination of non-humans, women, the colonised, working and Indigenous peoples. Plumwood proposed philosophical animism as a way to an ecological community of kindred beings (Plumwood 2007). Theories around kinship with non-human life adopted by the burgeoning environmental movements of the 1970s have long histories in Australia, as elsewhere, through Indigenous and women’s knowledge systems–ontologies that are ancient, yet have remained in our psyche and collective consciousness despite attempts to diminish their significance.

Further information see Gilchrist, S. (2016). Everywhen: The Eternal Present in Indigenous Art from Australia. Special Exhibitions Gallery, Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, MA, United States of America.

The landmark exhibition, Everywhen: The Eternal Present in Indigenous Art from Australia was curated by WA Yamatji curator Stephen Gilchrist from the Inggarda language group. Presented at the Harvard Art Museums, this exhibition situated the ‘everywhen’ as a way to describe the concept of time in Aboriginal communities. Time as a cyclical or a circular order that merges the ancestral, natural and human worlds is the “everywhen.” This concept of time and place is important to understanding notions of relationality in artwork painted by Martu Aboriginal artists at the Aboriginal art centre, Martumili Artists.

The painting Ngayarta Kujarra (Lake Dora, 2009) captures deep time, but also the present relationships of the artist collaborators to the lake. Further north of Martu lands, in the Kimberley region, Emilia Galatis writes about the Walmajarri artist Annette Lormada, who paints with Mangkaja Arts. Lormada brings us into the Martuwarra River environment through her distinctive visual language for the everywhen that reflects her personal and social histories, and resilient and joyful resistance to the ravages of colonisation.

See Ruben, E (2022, April 14). To fight a uranium mine, remote desert artists paint a grand statement together, National Indigenous Times.

Aboriginal art centres are the foundation of Aboriginal visual arts practice in regional and remote Western Australia. They create the environment for professional arts practice to thrive and remain the nucleus for creative production, yet, remain chronically under-funded. As places for culture and creativity, they sustain culture, livelihoods and well-being. Art centres are the primary, and, often only safe Aboriginal space in towns that have histories of segregation and entrenched, systemic racism.

Martumili Artists has grappled with the legacies of these systems, particularly around land use. The painting Kintyre, is five metres by three metres and was painted by 23 Martumili artists, ‘young and old, working together’ (Samson 2022) about the Kintyre mine site in an area of uranium exploration. Martu artists have expressed deep concern about the proximity of the mine to the borders of Karlamilyi National Park, and most potently, to the threat of contaminating the intricate system of waterways that connect underwater to the highly significant Lake Dora and Ruddall River. There are also 28 threatened species live in the area.

In 2002 the Martu people were awarded native title rights that recognised 136,000 square kilometres of land, including the Kintyre mining area. However, in 2015 the Federal Government gave conditional approval for the Kintyre uranium mine. The Martu artist Curtis Taylor has stated the Kintyre painting “documents our Country and our ties to that area, not just the old bushman but also the younger generation…. We want that block of land to be reinstated into our park but also in the Martu determination so that we can co-manage with different agencies and our partners within the region.” (Taylor 2022). Kintyre remains an ongoing site of struggle — in March 2024 the opposition party declared they would overturn the current Western Australian ban on uranium if elected.

The climate crisis has been a powerful catalysing force for unity between disparate groups who take action against threats to significant areas by environmental destruction. These collective approaches have emerged as a demonstrable political force. Decades of citizen-led action has influenced progressive Western Australian leadership in some areas of environmental policy, notably, the WA State Government’s decision in 2023 to end native forest logging and commit to add more than 400,000 hectares of karri, jarrah and wandoo forests as nature reserves, national parks and conservation parks. The environmental planner and designer Daniel Jan Martin has been engaged in these efforts towards environmental protection.

Martin’s mapping, visualisation and geospatial practice create access to data with compelling outcomes for improving environmental and land management. Martin’s collaboration with artist Mei Swan Lim in Swampscapes (2018) along with the poet Nandi Chinna highlights how cross-disciplinary approaches create new dimensions for knowledge production. Kelly Fliedner, the writer and curator who has been instrumental in fostering discourse on the arts in WA through the newsletter, publication and collaborative project, Semaphore

(2019–2021) reflects on Swan Lim’s practice in which music, ecology, art and her Baháʼí faith intermingle with collaborators in “a corporeal and spiritual undertaking that balances life, all its complexity and beauty, with the making of art itself.”

The work of Yabini Kickett, a Perth-based artist and descendent of the Bibbulman nation is engaged with the concept of ‘solastalgia’—the emotional distress caused by environmental change—which she describes as “the feeling of being homesick while still at home.” The arts writer and journalist Rosamund Brennan connects Kickett’s work to the practices of Alana Hunt and Katie Breckon who have distinct visual languages, and approaches but both of whom have worked and lived in the Kimberley region as outsiders, interrogating their own identity on stolen land, the impacts of colonisation and sense of belonging. The long history of place does not disappear, and these artists critique the violence that continues to be perpetrated and, also the possibilities of creative work to restore.

Whilst situated in the local context, issues being addressed by artists highlighted in this book are in dialogue with a global discourse around concerns over environmental degradation, social injustice and rising inequity. The exhibition I curated, Actions for the Earth: Art, Care and Ecology, produced by Independent Curator’s International (ICI) and touring the USA until 2026 highlights artists who consider kinship, healing, and restorative interventions as artistic practices and strategies to foster a deeper consciousness of our interconnectedness with the earth.

The work Clearing (2019) presented in Actions for the Earth: Art, Care and Ecology by WA artist, Katie West is at the intersection of artistic practices and actions for, and of the earth. West makes space for quietude, dialogue and learning with opportunities to read texts by Indigenous authors underneath a canopy of naturally dyed textiles, blankets and pillows. The earthen colour of these draped silks are memories of landscape that are further recalled by the meditative soundtrack of poetry spoken by West and recordings of Country, creating a multi-sensory space to meditate and reflect on the question, how do we relate to the earth?

West’s work is engaged with the legacies of established artists in the exhibition such as Cecilia Vicuña, Ana Mendieta and Yoko Ono, but also emerging practitioners such as Zarina Muhhamed who lives and works in Singapore. The group of artists in Actions for the Earth: Art, Care and Ecology elude a unifying definition, but combine creative tactics from Fluxus, Social Practice, New Genre Public Art, Science Fiction, Futurism, Ecofeminism and a range of strategies emerging from the counter-culture ethos; protest movements; environmental activism and, significantly, ancient ways of being and knowing that have sustained humanity across millennia. In this way, they share ideas of reciprocity and interdependence with the Western Australian artists in this publication who are working to create interaction, collective action and counter action.

Katie West, Clearing installation TarraWarra Museum of Art, 2019

Photo: © Andrew Curtis Courtesy the artist

River Relationships: FOR THE LOVE OF RIVER

Dr Sandra Wooltorton, Dr Anne Poelina, Dr Len Collard

Martuwarra Fitzroy River: Calling in People of the World

I am Martuwarra, Mardoowarra, River of Life in the Australian Northwest. My waters have flowed, streamed and stormed since the Bookarrakarra, creation times. I bring seasonality, culture, socio-ecosystem and food to my nations, Indigenous and all.

I am Anne, Yimardoowarra marnin, Martuwarra guardian like my ancestors before me. I belong to River, being duty-bound to protect, defend and care for kin, relation for eternity. I bring knowledge and advocacy, welcoming all from many lands to learn and protect River.

I am Sandra, mooja Martuwarra marnin, friend of River, settler like my ancestors before me. I relate to River, and colonial history makes me duty-bound to learn with and care for kin. Today, Australian Invasion Day 26th January 2021, colonisation and invasion continue. Wunan Law is the law of the land and not of man. Of the Bookarrakarra, it means peace. Used for governance by Martuwarra nations, all descended from artists – not from warriors. In goodwill, the Martuwarra Fitzroy River Council formed to care for and protect River.

Even in these native title times, recognising all River’s people, places and heritage, Fracking – 20 wells and more – water extraction, land clearing, abuse aplenty planned. How about our songlines, bloodlines, obligations, cultural strength and forever knowledge?

Sacred River, love of River, care of River, protection of River, shared obligations now. It is reciprocal, our kincentric riverine lifeway. River of Life, carer of all over time. Must we go to war, as our only chance of continuing peace?

1 More-than-human refers to human and all beings.

What is the true value of our River world: our peoples, cultures, knowledge, economies? Beloved River Country, let them not destroy our souls, like Juukan Gorge’s disaster. People of the world, we call you. Like our ancestors before us, help us protect River of Life.

Juukan Gorge was a rock shelter holding 46,000 years of human history, 600km from the Martuwarra Catchment. After its detonation in June 2020 for its iron ore content, great outrage, sadness and bad public relations followed, for which the company said sorry. A few executives lost their jobs and the new ones just want to get on with mining (Allam & Wahlquist, 2020).

An Indigenous worldview, in which people see themselves as intrinsic to ecological health and wellbeing, has served the Martuwarra for many thousands of years. River is still whole, but extractive development now threatens kin culture, worldview and wellbeing. The worldview that slowly strengthened through the development of Western science is Newtonian/Cartesian. It is individualistic, mechanistic and reductionist, and is characterized by inert dead matter. The alternative is a world that is alive, sentient and characterized by a flow of things, a continuum. As Kimmerer writes: “[Western] Science pretends to be completely rational, completely neutral, a system of knowledge-making in which the observation is independent of the observer” (2013, p. 19). She refers to the knowledge tradition that sees itself as able to sit outside nature and look in, often missing the lively contribution and interchange of such actors as the grasses.

Over the last fifty years, science has superseded its Newtonian/ Cartesian roots, providing new physics and interdisciplinary ecologies for a worldview of sentience, unity, living waters and living nature (see for instance, Wooltorton, Collard, & Horwitz, 2019b). However, referring to adherents of a Western worldview, Mathews writes: “Unequipped to switch cosmological frameworks, we continue to do our social and normative thinking within the framework of Newtonianism” (1994, p. 30). Now 2021, this Newtonian/Cartesian worldview has strengthened through neoliberal justifications (Springer, 2016) to levels of power and corruption not previously visible to so many (Monbiot, 2016). Salami (2020) refers to this Europatriarchal knowledge as a binary, dualistic way of knowing that seeks power and control through acquisition; a form of knowledge that is self-perpetuating, unable to see the ground on which it stands. Using this logic Juukan Gorge, symbol of very many desecrated sites, is forever gone. 46,000 years of stories, histories and sacred waters sold for the small price of tonnes of iron ore.

From an Indigenous perspective, places and rivers are actively engaged in intuitive communication and messaging, understood through more-than-human1 behaviours such as bird visitations, wind variations and weather inclemency, and this is common knowledge in Australia’s north and well-known in the South West (Wooltorton, White, Palmer,

Click or scan the code to watch the film Liyan, directed by Marlikka Perdrisat

& Collard, 2020). These stories demand careful attention, perhaps whistled by a mudlark, sung by a magpie, danced by an elder, told by a storyteller, carried by a flock of birds, conveyed on the wind or brought in with a storm. There is also a place intuition, felt by perceptive people, rivers and ‘Country’, the ground we stand on. We describe the learning of this below.

Wellbeing and Attending

Various Indigenous languages use different words for an intuitive place-responsive capacity, which is called liyan in Nyikina lands, and wirrin in Noongar lands. Here is a description of liyan within the concept of first law, which links ethics, law and intuition:

First Law embodies the concept that is known regionally as Liyan—the feeling of a deep personal relationship with all living and non-living things [9]… Liyan is the spirit within us that connects us to the universal spirit of life. First Law is about creating positive energy and being true to ourselves, so that our spirits are at peace. (Redvers et al., 2020, pp. 3-4)

As background on liyan, we invite you to view the small film ‘Liyan’ produced by Marlikka Perdrisat (2020), a young Yimarrdowarra marnin (woman of the Martuwarra). ‘Liyan’ shares the learning of elder Micklo Corpus, to explain liyan through an Indigenous worldview. He describes liyan as instinctive and embodied. This is a deep and enduring relationship entwined with past, present and future in a circle of time. For Anne, liyan is her intuition, moral compass. She must pay extremely close attention to her responsibility to maintain harmony and balance with multiple species in reciprocal kinship relationships with Martuwarra, Fitzroy River Country and peoples.

Bawaka Country et al. (2016) describe the process of ‘attending’, or paying extremely close attention to place/time, to see it as emergent relationality, as gradual co-becoming. They use an Indigenous kinship system and its cyclical patterns to dissolve binaries between Indigenous and non-Indigenous, human and more-than-human, and to dismantle the hierarchy where academic understandings are seen to be more legitimate than Indigenous forever knowledge systems. We use this process of attending, to develop habits of connecting and observing synergies.

One might ask, how do these ‘sensibilities’ translate into a Western mindset? This is an interesting question to answer, since they are hidden in plain view (Wooltorton, Collard, & Horwitz, 2019a), relying on conceptual understandings, visualization and creativity. It is to recognize that the memories, visions, strengths, possibilities, hopes and dreams – and desecrations – of ancestors including those of more-than-human beings are in their landscape places. Not necessarily seen, they reveal themselves through animal messages, synergies, archetypes and shadow-traces, intuitions and feelings. These feelings might be joyful, empowering and optimistic, or perhaps might send chills up one’s spine when moving over dark, sad places. This is how place responds

2 Spellings vary. For example, walgu and wagyl refer to the same ancestral creator character.

to people, particularly when there is openness and receptiveness, empathy, creativity and imagination. These skills are part of the process of attending.

To understand the experience of enmeshment with nature, some Indigenous people sense that rivers might feel lonely without people. For instance, to explain why waterfalls no longer exist but recently cascaded generously into the ocean along the Kimberley coast, Bessareb cites her uncle:

‘Dat Country im lonely, ‘is people dey all gone, no one dere to look after ‘im anymore, so dat Country im lonely, im sad, dat why dat water bin dry up, ee missing ees people (2010, p. 45).

Bessarab (2010) comments this is a very different type of explanation than a Western understanding which might propose changed water courses, climate change or drought as explanation for the phenomenon. Engaging in a learning journey to heal her river relationships, Sandra uses a form of nature writing, using a process of attending or paying close attention. The idea of this writing is to develop experiential learning of a communicative river engagement. It is to learn to engage the senses to feel and hear place. Some journal entries are below, following the introduction.

Bilya, Collie River

The four tributaries of the Collie River, Bilya, meet in the upper Leschenault Catchment, upstream of Wellington Dam. Downstream from the dam, Bilya is one of five rivers, two of which – the Brunswick and the Wellesley – flow into the Collie before flowing into the Leschenault Estuary. (Government of West Australia, 2021)

Sandra:

I was born and grew up in the South West of Western Australia, but for the last decade or so I have lived in the northwest, 150km from the Martuwarra Fitzroy River. During summers, I visit family in the South West, and during each return visit, I notice more land clearing and harm to Bilya. This visit I noticed Bilya has only a very low flow. I do not recall having seen kin so dry.

Being-With

In summer evenings I regularly walk along Wagyl Bidi (Ancestral Serpent trail), the River walk trail east of Collie town beginning at the Mungalup Road bridge. I use protocols and skills of attendance first learned from traditional owners including co-writer Len Collard, a couple of decades ago.

I sing out in a loud, proud voice to Ngangungudditj walgu 2, the hairy faced snake. I tell kin in Noongar language that I am Sandra, back in Collie and walking with Bilya again to remember myself to kin, to voice my love for kin and Bilya, and to bring my goodwill, my friendship, and

Click or scan the code to watch the film Bilya

my full attention. I call out that I am sad for kin’s reduced flow. I sit with kin. I tell kin stories, listen for responses, walk her trails and then I bid kin goodbye, intent on returning tomorrow. ***

To understand the degree of respect necessary, we invite you to view the film: ‘Bilya’, and read or listen to the account by traditional owner Joe Northover, who is a Beeliargu Wilman Noongar man. Beeliargu is a person of river and river Country, who speaks for and with Bilya Wilman is the language region he speaks for (around the Collie River). (Northover, 2008).

Beckwith Environmental Planning (2010) also cites Northover, as follows:

The Ngarngungudditj Walgu came from the north of Collie, passed through the Collie area and moved towards Eaton, forming the Collie River and its tributaries (including the Brunswick River). When the serpent reached Eaton, it turned its body creating the Leschenault Estuary and then travelled back up the river to rest at Minninup Pool.

Many Noongar people feel wagyl as bringing a sense of peace, and there are accounts bearing witness to a shimmering rainbow carpet snake who is creator spirit and cares for fresh water (for instance, L. Collard, 2008). Meanwhile other encounters of heard, felt, unseen entities such as balyats, mammara and wurdatjies may bring messages of suffering experienced at that site by ancestors during the colonial conflict eras (for instance, Mia, 2008). Appearances of birds, animals and slight movements of leaves and grasses (independent of wind) also bring messages to perceptive humans (J. B. Collard, 2010; Nannup, 2010).

Sandra:

After calling out to Ngangungudditj walgu and introducing myself in the proper way, I sit quietly paying attention. Sometimes I feel the breeze stop for a moment and there is stillness. Sometimes, if it is already still, I feel a zephyr.

One day, at dusk, when people should be preparing for night, I was sitting quietly with Bilya. Suddenly, I noticed a huge owl sitting beside me in the rushes. We made eye contact, briefly. I instantly remembered Noongar lore: I should not be sitting here at dusk without a firelight or torch. Was this owl Balyat? I bolted immediately, hurrying back along the defined clarity of the Wagyl bidi. Once I settled down, I laughed with Wagyl and Bilya, feeling our mutual aliveness. She still likes to play! Cheeky! I promise to do the right thing. Did I say burdawan, farewell, as I ran off?

3 Noongar language is onomatopoeic, so many of the bird calls are their species names.

Sandra (Next Day):

There is a strong wind today and the summer sky is overcast and comfortably cloudy. The birds and animals are animated, noisy and industrious. Wardang the crow shows leadership qualities reflective of kin Wardangmat kinship moiety leadership. Kin clan regularly dominates the soundscape, but today’s community announcements seem particularly significant.

Since the dawn of time, all South West life – humans and other than humans – has been organized around two moieties or halves, being Wardangmat (belonging to Wardang, crow) and Manitjmat (belonging to Manitj, corella, white cockatoo). This kinship system designates family relationships and specifies individuals to whom one can marry. It assigns all creatures and humans to a moiety and subsection, indicating relationship and obligation.

As I sit writing, in my home not far from Bilya, wardang the crow regularly gains my attention, interrupting my thoughts with a penetrating call. Repeating sounds similar to kin own name3 kin adds the occasional noisy, voluminous ‘w-aaaaaar-dang.’ When nearby, my verbal response to wardang uses kin Noongar name and Noongar language, which often generates kin interest and mutual eye contact, and sometimes movement in steps towards me.

Karack the red-tailed black cockatoo has also been out in big numbers today and as I write about crow, karack clambers noisily for attention. I sense my community want me to stop writing inside our house on the edge of the forest, and join the interactions outside. I recognise the inside/outside binary needs loosening! I feel drawn outside.

As I approach the Wagyl bidi trail for my daily amble, the wind is still boisterous, bossy, noisy and cheeky – causing seasonally loosened bark to peel off the blue gums and crunch underfoot, and leaves, twigs and small branches to drift and tumble near me as I walk. I hear my creaturely community is excited.

On arriving at Bilya’s edge, I call out to Ngangunguttij walgu, throwing my sand to let kin know I have arrived. In Noongar language, I speak my intention to cherish kin and request kin care, but today there is much commotion around Bilya. I become clear that my role is to wander, listen, watch and attend. Today I am merely one of the co-actors in our multispecies cacophony of activity.

Tjidi tjidi the wagtail clan in a pine tree attracts my attention as I walk. I see an impressive meeting of maybe 35 birds scuttling, shaking tails, chattering and gliding/hopping/flying from branch to branch. The combined tjidi tjidi twitches and tones (sounding just like their Noongar name: “tjidi tjidi tjidi tjidi tjidi tjidi tjidi tjidi tjidi tjidi”) composes a surprisingly familiar, reassuring hum. The gathering is taking place

about two or three branches above my head, between Bilya and me. I know I am seen, but there is no particular interest shown in me today. Often tjidi tjidi groups will send out an individual to lead the visitor away, but not today. The meeting feels important. The weather is wintery with impending rain, a welcome change in this long, dry summer of drought and forest fires.

As I walk, I see that parrots in marri trees have knocked hundreds of large nuts down. Nuts, twigs and leaves are scattered scruffily across the trail, and I cannot tell which species did this. I need to take care when stepping as the fallen nuts can easily cause a rolled ankle! My attention is redirected to a great ruckus on the opposite river bank, high in some huge, old marri and jarrah trees. I hear karack the red-tailed black cockatoo, but I cannot actually see even one. As big as individuals are, they are expert at camouflage in the tall trees.

The throng across the river is loud and disorderly as the wind-speed increases and rain threatens. I sit down to observe, when a trio flies out and crosses bilya overhead. I see their red tails. The remaining karack group are still incredibly noisy, but I feel peaceful for having seen them. These characters make as much noise as wardang the crow, and sometimes there seems to be jostling for the top job. I worry greatly about manitj the white cockatoo though, a threatened species of whom I have not seen even one this summer. As leaders of the manitjmat moiety, manitj traditionally have a top job alongside wardang of the Noongar wardangmat moiety. What is happening to the balance of bilya and our forest, I wonder, without the company of these clan folk who collaboratively lead our multispecies governance? Bilya might feel lonely without them, like I do.

Although the wind gusts continue, I become aware that the noise level drops unexpectedly. My attention is beckoned higher than the tall tree tops, where I observe a flock of small birds in formation escorting a hawk. I presume hungry hawk needed eviction from their social activities. These small birds often display such cooperation. Once the entourage passes the volume of intermingled bird communication returns. This reminds me to pay closer attention. All the birds notice this several seconds before I do. I only look up because the noise level has dropped.

Wind as Metaphor: Feeling the Unseen

Towards evening, the wind speed increases with its own voluminous attention seeking dominating the ecoscape. While creating impact today, wind could not drown out the birds. The louder the wind, the louder kin collaborators. It is threatening rain, so I bid Ngangungudditj walgu burdawan, farewell. I feel at home here, a sense of belonging-with this place. ***

How did I, for most of my life, overlook the agency and intention of wind, who enlivens the creatures and animates the place-spirit? Every school teacher and parent (of whom I am both) knows that wind whips

up children’s energy – making them run, laugh, frolic, and sometimes, incapable of staying on task! We have felt this responsiveness since childhood. Like many elements that sit in plain view, here is a dimension I have previously overlooked. As described by Bawaka Country et al. (2019, p. 687), “Winds and the land, things not seen as sentient within a dominant Western frame, have response-abilities, emerging together as Country.”

There are two key aspects of responsibility, according to Bawaka Country et al. (2019) – response and ability. These response-abilities, which form part of a relational way of being, require deep attentiveness, recognising that one is engaged within a sentient, living world of all beings; and a requirement to respond. It does not include responsibility to, or responsibility for anything. Rather, there is a requirement to respond to meanings communicated, understood and learned in more-than-human, ethical, contextual ways.

For response-abilities are to our ancestors, are response-abilities as our ancestors, entangling time and space – they are not separate from us. Importantly, this is more-than-human. The wind sings and needs to be sung. Our response-abilities are not just to human ancestors, but as more-than-human worlds that might not even be there anymore. Trees cleared for a mine remain our response-ability to sing and hold and keep alive.

(Bawaka Country et al., 2019, p. 687)

Sandra (Two Days Later)

It has rained and felt chilly for two days, and the multispecies forest orchestra continued each day, only quietening while the night creatures including tawny frogmouth and owl in the trees, and bandicoot on the ground, come out to take up their roles while the day creatures sleep. It is late afternoon as I set out on my daily amble. Today I feel called by the Minninup bidi (trail) and respond by heading off along the river in the opposite direction to normal. This bidi takes me away from Bilya, through forest shrouded with late summer flowers. I see yongka the grey kangaroo, standing observantly. Overhead djakal-ngakal the pink and grey galah squawks, and nearby is kin friend. Kin stands askew a tall tree trunk looking like kin intends to enter an old tree hollow. This is typical of where djakal-ngakal nests and I wonder how the unseasonal wintery weather is influencing summer behaviour.

Arriving at Bilya, I continue past Minninup Pool and sit at a sandy beach. It is calm with a light breeze. I greet Nangkungudditj walgu in the normal way, today offering a more detailed story, advising my plan to leave for the northwest in a couple of days. I just sit today, watching the other bank, listening to the bird communications. I hear Wardang the crow is nearby. I see a flight of three Ngorlak: white tailed black cockatoo, crossing the river and screaming out as usual. The water is very clear, its level unchanged following the recent rain.

Today I feel drawn in and in response, I paddle my feet. Then, two or three metres downstream I notice something making bubbles and concentric ripples. Thinking it might be yabby the small freshwater lobster, or maybe a school of tiny fish, I investigate. Nothing – the sand under the surface appears undisturbed and there is no evidence of what caused movement. I sit down again. A couple of minutes later, I see another small circle of activity, this time a little deeper. Upon investigation, again I see no creature – bubbles from the underwater river sand, probably. I sit back down on the water’s edge in the sand and observe the avian activity. Then, I see something. Towards or rather across the middle of the river, I see a diaphanous, radiant rainbow glow in the small wavelets in the middle of bilya. Shining and glowing, with mixed translucent and mingling greens, mauves, blues and pinks, like an aquatic rainbow. I take photos, which upon inspection, are lifeless and dull. I could see this image for several minutes, and it has imprinted with beauty in my mind’s eye. I carry this image with me now, while I grapple with its message. I feel a commitment to protect this vulnerable river. I vow to speak kin situation in English.

***

As I write, ngorlak the white tailed black cockatoo in the tree in the back yard intrudes into my thoughts, reminding me of the deep respect many Noongar people apply to beings and places. For instance Noongar people have a profound respect, perhaps fear, of weerlow the curlew, understood to be a very powerful bird who brings news someone is going to die. (Buchanan et al., 2016; Collard, Harben, & van den Berg, 2004) Further, it is common knowledge in the South West that big male kangaroos have a right to conduct their own business undisturbed. Similarly, one must keep clear of dugatj the snake.

My practice has brought a meaningful recognition, a practical knowledge – and a feeling – of love, of immersion in a more-than-human place; a living nature that is all around me, with which I, as a very small part, can communicate. I can feel, hear and see my place anew.

Decolonisation Reveals the Radiance

Earlier, we asked how people could learn to deepen their relationships with rivers, to feel a compelling sense of enmeshment within their places. English language, with its discourses of separation, makes this topic tricky. We found that when writing, even prepositions like ‘the’ separate knower and known. When storying Bilya, for instance, Sandra felt like wagyl bidi trail was inviting her to walk alongside, and in fact helping her decide which way to go. However, the correct use of English required the preposition ‘the’, separating bidi and assigning passivity as ‘the wagyl bidi.’ (For this reason, we omitted ‘the’ where possible in text.)

Mountains, rocks, fire, water and places are animate in Potawatomi language, with the use of kin terms to address the living world (Kimmerer, 2013). This is also the case in Noongar language, which speaks an active, communicative, living knowledge system underpinned by the relational trilogy of Boodjar (Country), moort (family or relatives) and katitjiny (knowledge, or learning). In this system, moort, or a person’s relations, can be animals or plants in a particular place. For example, yongka might also be uncle and jarrah (a tree species) can be brother. This makes sense through a kinship structure inclusive of human and more-than-human relationships, a kincentric ecology. Kinship is foreground rather than background, in the sense that these living relationships are experiential. For instance, while walking Bilya regularly, Sandra took a day trip to Perth city. Walking along St George’s Terrace, she heard wardang the crow call out. Her felt reaction was to respond; but noticing other walkers, she looked down and quietly walked on. Instantly she felt ashamed for ignoring wardang. She immediately understood another pain for traditional Noongar like Fanny Balbuck and her ancestors (Ryan, Brady, & Kueh, 2020) who lived here – and walked on these walking trails now city streets – in 1829 during colonisation. Ignoring place-relations hurts.

Using two Indigenous languages, Nyikina and Noongar, people and place connect through a familiar relationship, which in Noongar language is gurduboodjar – which translates as heartlands or love of place (Moore, 1850, p. 45). This is ‘home’, in the sense that ‘home is where the heart is.’ In Noongar language, home is a relational place, inhabited by more-than-human kinfolk, where moort always lived. In this way gurduboodjar is Noongar moort (family), involving response-ability to rivers and kin species. Sandra found that without her thinking mind intruding, her body and senses respond to landscape-embedded invitation. Once removing linguistic and conceptual binaries and prepositional restriction from our minds, we are free to engage and respond with our living world.

We can understand our rivers not only as arteries and veins of landscapes, but also as nurturers of our bodies and souls. Like time itself, we-together respond to the seasoned, animate earth, emotion and grief, and political impression by the multispecies orchestra of place-governance. As actors and communicative influencers in our lives and communities, we with rivers together, act not as drains, but as living animate beings.

To this point English language with its implicit binaries has colonised our thinking, each other and consequently, ‘othered’ the radiance and in-our-face agency of our places, winds and their powers. Colonisation is in our shared English language, and colonial liberation is in our own hearts, mind and experience. Decolonisation reveals our collective potential.

Conclusion

We are aware that as long as we speak the language of the coloniser, live in a colonised Country, or have been schooled within the system of the coloniser, we are both colonised and coloniser in our thinking, our habits and necessary practices. The practical recognition that humanity has response-abilities with our places through endless multispecies relationships brings us richness, diversity and unlimited strength to make change. It is engaging, transformative and politically empowering. In our experience, practitioners become active participants-with rather than passive bystanders or admirers-of our places. This is actionism that is solutionary (not revolutionary); using the touchstone of aspirational language.

The question we set out to answer in this paper was, “how could people learn to deepen their relationships with rivers; to feel a compelling sense of enmeshment within their places?” This is a post human-centred question for the Anthropocene. It is to pay deep attention to common worlds embedded in plain sight, within hearing range in rivers and watery places. It is to sense our engagement within the creative milieux, to ‘feel into’ one’s response-abilities, to learn-with riverine ecosystems, to listen, hear, participate and actively respond. This is at once a political position, and a rallying call to respond, to voice, to speak out. We are intrinsically related members, held within a collaborative animate heart. Our relationships may be ‘in our faces’ such as the wind, or the air, water or bushes nearby. Indigenous languages speak these relationships into practice.

The position includes singing out to entities and creatures, and this could involve learning the local Indigenous or place-language. This is no time to be shy and retiring. It is to communicate across binaries in order to experience the dissolution of barriers only in the mind. Writing and storytelling can support verbalising of experience, helping to bring to mind place-based wisdom. The enterprise is creative and liberating, and rivers are dying for people to speak out for and with our greater selves. Rivers may feel lonely and sad, and yearn for missing species –including people. To compound this separation, they are under colonial attack, intent on regarding our greater selves as mere economic resource for financial growth.

We commented at the start that these two ways of understanding ourselves as human beings in our world, our worldviews, have different implications for engagement with and care of our landscapes, rivers and water places. Briefly, the colonial, modernist worldview separates people from place, mind from heart and place from culture, and as such cannot hear or feel the multispecies, living nature, or the vitality of our places. This is responsible for the human domination of the Anthropocene. An outside observer could easily understand this to be madness, a deliberate place-deafness and emotional silencing. Place-deafness and emotional silencing are essential qualities for detonating 46,000 years of human history, draining or fracking a cultural river of life, or intentionally causing further climate change through new gas mines for economic development.

The Indigenous standpoint taken in this paper is place-relational, exemplified by love-with and reciprocal care of Martuwarra – and Bilya – for millennia by Traditional Owners, and now those who stand-with kin. Collaboratively writing this story into one voice has offered Sandra the privilege of experiencing, and ‘writing herself home.’ The writers will give further attention to Indigenous leadership of post human-centred research methods in the near future. An invitation to an inseparable communicative bond of caretakers-with Rivers and local places since the dawn of time, is open to all of humanity, as it has always been. We suggest beginning by singing out greetings, and waiting for responses. Keep returning – River has memory and remembers, and one day the response will be recognizable.

As worldview, this collaborative standpoint sees place as alive and responsive, and humans having response-abilities leading to care and speaking-for, or voicing. The shared position involves learning through standing-with Indigenous mentors, and learning to hear, feel and respond to Country. It is to decolonize Indigenous communities, and decenter humans for Indigenous-leadership of ecosystem restoration. Traditional owners share this aspirational, visionary standpoint with the world – and governments – through websites, invitation, films, videos, public presentations and more. As such, it is a rallying call to action, to respond locally and globally. It is about learning to care – for and with one’s place, one’s wellbeing and the wellbeing of all rivers, and therefore, the planet. For all of our sakes. As Elders say, this is a regenerative movement from ‘me’ to ‘we’; a collaboration that includes the community of life and people of many nations.

A common human strength is that we all have ancestors who are Indigenous to somewhere and we all have capacity to relate. There is another great social transition in place at this historical moment, as our collective community comes to understand once again that we are intrinsic to our watery places. We are all place-kindred, river peoples, but some of us have long ignored our ancestral knowledge. It is in our psyches and our hearts though, and our landscapes and rivers are calling loudly for us to attend. Listen: hear the calls of rivers of the world, growing louder and stronger. Opening to this call can bring joy, love and reciprocity in our relational inter-being, great healing and regeneration. It demands deep respect and full attention.

Acknowledgement

Martuwarra, thank you. Bilya, thank you. Peter Reason, thank you. To the reviewers, thank you. Our paper is stronger for your support.

© 2021 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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In accordance with cultural protocols this essay is temporarily redacted due to the passing of this artist. Our condolences.

Right: Portrait view of water stained Devonian limestone cliffs reflected in the still dark water of Geikie Gorge where the Fitzroy River carves its way through the Napier Range in the Kimberley, WA.

Photo: © Philip Schubert

Memory of Stone Lakshmi Kanchi

i lift the sky and speak into stone that glistens with the wetness of the river.

small teeth of quartz, open.

grief sits opaque at the mouth, deepens into soft strain of sediment.

lick of red jasper listens, holds language through endless cycles of death and birth.

grief quickens with every turn. becomes the hardened core where secrets remain concealed.

i watch as stone sinks. as my message slinks into cupping hands of river mud. pools into estuarine blood of deep waters. swims inside the crystalline salt of sea.

and, sea curls in eddies at its depths. foams in waves that rise and wash up on your shore.

through time and space, through the despair of our parting, through countless rotations of sun and moon, when you uncover the tongue of sea.

i am the rough shape of memory in your hands. stone that is rinsed and washed and tumbled, making sand, like hope, that slips between fingers.

1 Warnman people are the traditional land owners for Kintyre. Warnman is one of the five language groups that comprise the larger ‘Martu’ group, with the remaining groups being Manyjilyjarra, Kartujarra, Putijarra and Martu Wangka.

2 In 2016 residents of Parnngurr community and other Martu communities embarked on a 110km walk in protest to the Kintyre uranium mine. In 2014 nine artists from Parnngurr community collaborated to paint Kalyu, also created with the intent to voice their opposition to the mine.

Kintyre: Young and Old, Working Together

Ruth Leigh, Martumili Artists

Martumili Artists is located in Newman, a town in the Pilbara region of northwest Western Australia. The art centre was established by Martu people living in the communities of Parnpajinya (Newman), Jigalong, Parnngurr, Punmu, Kunawarritji, Irrungadji and Warralong, and it draws on strong influences of Aboriginal art history. The artists and their families are the traditional custodians of vast stretches of the Great Sandy, Little Sandy and Gibson Deserts as well as the Karlamilyi (Rudall River) area.

Kintyre is a three-by-five metre collaborative canvas that was painted by 23 Martumili artists, ‘young and old, working together’ (Judith Samson). Kintyre is a claypan located just beyond the northern boundary of the Karlamilyi (Rudall River) region. During the pujiman (traditional, desert dwelling) era, the site was a popular camping ground. Today Kintyre is best known for its substantial uranium deposits, and the area has been developed for mining. Ongoing protests from Kintyre’s traditional land owners1 and unfavourable market conditions have resulted in the Cameco project being put on hold for the time being, but the prospect of future uranium mining looms. While the Kintyre painting inherently reveals the artists’ ancestral connection to the land and its surrounds, its creation expressively represents the most recent incarnation of this enduring struggle.2

In a harmonious melding of artistic styles, the vibrant work depicts the region’s geographical formations from an aerial perspective; “the hills and the waterholes… the claypans and the road [that] goes from the North to the South” (Desmond Taylor). The painting also records the lands’ intrinsic Jukurrpa narratives, causal to this same topography. As Curtis Taylor states, “Karlamilyi river is a very important place, not just for the Warnman people, but whole of the Western Desert people. This is where a lot of Jukurrpa (Dreaming) runs through… the stories and the songs that the ancestral heroes put down, mainly the Wati Kujarra (Two

3 Parliament of Australia, Parliamentary Business, Uranium Mining and Milling, Environmental Impacts  www.aph.gov.au

Goanna Men)... From the start there shouldn’t have been a mining project there, because there’s a lot of Jukurrpa there in that site, and we don’t want that to be disturbed in any way.”

Similar to the way that Kintyre was painted with singular intent, the works’ execution followed a deliberate and considered approach. The painting was begun on Country in 2020 at Karlamilyi, and led by Warnman elders. “We went out to Kintyre, we went out there and looked around for ideas about the rocks, claypans. It’s a rocky Country you know, tuwa (sandhill) Country. Had a look how the Country is and then went back and started painting on it. So we had the two elders sit down and we started drawing on a piece of paper. Then the elders told us this where this goes, and that goes there.” (Corban Clause Williams)

The artists’ and community residents’ opposition to uranium mining at Kintyre is multilayered. Environmental concerns relate to the depletion of ground water tables through the consumption of massive quantities of water3 in a sensitive arid region, in addition to the potential for radioactive tailings waste to contaminate local water bodies. At its fundamental core, however, the painting is a bold assertion of Warnman, and more generally Martu land rights, to “make sure that we have a say in our own Warrarn (Country), in our own homeland, our state. This Country is right in the heart of Martu determination area, and it is exempt from our native title rights… We want for non-Martu people to see it and learn about our fight, our story, about this Country.” (Curtis Taylor)

Muuki Taylor

Martu

Yuu ngaana wangkani ngapinkga Kintyrengka parra laju yarra ngaa wana julyju pujiman time, no walypala parni martu wayiju. Kukakulaju wartilpa yarra yapungka ngaangka kuwarriya minemanu.

Minepa Kintyre mirta kunjunyu palya poison walypala payintamanu uranium junuya. Minepa ngaangka palukamatalaju ngurlurrininpa mine jii Janu

Uranium miiti mikijimaljaku kalyungka ngukulkulaju ngantatiku jawaljikaluya. junkuwanya marrkuninpalaju jananya mirtaya walykulkuwa kapi lampajuku kingkilypalampajuku walykutijaku.

kujaljakula ngalku jakula wangalpa kujupartini yankini. kakarra yankuni kayili yankuni yulpari yankuni yapurra ngurlurrinpalaju. jii janu walyku janu yilta laju ngurlurrinpa

Ngaanya walyku walypalalu wajarni walyku panakuraya. nintilaju walyku yankupayilaju pujimanpa Jinanagu nikirrpala ngaangka minepa. wiya paki julyju yirrijunkulaja Jangalyi marlungka kukalalaju. parralaju yarra jinangu walypalani yani minenamalkuraya kankayuku. yanuniya mankuya ngurra mineamal ngapilku wululyu marrkuninpalaju. jananya ngamulaju Parnngurr kamu Punmu mineamalkuwaya kutu yirna kujarrangka. wajarnila janampa wiya jurra walyku mirtupayi

Palungulyuna wajarnu. ngurlurrinpalaju walyku walykuljaku kapi wangalju katijaku miti. kingkilypa walykutijaku yuu palunguyu.

English

Yeah, I am here talking in Kintyre. We used to walk around here a long time ago in the pujiman (nomadic, desert-dwelling) time, no walypala (whitefella, European), only black man. We used to hunt for wild game in these hills, but now they’ve made into a mine, this mine is Kintyre. This mine here is not like normal mines, it’s no good, it’s poison.

Walypala found it [uranium] and they put a mine here, that’s why we’re getting frightened of the mine, it [uranium] might get mixed up with our water and then we’ll drink the poison and get sick. They wanna dig it up, but just leave it. We are stopping them though, us mob, we don’t want them to ruin our water.

If it goes into the water up west, it might get mixed up with our wild game and we might cook it and eat it and it’ll get mixed up. And you know the west wind changes, and it goes south, and it goes east, and it goes north, and it goes back to the west. We are getting frightened, from the poison, we are really getting frightened. This one here, it’s poison, white people are saying it’s poison. They want the land. We know it’s no good.

When we used to go pujiman walking around here, no mine, long time ago. We’d set the dogs onto kangaroos, and we’d cook it. We used to walk around here, white people came after us, to mine. Like a crow they came in.

They’re gonna take the home away and they’re gonna put the mine there forever, and we are stopping them. We are close by in Parnngurr and Punmu. They want to mine in between to the two men, but we are saying no, leave it, it’s not good, it kills you. Yes, I’ve already said that. We are really frightened, it’s poison. It might poison our water, and the wind might take it, and it might make our wild game no good. Yes, that’s it.

Click or scan the code to learn more about Martumili Artists

Artists: Wokka Taylor, Muuki Taylor, Ngalangka Nola Taylor, Curtis Taylor, Ngamaru Bidu, Kumpaya Girgirba, Desmond Taylor, Corban Clause Williams, Judith Anya Samson, Ignatius Taylor, Tamisha Williams, Derrick Butt, Jenny Butt, Chloe Jadai, Kiarah Jadai, Shirley Jadai, Yvonne Mandijalu, Marilyn Bullen, Mayika Chapman, Nikeal (Noni) Taylor, Robina Clause, Christine Thomas, Maisie Ward © the artists, courtesy Martumili Artists, Newman / Copyright Agency, 2024

Waturarra (Kintyre), 2020–2021

Acrylic on canvas

300 x 500 cm

Martumili

In 2016 Anohni joined Martu people on an eight-day peaceful protest walk of nearly two hundred kilometres from the Parnngurr community to the Kintyre mine site. The photo shows a work in progress on the painting Kalyu, 2014. The collaborative painting represents a protest against uranium mining exploration in an area of Karlamilyi National Park known as the Rudall River depicted by the artists: Ngamaru Bidu, Jakayu Biljabu, Bowja Patricia Butt, Kumpaya Girgirba, Noelene Girgirba, Kanu Nancy Taylor, Ngalangka Nola Taylor, Muuki Taylor, Wokka Taylor. The painting was acquired by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney.

Anohni performs during an event with Aboriginal artists at Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art on June 22, 2015. The Aboriginal group is protesting a proposed uranium mine on their land in Australia’s remote far northwest on the edge of the Great Sandy Desert. Anohni said he supported the protest and that environmental issues were a global problem.

Photo: © Saeed Khan/AFP via Getty Images

Martumili Artists

Actions For and Of the Earth Sharmila Wood

(SW) in conversation with Katie West (KW)

Katie West is an artist and Yindjibarndi woman based in Noongar Ballardong boodja. Her practice is defined by experiments in a ‘custodial ethic’, as termed by Murri academic Mary Graham, grounded in the understanding that the health of human society and Country mirror one another. Katie’s installations, textile pieces, and happenings invite attention to the ways we weave our histories, places, and more-than-human kinships. Sharmila Wood (SW) interviewed Katie West (KW) in Northbridge, Western Australia about her work Clearing (2019), being presented in the exhibition Actions for the Earth: Art, Care and Ecology currently touring the USA with Independent Curator’s International.

SW: Could you tell me about the piece, Clearing which is included in the exhibition, Actions for the Earth: Art, Care and Ecology?

KW: Clearing is a work I made for the Tarrawarra Museum of Art. At the time, I was thinking a lot about how I cultivate my own sense of connection to Country as someone who’s been disconnected through the Stolen Generations history.

I was living in Melbourne, so, I was in someone else’s Country. This isn’t unusual because I’ve always lived in someone else’s Country. I discovered the practice of natural dyeing. I found that was a way to infuse textile materials with plants and Country. The other thing that was simmering in my mind was the practice of meditation and how as an individual practice that could be a way to decolonize the self.

I was thinking about experiences of racism, and how to create a sense of bodily calm. When you experience racism it’s a full-on adrenalin rush and finding meditation is really helpful, but also, that quieting down is a way to sift through what beliefs are actually healthy for myself, versus other beliefs that might be from bigger constructs around race that I might have internalized.

So meditation can be a tool to grapple with those things. There is a sound work that I made with the help of my partner, who is a composer. There are field recordings and some sounds included that accompany the guided meditation. There are texts by Kerry Arabena, Bruce Pascoe, Aunty Joy Murphy Wandin, and Uncle David Wandin in partnership with Yarra Ranges Council, Dixon’s Creek Primary School, Ralph Hume, Victor Steffensen and Brett Ellis. In Kerry Arabena’s book she talks about approaching knowledge indigenously, which was such a cognitive shift from being at university where I was trying to use as many Indigenous sources as possible, but finding it really difficult to source those books.

In my audio recording, I was thinking about yoga practice where you cycle through the body focusing on different points in the body. I found it to be really powerful. I don’t think I’d had that kind of full body awareness before.

I was taking that idea, but then thinking of an expanded human sense of what it is to be human that is based on our bodies, but extending out to soil and the body parts of all the animals as well, so expanding that sense of self. It was the first time I was using my voice in a work. At the time I was thinking a lot about having multiple ways into the work so it’s not just a visual experience, but there is a sense of being immersed in a space and also thinking about how you make your work more accessible. This is why sound has become important.

SW: In terms of how the audience would interact with Clearing, do you have a particular way you’d like an audience to participate?

KW: I make things with a general idea and I always really enjoy the surprises that emerge from this. You think about creating a comfortable meditation space, but whether it is actually comfortable or not is not known until you are there. In the gallery where Clearing was first shown is a beautiful window that looks out across a valley, and people were setting themselves up in front of the window to meditate. Others were getting comfortable to read the texts, others were rearranging the space so they could sit and have a conversation. Kids had a chance to really make themselves comfortable and play. They had fun stacking cushions. I enjoy seeing all those ways that people make themselves comfortable in the work.

SW: How much comes back to the general concept of rest?

KW: I think we’ve been conditioned to always be on the go and doing something and it’s a kind of madness actually. It feels like our existence isn’t justified unless we’re doing something, whereas what if we’re allowed to simply exist? Remembering that is really important. Rest Is Resistance: A Manifesto by Tricia Hersey, highlights the idea of taking time to rest and to rub up against a hyperproductive industrial production line society.

SW: Could you talk to me about your creative process and materials of interest to you?

KW: I spend a lot more time thinking than making. More recently I’ve been using found materials so I spend time collecting from discarded stashes of fabric from op shops. So much of it is synthetic and I really enjoy the colour and texture of those kinds of fabrics and I enjoy the process of chance.

The work is totally dependent on what I happen to find. It sits in this space, which I grew up in. Being on a farm and not having much money and seeing my parents; grandparents; recycle everything and use those synthetic materials. It’s a material that has a considered life, it has a deep origin as well. I’m enjoying tapping into that kind of story or bringing it to the surface. So in a way, they could be handled as very old materials.

SW: Do you feel like some of your past practices are now shifting?

KW: I see it more as a continuum. When I made Clearing I was still processing a lot in terms of my own, displacement. Now I feel like I’ve shifted to a point that is more true to where I grew up. So, for instance, my adoptive nan thought it was really important that I learned to sew. I have known how to use a sewing machine all my life and it’s always been important. I’m honouring that learning because it does feel really embodied and natural to me.

SW: In the past , we’ve spoken about health and well-being as a central thread throughout your practice. Why is this important for you to explore?

KW: I suppose within my family, health has been an issue for various members of my family, and I suppose myself as well. In my early twenties, I worked at an Indigenous counselling service for a while on the ‘link up’ program for members of the Stolen Generations to help people connect with their families and Country again and also studied at university in Indigenous health. This had a big influence on me.

I believe health is the most important thing and we are distracted from tending to it. I have found being an artist I’m able to create my own space to do the tending that’s not institutionalised. In this gap, you can be on your own terms. There is freedom that you can’t find elsewhere in artistic practice.

Because of my background in sociology, I am interested in a very academic space as well. I find it really interesting to put concepts around what we’re actually doing as artists and curators and how it operates in the world. I decided to do sociology straight after my undergraduate degree in visual art, partly because, what am I going to do with my visual art degree? Toward the end of the first degree, I was dealing with social issues and just didn’t have the language to talk about them. So, sociology was super helpful. It’s where I came across the term transgenerational trauma, and that helped me understand my mum’s experience, and how her experience impacts generations. Previously, I had an individualised way of looking at her situation— that she was an alcoholic as a personal, moral failing rather than an expanded view across a population who’s had a particular experience. That was, super helpful.

Also, at the end of finishing up visual art, I felt art was really self-indulgent because it seemed like art as an artwork should have a deep social purpose. I think it does when you do get to it but it took me time to feel appreciation for artists and how they put themselves out there. I was really craving a way to change things for myself and others at the time.

SW: Do you feel like you still have that kind of change driven purpose to your work?

KW: Yeah, but it feels way gentler on myself and others. It’s not gentle in a passive way. If you want calmness and peacefulness, then you have to put it out there in the world and it’s a powerful and difficult thing to do.

Katie West, I love you my baby, you are my first born, 2020–22, installation view, Primavera 2022: Young Australian Artists, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney, 2022, found driftwood and metal, 2-channel video projection.

Courtesy the artist and Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney

Sharmila Wood in conversation with Katie West

Katie West at Cossack, 2020

Photo: © Peacock Visuals

Courtesy the artist

Photo: Anna Kučera

Katie West, Clearing, 2019

Suspended fabric: silk dyed with eucalyptus and wattles collected from area around Maroondah Dam; Cushions: silk dyed with ecalyptus leaves and bark; muslin dyed with puff ball fungus; calico dyed with eucalyptus leaves and bark and puff ball fungus; all filled with wool and cotton wadding;

Texts by Kerry Arabena, Bruce Pascoe, Aunty Joy Murphy Wandin, and Uncle David Wandin in partnership with Yarra Ranges Council, Dixon’s Creek Primary School, Ralph Hume, Victor Steffensen and Brett Ellis; Sound work: composed by Simon Charles with spoken score by Katie West, duration 00:13:00.

Photo © Andrew Curtis

Courtesy the artist

Katie West, Emanations, The National 4: Australian Art Now, 2023

Installation view, Carriageworks, 2022

Photo: Courtesy the artist

Katie West in her Studio, 2022

Photo: Courtesy the artist

Katie West, We hold you close, installation view, Perth Institute of Contemporary Art, 2022

Photo: Courtesy the artist

Silica Kathryn Gledhill-Tucker

Inside a room buried beneath Kwinana is our first quantum computer, delivered in a shipping container in the mid-century. Over several weeks, a team of Noongar engineers and storytellers assembled it by hand. Cables from the undersea network feed the machine like a life support system, the thick arteries of power and data keeping the computer alive, and its aerated veins of ancestor blood lying like river branches.

The length of coastline down the west is home to mountains of sand that squeak from the high content of silica. Since the sky network of satellites crashed into the ocean, we have reverted to relying on an underwater network of submarine cables filled with such silica to connect us to the rest of the world. Tendrils of resonating fibers talk to one another like mycelium. When the satellites fell, they created ripples on the surface that propagated outwards across shallow water and rising tides, from bilya to boodja. We now have stories encoded in our oral history for the showers of satellites that fell from Lower Earth Orbit.

To allow the machine to function optimally, we had to invent a new coolant that kept temperatures down to around absolute zero—cold time. Cold time slowed the output of the machine and widened the aperture of memory. We watched time stretch like an infinitely long shoreline until it was a pliable sheet that could be folded onto itself. Computed memories fell from the read-out like ice shards: memories of the nyitting, memories of bilya when we walked from shore to island, memories of fallen stars whose corroded parts were absorbed into boodja.

Analysing the fragments of cold time, we learned to speak the computer’s language. It spoke a creole of machine language and Noongar, with an affectation that echoed the coastal sand. The memory of its Walyalup ancestor could be read in its output. Engaging in deep listening with the quantum machine, we could hear the moment when the limestone jaw of the inlet was cracked open to create a new harbour, and Walyalup’s throat was filled with salt. It sounded like a deep, earthy sigh.

Bilya speaks through the quantum machine. We have a new common language. First appeared in Aqueous Archives by

Where You Fix Your Gaze, You Will Go:

THE WORK OF MEI SWAN

Kelly Fliedner

LIM

When we focus our eyes and ears here, right here, we begin to notice what was once a resting and living ground, a place of swamp and damp, a place with birds and rocks, and our collective breath. This is the strength of Mei Swan Lim’s work, which asks us to focus on the here. Her work asks the audience to focus on their bodies as they enter and merge with the landscape around them, a corporeal and spiritual undertaking that balances life, all its complexity and beauty, with the making of art itself. Based in Wanneroo, a northern suburb of Boorloo/ Perth, Western Australia, a city built on hundreds of kilometres of wetlands, Mei is attentive to that resonance of what once was and now is. In a practice that is both collaborative and solo, Mei responds to the textures of everyday ecologies through field recording, sound collaging, singing, video art, and weaving. All of these actions bring us back to our bodies as they interact with the landscape, both built and natural, and somewhere in between, that merging of spiritual and physical realms, too often divided in thought and practice.

Mei, who is part of the Baha’i community, uses her faith as well as her strong network of family and friends to centre herself in the environment, viewing collaboration as essential to having a sustainable art practice. Spiritual and art practices are community work that enables and empowers her to reach a more intentional state of mind and being. Mei likens the Baha’i practice of fasting, which she observes during the month of March, to her artistic practice — often undertaken with others, but also individually both are a way of relinquishing desire and focusing the mind, of attending to our own attentiveness, all in an annuity of celebration and ritual. It helps amplify art as a way towards faith itself. The heightened awareness of consumption that the fast produces also enacts the body as a site for environmental activism and ethical action that mediates the outside and inside, that allows us to position our very selves alongside other people, animals, plants and things. It begins to pulse and breathe in different ways.

With this as a foundational tenet of Mei’s practice, she continues to collaborate beyond her familial community to call forth new ideas and materials that are local to here. In 2019 she first collaborated with local traditional custodian, writer and academic Cass Lynch on Float, a sound work that layered a narrated story by Cass with field recordings by Mei. The work responded to the stones of the city, those that have recently been bought here, and those that have been here since the beginning, and imagined Perth as a floating city in the sky and asked the question, how does the settler city connect to Country below? This collaboration continued and developed in 2021 with Dampland and most recently Dampland 2.0, both audio and mixed media installations rooted in Noongar oral storytelling, that provide a sonic journey into Perth’s subterranean histories and geological time. For Mei, these works and the collaboration are a response to the isolation and uprooting that she sees as endemic here. Grounding projects, they allow her to become more attuned and attentive to the long duree of Whadjuk Country, before and beyond the temporary structures that count as occupation in the here and now, a process grounded in relationships beyond identity. As Mei herself puts it,

“We learn from each other, she [Cass] teaches me to be more purposeful, and I bring a more free-flowing approach. Back-and-forth discussions, friendship, and mutual understanding have evolved our collaboration over time. The friendship has made the work easier, allowing direct communication without fear of hurting feelings, understanding each other’s limitations, and caring about each other’s mental health.”

It is a practice of art that is successful because it is aware of the spirit as well as the body and the Country it is made in and from.

In 2008, Mei created two audio works or environmental / topographic arrangements, Sky Life and Ground Life. Both pieced together from field recordings of Boorloo/Perth’s various natural and unnatural bush and wetlands, they were collected as part of the University of Western Australia’s Cruthers Collection and are intended to be encountered within exhibition spaces, presenting a looped aural portrait of the local environment, as a collision of constructed and unconstructed space and of native and introduced species. The recordings including the honeyeater, wren, wattlebird, crow, magpie, bee and cricket with the occasional nearby car or overhead plane. This interest in colliding or converging spaces and organisms have been maintained with similar projects such as Swampscapes or Swamp Club. These also connect to the earth beneath the buildings, a way to move below the screens under our noses, and to connect through bare feet to wetlands below. These have been collaborations with poets, musicians, photographers, architects and cartographers, always finding a way to connect attention to community and to create rituals for place. They are then received, accepted, worked on again, with people living amid a traumatised Anthropocene and engage with communities to emphasise the therapeutic qualities of ambient audio experiences.

Mei’s art is about looking with intention, about carefully choosing where to direct our attention, about how we look at the world and the community in front of us. It is about the collaborations we forge across boundaries and barriers, and how art can move us into our bodies, rituals, places. It responds to more than the global environmental crisis, emphasising the need to cultivate visions toward unity. Each moment in time, each art work, each person is a drop in the ocean that collectively forms a whole, a unity that we seek and desire and make together. Our dialogue begins, continues and ends with a reflection on the balance between material and spiritual considerations, acknowledging the need to think about both aspects in the context of living a good life, here on Whadjuk Country itself.

Mei Swan Lim, Performance, Proximity Festival, 2016

Photo: © Peter Cheng

Courtesy of the artist

Mei Swan Lim

Photo: Courtesy the artist

Red pitchers of the Albany pitcher plant (Cephalotus follicularis), 2018

Photo: © Anja Hennern

Future Yule Brook Regional Park, 2022-2023

© Daniel Jan Martin, Alice Ford and The Beeliar Group

This strategy for the future Yule Brook Regional Park has encompassed landscape planning, mapping and advocacy for one of the most biodiverse landscapes in the world, extending through Perth’s eastern suburbs. As development encroaches, a strategy for design together with conservation is vital. Over 10 kilometres, Mandoorn – Yule Brook makes up a megadiverse 702-hectare corridor – an area of ongoing advocacy with The Beeliar Group for a future Yule Brook Regional Park.

Ways of Seeing Between Ecology and Design

Daniel Jan Martin (DJM) and Sharmila Wood (SW)

SW: We’ve been speaking about how opening up new ways of practicing a discipline can be both difficult and exciting. I’m interested to know how you describe what you do.

DJM: I’ve been working for the past decade between the fields of ecology and design. I have a background in landscape architecture, often associated with urban nature: parks, gardens, riversides, coasts and street trees. But landscape architecture has another side, concerned with larger scales. My work in recent years has been looking at the whole South West ecoregion. Everything I do is about environmental communication: how we represent environments and how we tell their stories.

In landscape architecture and environmental planning, the outcomes can be visionary, the designs can communicate and realise new futures. This communicative basis really interests me. Along with the constant collaboration – I am always working in conjunction with others. I have loved working with ecologists, scientists, environmental engineers – this generates vital perspectives through interdisciplinary conversations. The idea of a single discipline has always been limiting for me – earlier in my career, straying beyond the boundaries was tricky and often criticised, but with some time and a few interesting projects, this criticism fades.

SW: You have been deeply invested in the landscape of the South West of Western Australia? Why do you focus on this particular region?

DJM: It feels very meaningful to focus on the land where I live and was raised. I grew up on Menang Country in Torbay on the south coast. The whole of Noongar Country is an incredible part of the world, a lot of us who live here understand and feel this. Though the South West has been misunderstood by almost everything that has recently landed on it – whether that is urbanisation, mining or agriculture – this impact is an

ongoing dilemma. A challenge I have is communicating the richness of this biodiversity amidst all the inherited colonial notions of landscape. Landscapes are not only beautiful and valuable when they’re green, towering tall or mountainous, and we are starting to see our wetlands, heathland, and woodland ecosystems in new ways. This landscape is so rich. Of plants alone, there are almost 8,000 native species in this corner, with half of these found only here. Very few places in the world have this richness. For this reason, South West Australia is a biodiversity hotspot. But it gets this title because it is biodiversity under threat. So the story of loss needs to be told alongside the story of richness.

SW: What are some of the ways loss is happening, what are the biggest threats?

DJM: If we look at maps going back 50, 100, 200 years the biggest shift on the macro scale is the loss of vegetation through the once-woodland landscape of the Wheatbelt and the Perth metropolitan region. Land clearing has driven a lot of changes in the South West, including major declines in rainfall and water in rivers, streams and aquifers. In coastal areas around Perth, urbanisation is the most visibly destructive way of engaging with the lands and waters here. Despite warnings to establish urban growth boundaries, the sprawl keeps going. In the forest regions near Perth and further south, the increasing pressure is mining and fire and all the other impacts that go with these issues in a drying climate.

SW: Through your involvement with civil society groups, what are some of the actions that are responding to these challenges of ecological destruction?

DJM: I got involved with mapping the South West forests six years ago through The Beeliar Group, a network of professors for the environment who were formed around the Roe 8 disputes at the Beeliar Wetlands. The Beeliar Group was instrumental in connecting my world of landscape architecture with ecologists and environmental scientists. I met people like Kingsley Dixon, Andrea Gaynor, Hans Lambers, and then inspirational environmentalists like Jess Beckerling who has led the interface between the forests and political action for more than a decade as Convener of the Forests Alliance. In this group, there was immediately a community of care and action.

I became increasingly involved in all kinds of mapping. Initially, these were activism, but I learned to give them a research lens and they morphed into reports and forms of advocacy. As I gathered and produced map after map over those years, an atlas started to emerge. Native forest logging was still happening with force and this started out as a cautionary atlas. One day, Jess called me with this breathtaking news: the State Government were ending native forest logging. The community were astonished, that a movement to stop logging going back many decades had finally prevailed. It was also announced that more than 400,000 hectares would be dedicated to new protected areas and national parks. From here, I led a project with Noongar custodians, scientists and community groups to map where these protected areas

might be established. This work, Beyond 2024, was published by The Beeliar Group and Leeuwin Group in 2022. But the concept of an atlas was still here and what was going to be cautionary was starting to evolve into something celebratory.

SW: Could you describe the outcome of this research and work notably the Forests Atlas (2023) a publication with collaborators Dr Noel Nannup, Alice Ford, Nansen Robb, Clancy Martin and Mariela Espino Zuppa?

DJM: The Forests Atlas brings together different ways of seeing through words, illustrations, photos and maps. The mapping by itself is important, but only part of the story. The voice and deep-time narrative of Noel Nannup weaves through the book. The artworks all speak to a fascination and care with the world of the forests, large and small. The analogue film photographs have a timeless quality – you don’t know whether they were taken a long time ago or yesterday. All these different ways of seeing communicate the value of the South West forests. From different tree species, ages, plants, and waters, to marsupials and birds, they all weave together to tell this story.

SW: Maps are an important tool for visualisation in the Forests Atlas and, across many of your projects, what is their significance?

DJM: Maps are teachers for me. I understand so much about place through mapping. Of course, there is the embodied sense of place that you’ll never see through a map – when you’re immersed in the landscape, it’s raining on you, the wetlands are filling up with water and you’ve got your boots stuck. Ways of seeing through mapping are incredibly powerful. They’re important ways to resist the threats in our hotspots. Maps are deployed every day to dominate the land. Legitimacy and power come through maps: the drawing of planning boundaries, the creation of mining tenements; and the quantification of the landscape.

There has been a lot written about mapping as a tool of power with the ability to produce space. Before you’re in a place and know it as a reality, you will accept the map to be the reality. There have been many tricks with maps, in settler-colonial Australia so many of these have been violent. You can take away things with maps, and you can return to deep things that were once here, you can communicate ecological realities with maps. I have been engaged with a kind of counter-mapping. Our governments are collectors of all forms of data that are largely stored away for geospatial scientists to access. I like bringing it out of that space and into the public commons. Many people were fascinated to resee the forests they know through maps. In this way, they’re an educational tool, and a tool for the future as well.

SW: Can you talk about some of your recent work in the metropolitan area around Perth?

DJM: The work I’ve been involved in recently is looking at the ecological and water contexts of Perth, within the hotspot of the South West ecoregion. There are many maps, and I am currently compiling them all into another book. As well as being descriptive, this will have a more projective focus than the Forests Atlas, offering some new frameworks for ecological planning. New development and housing doesn’t need to continue to erase one of the richest ecosystems on the planet. There are more-than-human considerations: the importance of our black cockatoos, our quendas, not to mention the nearly 2,000 native plant species in the city. There are also purely human benefits to embracing nature in the city: cooler urban climates under the shade of trees and healthy people. After talking about these issues for a decade, it is good to finally see these start to become critical political issues, especially now as our summer temperatures are soaring.

The students I teach in Landscape Architecture at The University of Western Australia take on many of these fascinating briefs as part of their design studios. New green infrastructure networks for suburbs, designing trail networks in national parks, they look at sea level rise and coastal adaptation through ecological approaches. Last year we pieced together a whole series of student projects across the length of the Cockburn Community Wildlife Corridor from the wetland chains to the coast.

SW: What would a utopic future look like for you?

DJM: This is a big question, but my work in recent years tells me it’s the importance of the little movements, that grow into bigger movements, that suddenly grow into new imperatives for society. A kind of paradigm shift occurs then that the politicians and policymakers, developers and corporations can’t ignore. I was reflecting around the end of logging how movements grow and amplify. For a time, the core of members in the Forest Alliance were small and localised. But through the communication of all forms: films, social media, young people, advocates from the honey industry and ecotourism whose livelihoods were threatened by logging, the demographic rapidly widened and the calls were too loud for the State Government to ignore. WA’s decision to end native forest logging has led the way for other states: 18 months later Victoria announced native forest logging would end and there is now increased pressure on other states. This shows the immense power of communities to bring about change.

Read the Forests Atlas

Daniel Jan Martin and Sharmila Wood

Forests Atlas, 2023

Photo: © Mariela Espino Zuppa from the Forests Atlas by Daniel Jan Martin with Noel Nannup, Alice Ford, Nansen Robb, Clancy Martin and Mariela Espino Zuppa

Perth is a Wetland, 2017

© Daniel Jan Martin

Perth is a Wetland, was then, now, still is. This project presents a journey of discovery of Perth’s underlying ecology through a projected, moving, sounding exhibition. This project opens the eyes to this ecology, making it apparent: revealing its continuity, presence through the city, and its continuing persistence. Re-seeing, reorienting and making visible.

Daniel Jan Martin and Sharmila Wood

Field Working Slow Making: The Certainty of Connection

Dr Perdita Phillips

April 2016

My approach to fieldwork draws from uncomplicated beginnings. I walk around taking photographs, sound recordings and video. That’s data coming inwards—conventional ways of recording—essentially objective ways of working. I sample. I take quantities of materials: rocks, twigs, botanical specimens in plant presses, soil in bags, labelling where they come from (quasi-scientific?). I draw. Perhaps not so scientific. I smell, I touch. I listen. Now that’s a bit different. Listening pulls back on any objectivity and reasserts receptivity. Bush listening starts to undermine the Western viewpoint that those who cannot speak, who cannot converse in English, are to be ignored. Even the quietest places are not silent; they just ask us to acknowledge other voices—and to slow down and attend to them much more acutely. One can expand attentiveness to a more active state again: the process of moving on from silence. To hear is to take heed—to hear other voices and then to act. This means grappling with the fundamentally difficult questions of how to converse with the many Others (sand, bushes, ants and other encounters) and how to negotiate the uneven field of power that results when we engage with more-than-human worlds. How do we hear, attend and respond to being nudged, pressed and jostled by those others?

I listen to human others. I read their knowledge, take their advice; try to see things through their eyes. I am grateful for the possibility of scientific knowledge to rigorously pull at our assumptions at the same time as I absorb the anecdote, personal experience and acknowledge the deep-rooted beliefs of First Cultures. And then there is living knowledge from more-than-human worlds—other lives lived differently from your own and who go on living, well after you have traipsed by. All these things make for richer, deeper encounters brought together as a mesh of perceptions and meanings. What builds up is an organic network of knowledges.

Phillips, P. (2007). fieldwork/fieldwalking: art, sauntering and science in the walking Country. (PhD), Edith Cowan University, Perth. www.perditaphillips. com/portfolio/ fieldworkfieldwalking-phd-2003-2006/

Phillips, P. (2012). Walk ‘til you run out of water. Performance Research: A Journal of the Performing Arts, 17(4), 97-109. doi:1 0.1080/13528165.2012.6 71078

Rose, D. B. (1996). Nourishing terrains: Australian Aboriginal views of landscape and wilderness. Australian Heritage Commission.

In Country, I am caught by small encounters that I find or create. Many years ago I stole the word ‘eclogue’ to refer to these moments of aesthetic recognition/revelation in the landscape. The ephemeral eclogue is most often documented through photographs, so there is a conundrum in relying on a method that distances the viewer from the situation.

My work is often about the tensions between the ordinary and the extraordinary. There is too much wilderness in Western environmentalism and too much distancing sublime in orthodox Western art history; and not enough wildness, curiosity and wonder (Phillips, 2007). Here I mean wildness, not in the sense of uncared-for Country (Rose, 1996), but as an unruly upturning of Western order and control. Heat, sweat, sunburn, thirst show that walking the field is a bodily process. Moreover, I listen through objects: more-than-human things brought to my attention through wild rhythms, and things from humans that are placed in the environment: things ‘stranded’ by others and things that I strand: books, a backpack, gloves, souvenirs, socks left behind. Things are then retrieved months or years later with the traces of weather histories, tree blood and insect attack. When taken together, these strand(ing)s form part of a complex whole that encompasses a myriad of smaller processes, thoughts and impressions.

When making from Country I strive for a lightness of touch—realigning or reassembling elements, conversing and interacting rather than treating matters as dead things: I don’t want to lessen the agency of the materials. I want to be able to bring us close to the experience, but retain the sense of wild otherness of things-outside-ourselves. When working from the field, I want to get a sense in the gallery of the interdigitation of two different places. Translating one place to another is too limiting. Transformation, retaining differentness, is required: valuing the strange kinships that you find.

Today in this Anthropocene era we are surrounded by change in environments from local to global scales. Some of these changes are mild and expected in ecosystems but others are volatile and unprecedented. The sheer complexity of the situation is a bind, but also a bonus, as there is always the certainty that nothing operates in isolation, and can be accounted for, somewhere in the mesh. Elsewhere (2012) I have written about how responding to change requires us to practice walking on uneven ground—walking with continual mindfulness and frequent adjustments. With my fieldwork, I look to walking and listening as hopeful processes, that assist us in dealing with uncertainty and change.

page: Timefullness (numbat), 2023

We Must Get Together Sometime:

WALKING WITH GROUND | PLACES AROUND THE TABLE

Dr Perdita Phillips, Dr Annette Nykiel, and Dr Nien Schwarz

March 2024

We must get together some time was the rallying call-and-response by a loose group of creative friends in Western Australia that exists as the collective, Underfoot. The name references the ground beneath our feet—whether it is sand or clay, strewn with leaves or obscured by paving—is what connects Underfoot to the global ecological cycling of which we are an intrinsic part—Earth. Collectively we had known each other for over 20 years, with our work across the visual arts, crafts and writing being united by our grounded concerns. We are attentive to the land—and care for those with whom we share it. Our backgrounds are diverse, including experience as art lecturers and mentors, in Indigenous studies and food science, careers as environmental scientists and geologists, workshop leaders and creative writers in essay and poetic form.

For each of us, coming to Country means acknowledging Traditional Owners of these unceded lands and sending out a greeting to the more-than-human others. We practice slow-making, through active, passionate, long-term creative engagements with non-urban places and non-human worlds. Attuning to places and their different rhythms connects our practices globally to other artists who walk and make with ecologies.

We experience the larger-scale iterative patterns of ecological communities and weathering and respond to these multispecies flows and pulses in our work. The South West corner of Australia is renowned as one of the World’s original biodiversity hot spots and is reflected in Nyoongar people’s Kaartdijin (knowledge) of Boodja (Country). Our practices have been directly shaped by its botanical richness and unique evolutionary pressures. We have experimented with collected materials from endemic plant species to make dyes, inks, paints, stains and toning agents, leading to unique approaches and

expressions through textile, works on paper and analogue photography. A multisensory engagement with materiality and provenance is inherent in our practices. Our place-based creativity is entangled: steamed, coiled, cast, formed, stitched, walked, written, printed, photographed, narrated, recorded and performed.

In 2016 we gathered in the Spectrum Project Space at Edith Cowan University for the exhibition Field working slow making. Desert sand entered the gallery. Tinctures of poems (Poemeopathics) were offered from wetlands. Artists crafted in the gallery—responding materially— and plying conversations about making and sustaining.

Just a year earlier, an impending State infrastructure project dubbed Roe 8, would build a major road freight route through our suburbs and the Beeliar wetlands of Perth, on the way to the inner port of Walyalup/ Fremantle, agitated us. With its collision of habitat destruction, extractivism and fossil fuel addiction, Roe 8 interwove the destruction of Aboriginal heritage, urban wetlands and bushland, the lack of planning for sustainable transport or reduction in greenhouse emissions, and the need for participatory democracy. It showed the power of the local Main Roads Department and the global fossil fuel lobby, and the determination of the then-conservative State Government to pursue ideological goals for election purposes.

The gravity of Roe 8’s environmental issues forced us to engage with direct dialogue—in the process of political dissent—and exchange with the Beeliar Wetlands themselves. We began walking together and connecting with North Lake (Coobellup) and Frog Swamp, which were part of the route. By October 2016, after all avenues of environmental and Indigenous appeal had been exhausted, the bulldozers moved in. In response, artists from Underfoot joined in what became WA’s largest and most significant environmental protest this Century. We were witnesses to the ‘dozers, the security guards and riot police presence, including brushes with mounted police. Despite the protests, land clearing continued up until the day before the state election in March 2017, after which the incoming government called a halt. Roe 8 had a profound impact on our understandings of the nexus between art and action, place and environmental commitment. It led to the Direct Address travelling exhibition (on show at Eastern Riverina Arts, Wagga Wagga) for the 2016 Land Dialogues conference. Text and map works, tactile sculptures and stitched and twined pieces were made in direct response

The 2021 exhibition We Must Get Together Some Time for the Indian Ocean Craft Triennial (IOTA21) was led by Underfoot artists. Ironically impacted by Covid-19, it was a project to further the threads of connectivity and exchange cultivated earlier, through zoom meetings and get-togethers on Country to spur critical development and refine work for the show. The variety of our material approaches ended up being a strength, as we put into practice shared time walking, making, preparing food, and gathering around the dining table.

1

In much of Western Australia, the geological past is ever-present. Time spans the 4.4 billion years of Earth’s history, including the oldest dated zircon mineral grains at Jack Hills and ancient 3.7 billion-year-old Archean gneiss in the Narryer Terrane. Geological terrains show evidence of achingly slow continental collisions. Stromatolites living today echo the earliest fossil evidence of life on Earth in 3.5 billion-year-old rocks in the Pilbara. Until relatively recently, all of this geo-activity occurred without human help or intervention—and will continue well after we pass. Touching, sensing and listening to the lithic are important aspects of the Underfoot artists’ approaches and creations. We sound out heightened scales of space and time; we make with geophones, ochre, rock, clay and soil. Deep time starts here, now.

Over the years we have learnt the value of shared sensibilities, trust and generosity in times of extinction and rebellion. Now Underfoot is working towards the Melange exhibition in July 20241. The exchange of ideas and knowledge, materials, technical skills, and scientific inquiry has nurtured long-term relationships. It has been an ongoing engagement with people and places, grounded in connection, care, and sharing. In these precarious times, it is relevant and significant to continue having critical conversations around the table about how we work, what we work with, why and where we do it, in relation to others— human and otherwise—and in relation to ourselves.

Written on Wadjak Nyoongar Boodja and palawa-pakana milaythina: always was, always will be.

Over different iterations, recurrent Underfoot members have included poet and activist Nandi Chinna, weaver Jane Donlin, Nyoongar painter, maker and sculptor Sharyn Egan, slow-maker Annette Nykiel, and ecological and interdisciplinary artists Perdita Phillips, Nien Schwarz and Holly Story. The group will come together again in Melange at Mundaring Arts Centre as part of the next iteration of the Indian Ocean Craft Triennial (IOTA24). Click or scan the

code to watch the film underFOOT by Nien Schwarz and Rory Mahony

The title references chaotic jumbles of large blocks of rocks and material brought together through geological processes.

Dr Perdita Phillips, Dr Annette Nykiel, and Dr Nien Schwarz

We must get together some time at Broke Inlet, 2021

Photo: © Nien Schwarz

Nien Schwarz, We must get together (some time), installation view, 2020- 2021

Photo: © Daniel Wilkin

Annette Nykiel, The Country, 2018 Plant and soil pigmented cloth and foraged fibre, baskets and finger-plied string, raku and wood-fired ceramic vessels and beads

Dr Perdita Phillips, Dr Annette Nykiel, and Dr Nien Schwarz

Detail, installation approx. 1500 x 350 cm

Photo: © Louise Gan

Roe 8 caution tortoises crossing, 2017

Photo: © Perdita Phillips

Dr Perdita Phillips, Dr Annette Nykiel, and Dr Nien Schwarz

Nien Schwarz, Cockie Warrior Vest Say No to Roe 8, 2017

Hand stitched fabric (following the form of a Japanese Jinbaori or warrior’s surcoat)

Approx 80 cm high

Photo: © Nien Schwarz

The Radical Act of Remembering:

ART AND SOLASTALGIA IN WESTERN AUSTRALIA

Rosamund Brennan

False narratives dominate the stories we tell ourselves about Western Australia. Our collective memory has been built on a state of forgetting, whereby the colonial ‘truth’ has buried the experiences and contributions of First Nations people, a phenomenon which anthropologist W.E.H. Stanner identified in 1968 as the ‘Great Australian Silence’ (Stanner, Boyer Lecture, After the Dreaming). This collective forgetting—this tension between the stories we want to believe and the more complex, darker truths of our history—is an enduring influence for many artists in Western Australia.

Yabini Kickett, a Perth-based artist and descendant of the Bibbulmun nation, spent her childhood immersed in nature. Her land conservationist father and artist/poet mother would often take her “out bush”, where they’d forage for native orchids. Her interdisciplinary practice observes a similar enchantment with the natural world—deeply rooted in endemic plants and animals, family, totemic relations and found objects from Country.

Many of Kickett’s artworks are concerned with the concept of ‘solastalgia’—the emotional distress caused by environmental change—which she describes as “the feeling of being homesick while still at home.” This concept encapsulates how she feels about the destruction of the Wheatbelt, her family’s Country. “These massive swathes of bushland have been flattened. I just can’t switch off knowing that place does not look how it’s supposed to,” she says.

Her grandmother Enid Kickett was born under a towering salmon gum in the Wheatbelt. Today, it’s the last tree standing in the area. “That tree should be in a complete ecosystem but there’s nothing else around it. It’s so important to my family, but it feels lonely.”

Stanner, W.E.H. 1968, After the Dreaming, Boyer Lecture, Sydney.

In honour of her grandmother Enid, who was a seamstress, her solo exhibition Nidja Tuart, marlap Wuruk (Here Tuart, There Salmon Gum) 2019, featured a range of textiles dyed with flowers and leaves from the salmon gum she was born under. The exhibition also included a series of found objects including “road kill”, bird bones and carcasses, lovingly collected from the roadsides of her Country. These works draw on Kickett’s totemic connection to native birds, and her sadness at witnessing their decline. “This is my way of honouring them,” she says.

For her installation Burdiya-ka (Bosses, 2021), Kickett presented a series of portraits of her mother Lola and her four aunties, taken on Country in important locations to the family and presented with an assemblage of treasured personal objects. The works speak strongly of kinship within the matriarchy of her family, and the “tireless work women do within Country and the important role we hold as caretakers for Country.”

While many First Nations artists, like Kickett, create works about their Country as a method of strengthening and reflecting upon culture, for non-Aboriginal artists it can be a mechanism for establishing a sense of belonging, and reckoning with their identity as a settler in this place while exploring the often transient notions of home and selfhood as examined by New Zealand born artist, teacher and community arts worker Katie Breckon, who has lived in the Kimberley region of Western Australia for over a decade.

Across photography, printmaking and drawing, her practice often explores the emotional and intuitive connections she develops with her environments: her childhood home, of Aotearoa, New Zealand , and the vast mud flats of the Kimberley. Her practice is rooted in ‘place attachment theory’, the emotional bond between person and place.

Her installation Ochre and Light (2018) evolved from a feeling of homesickness while living in the flat, sparse savannah of Derby. “During prolonged periods of intense heat and isolation, I began to have recurring daydreams of standing under mountains in the deep south of New Zealand.…I kept seeing this vision of Mitre Peak in Milford Sound, and it called me home.” The work features digital and historic wet plate photography of Aotearoa’s mountainscapes layered with natural pigment–which acts as a stain or filter to symbolise the persistent ache of belonging to two places.

Breckon’s practice is deeply influenced by her many years of working as a remote community arts worker. In her solo exhibition Backtrack, (2023) a series of large-scale incised drawings weave together the many fragments of her time working with Wandjina Wunggurr people of the northwest Kimberley region—retracing bush trips, conversations and time spent on Country, as well as plant life and natural landmarks. “When I made these drawings I was going through a massive transition emerging from an intensive period of remote art centre work into the unknown (...) the physical act of drawing became an act of catharsis, it was about remembering, honouring and releasing.”

It was Breckon’s close relationships with Wandjina Wunggurr elders and senior artists in the Mowanjum Community that inspired confidence in valuing her story and ancestral connections. She’s now working on an art project that explores her family’s colonial history and involvement in the destruction of wetlands in Ōtepoti, Dunedin, where her ancestors settled in the mid-1800s. Breckon describes this as an important step in “identifying my own colonial stories” and “taking responsibility.”

A multidisciplinary artist now based in Sydney, Alana Hunt’s practice is also informed by the people, places and stories of the Kimberley, but through a different lens. A non-indigenous artist, Hunt has lived in Gija and Miriwoong Countries for the last 12 years—a time which galvanised and deepened her career-spanning examination of colonial culture and violence as it persists today, and the myopic vision of nations who uphold it.

Working across film, installation, photography and writing, Hunt’s practice challenges dominant ideas and histories, often working with unconventional modes of circulation—from radio announcements to street signs and newspaper serials—bringing her ideas directly into the public sphere. In 2018, the artist installed an unofficial street sign at the base of the dam wall at Lake Argyle, which read Faith in a pile of stones (the work’s title). This subversive intervention seeks to interrogate the deleterious impact of the dam’s creation on Miriwoong Country and people. Over 50 years ago, an entire mountain was blasted to pieces to build the dam wall, constructed from thousands of stones.

“Even though the dam has been there now for 50-odd years, what is that in relation to 500 years, or 5000 years or 50,000?” Hunt says. “There’s this sense of certainty that my own culture has in this apparent engineering feat. And I wanted to highlight the fragility and absurdity of that, and that one day the dam will fall.”

Hunt’s photographic series All the violence within / In the national interest (2019-22) features six images shown across three double-sided light boxes. On one side, a series of voyeuristic colour images capture tourists enjoying hot springs, creek beds and palm-fringed outcrops— seemingly unaware they are trampling across stolen Aboriginal land.

On the reverse, black and white images show lacerations and gashes to the land due to ‘small-scale’ gravel mining activity near Kununurra, Hunt’s then home. In these arresting portraits, Hunt surveys the land “like a crime scene”, revealing the casual, often unseen acts of colonial violence unfolding in everyday life.

Similarly, in her 2023 ‘long term’ essay-film Surveilling a Crime Scene, which was filmed on Miriwoong Country, through the town of Kununurra and its surrounds, Hunt explores what she calls the “continuum of colonialism”—the ways in which settler violence is not historic, but ongoing and present. Bringing together new and archival film and voiceover, the work explores the various ways Kununurra has been manipulated and exploited to fit the colonial project.

“This film feels like a very personal, almost guttural response after 12 years of living in the region,” Hunt says. “I think it’s very easy as non-Indigenous people in Australia to think that colonisation is something that happened in the past and now we just happen to be living here. But we are living on stolen land, and our daily lives perpetuate this violence.”

Across time, the one thing that links all human beings, and sets us apart from other species, is our belief in stories. Since ancient times, self-reinforcing myths and imagined realities have served to unite human collectives. Perhaps, by digging into their own grief and loss, their own solastalgia, these artists can awaken us from “collective forgetting.” Here, in Western Australia, a place on the front line of the climate crisis, where colonial violence still echoes into our everyday lives, the least we can do is tell stories grounded in truth.

“It’s incomprehensible to me just how biodiverse Western Australia is in comparison to other parts of the world,” says Kickett. “I want everyone to get acquainted with how unique and special and old this place is, and how lucky we are to live here.”

Rosamund Brennan

Barbara Burdiya-ka (Bosses) series, 2021

© Yabini Kickett

Courtesy the artist

Faith in a Pile of Stones, (onsite 2019)

Lake Argyle

Polaroid

© Alana Hunt

Courtesy the artist

Hill near Wunaamin Miliwundi Ranges, 2021

Katie Breckon

Incised Paint on Aluminium Sheet

160 x 120 cm

© Katie Breckon

Installation view, Katie

explores expanded drawing and mark making practices through the lens of mapping personal and physical geographies

Bottom: Installation view, Katie Breckon, Ochre and Light, 2018 Materials from Aotearoa New Zealand: ethically sourced kōkōwai (red ochre) from the Ngāi Tahu region that was gifted to the artist and the Kimberley, Western Australia: acquired with permission through Mowanjum Art and Culture Centre, externally sourced from Kimberley and national art suppliers.

Top:

Breckon, Backtrack at Fremantle Arts Centre, 2021 Breckon

Photo: © Miles Noel Photography Courtesy the artist

Photo © Sandra Landro Courtesy the artist

1 Mundaring and Hills Historical Society. Chidlow. www.mundaringhistory.org/ chidlow-shire-mundaring (Accessed March 2024).

Chain Reaction

Grace Connors

The power of three. Heat, fuel and oxygen create a chain reaction, remove one link and the chain will break.

These three elements conspiring with one another are referred to as the fire triangle, remove one chain from the link and a fire will extinguish.

I have lived in, and amongst, dense bushland for most of my life and have a strong memory of living in acute fear about the possibility of losing our lives, our things. A constant reminder of our mortality and proximity to a changing world with hotter temperatures, later winters, less rainfall, drier soils, dead leaves.

A perfect storm.

Growing up in a town with a colonial history of removal, subtraction of the bushland into oblivion, and replacing it with orchards. Fruit trees. Industry. A railway established as the water pipeline was sprawled across the eastern suburbs. The local lake once used to fill up trains is now used by water bombers to extinguish fire (and don’t forget leisure, a shady water hole).1

A purpose-built lake and a changing world.

We remain (for now), we stay vigilant, we prepare our plans, we keep everything we need by the front door flyscreen.

Life begins and ends in the plastic crate and briefcase.

Certificates, awards, accreditations, photographs, photo negatives, a rechargeable torch, USB chargers and batteries, a large bottle of water, wills and testaments, my Mother’s artworks. Heirlooms hidden behind the fireplace mantle. Meticulous, shy, and handled with care.

We are living in constant awareness, more than ever, of our proximity to danger (that awareness is far more frequent these days).

It takes a great deal of care to decide what to keep and what to leave behind.

2 Alan N Williams, Mark Constantine IV, Scott Mooney. University of New South Wales. www.unsw.edu.au/ newsroom/news/2023/04/ a-dive-into-the-deep-pastreveals-indigenous-burning-helped-supp. Published 18 Apr 2023 (Accessed March 2024)

Run

Hide  Grieve  Mourn

Support Retreat Surrender

Regenerate.

Plant the seed and regrow.

Spend the afternoon hosing down the weatherboard house to wet the dry leaves on the roof. Falling ash. Helicopters flying low overhead, you could almost reach your tongue up to lick their harsh metal bellies.

Whirring, whirring, whirring.

Heavy smoke cover blankets tinge everything a bright orange.

Holding my breath.

A link in the chain can be broken through First Nations thousand-year-old methods of cool burning,2 parts to a whole to reduce fuel loads, mapped out three metres squared. Two (mosaic) zones eventually confluence as one to reduce heat and intensity.

Fire is necessary for life, for living, for surviving and for regeneration when deployed with care and knowledge.

Stay calm, think of what can be saved.

In 2020 Lake Disappointment was officially named on the WA map as Kumpupintil Lake in an important acknowledgement of the ecological richness and cultural significance of Kumpupintil Lake. The name reinstatement was requested by the Martu traditional owners.

Kumpuirntily (Lake Disappointment), 2005–2008

Yunkurra Billy Atkins

165 x 91.6 cm

Synthetic polymer paint on composition board National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne © the artists, courtesy Martumili Artists, Newman / Copyright Agency, 2024

Contributors and Acknowledgements

This book was produced on Whadjuk Noongar Boodja.

Published with support from the Department of Local Government, Sport and Cultural Industries

Editor

Sharmila Wood

Contributing Authors

Kathryn Gledhill-Tucker, Dr Sandra Wooltorton, Dr Anne Poelina, Dr Len Collard, Emilia Galatis, Lakshmi Kanchi, Sharmila Wood, Kelly Fliedner, Dr Perdita Phillips, Dr Annette Nykiel, Dr Nien Schwarz, Rosamund Brennan, Martumili Artists, Grace Connors

with Contributing Artists

Annette Lormada/Mangkaja Arts, Katie West, Mei Swan Lim, Daniel Jan Martin, Underfoot Collective (Nandi Chinna, Jane Donlin, Sharyn Egan, Annette Nykiel, Dr Perdita Phillips, Nien Schwarz and Holly Story), Martumili Artists (Wokka Taylor, Muuki Taylor, Ngalangka Nola Taylor, Curtis Taylor, Ngamaru Bidu, Kumpaya Girgirba, Desmond Taylor, Corban Clause Williams, Judith Anya Samson, Ignatius Taylor, Tamisha Williams, Derrick Butt, Jenny Butt, Chloe Jadai, Kiarah Jadai, Shirley Jadai, Yvonne Mandijalu, Marilyn Bullen, Mayika Chapman, Nikeal (Noni) Taylor, Robina Clause, Christine Thomas, Maisie Ward, Jakayu Biljabu, Yikartu Bumba, May Chapman, Nyanjilpayi Nancy Chapman, Doreen Chapman, Linda James, Donna Loxton, Mulyatingki Marney, Reena Rogers, Beatrice Simpson, Ronelle Simpson, Muntararr Rosie Williams), Katie Breckon, Yabini Kickett, and Alana Hunt

Graphic Design

Dalina Dominguez

Proofreader

Kelly Fliedner

Production

Scott Print, Western Australia

© 2024 the authors, the artists

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. Unless otherwise specified, material and texts were supplied by the owners of the works, who hold the copyright thereto and are reproduced with permission. We have made every effort to obtain permission for all copyright-protected material in this publication and if you have not given us permission please contact the publisher.

For our family. Special thanks to our children for inspiring us to make the future better.

ISBN: 978-0-6454694-3-1

Click or scan the code to read more about the contributors to this publication

Click or scan the code for creative ways to upcycle this book

Editor: Sharmila Wood

Design:

Dalina Dominguez