Re-membering Weather Relations: Urban Environments in and as Country

ABSTRACT

In so-called Australia, there is growing engagement with cities and towns as spaces of ongoing Indigenous presence and as Indigenous Country. In this paper, led by Gumbaynggirr Custodian Uncle Bud Marshall, we engage with urban(ising) environments through weather, memories and ancestral presences; re-membering weather's agencies, such as winds and seasons, as Country. Through more-than-human relationships, and our places within them, we attend to the ways that weathery presences call urban scholars and practitioners to respond to the fact that no place in Australia, no matter how colonised or urbanised, exists outside of, or separate to, Aboriginal relational ontologies and sovereignties.

摘要

在所谓的澳大利亚，人们越来越多地将城市和城镇作为原住民持续存在的空间和原住民国家。在本文中，在Gumbaynggirr监护人Bud Marshall叔叔的带领下，我们通过天气、记忆和祖先的存在与城市环境接触；重新记忆天气的机构，如风和季节，作为国家。通过超越人类的关系，以及我们在其中的位置，我们注意到天气的存在要求城市学者和实践者回应这样一个事实：澳大利亚的任何地方，无论如何被殖民化或城市化，都不存在于原住民关系本体和主权之外，或与之分离。

KEYWORDS:

• Arts-based practice
• Indigenous methodologies
• weather
• urban geographies
• settler-colonialism
• Aboriginal-led research

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to acknowledge Gumbaynggirr, Awabakal, and Worimi Countries where they live and work. Thank you to Nick Warfield for his work on the Uncle Benjie sculpture and to organisers of the 10th State of Australasian Cities National Conference where this paper was first presented. Also, thanks to Wendy Steele for her support of this paper through the conference and publication process.

Disclosure Statement

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

Notes

1 Always, and in our work together, Lara and Sarah must reckon with their complicity as yirraali and the undue benefits they accrue from their positions in relation to ongoing colonisation, the logics and laws of white possessive relations in Australia (Moreton-Robinson 2015), and colonial-capitalist practices of extraction. They are trying to unlearn their own whiteness, possessive and extractive logics and learn to be in respectful relationship with Gumbaynggirr and Aboriginal sovereignties. This is a life-long and intergenerational change that must be simultaneously forward and backward facing in time, accounting for the ways that past, present and future are co-becoming in a Gumbaynggirr relational ontology and past colonial injuries are felt and continue in the present.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Australian Research Council [grant number FT160100353, LP200201066].