‘That means the fish are fat’: sharing experiences of animals through Indigenous-owned tourism

Abstract

This article considers the ways members of Indigenous-owned and operated Bawaka Cultural Experiences (BCE) from northern Australia share diverse ways of knowing the world with tourists through a focus on the sapient beings categorised as animals in western cultures. The article is co-authored by two owners of BCE and three human geographers. Lak Lak and Djawa of BCE are situated as key agents who sculpt the experience for visitors and tourists and in the article discuss the various ways they actively challenge tourists through a range of experiences on country. Sarah, Sandie and Kate are multiply positioned as academics, collaborators and visitors. The article discusses the ways members of the Burarrwanga family invite tourists to learn about the interrelated importance of animals through a range of sensory experiences. The relationships shared by Lak Lak and Djawa with tourists are indicative of an ontology of connection that underpins Yolngu and many Indigenous ways of knowing the world. As tourists are invited into these worlds, they are given the opportunity to challenge their own relationships with animals and rethink an interlinked social–cultural–economic and ontological approach to self-determination in a postcolonial nation.

Keywords:

• Indigenous tourism
• Yolngu
• Indigenous epistemologies
• ontology of connection
• animal geographies
• northern Australia

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Bawaka Cultural Experiences and the Gay'wu Women's Program for their help in writing this article. We would like to acknowledge our family and friends from Bawaka, Yirrkala, Nhulunbuy, Sydney and Newcastle for their wisdom and support, and DBERD, Tourism NT, ArtsNT and the North East Arnhem Tourism Hub for their ongoing assistance. Thanks also to Matalena Tofa for her research assistance with the paper and to the anonymous reviewers for their insightful, detailed comments on the original version.

Notes

The Homeland Movement, which began in the 1970s, was a response by many Indigenous Australians to centralised settlement on missions and communities. Family groups of varying size returned to their own land to re-establish permanent and semi-permanent settlements known as homelands or outstations (Williams, 1986).

As discussed in more detail below, country is an Aboriginal English term used to refer to specific areas of what would be called land or sea in Western frameworks but in Aboriginal ontologies encompasses a range of sapient, interrelated entities including ancestors–ancestral beings–land–water–animals–trees and so on. Country is animate and is fundamental to Aboriginal people's identity.

This ultimately contributed to the establishment of the Aboriginal Land Rights Act (Northern Territory) 1976. Under this Act, visitors and tourists are required to get a permit to access Aboriginal land.

Indeed, for Lak Lak, as the eldest sister, there is the additional cultural obligation to educate others.

Doucet (2008) uses the metaphor of gossamer walls to problematise research relationships. She shows how the relationships researchers have with themselves, with their participants or collaborators and with their audiences sometimes nearly touch, at other times are far apart, and always are ultimately unknowable.

Many Indigenous cultures have distinct, dynamic and diverse ways of understanding animals, human–animal relations and the place of both animals and humans in the world at large. Many Indigenous cultures emphasise connections and relationships between animal and human worlds within a placed-based yet broadly defined environment (M. Adams, 2008; Cajete, 2000; Ingold, 2000; Johnson & Murton, 2007; Marker, 2006; Nadasdy, 2007; Rose, 2005; Suchet, 2002; Watson & Huntington, 2008). Within this context, animals are important agents. Watson and Huntingdon, for example, discuss human–animal relationships around hunting as practised by Koyukon Athabascans in North America. Here the moose hunt involves complex relationships between hunter and prey that accord significant agency and respect to the moose that will choose the time to give itself to the hunter (Watson & Huntington, 2008).

BCE's business plan and aims were developed through a Stepping Stones Program funded by Tourism NT and the Department of Business, Economic and Regional Development. Further business, marketing and tour development support has come from other government organisations such as Indigenous Tourism Australia, Arts NT, local community organisations such as Yirrkala Dhanbul and the academic community – including the University of Newcastle and Macquarie University.

Elcho Island is located off the coast of Arnhem Land to the north west of Bawaka.

See Magowan (2001) and Buku-Larrngay Mulka Centre (2003) for further discussion of the complex relationship with crocodiles.

Although the crocodile is sacred and should not be hurt at Bawaka, in other Yolngu places and at other times, crocodiles may be hunted and eaten. However, context is always crucial. Morphy (1995) describes an incident very near Bawaka where an Indigenous hunter who was about to shoot a crocodile was stopped when it was pointed out that the leader of a particular clan was ill and that if the crocodile was killed on this clan's country at this time it could well weaken the leader's spirit. During this incident, the crocodile prudently remained on the ill leader's country and hence was not shot. Saltwater: Yirrkala bark paintings of sea country by the Buku-Larrngay Mulka Centre (2003) is a publication accompanying an exhibition of 80 bark paintings by 47 Yolngu artists of Yirrkala in northeast Arnhem Land which toured nationally. The exhibition was a response by the artists to the desecration of a crocodile's nest by barramundi fishers on the shores of Blue Mud Bay in 1996. These paintings were recognised as evidence of native title and ownership of saltwater in the Blue Mud Bay Case.

See Dunbar-Hall (2001) for a discussion of similar processes of putting limits on knowledge in interactions between Balinese and tourists.

It is important to remember that the Burarrwanga family has not been dispossessed of its land. Many Aboriginal people do not have legal recognition or ownership of their land and need to ask permission to access cultural sites on national parks and on privately owned land (e.g. Bissett et al., 1998).

Including connections between the authors of this article.