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Testimony and witnessing require sentiency, not humanity. Sentiency is distinguished here as the capacity to experience energetic coalescing between elements/entities/presences and to derive a response from such encounters. Taking as its focal point the kincentric ecology and lifeworld of Yanyuwa Country in the south-west Gulf of Carpentaria, northern Australia, this paper strives to expand the conceptual roots for a discussion of testimony and witnessing through the principle of "unflattening." Unflattening is a commitment of orientation, one that counteracts the type of narrow, rigid thinking that is flatness, a condition in which humans are often unable to see past the boundaries of current frames of mind, the limits of our existence, our ontology, epistemic and moral habit (Sousanis, Unflattening (Harvard UP, 2015)). In a settler colonial context such as Australia, these are conditions which reflect a dominant epistemic tradition of the West, which relies upon certain ontological habits, reflective of a capitalist, modern, neo-liberal and individualistic tendency. But this is not the only Law and way of knowing that exists across the great landmass of Australia, mapped as it is by the languages and Laws of diverse Indigenous language groups. In Yanyuwa Country, communication between multifarious agents is common, ranging from those between humans, deceased kin who reside as "old people" in Country, Ancestral Beings which have become the embodiment of Country, non-human animals, elements, objects and places. Each and all are capable of communicating; be it as expressions of recognition of one another, revelation of emotional states, health or disorder, responsivity to the presence of others, Law and local empiricism. Drawing on my ethnographic encounters with Yanyuwa families, I aim, throughout this paper, to unflatten on three fronts: first, expand the relational scope of potential communicative pathways to take in sentient presence as a catalyst for relationality (carried forth by responsiveness to and between presences), second, examine the multidimensional nature of testimony and third, expand our vision of the enactment of witnessing – to consider who, what and when. I consider Indigenous, specifically Yanyuwa, relational ontologies as they bond and unify the human and non-human across a field of sentiency and communicative intention, shifting the focus or primal orientation to either side of and all around the human. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There are distinct bodies of cultural knowledge attached to the sea. In this paper we orient the focus towards the nature and extent of cultural framings of sea territories, as inclusive of submerged landscapes, for Indigenous maritime peoples in northern Australia. This approach is distinguished by a pluralist methodology and reorients the primal focus of a human geography and broader geographical scholarship concerning submerged landscapes to begin with an Indigenous perspective. Engaging ethnographic accounts of Indigenous Australian knowledges of Sea Country, as inclusive of ancient pre‐inundation landscapes that lie out‐of‐sight on Australia's continental shelves, highlights the potential for a more expansive vision of human connections to the past and present continental landmass of Australia. Indigenous oral traditions, Dreaming Ancestor narratives and songlines provide extensive detail to assist in understanding these parts of the greater Australian landmass and in this paper are brought into relation with recent sea floor mapping efforts which operate to draw back the water and reveal commensurable geographies upon which to envision possibilities for socialised realms of human emplacement. Both bodies of knowledge generate information of submerged landscapes that call for an expansion of thinking on where the land ends and the sea begins and how submerged terrestrial landscapes are understood across cultures as part of human geography. The approach outlined here calls for a habit of bringing principled systems of understanding to stand together as part of an explanatory schema for a world populated by and yet differentially known by people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The main argument presented here is that in cultural contact zones, such as the Australian settler state, there can emerge violent tendencies in dominant patterns of thought, as both epistemic habits and systems of value. The logic of coloniality is one of war, destruction and inequality, and this is expressed through attempted erasure and actual ambivalence towards Indigenous peoples, their lands, waters, Laws and cultures. This is supported by habits of epistemic violence and axiological retreat. This paper examines such habits, through an ethnographically informed and localised case study of the destruction of an ancestral Dreaming site on Yanyuwa country in the Gulf of Carpentaria, northern Australia. In this instance the body of Yulungurri, the ancestral Tiger Shark, manifest in a large cycad palm, was cut down. Read through the lens of axiological retreat, and coloniality's ambivalence towards Indigenous presence, the discussion considers the dispositions which lead to and support violence in such forms and how these might become naturalised or concealed in everyday life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We write from an ontological premise that there are other ways to know and understand the "archaeological record" and "rock art" that are devoid of Western ontology, and there have been for many millennia. In this article, we consider one specific Indigenous place and its associated visual elements, what might be commonly referred to as "rock art." This place, Nalangkalurru, is replete with meaning, grounded in a well‐founded and understood logic and reason. Nalangkalurru belongs to the Yanyuwa people of the southwest Gulf of Carpentaria region, northern Australia. By adopting methodological openness, we take a journey of steadied nondistraction oriented towards the Yanyuwa ontology that is in place. When viewing the visual elements of Nalangkalurru, which include Ancestral Beings that are visually present on the cave's large rock surface, Yanyuwa have resolutely declared that this "is not a painting." We explore what this comment means and expand the discussion to consider the nature of rock art research, when "rock art" is not "rock art." These insights inspire a reflective discussion on the ways Yanyuwa, and Indigenous ontologies more broadly, unsettle and aid the ontological turn. [ontology, rock art, colonialism, Indigenous, Australia] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers themes of species maintenance and place engagement in Yanyuwa country, northern Australia. It traces the complexity of interpretations and relational contexts involved in places that are commonly – and we argue – misleadingly, referred to as increase and magic sites. Examining one specific place, at which people carry out maintenance rituals, we explore the complex bonds that unite Yanyuwa with the geography that is the Ancestral Hill Kangaroo. Not content with the classificatory habit of declaring actions either increase oriented or hunting magic, this research more fully explicates the relational substance of places that play a key role in ecological health. This is achieved by asking how might the profundity of a place of relational importance, such as a maintenance site, be better understood and written of in ways that convey an Indigenous ontology and epistemology? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we explore how we might "see" and interrogate absence and presence in the archaeological record. Our aim is to bring into question the epistemic lens (archaeological), through which absence is made visible, and the epistemic lens (Indigenous knowledge), through which absence is made impossible. To do this, we turn to the contact rock art record from Yanyuwa Country in northern Australia, where, despite four centuries of contact with the "other" (Indonesian trepanger gatherers and Europeans), no motifs depicting introduced subject matter resulting from these encounters have been found. Rather than attributing this absence to taphonomic factors, we argue that it can be understood as an Indigenous presence when juxtaposed with the richly narrated lifeworld of the Yanyuwa. For Yanyuwa, creating rock art is a non-human-centered activity; it is through the actions of Ancestral Beings and spiritual entities that all rock art, potentially including introduced subject matter, is made and taken away according to cultural circumstances such as Yanyuwa health and well-being and changing engagements with country during postcontact times. We conclude by advocating for archaeologists to look outside of or suspend Western-oriented frameworks and reasoning and turn to self-determined Indigenous ontological and epistemological habits around how absence appears and operates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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 knowledge in reading meaning in place. We conclude that opening up both anthropology and archaeology 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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I explore the kincentric ecologies that define sea country for Indigenous Australians, in particular the Yanyuwa of Northern Australia. Despite colonial alienation from their coastal territories, Yanyuwa have sustained a four-decade long legal fight for restitution. Using the framework of ‘urgent patience’ as resistance against ‘social death’, this paper tracks the historical legacy of legislative land rights for saltwater peoples. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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

For close to six decades, ethnoarchaeology has studied the present to better understand the past. However, if understanding the past is paramount, then what of the wishes and interests of those with whom we collaborate in the present? This situation raises questions such as who is ethnoarchaeology for, and how might its outcomes be valuable to both researchers and collaborators? We address these issues by focusing on the space in which researchers operate, namely the 'gap' between archaeological and Indigenous conceptualizations of the world, and propose methodological openness to help achieve new ways of thinking about ethnoarchaeology. Drawing on our experiences conducting rock art research in Australia and the American Southwest, we describe the complexities that emerged during conversations with Yanyuwa and Zuni elders and how they have helped bridge the methodological 'gap' and enrich our research and understanding of rock art. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Transport innovation and social complexity among maritime cultures have long been associated with one another. The relationship between watercraft technology and sociopolitical complexity has been argued by many, including Arnold (1995), Hayden (1983), Hodgins et al. (2001), Jones and Allen (1980), Kirch (1991), Patton (2014) and Rowland (1984, 1987). Arnold (1995) presents the view that coastal settings represent distinctive environments with unique opportunities for the development of social structures, networks of communication, and the movement of people, objects and ideas. For many Indigenous maritime cultures in Australia, ownership of sea territories is governed by systems of Law (see Cordell, 1989; Memmott and Trigger, 1998; Peterson and Rigsby, 1998; Sharp, 2002; McNiven, 2003; Morphy and Morphy, 2009; Bradley, 2011; Greer et al., 2011). The relationships that people establish with the sea and coastal areas are often defined according to rules of descent, links to ancestors, rights of access, obligation and moral duty. Under Indigenous Law, all is not free for the taking. This Law governs and controls what people can do in terms of travel, taking of resources, recounting of narrative and song, as well as holding and enacting knowledge (Morphy, 1995). With this in mind, this research explores the possibility that the relationship between people and their watercraft, as a vital facilitator of movement across sea territories, is much more than a functional dependency. We raise the possibility that the type of watercraft used has links to ideologies of movement and notions of relatedness, and ask: What is the relationship between modes of sea travel and the relationships people have with their sea territories? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I introduce the term ‘cultural wounding’ as central to an analysis of ethnicity and ethnic identities that have experienced trauma through inter-ethnic conflict. Cultural wounding speaks to rupture and assault in a physical, emotional, spiritual and ideological sense. By establishing the definitional character of cultural wounding, I present a discussion of the ‘wounds’ that result from the deliberate targeting of ethnic groups in campaigns of violence and conflict. I focus the attention here on instances of wounding and healing within historical and contemporary contexts of Indigenous Australia. The primary aim here is to propose a framework for understanding wounding, healing and transformation as experienced by ethnic groups that undergo change brought about by conflict. Wounding, healing and transformation are steps in the journey to not only surviving but also thriving along ethnic lines in the aftermath or amidst moments of conflict and challenge. Drawing on instances of cultural wounding and the healing project amongst Indigenous groups in Australia, I propose a discourse that articulates what happens when the wounded survive, examining the link between wounding and healing, action and projection. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Drawn into a discussion of emotional environs, this paper offers up an emotional geography of the social and sensory relations that define a group's heritage and traditional homelands. It focuses on the homelands and heritage of the Yanyuwa, the Indigenous owners of land and waters throughout the southwest Gulf of Carpentaria, northern Australia. This discussion provides an insight into homelands that are deemed 'too strong to ever not be there', recognising 'home' and 'country' as the embodiment and containment of all forms of heritage, tangible and intangible. Emotive narratives informed by cultural habit and experience are what connect people to their ancestors and homelands. I propose emotional geography, as informed by ethnoarchaeology, as a means to explore the manner in which emotions and sensory experience affect the way that cultural groups sense the substance of their past, present and future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reflects on the emotional geography of a place; one part of the Yanyuwa people's Indigenous homelands in northern Australia. It offers a biography of a Yanyuwa place that is deemed 'too strong to ever not be there'. There is no discreet past or present chapter in the story of this place, rather there is a continual narrative that exists right here and now, one that is embodied in emotional engagements drawn from people's connections to the spirit ancestors, the 'old people', today's youth, land rights, language and education. It is understood as somewhere of great strength, endurance and power, because such traits are revealed through the very name Manankurra. This is the power of a place name. Manankurra remains in memory, despite colonial actions enforcing a physical alienation from this place. Exile and physical estrangement from homelands are too familiar in colonial settings. Despite this, the cultural engagements and emotional geographies that demarcate Yanyuwa homelands, specifically Manankurra, by way of narrative, knowledge and memory were never lost, nor disembodied from the emotional experience of homelands. They surge back to life again and again, across generations, because of triggers in individual and group remembering. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores interculturalism in Australia, a nation marked by the impact of coloniality and deep colonising. Fostering interculturalism—as a form of empathic understanding and being in good relations with difference—across Indigenous and non-Indigenous lived experiences has proven difficult in Australia. This paper offers a scoping of existing discourse on interculturalism, asking firstly, 'what is interculturalism', that is, what is beyond the rhetoric and policy speak? The second commitment is to examine the pressures that stymy the articulation of interculturalism as a broad-based project, and lastly the article strives to highlight possibilities for interculturalism through consideration of empathic understandings of sustainable futures and land security in Australia. Legislative land rights and land activism arranged around solidarity movements for sustainable futures are taken up as the two sites of analysis. In the first instance, a case is made for legislative land rights as a form of coloniality that maintains the centrality of state power, and in the second, land activism, as expressed in the campaigns of Seed, Australia's first Indigenous youth-led climate network and the Australian Youth Climate Coalition, are identified as sites for plurality and as staging grounds for intercultural praxis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies of introduced subject matter in rock-art assemblages typically focus on themes of cross-cultural interaction, change and continuity, power and resistance. However, the economic frameworks guiding or shaping the production of an assemblage have often been overlooked. In this paper we use a case study involving a recently recorded assemblage of introduced subject matter from Marra Country in northern Australia's southwest Gulf of Carpentaria region to explore their production using a hybrid economy framework. This framework attempts to understand the nature of the forces that shape people's engagement with country and subsequently how it is being symbolically marked as adjustments to country occur through colonization. We argue that embedding these motifs into a hybrid economy context anchored in the pastoral industry allows for a more nuanced approach to cross-cultural interaction studies and adds another layer to the story of Aboriginal place-marking in colonial contexts. This paper aims to go beyond simply identifying motifs thought to represent introduced subject matter, and the cross-cultural framework(s) guiding their interpretation, and instead to direct attention to the complex network of relations that potentially underpin the production of such motifs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Archaeologists have routinely used insights derived from the study of rock art to learn more about the lifeways of humans from the deep and recent past. Yet questions concerning the contemporary significance, symbolism, and meaning of rock art to Indigenous communities have often been overlooked in pursuit of archaeological agendas. In this article, we examine contemporary engagement with rock art by the Yanyuwa Aboriginal community in northern Australia's southwest Gulf of Carpentaria region using relational and affectual experiences to highlight how rock art is rendered multivocal, sentient, and an active social agent in the present.We argue that, by focusing on the wider social context of rock art, such as the networks of relationships that images are embedded within and the powerful affective nature of motifs, researchers are better placed to examine rock art in a holistic sense while also considering notions of change, continuity, and relevance in relation to visual heritage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The COVID‐19 pandemic has prompted renewed attention among health professionals, Aboriginal community leaders, and social scientists to the need for culturally responsive preventative health measures and strategies. This article, a collaborative effort, involving Yanyuwa families from the remote community of Borroloola and two anthropologists with whom Yanyuwa have long associations, tracks the story of pandemics from the perspective of Aboriginal people in the Gulf region of northern Australia. It specifically orients the discussion of the current predicament of 'viral vulnerability' in the wake of COVID‐19, relative to other pandemics, including the Hong Kong flu in 1969 and the Spanish flu decades earlier in 1919. This discussion highlights that culturally nuanced and prescribed responses to illness and threat of illness have a long history for Yanyuwa. Yanyuwa cultural repertoires have assisted in the process of making sense of massive change, in the form of past pandemics and the onset of sickness, the threat of illness with COVID‐19 and the attribution of 'viral vulnerability' to this remote Aboriginal community. The aim is to centralise Yanyuwa voices in this story, as an important step in growing understandings of Aboriginal knowledge of pandemics and culturally relevant and controlled health responses and strategies for communal well‐being. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a dialogue about the COVID-19 pandemic with Yanyuwa families from the remote community of Borroloola, southwest Gulf of Carpentaria, Northern Australia.[1] As we examine in a longer work, the coronavirus pandemic is one chapter in the history of pandemics in the region, from which Yanyuwa have born social and cultural consciousness around the threat and actuality of incoming sickness and loss of life, translating meaning and launching actions to safeguard their kin and the health of their community. For Yanyuwa, the current COVID-19 pandemic has been understood primarily as a "whitefella virus", brought to Australia by tourists returning from overseas, spread by travellers and the product of Western science. Yanyuwa stories of the COVID-19 pandemic show that people have pulled through the most challenging phase of this pandemic, with their families and community intact. [Extracted from the article]