SCARRED TREES AND BECOMING-WITNESS

Abstract

What happens when the landscape looks back? How is it that the landscape sees? This essay goes in search of material-semiotic signs of Australian Indigenous Country, overlooked and actively unseen through the history and enduring violence of European invasion. Whether in the form of eel traps, fishing weirs, remnants of stone huts, scarred trees, or else discovered in the notebook sketches of early explorers who wondered at the park-like composition of the landscape they were newly encountering, such evidence offers testimony to an Indigenous environmental knowledge we are in great need of today, grappling as we are with the concatenating effects of the climate crisis. The acknowledgement of sites of Indigenous significance across Australia, often threatened by mining interests and infrastructural projects, is discussed here in relation to the cultural and ritual artefact that is the scarred tree. This article explores the entangled act of witnessing via the more-than-human becomings of the landscape, or what Indigenous custodians call “Country,” and through the protean figure of the becoming-witness. Drawing on the theories of feminist ethnographers and philosophers while paying crucial heed to the voices of Indigenous scholars, I situate myself as a non-Indigenous scholar between the fields of architecture and philosophy. Venturing into the deceptively mundane suburban hinterlands of Melbourne, Australia in search of scarred trees, I attempt to broach a careful dialogue between Indigenous and non-Indigenous modes of what Deborah Bird Rose and Thom van Dooren call “Storying” as a process of learning with Country.

Keywords:

• scarred trees
• becoming-witness
• testimonial landscape
• storytelling

disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 I acknowledge the traditional custodians upon whose unceded land I live and work, the Wurundjeri peoples of the Kulin Nation. I pay my respects to their elders, past, present, and emerging, and thank them for the embodied knowledge that continues to be passed down to Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. What I attempt here is indebted to them. I thank the editors Michael Richardson and Magdalena Zolkos for their kind guidance and invaluable feedback. I also thank Frank Burridge for reading an early version of the essay.

2 The Tree School was a collaborative initiative set up at MADA (Monash Art Design and Architecture), Monash University between 11 and 23 March 2021. It forms part of a suite of similar Tree Schools conceived by architects Sandi Hilal and Alessandro Petti. This instantiation was coordinated by Yorta Yorta and Woiwurrung artist, organiser, and educator Moorina Bonini. The curriculum was further developed with N’arweet Caroline Briggs, founder of the Boon Wurrung Foundation and Brian Martin of the Wominjeka Djeembana Indigenous Research Lab, Monash University. The Tree School formed part of the exhibition Tree Story, curated by Charlotte Day with Brian Martin at MUMA (Monash University Museum of Art), 6 February–10 April 2021. I visited the Tree School on 20 March 2021 when the following questions were being asked: how do you acknowledge and engage with the Traditional Owners of the Country in which you live and work? And: how do you learn? Who do you learn from?