Intimacy and Distance: Indigenous Relationships to Country in Northern Australia

ABSTRACT

Among the strategies employed by colonial authorities to ‘manage’ Indigenous people, forced removal and centralisation to townships was a deliberate attempt to fragment relationships to home territories. For Yanyuwa, an Indigenous group in northern Australia, this meant being removed from their saltwater ‘country’ in the Gulf of Carpentaria and resettled 60 km inland. Despite this violent act Yanyuwa saltwater identity has remained strong. Whilst enduring, it has however undergone changes in the way relationships to place are established and maintained. Travelling through saltwater country with younger and middle generation Yanyuwa has revealed that sometimes relationships to place are marked by conditions of fear, nervousness and uncertainty. Not classically held to be dispositions of a ‘proper’ Indigenous person, these reveal that states of intimacy require time and certain conditions to flourish. So too, distance, signalled by fear and uncertainty, is a relational state that defines a vitally important relationship with country.

KEYWORDS:

• Indigenous Australia
• place
• fear
• uncertainty
• cultural wounding
• healing

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Country’ is a term used by many Indigenous Australian groups to refer to their homelands as made up of land, sea, bodies of water, kin and resources. Rose (2014: 435) describes it as an ‘Aboriginal English term’, an

area associated with a human social group, and with all the plants, animals, landforms, waters, songlines, and sacred sites within its domain. It is homeland in the mode of kinship: the enduring bonds of solidarity that mark relationships between human and animal kin also mark the relationships between creatures and their country.

2 The NTER (in 2007) was a moral panic, induced by the Australian federal government as they staged a militarised, political and economic intervention into Indigenous remote community life in the Northern Territory. It was a federal response to allegations of sexual abuse involving children in Aboriginal communities, which involved the suspension of the Australian Racial Discrimination Act. The widespread effects of the response were felt in Borroloola and elsewhere in the form of welfare quarantining, mandatory health checks for children, abolishment of government funded community development employment programmes and compulsory acquisition of Aboriginal lands (see Altman & Hinkson 2009; Adam 2010). There remain deeply polarised views among Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians as to the merit of this event.

3 This project was inaugurated in 2007 by the Yanyuwa community. It involves the use of animation to re-present Indigenous narratives and songlines (see Kearney et al. 2012). The project is the result of over 30 years of Yanyuwa cultural recordings with anthropologist John Bradley.

4 ‘The Great Chain of Being’ was a theological and hierarchical attempt to explain life. It was readily used by Darwinists to claim an inevitable demise for Aboriginal people in Australia (see McGregor 1997).