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Intercultural communication at Bawaka often brings ŋäpaki, non-Indigenous visitors, into a series of new relationships – with Yolŋu people, with each other, with place, and with themselves. From a Bawaka Yolŋu ontology, this is part of bala ga' lili, giving and taking, co-creating balance through relationships of reciprocity and responsibility. This paper is a collaboratively written piece by Yolŋu hosts and non-Yolŋu academics as part of Bawaka Country and reflects our own efforts at embodying bala ga' lili. It considers how visitors to Bawaka come into relationship with themselves, their hosts, each other, and place. It discusses the opportunities and limitations of these relationships and emphasizes the importance of multi-directional, embodied, more-than-human communication. Through an analysis of a student fieldtrip and discussion of Yolŋu hosts' expectations and aspirations, it argues that with communication and the formation of new relationships comes responsibilities to translate new understandings across time and place, assisting with the important, although only ever incompletely possible, work of breaking unjust systems and contributing to more just and sustainable processes and outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This piece explores the work and entanglements of our research collective, formed in 2016. First, we collectively articulate the ethos and the motivations that inform the ways in which we labor to engage with complex, plural, multi-vocal experiences of extinction, "the Anthropocene," and earth violence as they are felt and known across the diverse communities we represent. Then, drawing on more than three years of work across relations that tie us to Australia, Canada, Malaysian Borneo, the Philippines, and the United States of America, we share reflections on some of the vital relationships, methods, and "creatures" that animate our collaboration. This collection of "manifestings" aims to show how we work, very consciously, to foster more-than-human capacities for confronting the multi-scalar, cross-cosmological forms of violence that drive extinction and other forms of ecological harm in the world today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We say it becomes dhawaḏatj. This is muddled up; the process is not right. In songspirals and ceremonies, when things become dhawaḏatj everyone says 'errgh' and claps to erase the mistake and start again. Songspirals have been here forever. They are Rom, Law. They continually bring us and everything in our Country into being. They must not be muddled. We are still singing and keening these songspirals. As Bawaka Country, we say 'errgh'. Too much has been muddled up: the violences of ongoing colonialism; the Rom not followed; non-humans treated as if they have no voice. Our intention is bunbum ga dhä-yuṯakum, to make it right again, to remake, to build something through its renewal. We are starting again. We want to refuse the mistake and we hope to contribute to processes that heal. We are a more-than-human, Yolŋu-non-Yolŋu Collective from North East Arnhem Land and south eastern Australia. We consider Yolŋu songspirals and the importance of order and process to continually remaking the world. We also reflect on how our working together is part of the songspirals and how this contributes to bunbum ga dhä-yuṯakum, to making it right again, to resisting that which silences or muddles, and to repairing damaged relations and connections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we engage with the Goŋ Gurtha songspiral, shared on/by/with/as Bawaka Country in Yolŋu Northeast Arnhem Land, Australia, to provide a basis for re-thinking responsibility in the context of ongoing Eurocentric colonising processes. Goŋ Gurtha encourages us to consider two key aspects of responsibility – response and ability. We argue that Yolŋu relational ontologies conceive response-abilities as requiring an ability to pay close and careful attention as part of more-than-human worlds, and an imperative to respond as part of these worlds. As such, rather than being responsible to or for others, we seek to respond as, emphasising our emergent co-becoming in more-than-human, situated, ethical ways. Goŋ Gurtha guides the paper through four aspects of these response-abilities: response-abilities as songspirals; response-abilities as continuity; response-abilities as academics and response-abilities beyond Bawaka. In doing so, we understand response-abilities as more-than-human co-becomings enacted in contingent ways that none-the-less need to be grounded in deep obligations of more-than-human kinship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We invite readers to dig for ganguri (yams) at and with Bawaka, an Indigenous Homeland in northern Australia, and, in doing so, consider an Indigenous-led understanding of relational space/place. We draw on the concept of gurrutu to illustrate the limits of western ontologies, open up possibilities for other ways of thinking and theorizing, and give detail and depth to the notion of space/place as emergent co-becoming. With Bawaka as lead author, we look to Country for what it can teach us about how all views of space are situated, and for the insights it offers about co-becoming in a relational world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]