As part the University’s Reconciliation Week celebrations, Walanga Muru together with the Library hosted a writing competition, with students and staff invited to submit short stories, poems or essays based on the 2021 National Reconciliation Week theme:  “More than a word. Reconciliation takes actions”.

All winners received a book pack, featuring a range of Indigenous authors.

The winning staff entry below comes from Dr Jo Anne Rey,  who currently holds a Macquarie University Fellowship for Indigenous Researchers.

View the winning student entries >>

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“Wirriga Way”: Activism as six conciliatory steps

 In the context of reconciliation between colonising pasts, presences, and futures, on the one side, and Australian First Peoples’ perspectives, times, places, and events on the other, a ‘third-way’ approach requires movement and action between these oppositional stances (Bhabha, 1990). I contend the conditions for activation of a conciliatory ‘third-way’ path involves six steps: recognition, respect, reciprocity, responsibility, resilience, and restitution. The approach involves reflexive learning steps for all parties. Together they carve a pathway towards sustainable futures across a landscape which until now has been very rocky. I call it “Wirriga/Goanna Way”[i]. This essay walks through these steps.

The first step involves recognition. To see a pathway ahead first requires recognition of the need for it. This involves desiring a resolution to an unresolved problem. In Australia, that unresolved problem is the simple, yet awful, fact that this continent was unlawfully stolen from its original inhabitants. That theft involved the British stealing from around 250 nations, who spoke more than 250 languages, who represent the longest continuing civilization on the planet across more than 65,000 years. This longevity puts all other human civilizations in the shade of this accomplishment.  Volumes have been written, and careers built, and some destroyed addressing and then not resolving the problematic fact that across a relative eye-blink of 233 years, genocidal intent has underpinned massacres, decimated peoples, landscapes, extinguished species, and ecologies (Tatz, 2017). This colonising and unsustainable path, implemented by the ‘disconnected’ people (Steffensen, 2020, p. 163) is recognised as having led us to the point that the continent is now suffering traumatic climactic responses, evidenced through recent megafires, years of droughts, species extinctions and ecological collapses (Rey, 2021). Additionally, such an unconciliatory pathway showed deep disrespect for the original system which sustained the presences, places, and peoples of this continent for multi-millennia. Such is the unresolved problem that struggles to be recognised by most of the disconnected populations of Australia today. However, with this problem recognised, the next step becomes possible. That step requires showing respect, although unpacking the causes of disrespect first, is necessary, before engaging the ways for activating change.

Beyond Aretha Franklin’s famous 1998 song R-E-S-P-E-C-T (“Aretha Franklin,” 2021), unravelling the dimensions of respect (and disrespect) requires another recognition: that disrespect causes problems that should not be ignored. To have respect for an Other means that you understand and give value to who/what you are meeting (presences, places and/or peoples). If you are disconnected, then learning to value the Other for respectful recognition requires learning with, not learning about, them (the latter form being an objectifying process that does not respect or recognise the need for relationship). So, learning with involves experiences with, which in turn requires time spent with them, which in turn requires active participation in forming that relationship. Thus, relational activism is required.

Thoughtful sustainable relationships with presences, places and peoples requires activated two-way reciprocity: giving and receiving, so those relationships can be equitably beneficial. As it happens, Aboriginal Law/Lore recognises reciprocity as a fundamental element in sustainable, equitable, relational justice, in both human and other-than-human realms (Graham, 2014).

In contrast, hierarchies and elitism within knowledge systems and practices have characterised preferred values and ways of engagement by the disconnected peoples arriving here, resulting in significant grievances incurred by First Peoples from the ignorance and unsustainable maladaptations that foster disrespect. To address the ignorance and disconnected maladaptations, colonising systems, such as in education, other governmental bureaucracies, and corporations, need to take responsibility for activating the change.  They need to recognise the problem and that the solution requires respectful, reciprocal activated relationships.  Being welcomed onto Country is the offer for such relationship, and so the recipient is duly obliged to accept and activate their responsibilities by providing opportunities through reciprocal, relational experiences with First Peoples.

Establishing responsible relationships requires recognition and respect so equitable reciprocity can be shared. It requires each partner in the relationship to accept their accountability for maintaining that equity. However, just as Wirriga/Goanna interprets its context and then determines which next step to take for the most strategically sustainable outcome, so reconciling partners need to negotiate together the most strategically sustainable steps required to produce shared wellbeing within the context of their existing situation. All partnerships are contextually reliant, so recognising the characteristics of their landscapes (historic, physical, spiritual, and judicial) is critical to successful outcomes. In Australia therefore, with 250 different Countries, peoples and diverse physical attributes and liabilities, accepting responsibility for equitable reciprocity requires localised reconciliations. Like shoes, one size does not fit all feet. Therefore, sustainable reciprocal relationship building requires recognising the factors that underpin resilience contextually and learning experiences that require shared times-tellings. ‘Yarning’ (as times-telling) for sustainable futures, opens experiential, reflexive, and resilient learning outcomes (Bawaka et al., 2016; Bessarab & Ng’Andu, 2010).

Building resilience involves yarning, sitting together, sharing stories, finding common ground, learning to see the other’s perspectives. In the early stages this storying can seem uncomfortable. However, yarning builds trust and trust builds relational reciprocity – the sharing that opens pathways to being together. Reconciling is the weaving together of the differences into a stronger fabric of wellbeing.

Such a fabric cannot exclude Country. It is well known that human resilience relies on Country. Resilient Country requires water, soil, plants, animals, marine life, oxygen, sunlight, etc.) and supports resilient communities. Resilient Communities support families. Resilient families support individuals. Resilient individuals reflect a resilient healthy human-Country system. Yet, without reconciliation there can be no resilient human society and without restitution for the wrongs engaged, there can be no reconciliation, no resilience, no reciprocity, and no respect. As such, our conciliatory journey cannot exclude restitution for wrongs done.

Restitution is the action, the activism that is required to resolve the problem. Without restitution for the damage done to the presences, the places, and the peoples of Country there can be no equitable sustainable relationship sourced in reciprocity and justice. To get to the place of restitution requires all the previous steps: recognition, respect, responsibility, and resilience, locally activated.

In conclusion, I have argued that walking Wirriga way sustainably requires respectful recognition of all the landscapes and their inhabitants. Spending time yarning can activate the conversation. However, will restitution continue the blockage or open the pathway?

Yanama budyari gumada,
Walking with good spirit.

References

“Arertha Franklin”. (2021). Retrieved from https://www.arethafranklin.net/. Rhino Entertainment.

Barad, K. (2010). Quantum Entanglements and Hauntological Relations of Inheritance: Dis/continuities, SpaceTime Enfoldings, and Justice-to-Come. Derrida Today, 3(2), 240-268. doi:10.3366/drt.2010.0206

Bawaka, C., Burarrwanga, L., Ganambarr, R., Ganambarr-Stubbs, M., Ganambarr, B., Maymuru, D., . . . Sweeney, J. (2016). Co-becoming time/s Time/s-as-telling-as-time/s. In J. Thorpe, S. Rutherford, & L. A. Sandberg (Eds.), Methodological Challenges in Nature-Culture and Environmental History Research (pp. 106-108). London Routledge.

Bessarab, D., & Ng’Andu, B. (2010). Yarning About Yarning as a Legitimate Method in Indigenous Research. International Journal of Critical Indigenous Studies, 3(1), 37-50. Retrieved from http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11937/37083

Bhabha, H. (1990). The third space. In J. Rutherford (Ed.), Identity: Community, culture, difference (pp. 207-221). London: Lawrence & Wishart.

Graham, M. (2014). Aboriginal notions of relationality and positionalism: a reply to Weber. Global Discourse, 4(1), 17-22. doi:10.1080/23269995.2014.895931

Rey, J. (2019). Country Tracking Voices: Dharug women’s perspectives on presences, places and practices. (Doctorate). Macquarie University, North Ryde.

Rey, J., & Harrison, N. (2018). Sydney as an Indigenous place: “Goanna walking” brings people together. AlterNative: An International Journal of Indigenous Peoples. doi:10.1177/1177180117751930

Rey, J. (2021). Indigenous Identity as Country: The “Ing” within Connecting, Caring and Belonging.
https://protect-au.mimecast.com/s/hqAECnx1Z5U57AWNH1cr7q?domain=mdpi.com

Steffensen, V. (2020). Fire Country: How Indigenous Fire Management Could Help Save Australia. Richmond: Hardie Grant Publishing.

Tatz, C. (2017). Australia’s Unthinkable Genocide. Bloomington, USA: Xlibris.

_{[i] Goannas (Wirriga in Dharug language) are not usually considered a conciliatory mob. As storying goes, they are fierce, predatory, and their bite, if survived, is something never forgotten. Yet I have argued before that they take the middle ground, the ‘third space’ (Bhabha, 1990) as the beings that wander with footsteps on the right, and footsteps on the left, leaving a trailing tail-tale weaving in between (Rey, 2019; Rey & Harrison, 2018). They create and activate their territory between other inhabitants’ times, places, and events. Their path involves recognising and respecting their context, interpreting the strategic benefits (food, safety, resilience) and/or difficulties (threats, obstacles, detriments) of the landscape and its inhabitants, and then determining next steps (response).}

_{As such Wirriga’s journey is an experiential, reflexive learning spiral, across time, space, and matter (Barad, 2010; Rey, 2019). Reflexivity is defined here as the mediation between the inner (instinctive, sensory) and outer (external, physical) contexts, which results in change.  I argue it is integrated and successful strategy from which humans could well benefit for their own sustainability.  In the case of Wirraga for example, ‘reading’ the landscape through a gland in their mouth conforms to the notion of mediation between inner and outer contexts. Interpreting and changing direction would conform to the resultant change.}

_{For humans, the inner (intuitive, emotional, psychological) contexts interpreting the outer (external, physical) contexts, is indicative of that mediation, and the reflexivity becomes evident through the resulting changes as activated through speech, writing, art, dance, and other forms of production.}

^{For more on Goannas see https://australian.museum/learn/animals/reptiles/australian-goannas-evolution-and-radiation}