Ontological openness on the Lurujarri Dreaming Trail: a methodology for decolonising research

Abstract

The Lurujarri Dreaming Trail is an ancestral dreaming track1 near Broome in the Kimberley region of north-western Australia. Walked each barrgana2 season by Goolarabooloo traditional custodians and non-Indigenous people, this trail was also recently the site of a major land use dispute. Conflicts over what the land is and how it should be valued have defined Indigenoussettler relations since the first wave of colonisation of Australia’s First Peoples and their ancestral estates (Wilson & Ellender, 2002). At the heart of these conflicts are different ways of conceptualising and relating to the land, and ultimately, divergent ontologies.3 This paper reflects on my doctoral research and the recent dispute in the Kimberley which foregrounded my research, to contribute to conversations on how research methodology can recognise the ontological politics (Verran, 2007) enacted in place. It explores how I, as an ethnographic researcher, used ontological openness to work ethically and productively with the different realities being performed in place. It also explores the broader implications of this approach in terms of decolonising research practice and supporting respectful dialogue between Indigenous and Western peoples and realities. Landing in Broome: Meeting the Goolarabooloo Community and Country The flight into Broome always ends with a sweeping arc over the milky blue waters of Roebuck Bay (fringed by red pindan earth and mangroves) and a low fly-over Chinatown and the historic Sun Pictures. The intensity of these colours seared into my memory when I first arrived in Broome in the year 2000. I was an undergraduate student from RMIT University who had travelled to the Kimberley to walk the Lurujarri Dreaming Trail with the Goolarabooloo Indigenous community. 1 Dreaming tracks trace the pathways of ancestral creators. Embedded within these pathways are traditional knowledge, stories, songs and law, which contain codes of behaviour for balanced relationships. In the West Kimberley, this body of cultural knowledge and law is referred to by the name Bugarrigarra (Wilcox, 2010, p. 26). 2 Barrgana is the season when cool winds blow from the southeast (July – August). In the ocean walgawalga (salmon), catfish, galbany (mullet) and jugan (dugon) are fat and the whales are migrating north. On the land, yarrinyarri (bush onion) are plentiful and can be dug out of the shallow sands (Goolarabooloo, 2013). Indigenous language words written in this paper appear in italics and originate from the Nyulnyulan family of languages, including Bardi, Jabirr Jabirr, Ngumbal, Nyulnyul, Jugun and Yawuru (Muecke & Lowe as cited in Kelly, 2016). 3 In this paper, ontology is taken to mean the nature of existence and being, which takes into account categories that structure what is (Fielbleman, 1960, p. 219). The term is also used to reference ways of being, and to provoke a questioning of the realities that people enact (Law, 2004, p. 162). 83 Learning Communities | Special Issue: Decolonising Research Practices | Number 22 – December 2017 This year marks 30 years since Nykina and Goolarabooloo Elder Paddy Roe OAM established the cross-cultural walking of the Lurujarri Dreaming Trail. Paddy’s motivation for inviting nonIndigenous Australians to walk the land with his people is evocatively captured in the statement: This is why this [dreaming] trail I got. You know I was thinking about how we can come together and this [Trail] is the only way we can come together to look after the Country. (in Whitmont, 2010) All journeys along the Lurujarri Dreaming Trail begin under a broad old tamarind tree at the Goolarabooloo Hostel in ‘old Broome’. It is here that Paddy’s family, the Goolarabooloo people, welcomes walkers hailing from many places and cultural backgrounds to Country.4 Over nine days and 90-kilometers, this eclectic ‘mob’ of walkers trace the pathways and patterns of ancestors and creator beings, camping in the same seasonal camping places that have been dwelled in for thousands of years. Located on the west coast of the Dampier Peninsula in the Kimberley region of Western Australia (see Figure 1), this ancestral dreaming tract, otherwise referred to as the Northern Tradition Song Cycle, is an entity that connects with other song cycles5 that cross the Australian continent. The Trail is a constitution of human, more-thanhuman and ancestral relations that are invoked and maintained as people walk through, with and as Country. For nine days we walk along the Lurujarri coast, through mayi (monsoonal vine thicket) and along sandy beaches and rocky cliff tops. At sundown we unfurl dusty swags onto red pindan or white sand, tying mosquito nets to the branches of murga (Melaleuca alsophylla, saltwater paperbark). Smokey fires ward off persistent mosquitoes, infusing hair and cloth with the smells of gunaroo (Eucalyptus zygophylla, white gum) and jigal (Bauhinia cunninghamii). We sit grounded, cross-legged in sand and dust, amongst the murga. They fringe our camps, sheltering us from the south-easterly winds that blow across this country during barrgana time. Each year we return to the same buru (camping or highly significant spiritual place). The same ground is re-visited and old fires are re-lit, ashes mounding up. Remnant coals glow once more under fires that dot dry, sandy creek beds. In walking the Trail I was one in a continuum of students to carry on RMIT’s long-standing relationship with the Goolarabooloo community, a relationship that began in the 1990s through the friendship of Paddy Roe and Landscape Architecture academic Jim Sinatra. My first and subsequent journeys along the Lurujarri Dreaming Trail in the years 2007 and 2011, and further time spent camping on Country with Goolarabooloo families during 2000 and 2001, enabled me to form lasting relationships with people and place. These relationships ‘called’ me back to Broome in 2011, at a time when the Northern Tradition Song Cycle and Lurujarri Dreaming Trail faced a major threat from a proposed industrial development. It was in this context of such significant personal relationship, to both people and place, and the depth of concern I had for what could happen, that my research emerged. 4 In this paper the term ‘Country’ refers to a place-based ontological entity that exists for Indigenous Australians. Burarrwanga (in Burarrwanga et al., 2013) describes Country as a totality of many things, including multiple layers of meaning: ‘It incorporates people, animals, plants, water and land. But Country is more than just people and things, it is also what connects them to each other and to multiple spiritual and symbolic realms’ (p. 128). Stated otherwise, ‘Country includes humans, more-than-humans and all that is tangible and non-tangible and which become together in an active, sentient, mutually caring and multidirectional manner in, with and as place/space’ (Country et al., 2016, p. 456). 5 Bradshaw and Fry (1989) describe song cycles as manifestations of the creative journeys of ancestral beings, through which ‘stories, ceremonies, laws and rituals are passed between communities’ (p. 7). These stories about the journeys of creative ancestors are invoked through song-poetry to form oral maps of the country. Wilcox (2010) states that ‘a person who knows the songs can travel through the country and stay in a sustaining relationship with it’ (p. 26). 84 Ontological Openness on the Lurujarri Dreaming Trail: a Methodology for Decolonising Research | Nia Emmanouil Conflict, Ontological Politics and the Emergence of a Research Project The context of this research was inextricably shaped by conflict and ontological politics over place. This conflict was sparked by the proposed siting of the Browse Liquefied Natural Gas processing plant at Walmadany (James Price Point), approximately 60 kilometres north of Broome, by the West Australian (WA) Government, Woodside and their joint venture partners.6 My research became a way to draw attention to a radical difference in the way that place was being enacted by different parties. Figure 1: Map of the Lurujarri Dreaming (Heritage) Trail Source: Goolarabooloo (2013). 6 The WA Department of State Development was the key proponent for the development of a land-based LNG processing plant at Walmadany/James Price Point. At the time of writing my doctoral thesis from between 2012 and 2016, the joint venture partners to this development were Woodside, Mitsui, PetroChina, Shell and BP. For many people in Broome and on the Dampier Peninsula, this development was colloquially referred to as ‘The Gas’. 85 Learning Communities | Special Issue: Decolonising Research Practices | Number 22 – December 2017 I mobilised the concept of ontological difference to reveal what was being missed in the conflict being played out around ‘The Gas’. Proponents of this development and the Goolarabooloo people were enacting very different relationships with place. For the WA Government and the mineral resources industry the Browse Basin and land at James Prices Point (the place name used by the proponents) represented commodities,7 shareholder profits and mining royalties, pointing to a very particular ontological position. Yet, the Goolarabooloo people were ‘seeing’, relating to and speaking about the same place from a very different worldview: James Price Point was recognised as ‘Walmadany’, a highly significant cultural heritage site along the Song Cycle path where the Jabirr Jabirr ancestor Walmadany continues to live. The land was not a commodity to exploit, but ‘Country’, a multi-dimensional entity with which a person can experience reciprocity of care and to which they have a responsibility to maintain and enliven. The Goolarabooloo people unequivocally opposed the industrial development of Walmadany (Whitmont, 2010). Such development posed an imminent threat to the integrity of the Northern Tradition Song Cycle, including, the law and culture that emerge from Bugarrigar