The epistemological intimacies of the urban frontier: mangrove swamps, possessive (non)belonging and kinship (m)otherwise

Abstract

In this article I (t)race the (onto)epistemological intimacies of the urban frontier through their attempted erasure and annihilation of the Bla(c)k, Indigenous and racialised (m)other and her rendition to non-being and non-belonging in the city of Mulubinba-Newcastle on the unceeded lands of the Worimi and Awabakal peoples in so called Australia and in relation to the complex lineages and herstories of exile, displacement, dispossession and desire and survivance which bring my kin and I to these lands. A crisis in home and homeplace is thus not new for the racialised mother, it is foundational to the hetero-patriarchal modern (settler) colonial project. I do not, could never, stop here but rather I foreground ongoing Indigenous sovereignties and a political project of nurturing and revival of kinship (m)otherwise as a powerful Black axis upon which the urban might be decolonised and Indigenised in complex inter-cultural and inter-generational ways and as pluridiverse relations and relationality.

KEYWORDS:

• epistemologies of the urban frontier
• decolonial feminisms
• settler coloniality
• heteropatriachy
• Bla(c)k and Indigenousmotherhood
• healing liberations
• kinship (m)otherwise‌

The November winds blow away the remnants of the last round of forced displacement and non-belonging that mark the bodies of my children and I. Mid-global pandemic we are forced out of our home from a thick dust of dispossession that took away our breath and denied us even temporary belonging. A faultline in the reproduction of White settler insistence on property and possession as signs of humanity exposed for its violence against all those who refuse and/or are denied such a being of Mastery and instead inhabit the realms of non-being, inscribed with a surveillance forged with suspicion and mistrust. Racialized and feminized registers of Blac(k) single mother love, care, and wisdom are met with fear and immediately experienced as a threat to these tightly held rigidities of Right and Ownership; arousing secret fantasies of doing harm that when the moment is right are enacted with gritted teeth behind smiles of reason, niceness, and civility.

Yet within the underside of purported non-being exist and remain other emergent registers of care and love beyond heteropatriarchal kinship, embodied notions of dignity and enfleshed forms of reason. I uttered a call from within the toxic dust; a spiralling call of crumbling certainties, ongoing systemic realities of acute fragility, a trigger reminder of ancestral and ongoing displacements and a refusal to not trust or lose hope. The call was met with multiple forms of kinship as both a defence and protection of us, a (re)telling in the act and of the flesh that we are welcome here and a showing up to put privilege on the line and face with me these institutions of settler Violence.

Some of these figures of refusal who showed up weave back into the University, a place itself complicit with the logics and rationalities of gentrification that re-enact historic right as possession and/as Whiteness in our city; complict in the racialized, gendered, and classed displacement of our, and many other, family(ies) from a home, belonging and homecoming. Yet these figures are of the flesh, not the civil body. They are emergent from the unlearning of the rigidities of Right, Possession, and Reason, and the gentle unpicking of the stitches that something is not right transmuting this from a feeling to shed and be rid of, a source of self-silence to a site and sight of possibility, shared voice, a kinship (m)otherwise and reason of the flesh. They are a return of a prefigurative decolonizing politics of knowledge in which our inner and outer territories of land and body become fonts of wisdom and healing through which we re-member ourselves as all we have been waiting for and re-turn to the sacred teachings within and without.

We cannot situate the deathly constriction of breath and degradation of the capacity to live within a genealogy that begins with the Covid-19 virus for this is a history that commits an avowal of the foundational and ongoing constriction of breath and capacity to live as a result of the virus of patriarchal capitalist (settler) coloniality. This is a virus that has always been premised on the denial of humanness and humanity to the raced and feminized territories of black and indigenous flesh and Country as kin. Instead, our/my genealogy must begin from the placed-ness of where I write – the settler colonial patriarchal heteronormative lands of so-called Australia, – and attempt to defend our dignity of breath and life.

This is a Bla(c)k genealogy and one that does not touch on the intimacies of the urban frontier in which white working-class communities meet First Nations’ communities as kin. Whiteness, here, following Sara Ahmed (2007) , is a subjectivity which embodies phenomenologically the masculinized heteronormative bourgeois (settler) subject.

Settler-colonial Modern Australia brutally emerged through genocidal processes of invasion which sought to eliminate the existence of other subjects, territories, life worlds, and practices of social and communal life which move beyond and against heteropatriarchal capitalist (settler) coloniality. In the context of these sacred lands Possession, Right, and Reason became bound up into a nation-state logic of control, taming, and ownership of lands through private property with the traditional custodians of these lands racialized as flesh and considered dirty, menacing, and met with contempt and disgust (Moreton-Robinson, 2000, 2015; Morton, 2019; Simpson, 2016). Yet such origins and ongoing violences are disavowed through stories of innocent settlement and urban (re)development (Moreton-Robinson, 2004). This leaves psychic and affective anxieties that haunts White possessive subjectivity with the ghostly figures of Bla(c)kness. This is a figure that never left and actively refuses to leave.

As such, despite narratives of extinction and absence, the survivance of Indigenous nations, practices of sovereignty, and forms of custodianship of Country and/as kin persist through a timescape that is both prior to and extends out beyond the linear timescape of Modern Australia (Watego, 2021). Meeting such survivance were and are waves of migration of communities of colour and other Black peoples arriving to these shores with their own histories of dispossession, exile, settlement, and removal/exile from Kin and Country. Migrants of colour, displaced Black families, and refugees are met with similar logics of disgust, mistrust, and denial of knowing-being (Motta, 2016; Ramsay, 2017). They/we find them/ourselves interpolated through a deeply racialized and embodied spatiality in which belonging implies assimilation into the logics of White disavowal and the stories of black absence and lack, and yet whose belonging is always-already impossible to reach (Hage, 2014; Moreton-Robinson, 2003).

This project of ‘modern’ Australian and its reproduction is a deeply onto – epistemological project, in which the negation of other ways of knowing, knowledge, and creating knowledge is a negation of other ways of being and reproducing our selves and communities. The urban centre with its courts, universities, and government centres, just like the lettered city in Latin America (Aparicio & Blaser, 2008), has played a crucial role as the urban frontier in which Reason, Right, History, Property, and Humanness meet Country represented as unruly, beastly, dangerous, and demonic. Settler coloniality is not a one-off historical moment but an ongoing logic and rationality of anti-life which strangles the breath and re-draws its battle lines along both the rural and urban frontier, marking an ongoing attempted genocide into the skin and soul of Country and Black life (van der Walle, 2018). Yet I concur here with Porter and Yiftachel (2019, p. 118) following Jacobs (1996) that

the city – due to its inherent openness – is the ‘Achilles Heel’ of the settler-colonial project. By definition, settler nation-building is always structurally incomplete, and it is in urban settlements that this incompleteness is most visible and most paradoxical.

The contested urban frontier and/as the lettered city is a site in which new/ancient, multi-lingual, and complex emergences of struggles, subjectivities, and onto-epistemologies of decolonization and sovereignty are (re)born and nurtured. It is to a particular contestation and refusal of the urban frontier that this piece turns; that of a contemporary regional city, Mulubinba/Newcastle, the first area of white invasion in New South Wales (NSW) outside of the Sydney basin in the nineteenth century, heralded in the twentieth century as the ‘heart of basic industry’ and now into the 21st being re-invaded in the name of the globalized smart city with an intense round of investment speculation, inner-city gentrification, housing construction boom, and displacement.

This contribution emerges out of my praxis and struggles as an Indigenous-mestiza migrant single mother militant attempting to make sense of and contest these violent frontier logics with my First Nation and other kin, and together co-create languages to speak on our own terms about the ongoing forms of decolonizing sovereignty and place-making that support our survival and allow us to breath, but also nurture the seeds of our flourishing and healing liberations (Motta, 2018). It responds therefore to the call by Porter and Yiftachel (180, 2019) to ‘foreground the subtle and multi-layered processes created by the spatial and political interaction of colonial, urban and Indigenous forces’, and centres the epistemological as central to this battle ground and liberatory struggle. It brings together my lineages in decolonial feminisms from the Americas with the lineages of First Nation scholars and scholars of settler colonialism from these and other settler-colonial contexts and puts these into dialogue with the enfleshed wisdoms of our (in)visible webs of decolonial reason and practices of homecoming dedicated to life, our lives well-lived here in the lands of the Awabakal.

The epistemological intimacies of the urban frontier: heteropatriarchal kinship and/as White possessive subjectivity

The settler city is portrayed as a symbol of modernity, progress, liberalism, and democracy, a hub for globalization and centre of international investment and migration. Yet it is an (in)visible/ized frontier of invasion which renders First Nations peoples as out of place. Frontiers are not merely built spatially as physical demarcations and concrete constructions but are forged subjectively and relationally through the (re)production of ‘white possessive’ subjectivity. As Geonpul scholar Aileen Moreton-Robinson argues such subjectivity is constructed in relation to the dangerous other(ed) Indigenous (non)subject. As she (2015, p. xi) elucidates, ‘[the white possessive] is an interrelated settler colonial liberal capitalist system that dually creates possessiveness through a process of perpetual Indigenous dispossession’ and ‘the possessive logics of patriarchal white sovereignty’. Here the state of Law is a state of relationships and subjectivities in which settler statecraft is dependent on settler kinmaking in which ‘the heteropatriarchal family [is] the locus of private property organisation’. (Morton, 2019, p. 444).

These kinship structures are premised on the production of Country as commodity and ‘the land like a dead body to be extracted from’ (Simpson, 2016, sec.2, par. 10). They are discursively legitimated through the creation of philosophies and discourse of natural right to/as private property (and the right to protect such property from the ‘heathen black threat’¹) as a universalizing denial and legitimization of violent dispossession of First Nations peoples and attacks against Indigenous forms of kinship and place-keeping. As Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate scholar Kim TallBear’s work teaches us (2016, 1) ‘ … Indigenous kinshipmaking produces mutual obligations whilst the elimination of those kinship structures enhances Indigenous dispossessions and disappearance’. The settler state and/as settler white possessive subjectivity becomes produced through the embodiment of affective registers of protection of property as kin, home, and private possessions. Responsibility for ongoing violence and dispossession are elided through their entanglement with stories and relationships of family, hearth, and home. As Morton (2019, pp. 447–448) explains

such settler logics of placid occupation, ownership and family are [not] new … [they produce] re-articulations of what it presents as common-sense facts, such as Indigenous peoples are criminals and/or not rightful owners of the land as well as whiteness equals innocent and rightful ownership through particular acts of possession’.

These particular acts of possession occur(ed) in relation to the disavowed and dispossessed. In Australia this was/is articulated with two clear strategies in relation to First Nations peoples: direct physical extermination and elimination through assimilation (Wolfe, 2006). In the case of NSW and in particular, Newcastle which was officially invaded and named as a settlement in 1804, the first strategy was enacted forcefully through European diseases which wiped out hundreds if not thousands of Awabakal people and then through direct terror (Heath, 1997). As one colonial author described an example of such atrocities:

A large number were driven into a swamp, and mounted police rode round and round and shot them off indiscriminately until they were all destroyed. When one of the police inquired to the officer if a return should be made of the killed, wounded there were none, all were destroyed … forty five heads were collected and boiled down for the sake of the skulls. (Threlkeld cited in Neil, 1998, p. 241)

The strategy of elimination by assimilation was personified in the figure of Lancelot Edward Threlkeld the founder of the first Aboriginal mission in the area in 1824. His belief in the civilizing mission of Christianity and its possibility to save the Australian Indigenous embodies the missionary violence in which, for example, ‘in his legal work, Threlkeld crafted a position for himself that was dependent on his exclusive right to speak on behalf of Aborigines’ (Johnston, 2012, p. 24). Such arguments were the forerunners of the large-scale separation of families and removal of First National children from kin that marked Aboriginal policies for much of the twentieth century (Heath, 1997: Maynard, 2015), and which arguably continue in new forms and refined justifications (Motta, 2016; Ramsay, 2017). Importantly, these debates mirror those of the Valladolid debates (1550–1551) some three hundred years prior and key in the foundational moments of modernity/coloniality in relation to the humanness of the Indians of the Americas (Brunstetter, 2010, pp. 412–413).²

Thus, the formation of White Settler Possessive subjectivity in relation to those othered builds a deeply embodied and physical relationality premised on negation and violent denial and on the belief in the right to speak for and about and intervene on the lands and bodies of First Nations and other racialized communities. This is rendered reasonable and civil through historical and contemporary stories in which colonization as the claiming of private property becomes connected to stories of innocent settler struggles for home and security. This of course both elides prior First Nation occupation and custodianship and the violences of dispossession that enable(d) the claiming and defence of such possession. These logics and processes of White possessive and indigenous racialized subjectification shape the intimacies that are entangled in the marking, defence, and contestation of the urban frontier.

As urban settlements became formalized so did laws and discourses of threat, illegitimacy, and removal mark official relationships between settler-subject towards Indigenous peoples. Discourse of the city continued to reproduce this out of placedness/unwelcomeness of First Nations peoples from the(ir) lands of the city, as this 1897 Newcastle Morning Herald editorial illustrates

A hundred years ago only a few wandering blacks maintained a precarious existence by hunting and fishing along the banks of the river. An aboriginal in our streets is now regarded as being strange to us, and almost less Australian than a Chinaman. (cited in Eklund, 2007, p. 135)

Dispossession from lands initially resulted in the formation of camps on the outskirts of growing cities and escape into bushland/or swampland as forms of survivance and removal from white presence and violence (Bryne, 2010, p. 118; Edmonds, 2010; see Maynard, 2015; Heath, 1997, in relation to the Newcastle area and surrounds). Despite attempts at segregation and Indigenous removal and invisibilization from the formal cityscape the frontier was visited by ‘marauding white men’ (Marikyn Lake cited in Edmonds, 2010, p. 139) who as Chief Protector Robinson (speaking in relation to Melbourne settlement) states ‘we are on the border and can do as we like’ (cited in Edmonds, 2010, p. 139). Threlkeld in the Newcastle region recorded hearing

the shrieks of girls, about 8 or 9 years of age, taken by force by the vile men of Newcastle. One [Aboriginal] man came to me with his head broken by the butt-end of a musket because he would not give up his wife. (cited in Maynard, 2015, pp. 40–41)

The contested racialized urban frontier was founded through brutalities particularly against Indigenous women and children, considered as flesh to do with as pleased without moral restraint. These historic foundations mark the psychic formation of (Australian) settler masculinity (Edmonds, 2010; Riggs & Augoustinos, 2005: Simpson, 2016) and form the hidden racialized and gendered underside of ‘modern’ urbanization.

Urban settlement frontiers were intimately intertwined with race and gender not only in terms of Indigenous women’s everyday experience of ‘often violent, sexualized contact with white men’ (Edmonds, 2010, p. 131) but in terms of the differential experience between white women and Indigenous women. As free settler white women increasingly arrived in the colonies and took up house and home as dutiful wives and mothers supporting the building of the nation, they often experienced new found freedoms. Their subjectification into this racially spatialized occupation was bound up with honour, chastity, respectability, and Christianity, a white womanhood to be protected from the ‘heathen black male’ and aghast at the ‘unfit black mother’ (Robinson-Moreton, 2000, p. 40; Motta, 2016, 2022b). White woman could wilfully (un)see and remain at ‘innocent’ distance from the violences in the building of the settlement and the brutalizations at its borders. Relegation of Indigenous peoples to liminal camps on the outskirts of settlements and then forced displacement to missions whilst white women were often relegated to the private spaces of the city, laid the groundwork for the formation of a white female subjectivity and belonging characterized by an affectivity of wilful innocence and a practise of racism characterized by ‘[its] censored, unnoticed aspect … a low profile for those not on the receiving end of it’ (Bryne, 2010, p. 104).

Such ‘wilful forgetfulness’, as Ridgeway (2001) names it, continues to shape White subjectivities, leaving traces of white anxiety premised on denial and disavowal of Indigenous sovereignty and the formation of the figure of the Black as a threat to the nation (understood as hearth, home, family, and property) (Riggs & Augoustinos, 2005, p. 468). The raced and gendered other becomes marked as having race and along with this a series of affective markers such as dirty, smelly, threatening, disgusting, uncouth, and criminal (Lawler, 2005). The cleanliness of the White settler vis-a-vis the squalor of the Aboriginal was a central organizing principle on missions and in national discourses of order versus savage criminality (Pels, 1997; Stoler, 2002, 2010), impacting the everyday embodied treatment of black families who were met with a ‘racism of disgust’ (Hook, 2004). Disgust is an emotion that draws boundaries against what is not like us; what cannot be like us, and as Fanon demonstrates this is embodied through ‘the writing of difference on the skin of the other’. Here as Riggs and Augoustinos (2005, p. 263) argue

… in the context of a nation build upon colonising desires … bodies come to matter precisely as markers of race that are used to shore up the colonising project … as a prerequisite for intelligibility within a nation that is founded upon racial difference as its source of legitimation.

Such logics are epistemological in that ‘the racialisation of bodies is the very ground for subjectification- [we] come into being as knowers/subjects or objects in the form of particular racialised bodies’ (Riggs & Augoustinos, 2005, p. 463). And to come into being as an unmarked settler subject is to be granted the right to name, intervene, judge, narrate, and author the nation; whereas to come into (non)being as a racialized other is to be denied such marks of modern subjectivity and humanness. Such logics of (non)being of the nation deny and seek to destroy other ways of coming to know, creating knowledge, forms of knowledge, and passing on wisdoms and lore between generations. They are premised on the story of epistemological terra nullius, or as Ridgeway has termed it ‘terra nullius of the mind’. This is viscerally embodied in Newcastle’s history through the eviction of one of the last remaining Indigenous camps in Newcastle to enable the building of the University in 1963 (Maynard, 2015, p. 46). The Lettered City is formed and reproduced in relation to the erasure and removal (or more recently assimilation) of the irrational, dangerous, and savage Other who is an impediment and block to modernity and progress and a threat to White reason and nationhood.

The post-industrial intimacies of the urban frontier and Covid-19

I did not write this black genealogy as a historical piece of critique. Rather, the time spent re-tracing the gendered and raced markings, contestations, and violations of the urban frontier through its onto-epistemological intimacies of White Right, Reason, and Possession against the non-being of blackness as unreason, savagery, disgust, and criminality is to lay the groundwork to understand the psychic structure of modern Australia. It is to centre its affective anxieties and fear, and its gaze that at once attempts to disappear blackness whilst at the same time re-produces our hyper-visibility to interventions which seek to tame, maim, contain, and ultimately eradicate and remove the dignity of life. This black genealogy is to help me, and my kin makes sense of the senseless and reveal the complexities and intimacies of White possessive settler subjectivity and how its coming into being is necessarily premised upon a relationality with the racialized and feminized other and her negation as a subject with reason and right. These embodied psychic structures of modern white possessive subjectivity upon which state, nation, and city are (re)produced as invasion continue to shape twenty-first Century post-industrial Newcastle as it navigates the post-Covid world.

Prior to and during Covid, the gendered and raced intimacies of the reproduction of the urban frontier as a site of negation and disavowal of First Nation’s people’s sovereignty and of the knowing-being of Black and POC immigrant migrant communities and refugees were manifest in the racialized geographies of the city and region. An increasingly gentrified inner city pushed out local community residents and sold off public housing and public support services such as youth centres and emergency housing. Rates of homelessness and housing precarity for women and children, and Indigenous women are on the rise (Nova, 2020) with government changes to funding of women’s refuges, through a process of privatizing and outsourcing to primarily religious organization resulting in closures of women’s refuges across the state (Hill & Cohen, 2015). Additionally, Newcastle and the Hunter region have some of the highest national rates of child removal of Indigenous, refugee, and ‘poor’ white families (Motta, 2016; Ramsay, 2017) and rates of incarceration in the state continue to increase, disproportionally against Indigenous peoples and women in particular, with the largest women’s prison opened in Windsor, NSW (between Sydney and Newcastle) in late 2020 (mid-pandemic) (Communities and Justice, 2020). Deaths in Custody are also a reality in the region, with the infamous case of Wiradjuri woman Rebecca Maher, mother, sister, auntie, and daughter who died due to police negligence in custody in 2016 at Maitland police station, just outside Newcastle (Hanshaw, 2020).

There are two moments that I would like to touch on which illustrate the intimacies of the raced and gendered urban frontier through the nexus of property, possession, disgust, and violent negation and disavowal. The first returns to the story with which this piece begins: that of a process of urban regeneration of a building which did not follow health and safety regulations and left my children and I without a home. Mid-pandemic, toxic dust enters our building. As mestiza single mother and one of the few private rentiers in the block, we had been consistently under surveillance from the Strata Committee ³with little incidents reported to our estate agent (not discussed with me)- from leaving shoes outside our door during three months of isolation to moving furniture to our balcony for one afternoon. A flat that was uninhabitable, a single raced mother with three children, leaving with one suitcase as we couldn’t breath. I am a long-term sufferer of asthma and my youngest son was needing inhalers. No one- estate agent, landlord, or Strata wanted to take responsibility. Instead of offering kindness, care, compassion, and taking responsibility, this is how a Strata Committee Member responded by reporting on us after we allowed her in to undertake their responsibility of sealing up (as it turned out unsuccessfully) the windows to prevent dust entry:

Yesterday I spent 2 hours in Unit ** sealing the windows as best as I could. It is worth noting that I had to stand in between broken slats of a child’s bed that was too broken to use (the mattress appeared to be in the living room), underneath there was so much that i had make a spot for one foot only & rest the other one on the broken bed to have anywhere to stand. In the master bedroom the blinds were broken & covered with dust (not just brick dust) & it was difficult to also make a space for the ladder. The Balcony room window had another mattress on the floor under the window that was quite filthy, nothing to do with dust & I was told I could stand on the mattress to fix the window, while there i accidentally uncovered an old dried-up bowl of leftover cereal, near the wall.

With all of that in mind it’s not easy for me to think of it as a particularly dust-free or hygienic apartment to start with, although granted this does not mean there wasn’t brick dust present.

In addition, I would like to mention that I have had to raise more issues about breaches of By-Laws with this tenant than any other resident in the building. You should have a record of the issues raised in the past twelve months.

There is also the question of a mat placed in the lift lobby that has been there for some time. I did indicate to her 3 times that it should be removed, the shoes have gone but the mat is still there. The By-laws state that all personal belongings must be kept inside units. It is unfair that the cleaner has to move the mat when she is vacuuming the lobby area. it looks untidy and lowers the tome of the building.

There is part of me that wants to explain, that searches for these emails, and copies the words, and feels shame;⁴ that you as reader will think this of me; that I need to explain and come to account in registers of (in)visibility/hyper-visibility in which I and my children are always-already suspicious and dirty, unfit and ugly. Must I prove how much we do care, how I am friends with the cleaner; how I set up from social isolation the local mutual aid collective; how we were moving things because of the construction dust; how you know all teenagers leave cereal under the bed!

Do you believe them too? Do you see me through that racialized gaze that already reads me as the unfit black mother? Am I disgusting to you? As Bryne (2010, p. 118) describes in relation to Australian Aboriginal peoples first encounters with colonizers and which speaks to this experience ‘they speak of the effect of living under this disapproving gaze on a daily basis and what this does to you’ (see also Ahmed, 1999 for the harms of ‘passing’). I trusted a white female property owner, with the authority of a role on the Strata Committee to enter into our home and I-we were met with betrayal and a racism of disgust (Lawler, 2005). She saw things which otherwise would have remained unnoticed or smiled at through the knowing of having children, as signs of incivility, filth, squalor, and lack. Investments of power in these intimate violences of the urban frontier result in visibility as a ‘regime of looking that thrives on “major” and “minor” details in order to shore up ones’ symbolic position’ (Seshadri-Crooks, 2000, 2) and legitimize the objectification of the mestiza indigenous women and children. This regime of looking was weaponized to not only not take responsibility for our well-being and safety but to attempt to force our eviction. This encounter, like the many thousands that comprise the foundations and reproduction of modern Australia (re)produce the predication of white belonging on the erasure and removal of blackness and Indigenous forms of kinship making not premised on heteropatriarchy (Morton, 2019; Simpson, 2016).

The second colonial encounter which illustrates the violent intimacies of the (re)production of the urban frontier foregrounds how the spatial regime of Australia was always and remains, to borrow Michael Taussig’s (1991) a ‘nervous system’ in which ‘racial anxiety is arguably most intense and acute when the separating spaces reduces to zero- when black and white bodies actually touch’ (Bryne, 2010, p. 104). As a result of the increasing privatization and outsourcing of emergency accommodation, commercial hoteliers have been awarded contracts for emergency housing for women and children fleeing domestic violence and other vulnerable subjects facing homelessness (Lisa Harnum Foundation, 2021). One such contract was awarded to a central Newcastle hotel; in which hen party groups there for weekend celebrations would be side by side with construction workers in town for the week’s work and families in emergency accommodation. There are no support services in place, water soaks the carpets in many rooms when it rains, and there are no kitchen facilities, only vending machines with sweets, energy drinks, and crisps/chips for sale at inflated prices. There would be a steady stream of mothers and children, who we joined for the month we lived there, leaving the hotel in an early morning to go to school and returning in the late afternoon/evening with bags, buggies, and children in tow.

A local private residents group organized a petition to end emergency accommodation at this site because it was argued that residents receiving emergency accommodation brought criminality and other unseemly behaviours to the area. Here again the frontier is drawn, and all other(ed) subjects are objectified into re-presentations of criminality, disorder, disease, and general out-of-placedness in the modern urban chic inner city suburbs (Noble, 2005). As Hampton (2019, p. 374) argues ‘as neoliberal policies and practices of privatization and corporatization advance local, national and international social economic inequities and hierarchies are exacerbated and further entrenched’. In this encounter neoliberalism meets and reinscribes settler colonial (urban) frontier making of racialized spatialities and white possessive subjectivities, and as Hampton (2019, p. 374) continues ‘the result is often increased tensions regarding who belongs where, who owns what, and who is and should be entitled to … space and resources’. Forced relegation to the liminal cracks and edges of the city marks the ongoing brutalization of non-heteropatriarchal kinship practise through fragmentation, shaming, exclusion, the undercutting of the capacities to feed and safely house women and children and the disavowal of First Nation sovereignty that was never ceded. Breaking connections to kin and country and destroying the Indigenous woman as mother who is central to the reproduction of community and wisdoms and lore, has always been central to the logics and rationalities of (settler)-coloniality (Motta, 2016, 2018; Simpson, 2016).

Part two: Breathing life

Your love should not be dedicated to the nation state, it should be dedicated to your relatives. (Kim TallBear, 2020)

#BLM, indigenous sovereignty and reoccupying-decolonizing the city

A Black Lives Matter (BLM) matter rally was organized for July 2020 in Mulubinba-Newcastle. Two of the co-organizers Wiradjuri woman Taylah Gray and Gomeroi, Dunghutti and Biripi woman Tameeka Tighe of Fighting in Solidarity Towards Treaties (FISTT) successfully challenged a prohibition order sought by the NSW Commissioner of Police, regarding the protest. Commissioner of Police v Gray was part of a continued series of legal challenges as ‘prohibition orders’ sought by the NSW Commissioner of Police that in the name of the Covid-19 pandemic, attempted to stifle protests and silence Indigenous, POC and other voices challenging systematic police brutality and violence. FISTT’s victory meant that the BLM protest went ahead as planned.

At the protest/celebration Taylah read out a 10-point plan of action which included abolishing youth prisons and redistributing their funding to social services, opening an independent inquiry into black deaths in custody, abolishing elements of police Powers and Responsibilities legislation, raising the age of criminal responsibility from 10 to 14, and decriminalizing drugs. She also demanded that you ‘Allow our sovereign governance to operate concurrently with the western system. Acknowledge this’ (Criminal & Solicitors, 2020). Tameeka spoke of the 437 indigenous people that have died in custody since the 1991 Royal Commission into Black Deaths in Custody and continued:

But I want to say they’re not the only black deaths in custody. In 1831 Lachlan Macquarie declared martial law on our people, and we became prisoners of war in our own country. Every black death in this country is a black death in custody. Every one of them. Every black death in this country is a black death in custody, because Australia is a f—ing crime scene (Parris, 2020).

My elder daughter and I were welcomed to speak; she spoke of her vulnerabilities as an Indigenous young woman on the street, struggling with the heritages of trauma which criss-cross her life, of the violent criminalization of mental health and systemic inter-generational trauma, of the violences to her body and disavowal of her sacred territories of life-giving creativity. I spoke too; sharing a poem ‘I teach my children’; speaking the everyday traumas of living in a ‘f***ing crime scene’ as Tameeka would put it and surviving an everyday (in)visibilized war as a mestiza-Indigenous single mother.

I teach my children

I teach my children to trust their beating hearts

I teach my children to look for the other black kid in the class

I teach my children to know when to speak and when to keep quiet

I teach my children that when we are stopped and questioned to stay calm

hold it in

I teach my children our (m)other tongue so we might hablar en secreto cuando hay gente mirandonos con los ojos lllenos de odio

I teach my children our histories and songs

I teach my children when they are marked down and ignored for this in school to trust their beating hearts

I teach my children the rules of engagement with White Institutions, to stay calm

hold it in

I teach my children to feel the ancestors walk beside them

I teach my children how and why it can be scary in the daytime too

I teach my children it is not their fault when the bus doesn’t stop for them, the teacher ignores them, the security guard checks our bags, again

I teach my children why our experience makes no sense to peers and teachers and other supposed guides.

I teach my children to allow the grief amongst us where it is safe but not too loud, so the neighbour doesn’t call FACS or the cops

I teach my children that their anger is righteous

I teach my children to know their names and not feel afraid to correct others, for a name has power

I teach my children what I know about death and life.

I teach my children to recognise the lies

I teach my children as much as I damn can to not internalise those lies

I teach my children to find their anchor amongst the pain.

I teach my children to feel into the immenseness of their power, despite what They say.

But what do I teach my children when of a night?

I cannot sleep and pace

knowing they have her, knowing she is unwell

praying she is not the next Ms Dhu

What do I teach my children

when the call comes

that they beat her up, late at night, no one looking

as she hid so as not be be r**** again.

What do I teach my children

of the loss of their auntie Karen

head smashed to the floor by riot cops

dead alone at 39.

What do I teach my children

when hermanas

recount otra perdida

de otra compañera arrastrada desde su cama a su muerte.

What do I teach my children then?

Sara C. Motta

All Power to the sisters and brothers murdered, abused and denigrated by the cops and White Institutions.

This re-occupation of the urban place embodied a rupturing in the registers of visibility of racialized spatiality and white possessive belonging. Bla(c)k women and men spoke of their experiences of police brutality, forced removal from buildings and sidewalks, and state-sanctioned murder of kin. Trauma and survivance came into site/sight, flooding the gentrified non-spaces of the inner city. Sisters and brothers shared stories and poems, and danced sacred dance, appearing on their own terms and in their own languages of the political. This is a reclaiming of the urban space as Country, as unceded lands, and a speaking of the violences of disavowal and systemic racialized and gendered genocide which shape modern Australian urban space-making. As Levins Morales (1998, p. 3) explains

excavating and revealing the truth about my [our] experiences of abuse, and the sense of empowerment and release that process brought me, was the same process as excavating and telling the truth about the centuries of invasion, enslavement, patriarchal rule, accommodation, collaboration and resistance. The healing came from the same source.

This revealing of truth is not only an ontological place-making as being, as a revealing of the absent-presence that remains, but it is epistemological medicine-making. It is a medicine-making as healing that reclaims our inner and ancestral wisdoms and practices, and enfleshes forms of (un)learning and recognition through multiple collective and inter-generational pedagogies and practices. It is a re-rooting into unceded lands, a re-rooting into dignified being and knowing, a re-turn to the sacred co-responsibility to Country and Kin within and without, as body and land.

Plant wisdoms and reclaiming non-heteropatriarchal registers of care and kinship

We can’t just focus on surviving this war. We have to foster flourishing, nurture practices of Indigenous sovereignty that are already present, and bring to present forms of kinship premised on other relationalities of care, reciprocity, and love. One of the ways a group of inter-cultural women in Mulubinba and beyond are fostering flourishing and a reclaiming of inner and outer territories of being and knowing and the safety of belonging is through re-membering plant wisdoms and ancestral medicinal practices (Midnight, n.d.; Kimmerer, 2020 This is consciously and intentionally committed in a way that ruptures heteropatriarchal relationships of care and rather braids together forms of sisterhood across home, place, language, and culture (Gonzalez, Motta, and Sepalla, 2023).

Some of us are far away from our ancestral lands and so we must root into a belonging in these lands and learn of the plants (both native and non-native) which inhabit the Country that holds us. Following Levins Morales (1998) and her call for a politics of integrity and healing wholeness ‘[this] means reconnecting with all our grandmothers, black and white, to tell their stories and connect with their wisdoms across time’. We learn together and from many sources, lineages, and from raced and feminized medicine about the properties and medicines of plants and herbs; how to develop plant communication; how to meet with the ancestors in deep time and receive messages of guidance and support; how to grow and tend urban rebellious gardens in the small balconies, re-occupied lands, shared living spaces that we inhabit.

I sit here as a I write with a cup of skull cap, oat straw, and lavender infused tea; a tea for trauma, a medicine drink that calms nervous system overdrive and adrenal fatigue caused by the ongoing systemic trauma, that eases the aching body and muscles in shoulder and hips; parts of the body that carry too much weight; the weight of passing and surviving. I pour a small cup with tenderness for my daughter in recovery who tentatively walks an edge of the planting of seeds of healing marked by a ritual to the new moon. Vinegars for blood and fatigue; tinctures for healing hearts wracked with grief shared with open hands and listening hearts across borders and separations. I share these reflections with two sisters; ask where the thread is and am reminded how there is no linear thread to this story. It is multiple and messy, a journey in the making. There are so many drops of re-membering and magic from our grandmothers and mothers who so often forgot themselves in the responsibilities of sacrificial mother or raped grandmother, displaced in their own lands or exiled far away, or settlers themselves complicit in these racialized markings that we now contest in a decolonized braiding of kin (Motta, 2018, 2021, 2022b).

There is recovery in these growings and learnings and re-memberings; a recovery of self-worth, for one of the most damaging impacts of heteropatriarchal (settler) coloniality is our internalization of the branding on the skin; the thoughts and embodiments that reinforce that we are not loveable, that it is our fault, that we are unworthy (Motta, 2018; Anzaldua, 2015, 2009). There is a healing too in the intergenerational coming together of raced and feminized women who share diverse and divergent stories and come to reconciliation in their sharing and mutual caring and loving that breaks the tight constraints of White kinship structures. There is a strengthening of our minds, bodies, and hearts, a readiness for the ongoing realities of attempting to (not be killed by) and live and breathe deeply and freely in the liminal spaces of at once appearing as racialized and feminized non-being and at the same time be-coming into be-ing knowing otherwise. There is a trusting that we are indeed, together, in common, the ones that we have been waiting for (Motta, 2013).

I often pass on the train when visiting my daughter’s mangrove swamps that sit at an estuary entrance. I think that what we are stitching together is like the mangrove and her swamp with its unruly roots, invisible to the passing possessive eye, yet beneath the surface a cacophony of connections without one centre, teaming with life, able to survive harsh conditions, breathing in fresh and salt water and through the water and the air. This is a liminal space that does not need to be seen by the racializing gaze to be nurturing life. In the colonizer imagination swamps as Penelope Edmonds (2010, p. 143) describes ‘have been typically viewed as liminal, dystopian spaces, not picturesque, or useful, but wasteland … black waters  …  horrific places, associated with death and disease’. For First Nations peoples and Awabakal nations of Mulubinba and arounds, swamps were of course a place of plenitude, kin making and place guardianship. Thus, there is something more to the metaphor of mangrove swamps; it is part of a repertoire of insurgent and decolonizing re-membering and presence of other histories of survivance and existence (Motta, 2022a). We are honouring our foremothers and forefathers of First Nation’s peoples of these lands, of Awabakal ancestors who survived in the mangrove swamps, for mangrove swamps were ‘nervous spaces not yet property’ and ‘gaps in the grid’ (Edmonds, 2010, p. 134) of invasion and white possession.

Sanctuary homeplace

If the heart of heteropatriarchal settler coloniality is to displace us from belonging, kin, and Country and exile us from ourselves, each other and the wisdoms of the old ones and the broader cosmos, then perhaps one of the most radical and resistant acts we can embody of suvivance and flourishing is the (re)creation of homeplace and kinship beyond these constraints and violences.

Our vision here is to co-create a homeplace of sanctuary for survivors and led by survivors of the violences that criss cross the racialized and gendered body politic of Modern (Australia). A sanctuary place for 5–6 families, family understood in decolonizing/Indigenous sense of kin-making and nurturing, with a safe place for a family/woman in recovery or escape from violence and a space for radical education with and as part of our communities. We are few and scattered, juggling multiple time pressures and surviving and trying to flourish despite the reality of ongoing traumas and the (re)production of the urban frontier in the intimacies of our everyday lives.

We are dialoguing and sharing these practices of healing medicines, shared food, and shared care of our young ones, in and outside and beyond the University, before and beyond the Covid-19 pandemic, developing histories of co-organizing of gatherings and other attempts to make collective meaning and prefigurative enfleshments and enmeshments otherwise. We are doing our own research about levels of gendered and raced dispossession, violences (including state and carceral), houselessness, and housing precarity. We are reaching out to ally lawyers and economists to help us put together a proposal for our project that can come into dialogue with our stories. It is early days yet ancient, are these desires and steps towards safety and sanctuary.

Amongst this herstory making and relationship nurturing something that has stood out is the unexpected encounters with unexpected subjects who also, in complex and multi-dimensional ways, exist in liminal spaces of (non)belonging. We have run workshops around Rebellious Bodies (https://communiversitysite.wordpress.com/about/), gatherings to Politicise Precarities, a radical education course, ‘The Body Politic’ (Motta, 2018), and forged a mother-scholar collective (Motta & Daley, forthcoming). Throughout all these encounters we have meshed together tenderly and tentatively answers to the question ‘What does it mean to radically trust in others and ourselves when we have been living in the fear of attack, lack, and loss that underpins the cosmology of heteropatriarchal (settler) coloniality?’

We are co-weaving enfleshed answers to Bryne’s (2010, p. 111) question ‘On what basis do you continue to exist inside the grid of your own dispossession?’. These questions have taken us to the heart of private property, extractive logics, dualisms between Madre Tierra and the Human, the meaning of humanness itself, the territories of our bodies and Country as sites of knowing-otherwise and healing prefigurations, and the forms of political subjectivity and practices of knowing and nature of wisdoms that have been elided and systematically denigrated since the emergence of modernity/coloniality in the 1500s.

Conclusion

In this piece I foreground how a black genealogy of the virus that seeks to take away our breath and leave us for dead, cannot begin at the Covid-19 watershed, for the virus of heteropatriarchal (settler) coloniality is the virus that seeks (re)produce our epistemological and social death as raced and feminized subjects and communities. Thus, my genealogy begins from the herstories and presents/ce of the ancient lands of so-called Modern Australia.

I have sought to bring meaning to individual and collective raced and gendered experiences of the intimacies of the urban frontier and its originary and on-going logics of racialization as disavowal of Indigenous sovereignty, dehumanization as epistemological death and a racism of disgust founded upon White settler subjectivities and the heteropatriarchal rigidities of hearth, property, and kin. In the marking and (re)making of this intimate frontier is (re)produced (not without resistance and rebellion) a register of visibility into which the Indigenous/Bla(c)k/POC (m)other is hypervisibilized as threat, criminality, and disgusting object and legitimately subject to violent yet ‘wilfully innocent’ interventions that reproduce exile, denial of the dignity of life and invisibility of the raced (m)other for the wisdom womyn that she is.

This epistemological medicine-making foregrounds how the territories of the urban remain unceded and its logics and (ir)rationalities unable to contain or extinguish other relationships and subjects of kinship-making and place-guardianship. These relationships of care and love (m)otherwise foreground the reclaiming and re-membering of all our grandmothers healing wisdoms and a collective practise of becoming visible on our own terms and through our own languages, and thus the active refusal of these violent frontiers of Right, Reason, Property, and Kinship. It ends/begins with the planting of the seeds of a sanctuary homeplace in sisterhood with the enfleshed-vision of Indigenous Sovereignty over these lands.

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sara C. Motta

Sara C. Motta is a proud Indigenous-Mestiza of Colombia Chibcha/Muisca, Eastern European Jewish and Celtic lineages currently living, loving and re-existiendo on the unceded lands of the Awabakal and Worimi peoples, NSW, so-called Australia. She is mother curandera, poet, political philosopher, popular educator, and Associate Professor at the University of Newcastle, NSW. Sara has worked for over two decades with raced and feminized kin in resistance/re-existencias in, against and beyond heteronormative capitalist-coloniality in Europe, Latin America, and Australia and has published widely in academic and activist-community outlets. Her latest book Liminal Subjects: Weaving (Our) Liberation (Rowman and Littlefield) was the winner of the 2020 best Feminist Book, International Studies Associate (ISA).

Notes

1 In the case of Newcastle, John Laurio Platt is recorded as the first free settler in the Lower Hunter River area. On 21 August 1821 he received a grant of some 2000 acres which was described as being on the Hunter River of Newcastle. Platt’s land covered an area which includes the now disbanded BHP site and also the Callaghan Campus of the University of Newcastle. This land encompassed a large slice of prime Pambalang land taken without consent or consideration. Platt went to great lengths to demonstrate how he punished local Aborigines for what he interpreted as wrongs against his property. Platt’s method of control was taken up by many of his contemporaries (Maynard, 2015, p. 39). Or as Threlkeld recorded the story of an Aboriginal man who ‘was shot while attempting to steal some corn. The farmer, in an attempt to dissuade other Aboriginal people from theft, hung the body from a branch of a nearby tree with a corncob stuck in the lifeless mouth. It was a case of using a human scarecrow’ (Niel, 1998, 242).

2 These debates occurred principally between Juan Gines de Sepulveda and Bartolomé de las Casas as regards the ‘humanness of the Indians’ of the Americas. Sepulveda did not believe the Indigenous to be human and therefore they could be justifiable physically exterminated; de las Casas believed they could be humanized ‘once they cease to be culturally different’ or in other words once the ‘Indian is removed from the man (Brunstetter, 2010).

3 The Strata Committee is an elected group of owners or owners' nominees responsible for assisting the Owners Corporation in the day-to-day management of the strata scheme subject to the provisions of the Strata Schemes Management Act 2015, Regulations 2016 and other legislation. For further information see https://www.netstrata.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2017-A-Guide-to-serving-on-a-Strata-Committee.pdf for further details.

4 I note something curious here, that I invite you/us to dwell with and in. One of the reviewers of this piece felt really uncomfortable for me with this section; like I might well be shamed by the gaze of a White readership and that perhaps I might want to remove this section or elements of this email. I replied that I need to keep it in there; that I trust; not a trust that this will be read through recognition and black rage/love but that I am no longer scared of the misnaming or systematic and systematized acts of shaming. I refuse them and I invite you to come to the frontline and refuse them with us whatever your positionality may be in relation to the markings of the epistemological intimacies of the urban frontier.