Search

Sydney is an Indigenous place - Indigenous Country - infused with Indigenous stories and lore/Law. Yet as the original site of British colonisation in 1788, Sydney today is also a deeply-colonised place. Long-held narratives of Sydney as a colonial city have worked hard to erasure Indigenous peoples' presences and to silence Indigenous stories of this place (Rey and Harrison, 2018). In recent years, however, Indigenous-led tours on Country are emerging in the Greater Sydney region, whereby Indigenous guides share with visitors stories of place, history, culture, language and connection. We write together as Indigenous and non-Indigenous researchers, in conversation with four Indigenous tour operators in the Greater Sydney region to reflect on their experiences of conducting Indigenous tours in this Indigenous-yet-deeply-colonised place. We document the kinds of 'deep-colonising' (Rose, 1996) narratives and assumptions the operators encounter during their tours and within the tourism industry, and highlight how Indigenous tour operators facilitate many non-Indigenous peoples in taking their first steps towards meaningful interactions with Indigenous Sydney-siders. We conclude that Indigenous tour operators undertake incredibly complex, confronting and challenging emotional labours trying to change the pervasive and deep-colonising narratives and assumptions about Indigenous peoples in the Greater Sydney region. In a world where the histories of thousands of cities 'lie in dispossession and genocide of Indigenous peoples' (Porter, 2020: 15), we argue for further and careful analytical attention on Indigenous tourism encounters in Indigenous - yet deeply-colonised - places.

In non-urban places of Australia, caring-as-Country frames natural resource management (NRM) as a practice of reciprocal, more-than-human care-giving (S. Suchet-Pearson, S. Wright, K. Lloyd, and L. Burarrwanga. 2013. 'Caring as Country: towards and ontology of co-becoming in natural resource management.' Asia Pacific Viewpoint 54 (2): 185-197). Caring-as-Country is an idea that encapsulates the entangled, reciprocal relationships that people have with, and as part of, agentic more-than-human worlds. In more urbanised places, however, practices of caring-as-Country are often unrecognised, undervalued and undocumented. In this paper we make explicit practices of caring, healing and rejuvenation at Yellomundee Regional Park, Darug Country in western Sydney. Our discussion of care, entanglement and reciprocity at Yellomundee focuses on two specific activities that embody caring-as-Country: the return of cultural burns and sustained presence on Country in the form of Darug-led culture camps. The Darug principle of yanama budyari gumada, to 'walk with good spirit', embodies and invites new ways of thinking and practising intercultural caring-as-Country in heavily colonised, urban places like Yellomundee. As we document the practices arising from this invitation, we consider its far-reaching implications for NRM and planning, and we expand on the importance of geographies of care for unceded urban places.

Protected areas and nature conservation are profoundly shaped by Western ideas, and are embedded within powerful discourses and colonising practices. This thesis examines how colonialism and apartheid shape contemporary practices of nature conservation in Cape Town in South Africa - its institutions, geographies and peoples. Through three empirical studies of collaborative arrangements at the Macassar Dunes/Wolfgat nature reserves, the thesis develops a postcolonial nature conservation perspective to explore how colonial legacies live on, are contested and are re-shaped through everyday practices. Departing from Margaret Kovach’s Indigenous methodology, interviews and participatory observations are used to focus on collaborations as they occur in the everyday relations between people and nature, on-reserve and in the adjoining township areas. This shows how collaborative arrangements bring together participants across historical and social divides, including municipal nature conservators and residents from apartheid-era racially-segregated townships. Results illustrate how colonising legacies persist at wider and institutional levels through exclusionary conservation practices, a focus on biodiversity preservation, and through sustained racialised relations. Nonetheless, this thesis argues that some of the most transformative collaborative practices occur within ad hoc, informal, and unmanaged interactions, involving deeply interpersonal and ethically challenging situations. Through these interactions, conservators and community participants are re-defining what it means to be ‘postcolonial nature conservators’ in Cape Town. These everyday practices engage difficult and fraught steps that allow us to consider what it means to belong, to reconcile and to be responsible to nature and to each other in a postcolonial city. With its focus on collaboration as everyday relations, the thesis brings to the literature one of the first in-depth studies of urban nature conserva, Ways of Knowing Urban Ecologies - Formas

Within our cities the importance of urban green spaces such as forests, parks, wetlands, and protected areas are increasingly recognised for their contribution to human health and wellbeing, and in the provision of ecosystem services. Meanwhile, cities contain much social, cultural, economic, and environmental diversity, and natural resource management strategies for green areas need to account for the diversity of perspectives and conflict spaces that such urban diversity can encapsulate. Here, the empirical focus is on an urban protected area, Macassar Dunes, in Cape Town, bordered by vast informal and township settlement, and subject to a co-management arrangement for the last ten years between representatives of local residents, academic researchers, and conservation and planning authorities. This study examines the range of perceived ‘bridges’ and ‘barriers’ to co-management from the perspectives of stakeholders in the peak co-management body, the Maccasar Dunes Co-Management Association Management Committee (MDCA MC). This analysis finds the arrangements are perceived as both highly valuable and highly contested amongst MDCA MC stakeholders, with a wide array of bridges and barriers identified. In a complementary analysis the range of place meanings attached to Macassar Dunes within the MDCA MC are examined using the ‘sense of place’ concept. The contention of this thesis is that exploring issues of place through recognising places and their meanings as relational, political and contested can contribute to a co-management theory and practice which is more sensitive to the places through which it is enacted, and provide possibilities for understanding conflict in co-management arrangements.