Learning about Country
Tuesday 1st October
Before I moved to Australia, I was aware of my lack of knowledge and understanding of Australia’s history and also of the Aboriginal lands on which it is built. Though reading books like ‘Growing Up Aboriginal in Australia’, ‘Telling Tennants Story’, and ‘Dark Emu’, I was beginning to get a sense of the history and cultural nuances of my soon-to-be home.
Since arriving, of course, I know that that is wildly oversimplifying things. Through more reading and talking on and about Country, Story and the devastation that colonisation has caused to the land and people here, I am slowly learning that I will never have a wholly complete understanding. As Aunty Julie Freeman says, those who come to study Indigenous ways here are only in “kindergarten”, they cannot understand everything and must accept this and listen. Throughout both my work and life here in Australia, I hope to try to embody this openness to learning, understanding that I will make mistakes and also will not ever fully understand the multitudes of experience, understandings, and complex interactions between Indigenous/Aboriginal cultures and people, the colonial project, and academia.
Here are some readings that are helping me to learn and think about how I might action allyship, without turning a blind eye to my own inadequacies and misunderstandings:
Connecting With Country - Government Architecture Network
Reading country: Seeing deep into the bush - Daniele Hromek
‘Theres No Place Like (Without) Country’ - Shannon Foster, Joanne Paterson Kinniburgh, Wann Country
Working with and learning from Country: decentring human author-ity - Bawaka Country