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This article explores the affectual and relational contexts in which rock art is embedded through an exploration of the encounters, reactions, and responses to a well-known sorcery rock art site known as Kurrmurnnyini in northern Australia's southwest Gulf country. These encounters with a culturally powerful place, and the emotions derived from people's personal memories and experiences of Kurrmurnnyini and its sorcery-infused rock art, are vital to establishing an understanding of contemporary perceptions of what is clearly more than an 'archaeological site'. We contend that by turning our attention to the often-overlooked affectual and relational dimensions of rock art and the contexts in which it is found, researchers place themselves in a better position to access and become aware of the agency and affect of graphic imagery as well as the significance these powerful images and places hold for people today. [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]

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]

In this article we demonstrate that Yanyuwa people have detailed biological knowledge of their northern Australian environment, which is culturally defined and embedded within their relationships to country, resources and each other. Through a case study of the impact of Bufo marinus (cane toads) on Yanyuwa culture and everyday life, we argue that Aboriginal management strategies and Aboriginal peoples' intimate knowledge of species and environment need to be understood as both legitimate and fundamental when engaging in management initiatives in Australia. We demonstrate that for Yanyuwa people emotional engagement with their environment is underpinned by a morality of social and environmental relations and that 'memory' is pivotal to this engagement. We conclude by briefly delineating how the adoption of a 'moral ecology' perspective goes some way to addressing issues pertinent to discursive encounters at cultural management frontiers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]