Higher education towards the bardo: decolonising origin stories and place relations

ABSTRACT

The continued erasure of place and politics from modernity’s education systems and disciplinary knowledges perpetuates racialised and ecological injustices and extractive relations. In this paper I affirm the necessity of using evolving methods of critical place inquiry and relocalisation in higher education to redress these erasures. I illustrate an approach which centres the geopolitical (place and politics entangled) in a critical, inventive and relocalising inquiry enacted on sites of the gold rush on Dja Dja Wurrung Country, Australia. This brings to notice and questions the relations of mining with the origin stories and narratives of the state and its education institutions. I draw attention to the proposition that higher education is moving towards a transitional space, the bardo, requiring the death of its old forms and preparing the ground for new forms to grow, and point to possibilities for supporting the death of higher education as we know it.

KEYWORDS:

• Critical place inquiry
• decolonising higher education
• extractivism
• Australian geopolitics
• hospicing modernity

Introduction

This paper is intended as a contribution to the circulation of stories shared between educators who are concerned with creating possibilities for decolonial invention and new solidarities within their roles in higher education. It explores a kind of geopolitical place inquiry suggested as useful for enacting critical investigations of the sites which universities occupy and have helped to colonise, and for inventive re-connection with, and re-storying of these places. I argue that mining sites are necessary foci for geopolitical learning and decolonial reimagining in higher education as mining has been integral to the global intellectual, material, and political practices of colonial-modernity as well as to the ongoing existence of its education institutions (Yusoff 2018). The form of geopolitical inquiry proposed draws on critical place inquiry (McCoy, Tuck, and McKenzie 2016) and on McKittrick’s (2021, 58) interdisciplinary, intertextual, creative ways of restorying the world, to unsettle ‘suffocating and dismal and insular’ colonial logics. Through this approach I interrogate colonial gold rush master narratives and origin stories as particular kinds of ‘signs’ (Povinelli 2016) or readings of places, on Dja Dja Wurrung Country in Victoria, Australia, the self-named ‘education state’. I describe a critical reading together of geopolitical theory, gold industry public websites, historical and poetic gold mining accounts, and public education sources of gold rush knowledge including local Victorian gold rush museums, and the Australian Broadcasting Commission. I then move to an embodied engagement with Dja Dja Wurrung Country and its materiality, geology, politics, hauntings and relations, seeking alternative stories and ways of knowing this place, and engagement with its ‘signs’ (Povinelli 2016). Last I offer thoughts drawn from the inquiry about how educators within higher education might take or make space and opportunity for decolonial invention, possibility and new solidarities. I consider the proposition that these actions should be understood to be transitional moves, as, drawing on de Oliveira (2021), the successful decolonisation of higher education likely means the death of higher education as we know it.

Place and politics: phantoms in higher education

Traditional higher education has been a major pillar of the overarching arrangements of modernity, its colonial and extractive habits of being and knowledge systems (Stein 2019). These legitimise epistemologies that separate, quantify and determine categories of life and being (McKittrick 2022; Yusoff 2018) as part of a regime justifying objectification and instrumentalization for accumulation and hoarding of knowledge, property, resources, wealth, privilege, opportunity, pleasure and power. The limitations and flaws of this knowledge system are becoming more and more self-evident, in particular in terms of the divisions of categories of being and the conflict it naturalises, and the violence it authorises towards non-white and non-human beings (Da Silva 2016).

Knowledge production in this context engineers certainties, objective descriptions, and moralistic prescriptions, reflecting the compulsion to catalogue reality in its entirety (de Oliveira 2021; Da Silva 2016). Higher education supports the legitimization of this knowledge, including, among other things, by reproducing knowledge and learning which are stripped of their relationships with place. While we may feel fondness for our special places, the objectification, abstraction, and lack of relationality characteristic of higher education’s forms of knowledge undermine the capacity to experience reciprocal ecological care and community, or place kinship. Our connection with place is ephemeral, like an attachment to a phantom limb. As Simone Weil (1949/2001) argued, an absence of rootedness in place fails to provide any sense of historical context in which injustices can be perceived and understood, belonging can be manifest and valued, and ethical responsibilities can be reflected on.

Place is entangled in a broader constellation of erasures of traditional disciplinary knowledges. Disciplines also function and retain their authority by the erasure of their own relations with political economies and with the more-than-human bodies that these mark and govern (McKittrick 2015). The discipline of geology is a good example. Western geology has produced tools and processes for understanding the workings of material parts of the earth, and of how they have developed over time (Bjornerud 2018). But the entanglement of the knowledge and practices of geology with extractive economies and imperial and colonial agendas is largely absent from its educative discourse (Yusoff 2018). In their assumed universalism, scientism and colonialism bestow geology supremacy as a way of knowing the earth, erasing, for example, Indigenous knowledge of earth and rock, including their deep time histories, intelligence and spirit as part of Country (Bawaka Country et al. 2020).

Assumptions about ontological and epistemological individuality; objectively distinct and separate categories of being and knowledge (Da Silva 2016), continue to be obstructions for universities in understanding and meaningfully responding to the essential inter-relationality of the crises of modernity. For example, siloed disciplinary knowledge, abstraction of knowledge from place, and erasure of politics and oppression from knowledge and from place are highlighted in Yusoff’s critique of geology as a colonising construct used to ‘naturalize (and thus neutralize) the theft of extraction’ (Yusoff 2018, 12). This has contributed to the blinkering of universities to the interdependence of the logics of ecological devastation and the machinations of racial capitalism (Stein and Hare 2023).

For those who work in higher education institutions with genuine will to contribute to transforming the conditions that underlie the crises of modernity, confronting their institutions’ severances and blindspots in relation to place, politics and injustice is necessary. However, the notion that learning about historical colonial violence will alone create change is misguided. McKittrick (2021, para. 50) voices the need for academics to recognise higher education as a context of damaging colonial-capitalist reproduction, but also as a site of invention, possibility and new solidarities ‘that requires finding within it, and sometimes sharing (through a story or a theory or a conversation or a silence) methodologies and techniques that are invested in making this world bearable’. This paper represents such an attempt at sharing.

An important step is for educators to become attentive and responsive to the phantoms of their own workplaces, including the places and land (the geo) and the power relations, histories, hierarchies, and injustices (the political) that have been erased from sight. Bringing these concerns together, this paper explores an enactment of geopolitical place inquiry emphasising critical investigations of the sites which universities occupy and have helped to colonise, and inventive re-connection with, and re-storying of these places. Australia’s love affair with mining, established and imprinted in its gold rush origin stories, presents an important example of how extractive thinking insidiously permeates the fabric of place and culture. As mining has supported colonisation, wealth and the establishment of education institutions globally, mining sites are necessary foci for geopolitical learning and decolonial reimagining in higher education. The universities in the state of Victoria were established off the back of its 1850s gold rush. One; La Trobe University, is named for the lieutenant-governor of the state during the gold rush, responsible for the introduction of the mining license fee. Deakin University is named for Alfred Deakin, the son of an immigrant prospector during the gold rush. Deakin became minister of the goldfields seat of Ballarat in Australia’s first federal election and then the second Australian Prime Minister (National Museum of Australia 2024). Three of the largest universities in the state have extensive historical and current mining industry relationships (for example, see Monash University 2021; University of Melbourne 2024; Deakin University 2024). Deeply unequal power relations for more-than-human entities have unfolded from this history of mining in Victoria and are perpetuated in education and public discourse and resources, as discussed later.

Geopolitical place inquiry in higher education

The approach to geopolitical place inquiry explored here is drawn from evolving forms of critical and decolonial theory that hold as aims the deconstruction of, as well reimagining, resisting and escaping from, the habits of thought, being, relationality and storying of extractivist colonial-modernity. This perspective acknowledges the demands of McCoy, Tuck, and McKenzie (2016) who argue that traditional forms of place based education have reproduced many of the same problematic assumptions and imperatives of settler colonialism and do not go far enough to make the links between place, the genocide of Indigenous peoples, and ongoing colonialism. Their approach requires that researchers, teachers and learners recognise and attend to the historical, political, violent and unjust dimensions of places.

As discussed, the challenge posed by decolonisation is more than just one of recognising the limits and damages of colonial-enlightenment thought, but also to understand and enact other more ethical and responsive expressions and possibilities of being. In line with diffractive decolonial approaches (Bellingham 2022), this inquiry is not about revealing a reductive reality/storyline of hidden mechanisms of authority and power, but is premised on a pluriverse (Escobar 2018) of multiple possible realities and storylines, is concerned with the difference these make in the world, and how the past/present/future can be opened to more of them.

Barad’s agential realism (2007) elaborates this onto-epistemology intricately in relation to all mattering, but Povinelli’s (2016) articulation of meaning and embodiment in Country is nuanced in a way that is especially resonant with this place inquiry. This understanding, drawn from Povinelli’s work with the Australian Northern Territory Karrabing Indigenous Corporation, is that all aspects of Country, for example, fire, a place, a river, a ripple, are not separate and determinate things, but can be interpreted as manifestations of a sign. Signs do not work unidirectionally from sender to decoder, but are a mutually co-constituting interpretation (Povinelli 2016). Rock, gold, place, phantoms, institutions, ourselves, knowledge, are not subjects or objects, but signs emerging via a relationship.

Povinelli (2016, 135) further states that ‘all sign activity does something’ in the world. Our task is not to understand things in and of themselves, but to understand how their diverse expressions within locations are reciprocal signs of the ongoing reformation of things in the world. Signs and interpretations support particular ‘tendencies’, which can become our truths of being and thought. In the philosophy of the Karrabing, ‘(t)hings exist through an effort of mutual attention’. And ‘(t)his effort is not in the mind but in the activity of endurance’ (Povinelli 2016, 27).

Of especial relevance to geopolitics, and reconsidered in this inquiry, is the enduring tendency of thought in modernity that there is a meaningful and specific distinction between Life and Nonlife (Povinelli 2016). In the hierarchy of being of colonial-modernity, Life is privileged over Nonlife, in line with the celebration of movement from the supposedly simple to the supposedly complex, ‘from emergence, to creation, to production’ (Puig de la Bellacasa 2021, 198). But the view that Life and Nonlife can be meaningfully distinguished has been used widely to organise beings and phenomena in classifications and hierarchies that sustain the entitlement to thieve, harness, extract and degrade the vitality of ‘others’, as is emblemised by extractive and fossil capitalism.

The conceptualisation of the geopolitical underlying this approach is drawn from the above discussions and acknowledges the philosophy and work of Povinelli (2016), and of others including Alaimo (2010), Braidotti (2010) and Australian Indigenous collective Bawaka Country et al. (2016, 456). The latter explain, ‘(n)ot only are all beings – human, animal, plant, process, thing or affect – vital and sapient with their own knowledge and law, but their very being is constituted through relationships that are constantly regenerated’. By ‘geopolitical’ I mean expressions of spirit, vitality and ways of organising power, life, relations, and economy which are entangled and emergent with geology, earth and landforms. Attention is directed to place and geology as dynamic, sapient, and relational, and as important nodes of attention in political-ecological apparatuses.

The book length epic poem Mine Mine Mine by poet and academic Uhuru Phalafala (2023), identifies mines as ‘the key site to study the unholy trinity and afterlives of Dutch slavery, British colonialism, and apartheid in South Africa’ (Phalafala 2023, 61). Phalafala writes and speaks her family’s experience of the labour system of gold mining in which her grandfather worked; eventually, like thousands of other miners, dying of silicosis. Throughout, this paper makes intertextual links to Mine Mine Mine (2023), chosen for its geopolitical poetics: an intricate tracing of gold mining sites and practices linking the birth of capitalism and modernity with slavery and ongoing dehumanisation and subjugation of Black people. Mines are an ‘ownership paradigm exported / from the auction block’ (Phalafala 2023, 29).

Engaging as a settler colonial descendant with the Black and Indigenous poetics, philosophy and theory that inform this paper demands ongoing engagement with complex, sometimes troubling, and often unresolvable ethics. Asked in an interview about who can engage in what she terms ‘Black methodologies’ McKittrick (in Prescod Weinstein 2021, para. 6-8) replies:

… I try to focus less on Black-thought-as-authentically-Black and more on how a range of anticolonial thinkers have provided a series of methodologies and strategies for thinking about liberation. … I deliberately center liberation and collaboration.

But I also recognize and honor all these long-standing, rigorous, and studied ways of knowing that emerge from a community of Black creatives— … and scholars and intellectuals and organizers. This also makes room for thinking beyond identity-self (an identity-self that is authenticated by, say, race or other corporeal features) as the ultimate enunciation of what liberation is.

McKittrick (2021, para. 9) suggests that ‘thinking beyond identity-self moves us towards other, more interesting questions, which attend to how freedom is imagined and enacted through our extrahuman worlds’. From the Australian context, Paradies (2020, 5) argues that ‘(w)e need to focus on ways of living that are possible for all while letting go of an obsession with who is (authentically) Indigenous or not.’ Decoloniality is a ‘praxis of living’ enacted outside of modern identity categories, open to whoever wants to do it. These perspectives inform the intentions of this paper: that it helps to sustain conversations about the possibilities of critical, inventive and relocalising methodologies for those who are drawn to exploring these; that it honours the lives and work of the decolonial, Indigenous and Black thinkers who contribute so much to this space; that it is attentive to the significance and the limitations of different histories and selves for knowledge-making; and that it simultaneously tries to think beyond identity-self towards other interesting and vital questions.

The following parts of this paper move from the global to the local, first considering how master narratives of gold and gold mining emerge as powerful geopolitical signs or material-discursive phenomena, through a critical reading together of a range of global, Australian, and local Victorian theoretical, poetic and educational sources. It then moves into a more embodied geopolitical engagement with historical mining sites on the land that I live on; Dja Dja Wurrung Country. Where massive scale mining is integral to the origin stories of places, it is also entangled with the land, cultural psyches, colonial-capitalist imaginaries, spectral relations and violences of these places. But as McKittrick (2021, 58) explains, interdisciplinary, intertextual, creative ways of restorying the world can unsettle ‘suffocating and dismal and insular’ colonial logics. ‘(R)adical theory-making’ (24, 25) takes place outside our existing, dominant, self-replicating systems of knowledge. And for this intellectual and ethical task we need to ‘get in touch with the materiality of our analytical worlds’ (McKittrick 2021, 11).

Global and local gold mining: master narratives and their erasures

Gold; an already potent sign in global discourses, literatures, cultures, economics, and materiality, is today promoted by the global gold industry as crucial in terms of new frontiers and necessary advancements in science and industry, emphasising its uses in medicine, sustainability technologies, computing and space travel (for example, see Gold Industry Group 2021; World Gold Council 2021). The allied industry narrative is that ongoing gold mining is vital for economic stability and reliability as gold is a safe, essential form of investment that holds its value (Martin 2020). While its malleability and conductivity have supported a capitalist view of its predestined use in industry, these qualities are also read here as signs of the potential of gold to rework and re-story itself in other generative relations.

Phalafala (2023) demands that investors and beneficiaries of gold mining acknowledge that extracting their ‘safe’ investments has occurred at incalculable cost to others. Mine Mine Mine (Phalafala 2023) exposes the callous brutality and continuing reach of the ordering system entrenched through the gold industry, which through and beyond slavery has economised Black bodies, backs and wombs:

A vicious modernity

disfigures Black maternity

turns Black women’s wombs

into factories producing blackness

wombs of profit and prophets

birth canal strengthening GDP

ushering their children

into nonstatus, nonbeing

Black women’s birth canals

domestic middle passages

forced to deliver sons

into the mine tomb of the state

(Phalafala 2023, 9)

Yusoff (2018) argues that the discipline, discourse and practices of geology have been a specific catalyst in the emergence and entrenchment of the relation of gold mining with slavery, capitalist production and mass extractivism. ‘Geologic classification enabled the transformation of territory into a readable map of resources’ (Yusoff 2018, 83) and slavery and geology provided a ‘natural’ ordering system in the technē of extractive economies; a ‘structural inscription of subjects into matter-objects or property’ (Yusoff 2018, 69). A dominant use of geological mapping continues to be to indicate the locations of ‘earth resources’ (for example, see Monash University 2020)

On Dja Dja Wurrung Country, where I live, and the wider state of Victoria, significant amounts of alluvial and reef gold were extracted in the gold rush of the 1850s. While it may be commonly perceived that the heyday of Victoria’s gold mining industry is long over, Australian Mining (Creagh 2019 para. 9) reports that only half the gold likely to exist in the state has been found, ‘putting the state in prime position for a second gold rush’. Cherished colonial origin stories of the area are supported by its key sources of public and school education: The Victorian gold rush museums: The Old Treasury in Melbourne, The Eureka Centre in Ballarat, and the Sovereign Hill replica gold mining town in Ballarat; and the television series’ Things that Made Australia: Gold (Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC) 2022), and The Gold Rush (Macias 2019) (also produced by the ABC). These sources ubiquitously celebrate the gold rush as stimulating the emergence of strong industry and economy, of Melbourne as a globally significant city, and of the ‘Australian values’ of hard work, strong bonds and mateship, democracy and representational politics, and a multicultural society. While in general terms many Australian museums, forms of media discourse, and education curricula are moving towards more inclusivity of and respect for Indigenous narratives, gold rush stories seem to present a more impenetrable case. Mentions of Indigenous experience are now represented through Sovereign Hill’s website (see Sovereign Hill 2024) but are so far mostly absent at its physical site. Where present in all sources, Indigenous impacts and activity simultaneous with or due to the gold rush, are still represented in minor, siloed and marginalised narratives (see for example, Eureka Centre Ballarat 2022, 18–21). Other minor storylines presented across the sources surveyed include racism towards and exclusion of Chinese, and deforestation, erosion and pollution, but these are also not presented so as to compromise the significance of primary narratives.

The master narrative tying the gold rush to democracy emerges from the tale of the Eureka Stockade, in which miners reportedly stood up together against the implementation of a licensing fee, thereby establishing a tradition and expectation of fair and representational politics (Eureka Centre Ballarat 2022). These stories continue to celebrate the trope of the egalitarian (white) digger, uncritically reifying an interpretation of the relationship of the gold rush with ‘universal’ human rights and national democracy. That Indigenous were excluded from these successes and were not accepted as citizens to the extent that they were permitted full voting rights until 1984 (Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies n.d.) is still today omitted, or at best, significantly marginalised in the Eureka-origin-of-democracy storyline. For example, the ABC series Things that made Australia: Gold (2022) states that from the gold rush emerged the ‘idea of manhood suffrage; of every adult male having the right to vote, to stand for parliament’ (also see similar views from Prime Minister John Howard Eureka Centre Ballarat 2022, 8); and Victorian Premier Steve Bracks (Eureka Centre Ballarat 2022, 9). These stories suggest the kinds of blinkered, singular, and enclosed narratives which McKittrick (2021) cautions we should be wary of, here demonstrating the longevity of an Australian narrative that affirms a natural and racist order dependent on the absence of Indigenous from the category of Life.

Where gold itself figures as a material presence in public narratives it is typically in the form of bullion and giant nuggets (see, for example, Tout-Smith 2010; Old Treasury Building Museum n.d.). Gold bars and nuggets are accompanied by descriptions of their weight and monetary value, reifying the singularity of the economising gold rush narrative. On the goldfields, ‘mullock’ (today called ‘overburden’) represented land or rock containing no gold (Drinkwater n.d), Mullock was not only of zero economic value, but was an object of contempt, synonymous with rubbish and ignorance (“Talking Australian: Australian Gold Rush Lingo” 2021), epitomising a worldview wherein objects lowest in the hierarchy of Nonlife were those from which no economic value could be extracted.

The memoirs of Celeste de Chabrillan (1877/2003), ex courtesan and wife of Melbourne’s French Consul in Victoria during the gold rush, illustrate a colonial narrative in which Indigenous were objects lowest in the existential hierarchy, akin to, but more offensive than, mullock. de Chabrillan (1877/2003, 121, 122) says, for example:

The country’s black natives are the worst built and the most frightful beings I have seen in my life … They are so lazy of body and mind that no one has ever been able to teach a single one of them how to do anything … But anyway, one comes across them less and less often; as towns develop, their numbers diminish, and I think they will soon disappear.

The casual finality in this narrative of progressive time naturalising the supremacy of white men and making inevitable the disappearance of Indigenous societies is undermined by the fact of Australian Indigenous survival today. Nonetheless such banal, everyday violence towards Indigenous people is today sustained by ongoing erasures of politics and history, supported by this same view of linear time abstracted from ongoing materiality, enabling us to think of past events as relevant and significant only to others existing in that former time (Bawaka Country et al. 2020). This view of time, as Rose (2004) comments, has facilitated colonial Australia to make a virtue of single-minded self-interest and ruthless aspiration. A fascination with the progressive future makes invisible any need for ecological, relational change (Poelina et al. 2022), as is emblemised again in the result of the 2023 national referendum proposal to embed an Indigenous Voice to Parliament in the Australian constitution. The forceful majority opposition to the proposal calls into question Australians’ understandings of and relationship with place and history and their deeply held perceptions about Indigenous being and citizenship.

Academic scholarship has so far not made inroads to support these public institutions to challenge uncritical celebration of the Victorian gold rush. One example is Cahir’s (2012) text Black Gold, produced to address the absence of knowledge of Indigenous perspectives on the goldfields. While recording important histories, the text focuses on the usefulness of Indigenous contributions to the economics of the gold rush, and as such does not ultimately deviate from the colonial narrative reproducing an onto-epistemology economising being and erasing being that cannot be economised. In seeking an entry-point for re-storying the gold rush, I turn now to a closer engagement with Dja Dja Wurrung Country and read place, embodiment, materiality, poetics and theory though one another. The narrative in the next section is voiced in the second person – ‘you’; a kind of critical place-spectre; an unquiet ghost-on-the shoulder. This was the form of the fieldnotes taken at the time and has been retained to consider its possibilities for enabling critical shifts.

In the graveyard with a critical spectre: possibility and claustrophobia express themselves on upside down country

You walked with colleagues for several hours in mist and drizzle through the area of (for now) obsolete gold diggings on Dja Dja Wurrung Country up the line from your house. Your lasting impressions of that walk are damp cheeks, stands of dark slashes against mist – perhaps these are young box ironbark? Rutted landscape, glinting-wet mosses and grasses you couldn’t identify, fractured mosaics of geological stratification – maybe these are more accurately described as layers of blasted rock? How much did you miss and misinterpret due to your shaky and short-lived connection to the land and long training to think about (or not) and to move through place, rather than to feel its reaching threads of connection and read its signs? How to read these stuttering perhaps’s and maybes in your recall as signs? Is the Country aloof and withholding? Laughing?

In the decade of the gold rush, digging, hydraulic sluicing, dredging, and blasting for alluvial, reef and deep lead gold produced sudden and extreme impacts (Cahir 2012; Frost 2013). The Dja Dja Wurrung Clans Aboriginal Corporation (2017, 22) narrate their experience of the impacts on Country:

In the mid-1800s, large deposits of gold were discovered in our Country, enticing flocks of people looking to make their fortune. The miners cut down trees for firewood and building, diverted creeks and rivers and dug holes in the ground, pulling up large volumes of earth … This has left a legacy of soil erosion, salinity and toxicity from contaminants such as arsenic and mercury. The Country around the goldfields is very sick and a significant program of remediation is required.

Pausing at one of the many mouths of excavation, you and your workmates talked about the Dja Dja Wurrung name for the area: ‘Upside down Country’ and asked each other when this name emerged. This is an interesting question, but on reconsideration you think the significance you attach to it holds something of the compulsion to dissect history in terms of cause and effect and sequences of events in linear time; to master the facts. Bawaka Country et al. (2020) tell us that this is a problematic notion of time, closing avenues of thought and relations. Maybe more interesting and important questions might ask about Upside Downness itself, perhaps relating to the ‘archetypes, spirits and shadows of the past’ (Poelina et al. 2020, 8) which are held in its ongoing now.

Colonisers’ descriptions of the goldfields do paint images of an upside-down Country. Specifically, a hellscape: lethal, squalid, and ominously haunted; ‘what one might suppose the earth would appear after the day of judgment has emptied all the graves’ (Cahir 2012, 118). The Black Forest, the historical corridor to the goldfields passing the town you live in, was described by Miner Klaus Gronn (cited in Frost 2013, 78): ‘As far as the eye could see, there appeared: waterhole after endless waterhole; deep muddy furrows; broken-down wagons; dead horses and bullocks; and clothes, baskets, and gear of every sort – all abandoned in obvious despair’. The forest past your hometown is imprinted with the ghosts of accidents of travel, the displaced, the lost, muggings and murders, babies, genocide.

Walking on compacted earth thinly-slicked with mud, your mind returns to the local wisdom that great numbers of unmarked, coffin-less graves are spread across the area (Goldfields Guide n.d.), and to de Chabrillan’s (1877/2003, 96) prescient description that ‘(u)pon arriving in Balarate (sic) the sight of the mines frightens me: it’s like a cemetery where each person digs his own grave’. On a later occasion, on an underground tour at another mine site, you have an embarrassing near-panic experience which re-produces itself some nights at home. Your most visceral affective encounters with mining sites on Upside Down Country: raised heart rate; shallow, quickened breath; narrowing of thought towards escape.

Mine, mine mine (Phalafala 2023, 77) puts out there the privilege of disembodied, white academic concern for history, and the rift of experience this often results in:

They call it a historic turn

because history

to them is political.

For us

it is self regard

‘cause history

lives in our bodies

Are you picking up what is being put down? Does history live in your own body? Ask yourself: How might you feel these encounters between your body and this Country as signs? Are these encounters the ghosts of Country waking you from inertia? Confrontation with the truth of multiple deaths; of inevitable death? Verlie (2022) is inspired by the shared asphyxiation of Australia’s bushfire smoke. Do your bodily encounters make real the shared suffocation, the existential dread, the life-choking practices of mining? You felt these at tourist re-creations; in your own safe bed. Can they help you to connect breath, spirit, history and place?

Mine, mine, mine (Phalafala 2023, 47) depicts mining entering bodies as cacophonous penetration; but also as man gorging on the dark depths of himself, inseparable from the deeps of Earth.

Close your eyes

and observe a moment

of deep listening –

the drilling

in the heart of ancestral man

thundering terror

gorging his underworld

to unearth spirit –

If the Earth and the human body are contiguous material-spirit archives that maintain relations, marks, and memories, none of us can any longer afford not to feel history in our own bodies; not to learn to read signs with the places we inhabit; not to attend to their ghosts. Contamination from mining practices including arsenic, mercury and cyanide used in the extraction of alluvial gold (Mudd 2007), new substances that have altered the balance of geological materiality (Yusoff 2018), and the ripping, fracturing, blasting and exploiting of generations of Life, are dimensions of geopolitics that now permanently circulate through ecologies and ourselves. Understanding how to live with this reality means fronting up to how you are implicated in its history and its making and knowing the hauntings and contamination of places as hauntings and contaminations of yourself. If ghosts do not just express trauma and damage but are also a call for something to be done (Gordon 2008, 2011), how can you attend to poison, suffocation and claustrophobia as memories in the muscle of rock, river and gold for clearer visions of your own reality, and as calls to action and alternative possibilities of life and being?

How to be here now? The responsibilities of higher education in the bardo

This last part of this paper returns its focus to the higher education context and considers what this inquiry can offer there, first in relation to understanding the responsibilities of higher education today, and second in relation to how these responsibilities might be acted on by educators. If thought does not represent, but ‘does something; it assembles and correlates’ (Povinelli 2016, 137), higher education has an obligation to look closely at the world-making implications and relational politics of its forms of thought and attention, including the duty to speak, think and act toward the fact that we all have material skin and breath in the game and share responsibility for our planetary futures. The challenge is that colonial-modernity has as its heart a core belief in its own greatness and singular legitimacy and its thinking and systems exist and function for their own epistemological autopoiesis; they are not well-built for dialogue.

However, this state of existence cannot defensibly continue. de Oliveira (2021) argues for the hospicing of modernity, a challenging but necessary endeavour, recognising the inevitable decline of the stories and habits of being of modernity; that these are the sources of our greatest crises rather than the single, liberating truths of the world, and assisting in their – possibly graceful – death. While this death may not occur suddenly this notion suggests a profoundly challenging horizon for higher education. The bardo, from Tibetan Buddhism, is the liminal place or state of existence between two lives; a state of transition (Fremantle 2001). The bardo offers possibilities of liberation, as clear experiences of reality are possible in degeneration into death. But for the unprepared, it can also be a place of terrible danger, propelling one into regeneration in a less than desirable form. The bardo suggests the wisdom and value of assisting in the decline and death of higher education as we know it, as necessary to provide space and opportunity to seed new, more ethical educational forms.

While some academics might accept that higher education is ‘living off expired or expiring stories’ (de Oliveira 2021, 15); that these are un-generative, stuck, and violent, extractive, exploitative, genocidal and ecocidal, it is still extremely challenging to let them go. To do this is to contest our own habits of knowing and being and to court uncertainty. It will often feel professionally and personally unsafe. This is in part because modernity itself looks to the future, to life and progress; it does not accept death and decay (de Oliveira 2021). But many other cultures do not approach death, dying, or collapse in this way, seeing them instead as integral to the changes of state that comprise life (Povinelli 2016). This discussion does not intend to minimise the risks of coming to terms with the decline and death of higher education as we know it, but to suggest that as higher education’s current forms of knowledge and practice are integral to ongoing modernity, the alternative to exploring these risks will support ongoing ecocide. The discussion also works from the premise that there is value in believing in a greater range of decolonial possibilities in higher education work than may currently be perceived.

Productive disillusionment and a graceful death to master narratives and origin stories

Finally, I draw some thoughts from this inquiry towards questions of how educators might act to take or make space and opportunity for decolonial invention, possibility, and new solidarities. I reiterate and summarise some of the methods that have emerged in this inquiry, and discuss them within the context of actions to encourage each other to step up collectively to the responsibilities of the role; shift discourse under the radar; incubate marginalised ideas and practices; and seed new stories, as channels for productive disillusionment.

One of the reasons we continue to invest in an illogical and ecocidal status quo is because we assume it is normal, natural and unalterable; indeed, this is an assumption central to the epistemological autopoiesis of colonial-modernity. But in higher education, our work must now be ‘to notice this logic and breach it’ (McKittrick 2021, 2). To imagine something ontologically different we first need to nurture our skepticism and suspicion of what modernity offers; to pay attention to how its imaginative, intellectual, affective and relational restrictions injure and deform (de Oliveira 2021). The creation of forums and channels in teaching, learning and research for solidarity in productive disillusionment seems important in this regard, including collaborations with young people in communities, and with students and PhD candidates, as the shapers of future knowledges.

Critique is one of higher education’s primary tools of knowledge generation and is typically thought to be central to social transformations towards justice. But to assist in hospicing the stories of modernity, educator expectations of what critique is and does need to shift (McKittrick 2022). Critical practices need also to be employed in questioning the onto-epistemological foundations of disciplines themselves. Forums for productive disillusionment and critique might, for example, address the fact that the condition of being a postcolonial subject is not to know about the role of political and corporate institutions in shaping ways of being, knowing and relating. Against this ‘not knowing’, a decolonial act is to examine the relations between politics, place and knowledge across our own disciplinary fields and in local places. The methods for this employed in the inquiry above began with focussing attention on place, and attuning to and calling out some of the markers of colonial place narratives. Such colonial markers include the singular, the authoritative, the self-serving, the de-politicised, the siloing of knowledges, and extractive relations.

Disillusionment with and critique of modernity must mean disillusionment with and critique of the self. So forums and channels of productive disillusionment need to function beyond vents, and to start to create cultures of listening, self-questioning, and preparedness for challenge and distress at what is held up in modernity’s individualistic, hubristic and narcissistic mirrors. Parts of this inquiry use the second person voice – ‘you’, which helped to make some cracks in the sense of a singular, individuated, centred self, and to facilitate some of the necessary but ‘painful process of seeing ourselves as unreliable narrators of our own experience’ (de Oliveira 2021, 56). Other parts of this inquiry sought to abandon the safety and authority of abstract critical knowledge and to instead engage place knowledge as visceral, in affective and physiological manifestations between bodies. This aim steps toward nurturing another kind of critical knowledge; one that means engagement with the relationality and materiality that are always co-emergent with our intellectual practices (McKittrick 2021).

If educators also choose to publicly examine their own institutional origin and place stories and the erasures these contain, they model an ethics of care and accountability regarding place and history. In this paper, mining sites are identified as necessary foci of geopolitical learning and reimagining for universities in places where mining is central to the economy and to colonial origin stories. In Yusoff’s words (2018, 61): ‘There can be no address of the planetary failures of modernism or its master-subject, Man, without a commitment to overcoming extractive colonialism’. Serious examination of the relations between higher education and mining is challenging while the mining industry continues to be a major source of income for universities. But we should be discussing, raising questions about, and stretching the range of questions that it is possible to ask from within our institutions. What happened on the sites our university occupies? What stories and language are used in our university narratives to name and reify some experiences and to erase or denigrate others? How does our university continue to support extractive stories and practices in relation to place, people, materiality and knowledge? How can we partner with others to use university resources to move towards healing and decolonising our relationship with local sites and extractive practices? How else might we use our collective critical and imaginative powers to nourish practices that notice the logic of modernity and can breach it?

Breaching the logics of modernity: re-reading signs and seeding new stories

It may be easier to pursue the kinds of questions suggested above if our position is not that we seek to redefine the past, present or future, or to prescribe solutions, indeed this would be counterproductive to decolonial aims (de Oliveira 2021). A more generative, potentially more workable position is to accept and embrace the notion that there are multiple stories that might be told about place and being and past, present and future, in addition to those offered by modernity. The underlying aim of the layered, relational approach described in this paper is to re-read the signs of places; to draw out their multiple stories; to draw out the fact that there are multiple stories. In higher education teaching and research, normalising practices of engaging with multiple stories brings us a step towards a normalised acceptance that more than one position can simultaneously hold truth and be worth engaging with. A vital configuration of simultaneous possibilities that Australia and much of the rest of the world needs to build the capacity to contemplate is the possibility that privilege is attached to whiteness and that there are other profound differences of experience that are attached to constructions of race; simultaneous with the possibility of profound solidarity and shared human and more-than-human experience. Re-reading the world as a pluriverse of multiple stories of knowledge and experience paves the way for future shared dialogue, interest and concern as the basis of important conversations, displacing polemics and separatism.

Radical theory-making takes place outside our existing, dominant, self-replicating systems of knowledge (McKittrick 2006). For example, McKittrick (2006) draws attention to ‘demonic grounds’, and Tuck and Yang to the ‘darkness of the cave’ (2012, 20) as places of Black and Indigenous inventive possibility and of other legitimate and powerful forms of wisdom and ways of being which are not steeped in colonial modernity. In moving higher education towards the bardo, university educators also need to expect the growth and emergence of other educative grounds from which other, as yet unknown radical and insurgent seeds will germinate. They need to be prepared to give these space, accept and uphold their importance and legitimacy and, if and where possible, support them to expand existing pedagogical possibilities and ‘constellations of knowledge and relationality’ (de Oliveira 2021, 101) on their own terms.

Disclosure statement

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