11 ▶ WEAVING “LIFEWORKINGS” Goanna Walking between Humanism and Posthumanism, Dharug Women’s Way

“Who’d Have Thought?”: Unravelling Ancestors’ Hidden Histories and Their Impact on Dharug Ngurra Presences, Places and People

“…The cultural piece created for the exhibition, "Dharug Presences in Place: Where's Dolly Dreaming? ", drew on support from a variety of sources that, together, created a poetic, audio/visual 'journey' that not only entwined Presences and places on Dharug Ngurra as city today, but also, through the metaphor of 'Black Dolly', wove the colonisation storying of those Presences, places, and people of the past, using one particular auto/biographical experience from my Dharug colonial ancestor, Ann Randall (Rey and Parry 2022). The poetic multimedia production became a journey that articulated my connectivity-the 'kin-sensing' across presence, place, and Ancestral people.…”

“…This paper addresses these matters using a poetic multimedia production, Dharug Presences in Place: Where's Dolly Dreaming? (Rey and Parry 2022). I suggest that artistic productions allow a safe space for non-Indigenous people to meet the pain suffered by Indigenous peoples and other-than-humans across the last 235 years on this continent.…”

“…This meeting then opens the healing and reconciliation journey that is required for sustainable futures. Using the metaphor of 'Black Dolly' (a black rag doll) in the audio/visual poetic narration acts as the agent for one thread of my own Ancestral storying (Rey and Parry 2022). It is one that weaves together 19th-century childhood traumas with contemporary degradations of Ngurra created by colonising mentalities.…”