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A Place of Substance: Stories of Indigenous Place Meaning in the Southwest

Gulf of Carpentaria, Northern Australia

Article in Journal of anthropological research · July 2018

DOI: 10.1086/698697

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 A Place of Substance
Stories of Indigenous Place Meaning in
the Southwest Gulf of Carpentaria,
Northern Australia

A M A N D A K E A R N E Y , University of Adelaide, Adelaide, South Australia 5005,

Australia Email: [email protected]
L I A M M . B R A D Y , Monash University, Melbourne, Australia
J O H N B R A D L E Y , Monash University, Melbourne, Australia

This article is dedicated to a close examination of how stories of Indigenous place meaning
come to light, and the pathways by which they travel, both physically (as tangible expressions)
and intellectually (as intangible expressions). It offers a reflection on the epistemic habits that
render these stories audible, visual, and otherwise sensual in the context of one Indigenous
Australian community. Appreciating the communicative pathways that exist in place, and which
reveal the nature of place, is what motivates an ethnographic commitment to Indigenous knowl-
edge in reading meaning in place. We conclude that opening up both anthropology and archae-
ology to plurality in “knowing the place world” illuminates a “poetics of fit” for certain people in
certain places, highlighting the extent to which place has its own empirical order, and identity,
which, with certain epistemic habits, may be read, felt, and known.
Key words: place, Indigenous Australia, agency, ethnography, Indigenous knowledge,
sentiency

This was the strong place, old people, the Law, ceremony,
and fun too, fun dances and singing all night and
stories, many stories, Malarndarri grew us up
—(Annie Karrakayn [Bradley fieldnotes, 1982])

Places of ancestral activity make up the “sacred geography of Australia” (Rose

2001:104) and are sustained by nonhuman agency and sentiency. This geography,
however, is mutable (Redmond 2001:120). It moves, contracts, expands, and finds
momentary balance, “far removed from the static, timeless images of land” that non-
Indigenous peoples are inclined to imagine (Redmond 2001:121). Writing on such
place agency, Redmond (2001:120) recalls the words of an elder Ngarinyin man

Submitted February 21, 2017; accepted May 28, 2017; published online July 27, 2018.
Journal of Anthropological Research (Fall 2018). © 2018 by The University of New Mexico.
All rights reserved. 0091-7710/2018/7403-000X$10.00

000

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000 | JOURNAL OF ANTHROPOLOGICAL RESEARCH FALL 2018

from the northwest Kimberley region of northern Australia: “We humans did not
make the world with our own hands.” As such, the processes that bring place into
being are “not reducible to either the practical consciousness or the physical capabil-
ities of individual human beings” (Redmond 2001:120). Operating in this context
are logics of place agency, intentionality, and place’s transformative capacity.
Place agency and sentience hold on, even transmogrify relative to a range of con-
ditions that shape the character, mood, and distinctive qualities of place. Part of this
condition is human presence, experience, and ongoing interactions with place, both in
times of cultural certainty and also in periods of change. Place harbors human life in
the good times and bad, and it may come to carry signs of life’s joys and hardships.
In fact, a vast range of human experiences may be represented in place through inscrip-
tion and markers of play, family life, resistance, and struggle (e.g., David and Wilson
2002a, 2002b; Whitridge 2004). They also come to reside in narrative form, as the
corpus of a group’s social memory. When aligned, these forms of inscription distinguish
place as both an agent of meaning and a harborer of stories and human experience.
This article is dedicated to a close examination of how stories of Indigenous place
meaning come to light, and the pathways by which they travel, both physically (as tan-
gible expressions) and intellectually (as intangible expressions). It offers a reflection on
the epistemic habits that render these stories audible, visual, and otherwise sensual in
the context of one Indigenous Australian community. In our discussion we explore the
perceptual capacity of anthropology as a discipline inclined to encounter rich stories of
Indigenous place meaning, and to be privy to those accounts that emerge from Indig-
enous ontologies. A specific reading of place character, and story from Yanyuwa coun-
try in the southwest Gulf of Carpentaria (northern Australia; Figure 1) provides the
ethnographic context and inspiration to advance a methodology for realizing sentiency
and the prevailing power of stories in, and about, place. Informing this research is an
ethnographic method led by decolonizing logic. This safeguards against the “othering”
of Indigenous knowledge or speaking on behalf of Indigenous peoples. It is not dis-
similar to Johnson’s (2012:829) work on a critical pedagogy of place, which “seeks to
decolonize and reinhabit the storied landscape through ‘reading’ the ways in which In-
digenous peoples’ places and environments have been injured and exploited.” Commit-
ment to a decolonizing methodology requires methods that allow for the articulation of
place knowledge as expressed through nested ecology, kincentricity, and emotional ge-
ography. These methods include participating in the place world that is Yanyuwa coun-
try, as led by Yanyuwa invitation and visits to their country; narrations on Yanyuwa
country as performances of kincentricity; embodied encounters with places of substance
(in this case, Malarndarri); and listening closely to what Yanyuwa have to say about place
agency and sentiency—not as metaphor or culturally nuanced perspective, but as “the”
perspective which leads this study.
Decolonizing methodologies of this kind have been inspired by the critiques of the
unequal power that has long defined research and allowed for the alienating of Indig-

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 A PLACE OF SUBSTANCE | 000

Figure 1. Yanyuwa country in the southwest Gulf of Carpentaria, northern Australia.

enous persons and their knowledge from intellectual inquiry and knowledge produc-
tion (Smith 2012; Zavala 2013). Taking to task the intersecting worlds of Indigenous
peoples and that of research, Smith (2012) and others (e.g., Battiste 2000; Rigney
1999; Zavala 2013) have closely reflected on the “absences,” “silences,” and “invisibil-
ity” of certain people and ideas in the research process. Smith’s work highlights the ex-
tent to which Indigenous knowledge is expert knowledge and has emerged as a vital
intellectual space amid conditions that have largely conspired to silence it through per-
vasive and powerful canons of imperial and colonial thought. Yanyuwa knowledge fea-
tures as a vital part of this research because it makes available a holistic and socially so-
phisticated framework for appreciating the relationship between people and place (see
also Barnhardt and Kawagley 2005; Battiste and Henderson 2000; McGregor 2004;
Nakata and Langton 2009; Rose 2000; Smith 2012).
The place upon which this ethnographic reflection rests is Malarndarri, situated
on the eastern bank of the McArthur River across from the town of Borroloola (Fig-
ure 2). Malarndarri holds a special place in the lives of Yanyuwa men and women;
many elders today recall living here and remember this place as the setting in which
they solidified their adulthood, raising their families on the river bank, surrounded
by extended kin and the presence of Nangurrbuwala—the Hill Kangaroo Ancestral

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000 | JOURNAL OF ANTHROPOLOGICAL RESEARCH FALL 2018

Figure 2. Malarndarri, on the eastern banks of the McArthur River,

Northern Territory, Australia, most recently occupied by Yanyuwa families
in 1969.

Beings who moved through here, leaving spring waters in their wake. Established in
1916 by colonial authorities who sought to remove “all ‘unemployed’ Aboriginal
people” (Baker 1990:52, see below) from the nearby central township of Borroloola,
Malarndarri was a permanent Yanyuwa camp until 1969. Yanyuwa were not alone in
the experience of simultaneous exile and containment; neighboring Aboriginal groups,
including those of the Marra and Garrwa language groups, were also forcibly removed
from their country by settler colonial agents.
A sequence of unexpected and tragic events caused the abandonment of Ma-
larndarri (see below), and in the years that followed this place has become central
to Yanyuwa social memory. Whilst it has been left in relative solitude since the early
1970s, it continues to harbor and articulate stories of Yanyuwa life. Malarndarri is a
place with its own social memory. This memory is expressed in the shadowy foot-
prints of old campsites, the remains of children’s playgrounds, and the metamor-
phosed body parts of the ancestral Hill Kangaroos that distinguish this place as one
of great importance. Through a close and considered reading of this place, and a cul-
turally attuned listening to and looking upon Malarndarri through Yanyuwa testi-
monies, we seek to articulate a particular relationship with place, one with the capacity
to assist anthropologists in their navigation and appreciation of place meaning and its
meaningfulness to people today.

PERCEPTUAL CAPACITY AND PLACE MEANING

Indigenous perspectives bring to this discussion a distinct view of agency and sen-
tiency in place. Agency is treated here as a temporally embedded process of social en-

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 A PLACE OF SUBSTANCE | 000

gagement informed by the past but also oriented toward a future and present moment
(Emirbayer and Mische 1998:962). Agency invokes a sense of movement and sparked
motivation, intentionality, will, purposiveness, and creativity (Emirbayer and Mische
1998:962). For the most part associated with human beings, depending on the episte-
mic space in which one operates, agency can also be found distinguishing the lives and
existences of nonhuman agents and presences in the world. When agency is recog-
nized in place, it is possible to configure relationships of interaction, intentionality,
and communication between and among people and the places they call home. In
the context of Indigenous place meaning, what distinguishes place relations is kinship
and an ability for both humans and places to enact and extend kinship. Intentionality
is also embedded in place names that transcend human objectivation (see Bradley and
Yanyuwa Families 2010:134–35). Rose (2000:105) describes this concept of related-
ness as

the meat of life, situating people’s bodily presence in shared projects that link
human and nonhuman interests around intersecting and crosscutting contexts
of tracks, countries, totems and sites. Every discrete category is linked to other
discrete categories through kinship, and is crosscut by other discrete categories;
thus the concept of exclusivity is both sustained (because categories are dis-
crete), and demolished (because they are crosscut). This system links species,
places, and regions and leaves no region, place, species or individual standing
outside of creation, life processes and responsibilities.

The vast collection of ethnographies and documented oral histories of Australia’s

Indigenous peoples are, for the most part, guided by approaches that view people and
place as interrelated, where the interconnectedness of people and place is established
through social, moral, tangible, and personal threads (e.g., Bradley 2001; Kearney
2009; Langton 2002; Povinelli 1993; Rose 1992, 1996). The relationship is one
of reciprocity wherein people and place are linked through what Basso (1996:5) de-
scribes as “interanimation,” in which people and place mutually animate and inspire.
The action of imparting life, through accommodation, response, change, memory, and
emotion, is what flows back and forth between people and place. Malpas (1999:14)
further elaborates by practicing a stronger intellectual embrace of place as relationally
configured and ontologically capable of shaping human life and also revealing aspects
of human life through the telling of its own story:

if we [non-Indigenous persons] are even to begin to admit some recognition, in

our own experience, of the presence of something of the Aboriginal feeling for
the intimacy of the connection to land and to locality, then we cannot avoid try-
ing to understand that which might provide the ground for such notions. We
cannot avoid trying to think through the diversity of issues that surround the
idea of place, and our belonging to it, in some sort of unitary fashion.

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000 | JOURNAL OF ANTHROPOLOGICAL RESEARCH FALL 2018

Evidence of place agency is fairly common. It is widely documented through In-

digenous testimonies and ethnographic accounts of people and place (see Battiste and
Henderson 2000; Cajete 2000; Cruikshank 2005; Deloria 1994; Kahn 2011; Rose
1996; West 2005, 2006; Yunupingu 1997). These accounts reveal that place can be
the source of spirit children, entities that reside in place until such time as a person is
ready to be born.1 So too, mountains are known to move, whilst place may rush to
approach weary travelers who cry for their destination to arrive more quickly. Place
may be described as quiet or wild, conveying something of its personality at a par-
ticular moment in time (Rose 2001:117); ethnographically it has been recorded that
place can steal a person, hide them, and cause their death or a slow spiritual and phys-
ical decline (Brady and Bradley 2016). Often the reason for this place agency is that a
place contains ancestors, as spiritual beings, the ghosts of deceased kin, and elemental
presences. In sum, place is a co-presence made up entirely of agents capable of inter-
acting with human presences and responding to their absence. If place is imagined in
such ways, it becomes very difficult to envision space or place as a blank canvas given
color and expression predominantly by human consciousness. So too, it is impossible to
conceive of emptiness. Place has far more agency than anthropology and archaeology
have yet been willing to put their disciplinary names to. Opening up the field for a dis-
cussion of place agency is made possible through Indigenous knowledges pertaining to
place, enriching the very way in which biographies of place might be chronicled via
both disciplinary approaches.
Rose (2001:104) identifies Indigenous knowledges of place as the realization that
“sentience and agency are located all through the system: in human and nonhuman
persons, in trees, rocks, stones, and hills; wherever Dreamings [ancestral beings] are,
there sentience is.” She advances this discussion of sentiency in place, reflecting,
“Country is a living entity with a yesterday, today and tomorrow, with a conscious-
ness, and a will toward life” (Rose 1996:7). The “country” to which she refers in-
cludes the lands, seas, other bodies of water, kin, and resources that constitute home
and territories for Indigenous groups across Australia. “Country” distinguishes an area
associated with a human social group, and with all the plants, animals, landforms,
waters, songlines, and sacred sites within its domain. The discreteness of Indigenous
knowledge is traced to the specifics of its emplacement—that is, its embeddedness
in that country. Each Indigenous Australian nation, or clan group, emplaces their
knowledge within specific contexts of meaning, which ensure that they can relate to
their country, homelands, and associated places of importance. Thus, place knowledge
reflects the distinct epistemology, ontology, and axiology in which it is suspended.
Place knowledge is also nuanced, reflecting the character and identity of a specific lo-
cale, in as much as it does the character and identity of its people and knowledge hold-
ers. In describing Aboriginal relationships to their country, Rose (1996:7) writes:

People talk about country in the same way they talk about a person: they speak
to country, sing to country, visit country, worry about country, feel sorry for

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 A PLACE OF SUBSTANCE | 000

country, and long for country. People say that country knows, hears, smells,
takes notice, takes care, is sorry or happy. Country is not a generalised or undif-
ferentiated type of place, such as one might indicate with terms like “spending
the day in the country” or “going up the country.”

Whilst often representative of localized settings and local knowledge, some themes
related to place meaning emerge across the literature. Cajete (1986:17–18, 2000) in-
dicates that strands of connectedness do exist across Indigenous thought, a view bal-
anced by Battiste and Henderson’s (2000:41) reflection that “given the existing eco-
logical diversity, a corresponding diversity of Indigenous languages, knowledge, and
heritages exists.” Some of the key principles include knowledge of and belief in unseen
powers, knowledge that all things contained in the world and ecosystem are dependent
on one another, and knowledge that personal relationships reinforce the bond among
people, place, and all other elements (Battiste and Henderson 2000:42–43). This
means that place itself is a dynamic and relational structure in which human life is al-
ready embedded, rather than a static object over which “ownership” or narrative con-
trol can be asserted (Malpas 2009). In the seminal work Wisdom Sits in Places (Basso
1996:70), an Apache man reflects, “Wisdom sits in places. It’s like water that never
dries up. You need to drink water to stay alive, don’t you? Well, you also need to drink
from places. You must remember everything about them.” In describing a “Native Sci-
ence” approach to place, Tewa scholar Greg Cajete (2000:41) refers to an intellectual
commitment that requires “mutual reciprocity, [and] which presupposes a responsibil-
ity to care for, sustain, and respect the rights of other living things, plants, animals, and
the place in which one lives.” The universe thus becomes a “living breathing entity,”
“considered to be ‘alive,’ animate and imbued with ‘spirit’ or energy” (Cajete 2000:41,
75). Conveying a form of animism, coupled with perspectivism and distinctivism,
place is alive and imbued with its own character, spirit, mood, and energy. The earth
and all of its physical features are perceived as a “living soul” (Cajete 2000:186) as well
as a “living, breathing entity” (Cajete 2000:41) that has the power to move, create, and
destruct.
Rose (2001) describes the action and agency of Ancestral Beings that created Indig-
enous Australian territories and homelands. Everything that exists in the world is alive:
“animals, trees, rains, sun, moon, some rocks and hills, and people are all conscious.
So too are other beings such as the Rainbow Snake, the Hairy People, and the Stumpy
Men. All have a right to exist, all have their own places of belonging, all have their
own Law and culture” (Rose 1996:23). Place is held to be bursting with life (Rose
1996:24); it is richly animate, cognizant, and visceral. The beings are described as

walking, slithering, crawling, flying, chasing, hunting, weeping, dying, birth-

ing. They were performing rituals, distributing the plants, making the land-
forms and water, establishing things in their own places, making the relation-
ships between one place and another. They left parts of themselves, looked

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000 | JOURNAL OF ANTHROPOLOGICAL RESEARCH FALL 2018

back and looked ahead, and still travelled, changing languages, changing songs,
changing skin (Rose 2000:104).

LANDSCAPE AND PLACE

The rich way in which Indigenous people in Australia relate to their land has long
provided a focus for analyses that have been concerned with the dynamics of people
in social and cultural landscapes (see, e.g., David et al. 2006; Layton 1997, 1999;
Morphy 1993; Myers 1991; Rose 1992; Smith 1999; Taçon 1994). These works
demonstrate in varying ways how people make use of the material features of their
environment or shape those environments through everyday and ritual action(s).
So too, they have documented and encouraged richer appreciations for the cosmo-
logical processes that define kinship, group alignments, and cultural practices across
landscapes and seascapes (McNiven 2004). However, “landscape” is derived from a
Western epistemology. Bender (2002) describes the writing and thinking about land-
scape as coming from “the Western gaze,” a historically defined way of viewing the
world that creates a separation between nature (the object) and culture (the people).
The academic traditions of anthropology and archaeology have a history of under-
standing landscape as another form of attributed symbolic meaning or metaphor that
people assign to their “worlds.” As such, place has often become divorced from hu-
man interaction and viewed as a manifestation of the symbolic or structured relation-
ship between people and their landscapes, yet in its fullest theoretical sense, place
cannot be separated from people but rather is fully realized by the interrelationship
of human existence and practices (Basso 1996; Casey 1996; Tamisari 2002). Thomas
(2012:173) describes place as a “relational concept” that is embedded in the ontology
and epistemologies of people throughout the world; however this does not mean that
it exists only through human imagining and creation. When derived from ancestral
agency, as is the case for Indigenous Australian epistemologies of place, the place world,
whilst embedded in human life, antedates this life and has its own inherent and
ordered character.
Attempts have increasingly been made to explore further the idea of landscape as a
repository for cultural knowledge, actions, memory, and the inscription of meaning
in place (e.g., Ashmore and Knapp 1999; David 2002; David and Thomas 2008;
Ucko and Layton 1999). For the past two decades, archaeologists have investigated
the practice of place-marking through the lens of rock art, graffiti, and monuments
(e.g., standing stones) as a way of signaling a cultural presence and ascribing social
significance to the land (Wilson and David 2002:1; see also Bradley 1998, 2000;
Ralph and Smith 2014). For the most part, these are fine-grained attempts to get
to the heart of how people shape the place-world in which they live, yet what remains
relatively unclear is the question of how that place-world might, in reverse, shape the
lives of people in the past and present or be shaped itself by an internal or empirical
order (cf. Smith 1999). Two recent contributions that pursue this question while

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 A PLACE OF SUBSTANCE | 000

seeking methodological pathways toward new understandings and approaches to

place are those by Schmidt (2017) and Gero (2015). Both highlight the ongoing im-
petus to deconstruct somewhat conventional approaches to understanding people’s
interactions with place and the construction of place meaning through narrative ar-
ticulations. These studies emerge from archaeological and heritage-based inquiries.
Schmidt (2017:3) writes about “community crises and desires expressed by those
wanting to reclaim eroded identities that had previously been intimately linked to
their heritage.” Using participatory community research, he embraces an ethno-
graphic approach—with an empathetic response to the local scene. Put simply, he
cares about the people and contexts in which he works, and he prioritizes local voices,
which often weave narratives of rapid cultural change, the trauma of HIV/AIDS, and
resulting loss of elders who performed rituals in sacred places, into a recording of
heritage and places of substance. The strong alignment with local politics and orality
distinguishes this work, resulting in another kind of story, one that recognizes “that
oral genres of history provide insights often far more potent than material culture”
(Schmidt 2017:11).
Likewise, Gero (2015), in a study of Yutopian, a place in northwest Argentina,
fully embraces a narrative turn, abandoning the classic mode of “site reporting” to
prioritize the telling of a story about a place that is emotionally inflected with the
dynamics of local participants, site excavators, and herself as the researcher. In doing
so she seeks to challenge the unacknowledged agendas of science, inject a feminist
agenda into archaeological readings of place, and identify the role that “human
agency plays in knowledge production” (2015:8) by documenting the stream of hu-
man and social elements that science often obscures. This introduces a wider range
of voices in this particular narration of place, thus reminding us that ontological ques-
tions must be asked regarding “what we know” and “who can be a knower,” and the
relationship between a community of knowers and the knowledge they produce (Gero
2015:8).
Thus, it might be asked how places and the people intimately linked to them re-
veal stories of their own making and maintenance. What is distinct in the context of
this study, however, is the emphasis on how place itself tells its story and reveals
much about the people with whom it traces connections and kinship. This line of
inquiry means moving away from dominant and Western-centered structuralist views
and critiquing the tendency toward an overly humanistic approach to the world (e.g.,
Bradley 2001; Kearney 2016; Strang 1997; Yanyuwa Families et al. 2003). It takes
the lead presented by Schmidt (2017) and Gero (2015) to empathically engage in the
art of listening to place and people, realizing that, as Schmidt’s own work reveals, in-
sights provided by oral genres of history can be extremely potent. The intimacy that
is people in place means that place comes to make sense and reveal itself through the
understandings and expressions of its human counterpart. With this in mind, we turn
to Malarndarri as a case study designed to illustrate how the place world and all of its
features and elements shape the lives of Yanyuwa today.

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000 | JOURNAL OF ANTHROPOLOGICAL RESEARCH FALL 2018

MALARNDARRI: A STUDY IN THE SUBSTANCE OF PLACE

Malarndarri is a significant place in the history of the Yanyuwa people. Yanyuwa are
the Aboriginal owners of the lands and waters in the southwest Gulf of Carpentaria
(northern Australia). Their country extends to the saltwater limits of the McArthur
River and takes in the vast expanse of sea country and island territories to the north
(see Figure 1).
Malarndarri sits high on the eastern banks of the McArthur River, approximately
150 m across the river from the township of Borroloola, and overlooking the neigh-
boring places of Wulbularalamba and Walangka. Malarndarri is intimately linked to
these neighboring places and a wider sequence of places that populate the country of
neighboring Aboriginal groups to the east and west. All of these places mark a point
in the journey of Nangurrbuwala—the ancestral Hill Kangaroos (Yanyuwa Families
et al. 2003:232–39). In the Ancestral Past (the Dreaming Time or time of world cre-
ation), Nangurrbuwala either passed by each of the places mentioned above in the
journey they took or became the embodiment of those places, when their tails, or cer-
emonial body designs, fell from their bodies as they danced. Their actions in the an-
cestral past also leave their mark throughout the region as the freshwater wells they dug
(Figure 3), the lagoons they created, the landscape features that they sung into exis-
tence, and the imprints of their feet and tails when they danced Yanyuwa country into
being.
A major camping place for Yanyuwa families, Malarndarri holds many stories of
Yanyuwa life both pre- and post-European contact. The effects of settler colonialism
were expressed most aggressively in the southwest Gulf region by the early 1900s,
coinciding with the establishment of the township and colonial outpost of Borroloola
(Bradley and Yanyuwa Families 2010; Roberts 2005). Borroloola would become the

Figure 3. Freshwater well at Malarndarri.

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 A PLACE OF SUBSTANCE | 000

catalyst for a process of “coming in” (voluntary or forced relocation into areas of co-
lonial settlement) and increased welfare dependency for Aboriginal people in the re-
gion (see Baker 1999). Yanyuwa resisted the pressures of colonial violence and expan-
sion by largely remaining in country and seeking safety and autonomy on the islands
and coastal reaches of their homelands rather than relocating to Borroloola. This re-
sistance eventually proved difficult to maintain as the colonial desire for lands and con-
trol over the region escalated. Intermittent visits to Borroloola throughout the early
twentieth century, drawn by government welfare and food rations, were replaced by
increasingly centralized and permanent settlement across the river from the township
throughout the 1950s and 1960s. Malarndarri, as a camping place, was established
in 1916 by the local police as a way of segregating or moving Aboriginal people away
from Borroloola, and it remained a major camp until 1969.
Malarndarri’s proximity to Borroloola facilitated some degree of lifestyle change
and allowed for choice in terms of individual and group engagement with incoming
colonial agents and their provisions, yet its location across the river afforded a healthy
distance from the dysfunction of a colonial frontier town and ensured cultural auton-
omy and safety for many Yanyuwa (Baker 1999:155). Despite restrictions placed on
Malarndarri’s residents by government authorities, such as dusk-to-dawn curfews,
Baker (1999:155) reports that a significant feature of life at Malarndarri was the au-
tonomy of the people living there. People recall the independence they enjoyed and
the authority of “Aboriginal bosses” and “councils of elders” in camp life (Baker
1999:155). What overwhelmingly characterizes social memories about the years at
Malarndarri are accounts of freedoms, the pervasiveness of Aboriginal Law in govern-
ing everyday life, and the connectedness people maintained to hunting and gather-
ing, and moving across country in accordance with kinship rules and obligations.
Malarndarri was a place steeped in Law itself and thus was capable of supporting
Yanyuwa life in the best ways possible—something that many Yanyuwa people then
and still today feel cannot be achieved within Borroloola, where most Yanyuwa now
reside.
Places such as Malarndarri are ordered in ways that inherently dispose them to a
Yanyuwa way of life; they have a “poetics of fit,” which resonates with kinship and
Law (see Rose 2014 for an extended discussion). The following Yanyuwa testimonies
of life at Malarndarri illustrate this principle:

In the old days they all made their camp at that place we call Malarndarri. The
women would go and draw water from the spring water amongst the rocks; it
was clean clear spring water that was always there. The men would go down-
stream and hunt for kangaroo and we women would go out and hunt for wild
honey, goannas, long-necked turtle and blue tongues, while other men would
go down to the sea and bring back dugong and sea turtle. At night the moon
would be shining like a lantern. It was a beautiful place, there was no grog [al-
cohol], they never carried grog to that place, and we were there contented all

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through the night. The moon would come out and shine across the broad ex-
panse of the river, shining brightly; it was a beautiful place (Bella Charlie in
Yanyuwa Families et al. 2003:242).

Malarndarri camp, well, that place is where I was born. Mum even remembers
that bloodwood tree. She says that every year, she still remembers. My last
memory of that place is canoes. They was parked all the way along Malarndarri
there. I used to love those boat, the canoes, they were comfortable and long,
you didn’t have to jump around to just sit, like this new model boat, you just
sit in there and have your little arms out. Now you think, what are they doing,
crocodiles around. And they were fit and healthy you know, looking back at
the olden time photos, oh some of them, so strong. They were strong because
of that place—simple, that’s what it was (Roddy Friday Jr. [Kearney fieldnotes,
2002]).

See, this was the basketball court, church right next to it and then on the other
side place for fighting, you know proper way boomerang and fighting stick,
same place for Kulyukulyu ceremony, Yalkawarru ceremony, and a-Marndiwa,
big business that way east, I went through business here [men’s initiation], too
many stories here, too many memories, you know the other side river, you
know where we live now is fuck all! (Stanley Matthews [Bradley fieldnotes,
1985]).

You know we talk about this Malarndarri but people forget, white people made
that place, forced us across the river, rounded us up like a bullock, like a com-
pound, but you know it was good for us because white man left us alone and we
sang and danced every kind of ceremony, even missionary couldn’t stop us
(Mussolini Harvey [Bradley fieldnotes, 1988]).

As part of his research into Yanyuwa oral histories in the 1980s, Richard Baker
also recorded people’s feelings about life at Malarndarri, testimonies that reveal a no-
ticeable preference for Malarndarri over their current home at Borroloola. During a
visit to Malarndarri, Bella Marrajabu commented, “We should camp long here . . .
we don’t like it there amongst the whiteman,” while Eileen Yakibijna stated, “More
better here we’ve got to come back soon” (Baker 1990:56).
Beginning in 1969 a series of events significantly impacted the Yanyuwa commu-
nity and its cultural life, ultimately affecting language use and living patterns. A vir-
ulent form of influenza spread through the Yanyuwa camp, causing the deaths of
many elders (Kirton 1988:5); the camp was subsequently abandoned, although sev-
eral “satellite” camps were established until further deaths prompted complete dis-
bandment of Malarndarri. The breakdown in camp life was accelerated in 1974
when the community was affected by major floods, which led to further residential

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 A PLACE OF SUBSTANCE | 000

dislocation (Kirton 1988:5). Social memory of this time remains strong among
present-day elders, who recall desperate efforts to make sense of illness and seek
remedies for them from their existing suite of medicinal knowledge. The loss of
life as critical mass in any community, coupled with the loss of political structure
and capacity to transmit powerful knowledge from elders to younger generations,
had a profound effect on Yanyuwa at this time and in years to come.

MALARNDARRI’S STORIES OF YANYUWA LIFE

For the past three decades, we have had the privilege of speaking and working with
men and women who hold knowledge and memories of life at Malarndarri. Conver-
sations and visits to Malarndarri with Yanyuwa men and women occurred in many
different contexts, from both casual camping visits and long-term stays to short site
visits for recording oral histories. These have formed a substantive part of Bradley
and Kearney’s long-term ethnographic research in the region, and more recently
through Brady’s research into the archaeology and cultural history of the Yanyuwa
and neighboring language groups. Malarndarri is a place that, even when not visited
regularly, as is the case today, features in the conversations of any Yanyuwa prompted
to recall the “old days,” before people lived full-time in Borroloola. Whilst younger
generations do not recall living at Malarndarri, they know this place well through its
proximity across the river from the current Yanyuwa camp, and from the stories of
their elders and the substantial documentation of the region’s recent history and
long-term past in anthropological and social history publications. In the company
of Yanyuwa families we have visited this place and learned about its history, events
that occurred here, and recollections of people’s relationships to place—stories that
are vital to gaining an appreciation of how Yanyuwa articulate their identity and
make sense of their world. The following discussion draws attention to two major
themes identified through our experiences with Malarndarri, the first being accounts
of everyday life and periods of change and the second, the role of children as social
agents and presence in Yanyuwa country.
Conversations with men and women about Malarndarri reveal memories related
to everyday activities whilst reflecting an intimate knowledge of relationships to spe-
cific locations and parts of Yanyuwa country. Near the bank of the McArthur River
are three places that evoke strong memories of everyday life at Malarndarri: a shelter
in which damper (bread) was cooked and refuge taken in times of wet weather (Fig-
ure 4), a natural “shower” along a small creek/waterhole at which people would “bo-
gey” (an Aboriginal English expression for bathing; Figure 5), and a mango tree at
the entrance to a small rockshelter on the edge of the main camping area of Malarn-
darri (Figure 6).
Yanyuwa oral testimonies relating to these three features do not necessarily bring
forth social memories of ceremony and substantive cultural practices; instead they
recount the mundane features of everyday life, including cooking, bathing, eating,
and playing. The waterhole is known to “always be with water” (Figure 5), the legacy

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Figure 4. Small rockshelter in outcrop at Malarndarri where

children would prepare and cook damper.

of its ancestral origins, while the cooking of damper in the rockshelter is explained as
an activity of young girls playing at housekeeping and mimicking family subsistence
practices (Figure 4). Accustomed to the provision of flour, young girls would cook
the damper in little ground ovens, later becoming domestic workers in the region’s
pastoral households. The eating of mangoes is recalled as both the habit of young
people sitting under the mango tree as well as the catalyst for its existence (Figure 6).
Oral tradition has it that one of today’s elders, as a child, ate a mango in the shelter,
brought in from another location. The seed was dropped in situ, and in due course
germinated, eventuating in a large mango tree, which has grown up within the light
recess of this shelter. Today it stands as a grand shock of deep green amid the area’s
native vegetation. These recollections of Malarndarri’s features, including the water-
hole, the rockshelter, and the mango tree, are inflected with a sense of nostalgia and
pragmatism and tell of times of normalcy in everyday Yanyuwa life. Too often eth-

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 A PLACE OF SUBSTANCE | 000

Figure 5. The “shower” at Malarndarri.

nographic and anthropological accounts of Indigenous people’s lives are funneled

through one of two paradigms, the first being ceremonial life, spiritual conduct,
and kinship, and the second, hardship and the struggles brought on by violent colo-
nial encounters. These locations and the social memories they trigger offer an alto-
gether different look at Yanyuwa life.
The oral testimonies attached to the everyday practices at Malarndarri are a re-
freshing reminder of Yanyuwa life in its fullest sense, without the explicit incursions
of romanticism or trauma. The fact that these recollections are attached to Malarn-

Figure 6. Mango tree at Malarndarri, located at the center of the image

behind the outcrop.

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000 | JOURNAL OF ANTHROPOLOGICAL RESEARCH FALL 2018

darri says something very specific about the empirical order of this place, its capacity
to hold Yanyuwa people in a Yanyuwa way, and the certainty of safety in changing
times that this location once provided. That everyday life could continue in such a
manner highlights the extent to which people felt at home in this place, and that this
place harbored them in ways that allowed for everyday life to maintain and flourish.
This resonates with Rose’s poetics of fit in that the agentic force—the power of peo-
ple and places to act in a certain way—of Malarndarri was and is aligned with Yan-
yuwa ontology, epistemology, and axiology. It is capable of supporting Yanyuwa life in
this fullest sense because it allows everyday life to continue and has the provisions, an-
cestrally, geographically, ecologically, and socially, to sustain life in this manner.
The poetics of fit between Malarndarri and Yanyuwa families amplified the im-
pact of change and external incursion into Yanyuwa life at this place. As such,
Malarndarri is also the site of memories related to “hard times,” when people faced
challenges from colonial authorities, the introduction of disease and illness by colo-
nial agents, and the realization of the loss of autonomy and attacks on Indigenous
family life. For example, Yanyuwa women recall using song to alert the community
to the arrival of the “welfare car” at Malarndarri. Across Australia, children judged by
colonial authorities to be of mixed descent (Indigenous and non-Indigenous) were
taken from their families and placed into missions and foster homes as part of a na-
tionwide forced removal of the “Stolen Generations.” To warn of their approach at
Malarndarri, the women would sing:

Go quickly,
This is another welfare officer
That is coming from the west
The top of his car is shining
(Composed by Nora Jalirduma, from Yanyuwa Families and Bradley
2016:370)

Bradley has also recorded oral testimonies of hard times associated with the 1969
flu epidemic. Many of these testimonies reflect a great depth of sadness and memo-
ries of this time, infused by feelings of helplessness:

All of the old people were here at Malarndarri, we were all here growing up
with them. The Law was strong at this place, there were still people travelling
to the sea in canoes and people foot walking from here into the east to Manan-
kurra, and people walking from Manankurra to here. It was at the time of the
Borroloola rodeo when all of those old people died. We all had that flu. There
was Amy and her sister Bella and myself; we were cooking bush medicine for
those sick people. We used to lift those sick people up and wash them, then we
would make their beds for them and make them sleep. We would be there
with them with our heads bowed and we would pray over them. Some of the

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 A PLACE OF SUBSTANCE | 000

really sick old men and women we would take them in dugout canoes to the west
bank of the river and Mr. Stretton the missionary he would wait for us in his
truck. We would carry them to that truck and we would take them to the mis-
sion house and we would give them medicine. There were deaths from that great
sickness; it was truly very bad. We would carry those old people back over the
river to Malarndarri, but all those old people died. We couldn’t cry because
too many of them died all at once, all those old men and women. The police-
man, the missionary, and the Yanyuwa men would carry the bodies on their
beds, carrying them by their sides down to the canoes at the river, and they
would take the bodies downstream to Wumarrawanya. It was there they were
buried. None of us women went to that place, we were alone; only the men they
went there. They died all at once at Malarndarri. They died from that great sick-
ness. . . . It is because of that flu that we left Malarndarri; too many people died.
It is because of that we moved across to the west bank. We never went back; we
stayed on the west bank at Borroloola (Yanyuwa Families et al. 2003:242)

Yanyuwa social memory serves a greater purpose than recalling the past and pre-
vails as an exercise in sense-making, particularly when trying to understand traumatic
events and rapid-onset disasters within the community. That so many people died at
Malarndarri within a brief time frame deeply ruptured the Law of Yanyuwa exis-
tence, which places huge emphasis on the lives of elders and the knowledge they pos-
sess. The loss of elders from unknown causes and catastrophic illness introduced new
elements to the emotional geography of Malarndarri, including fear, grief, and un-
certainty. The shock of these events, which ultimately led to the abandonment of
Malarndarri and the gradual move into Borroloola, brought shock to the bodies
and lives of Yanyuwa, which came with new lifestyles, daily habits, and foods, and
also to Malarndarri, with the sudden absence of its human kin. The joy of Yanyuwa
presence would be replaced by the melancholy induced by their absence. In Yan-
yuwa, there is an understanding that people, as kin, lift up place, making it vital,
strong, healthy, and shining, through their daily activities and enduring presence.
The responsive nature of place is that it needs its people. Malarndarri is no exception.
In the years that have followed the abandonment of this place, imprints of its human
presence have endured, and when looked upon by Yanyuwa today, they reawaken
the call and response that distinguishes relationships with place.
Malarndarri’s capacity to hold evidence of the enlivening role of people in places
can be seen in both physical and social memory. Upon visiting Malarndarri, one of
the first features people encounter is a series of long, narrow stone alignments wind-
ing through the rocky landscape in a roughly north-south direction (Figure 7).2 At
first glance these stone arrangements seem similar to others found across the conti-
nent that oftentimes are investigated using archaeological and ethnohistoric research
methods with an emphasis on their antiquity, form, and function. Although stone
alignments in Australia are often linked to ritual and ceremony (e.g., initiations),

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Figure 7. Stone “highways” made by children playing at Malarndarri.

and in some cases are known and remembered for their role as turtle lookouts and
“increase sites” (e.g., David et al. 2004; McIntyre-Tamwoy and Harrison 2004; O’Con-
nor et al. 2007), they have also been discussed in contemporary contexts focusing on
their role in the political sphere as symbols of the reconciliation process between In-
digenous and non-Indigenous people (Ross 2008). However, at Malarndarri, the
stone alignments have an entirely different character, one which further highlights
the nature and depth of people’s relationships to, and memoires of, place. In this case,
attempts to investigate the stone’s cosmological and political meanings must be sus-
pended, because the alignments here are the product of children at play. Yanyuwa oral
histories collected by the authors over the past 37 years from men and women who
lived at Malarndarri recount that the stones were collected by boys from across the
landscape to construct a “motor car” race track or “highway” where boys and girls
would then race “billy cars”3 constructed from old tin cans (tinned beef, flour, pow-
dered milk, syrup, etc.) filled with sand and “driven” (pushed or pulled) along the track
by attaching a long metal wire to the can (Figure 8). Along the way, “drivers” would
stop to pay a “toll” (consisting of small pebbles) at a small, strategically positioned
flat-topped rock. The inspiration for these race tracks came in the 1930s when exten-
sive roadworks were being undertaken near Borroloola to facilitate access to Darwin,
as well as the construction of an airstrip near the township. Children witnessed bull-
dozers carving new roads through the landscape and emulated these activities by con-
structing their own roads using stones to outline their racetrack.
Memories of the racetrack and children racing their billy cars along the landscape
evoke a range of emotions among people who remember this activity. Most notably,
people remember the happiness and fun associated with playing games, but also sad-

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 A PLACE OF SUBSTANCE | 000

Figure 8. Billy can or treacle tin “car” used by children playing at

Malarndarri.

ness since such activities are rarely played in town today. Johnson Timothy and Don
Miller, two senior Yanyuwa men who worked with Bradley in the 1980s and 1990s,
commented on children’s play at Malarndarri:

That motor car business, up there, that started when I was a young man, I did
not play, I would go and look at them kid, lot of fun they were having, track
everywhere, proper highway number one, makes me really sorry, there were a
lot of good times over there, no whitefella humbug ( Johnson Timothy [Brad-
ley fieldnotes, 1990]).

Oh dear me! This one place, this one place alone I remember, it is here I grew
up with the old people, it was here that I saw the Law. It was a strong place,
and when I was little and silly I played motorcars up there on the rocks (Don
Miller [Bradley fieldnotes, 1982]).

The role of children is an important part of understanding how people’s memo-

ries and relationships to places such as Malarndarri are shaped and how place
responds to certain human presences. Whether people’s memories are linked to chil-
dren playing with billy cars on stone racetracks or simply observing and remembering
children playing, the racetracks themselves represent a tangible reminder of the pres-
ence and activities of children and are a trigger to recalling happier times. Too often
children are absent from our understanding of place and the broader landscape, yet
at Malarndarri they impact physically on a place and thus play a pivotal role in

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Yanyuwa social memories. By constructing their presence in Yanyuwa country, chil-

dren become ever-present and therefore represent an important part of the process in
which a place comes into being.
Memories of children at play should not be seen as mundane or unusual; for
Yanyuwa, children at play represent not only an important social memory but also
an important role in understanding relationships with Yanyuwa country. Children
being active in Yanyuwa country keep it happy and healthy. These activities are a
part of “lifting country up” and remaining emotionally engaged with a place. Chil-
dren running, playing, and making noise confirm to old people long dead, and other
spiritual beings present in the landscape, that people are at home in Yanyuwa coun-
try. If people have not visited a place for a long time and their country is considered
“low down,” more care is taken when the place is revisited, and children are kept
nearby until it is felt that engagement has been reestablished. Successful reengage-
ment might be ascertained when people have no trouble gathering bush foods or
catching fish, or capturing dugong and sea turtle. The communicative pathways be-
tween people and place are kept open through such engagements and encounters, and
they require a Yanyuwa sensibility on the behalf of people and place to take mean-
ing from these daily interactions.

DISCUSSION AND REFLECTIONS

The social practices and events that have come to define the Yanyuwa’s enduring re-
lationship(s) with Malarndarri not only reflect a shared identity rooted in a colonial
policy of forced relocation but more importantly are critical to understanding how
place acquires meaning and becomes meaningful. Malarndarri is described and re-
membered in diverse ways because people’s experiences are a vital part of the process
of constructing meaning in and of place. Often referred to with positive, and at times
emotional, memories, Malarndarri is more than simply a “dwelling” or a case of peo-
ple “being in place”—it is a sentient being that plays a role in shaping social memory,
just as people do. In his discussion of place-making among the Pintupi, Myers
(2000:84) noted that at particular places within the landscape,

People hunted and gathered, collected seeds, shared food, performed ceremo-
nies, eloped, bore children, fought, died, and so on. Such activities came to be
associated or memorialized—for the actors and their relatives—in the places
they occurred, and passage or residence through these areas invariably recalls
the happenings. In this way, through human action, places acquire—or
“gather”—meanings from lived experiences.

The description of events and activities that occur at particular places in the Central
Desert is equally relevant to Malarndarri. Here, the stories of seemingly mundane
experiences and memories involving racetracks, showers, and shelters for cooking
damper reflect what Myers (2000:100) refers to as “a sense of relation to the place.”

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 A PLACE OF SUBSTANCE | 000

These experiences and memories are central to the process of recognizing and appre-
ciating the nature and depth of people’s relationships, which continue to anchor
Yanyuwa’s attachment to Malarndarri. Myers’s discussion is focused on the “tradi-
tional” movements of a desert-based hunter-gatherer society. The Malarndarri case
study and the narratives linked to it have a different character, shaped by different
forces, yet still grounded in everyday actions and experiences, as well as in Yanyuwa
cosmology.
The events and memories that have come to shape people’s relationships with
Malarndarri are also similar to findings of studies that focus on how place acquires
meaning, most notably in the Jawoyn community near Katherine in the Northern
Territory. Ralph and Smith (2014) have investigated the relationship between graffiti
and place in the context of social and political upheaval in Jawoyn country. With the
introduction of the Northern Territory Emergency Response Act (also referred to as
“The Intervention” or NTER) in 2007 by the federal government, new regulations
meant consumption of alcohol in Aboriginal communities became highly restricted
(see e.g., Toohey 2008). The Jawoyn responded to the new rules by constructing
steel shelters just beyond the limits of the liquor restrictions, not just as places to con-
sume alcohol free of strict government regulations but also where people could meet
and interact, wait for rides, and so on. Ralph and Smith (2014:82) note that graffiti is
most likely a “secondary outcome” of people’s visits to the steel shelters, but that
nonetheless it is a significant marker that constructs meaning in and of place.
The steel shelters represent a place that becomes meaningful through inscriptions
or “tags” (names, initials, illustrations, statements, etc.) that reference individual and
group identity. The shelters can also be considered a new place, one born out of co-
lonial policy whose identity is slowly being shaped through the social practice of graf-
fiti. Much like at Malarndarri, relationships with a place and the acts that help con-
struct these relationships were created as a result of dramatic and rapid social and
cultural changes pursuant to colonial policy. Despite the restrictions placed on Yan-
yuwa movement at Malarndarri, they continued the songs, ceremonies, and subsis-
tence practices that would normally have been performed on the islands or across
the neighboring savannah grasslands. While the actions of Jawoyn and Yanyuwa
people—graffiti and ongoing cultural practices, respectively—could be viewed in
the broader context of resistance, they are also acts of cultural assertion which are
pivotal in reinforcing or establishing new relationships to place—that is, the peo-
ple’s tangible and intangible expressions reveal the identity of a place.
In the opening paragraphs of this article, we stated that place agency and sentience
holds on, even transmogrifies relative to a range of conditions that shape a place’s
unique character and mood. One of these conditions is presence of and ongoing hu-
man interactions with place, both in times of cultural certainty and also in periods of
change.
The story of Malarndarri, a vital part of Yanyuwa country and emotional geogra-
phy, highlights the particular histories and experiences that define human and place-

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000 | JOURNAL OF ANTHROPOLOGICAL RESEARCH FALL 2018

based relations. It is a place distinguished by the ancestral actions of Nangurrbuwala

and kept alive through social memory and subtle signatures of Yanyuwa presence
even when people are absent. That said, we have argued that Malarndarri has its
own enduring presence and empirical order, one that is designed to support the full-
ness of Yanyuwa life. Malarndarri has persisted, in the past lifted up by the strength
of a Yanyuwa physical presence, as embodied by everyday activities and children at
play. The strength and substance of Malarndarri as a vital part of Yanyuwa country
still resonates, despite the fact that people no longer visit this place. Evidence of this
is found in the township of Borroloola, where the local store bears the name “Mal-
andari” (Figure 9).
Despite an absence of Yanyuwa kin living in or visiting this place, on a regular and/
or intermittent basis, Malarndarri endures for two reasons. The first is the shadowy
presence of life in place—the mango tree, the shower, the kitchen, and the “highways”
of stone. The second are the social memories, which we document throughout this
article, shared with us through Yanyuwa oral testimony. For the former, which reveal
past human action and lifting up of place, there is an order which is not easily apparent
to an outsider but which reflects the communications and relations between a place
and its people.
Part of the experiential and agentic force of Malarndarri is that its meaning is so
inherently Yanyuwa, it takes a Yanyuwa epistemology and ontology to read it. Whilst
an outsider might step over the remnants of corrugated iron roofing, overlook the
outline of former household campsites, see the little creek as a simple source of water,
or romanticize the stone alignments as artifacts and evocative signatures of ceremo-
nial activity, Yanyuwa can read these markers for exactly what they are. The signature
in place reminds all who go there that this place is kin to Yanyuwa. The story of

Figure 9. “Malandari Superstore,” on the main street of Borroloola town-

ship, 2016.

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 A PLACE OF SUBSTANCE | 000

Malarndarri makes most sense when told in a Yanyuwa way, for it is a Yanyuwa ep-
istemic habit that renders it audible, visual, and otherwise sensual. There is a huge
lesson in this for those disciplines that seek to understand human interactions with
place, in both the past and present. As Gero (2015:9) notes, what we learn is directly
linked to how we work, and this in turn directly reflects our intellectual, social, pro-
fessional, and personal worlds. “Like other scientists, archaeologists write as though
objects, facts, sometimes even laws, are givens, and that such facts and laws merely
await the timely revelation of their existence by devoted scholars.” We are inclined,
she writes, “to think of our facts as being removed from any human agency that was
responsible for having produced them” (2015:9). So too we might overlook the role
of other agents in the making of our world and the meanings it invariably contains.
Appreciating the communicative pathways that exist in place, and that reveal the
nature of place, is what motivates an ethnographic commitment to Indigenous knowl-
edge as shown throughout this article. This commitment, imbued with decolonizing
logic, allows for complex encounters that challenge the anthropologist or archaeologist
by way of presenting ambiguity (Gero 2015:13). This ambiguity is not problematic;
rather it is ontological and epistemological—things that resist certitude and might re-
flect the limits of our experience. This is found in the ongoing importance of Malarn-
darri despite people’s absence from this place for some time now. So too it is found in
the proximity of this place, yet also in the distance it afforded historically from the
agents of settler colonialism. When encountering place, whether marked clearly by
tangible indicators of human presence or held strong in the minds of its kin, silences
may befall an intercultural encounter with it. In which case, when seeking to under-
stand the importance of place, or the substance of place, we must be prepared to listen
and attempt to understand what we simply don’t know (Gero 2015:13). Plurality is
key here, and this raises at least three substantive points for anthropological and ar-
chaeological reflection about place:

• Landscape “features” (i.e., shelters, stone alignments, mango trees) need not be
described only according to their morphology; rather, through careful investiga-
tion they can reveal certain identities in place and time.
• Place has its own empirical order, and identity, which, with certain epistemic
habits, may be read, felt, and known.
• Place has the capacity to reveal itself and the effects of presence and absence of
humans.

In closing, this article promotes an increased awareness of, and sensitivity to, place
agency and sentiency that might expand the perceptual capacity of broader human
life to configure place as a sentient co-presence, to which we are but one relational
element, albeit a very important one. A shift of this kind, in perceptual capacity, in-
vokes the willingness to be with another in a manner which shifts the self and to
practice a critical intimacy as an ethical way of coming to know the intimacy of place.

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000 | JOURNAL OF ANTHROPOLOGICAL RESEARCH FALL 2018

NOTES
We wish to acknowledge Yanyuwa contributions to this research; in particular we
are indebted to those who have been our teachers over the past 35 years, including
Johnson Timothy, Mussolini Harvey, Nora Jalirduma, Bella Charlie, Don Miller,
Stanley Matthews, Annie Karrakayn, Dinah Norman, Graham Friday, Jemima Mil-
ler, Roddy Friday Jr., Nancy McDinny, and Stewart Hoosen. From as early as the
1980s through to 2016 they have shared with us their experiences of living at Ma-
larndarri and of moving across their country throughout the southwest Gulf of Car-
pentaria. Thank you also to two anonymous reviewers and the editor of JAR for their
thoughtful comments and suggestions, which have improved this paper. This re-
search was funded by an Australian Research Council Discovery (DP1093341) grant
awarded to the authors and Ian McNiven.
1. For Yanyuwa, ardirri, the spirit children who inhabit the land and sea, are un-
derstood as placed in the earth by ancestral beings. Yanyuwa exclaim, for example,
rra-mangaji rra-kuridi kanda-yibarranthaninya ardirri nguthundu barra baji Wuman-
thala, which translates to “the Groper ancestor she placed spirit children there to the
north in that place Wumanthala” (Yanyuwa Families and Bradley 2016: 399, 408).
This spirit child, once born and inhabiting the body of a living person, is held to
reside deep within the bones of an individual, those being the least corruptible part
of a person (Yanyuwa Families and Bradley 2016:399, 408). This spirit child, a con-
stitutive part of place, hence resides in the bones of a Yanyuwa person, taking the
mutual constitution of people and place to a profound level.
2. Bradley has collected information about a second stone arrangement in the
shape of an airplane that children used to sit in and pretend to fly. This stone ar-
rangement could not be relocated.
3. The term “billy” is used in Aboriginal English to refer to an empty tin can
(tinned beef, flour, powdered milk, syrup etc.); a “billy” is most commonly used to
boil water for tea over an open fire but can have other uses such as the one discussed
here (see “Meanings and origins of Australian words and idioms,” Australian National
Dictionary Centre: http://andc.anu.edu.au/australian-words/meanings-origins/b).

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