‘We are kangaroo, we have the owl’: Linguistic and emotional clues of the meanings of the bush in changing Wiradjuri being and relatedness

Abstract

This article is an examination of the changing ways Bogan River Wiradjuri people from Peak Hill, central west New South Wales, speak about and emotionally relate to the bush, within the broader framework of Wiradjuri morality and kin relatedness. In this article I use emotional states of being, the way people feel when they visit and talk about the bush, to understand the complexity of meanings inherent in older and younger Wiradjuri inter‐subjectivities of human and non‐human relatedness. Shared emotional states of being are a language for the Wiradjuri self and the moral framework that governs local social life. I focus on the social and emotional orders of relatedness to argue that Wiradjuri ways of ‘being’ in the bush have changed from older to younger people in light of broader historical changes, subsequently affecting the relationships people have with the bush and the ancestral kin and spiritual beings contained within it.

Other‐than‐humans and the remaking of the social

“…In 1996, a senior Bardi woman from the northwest Kimberley region of Western Australia talked to me about how elders ‘used to frighten’ younger generations with stories about dangerous spirit beings, inculcating fear in children about wandering off through the bush. A similar use of stories about dangerous spirit beings has been reported in other Australian ethnographic contexts (see, e.g., Burbidge : 420‐1) . Although the term ‘spirit’ is a non‐indigenous term, it is one some Bardi and Jawi employ, by way of analogy, to describe the various (largely invisible) beings who inhabit the landscape, and I use it here to signify non‐corporeal ‘other‐than‐human entities’ (Hallowell : 179) which inhabit and animate Bardi and Jawi country.…”

“…11One difference between the Wiradjuri situation that Burbidge () describes (in New South Wales) and the Bardi context discussed here (in the northern Dampierland Peninsula) is that in the latter, different beings are associated with specific ecological zones, rather than a more generalized ‘bush’ (Burbidge : 420‐1).…”

“…Writing about Jawoyn people in the Katherine region, Merlan says that ‘experiential remove from country’ has contributed to generational differences: while older individuals have ‘feeling‐complexes’ associated with country which are ‘vital and personally felt’, younger people's ‘sense of country had been shaped at least as much within a framework of developing Western institutional influences as in some socio‐spatial experience of their elders’ (: 113). Burbidge, too, writes of generational change amongst Wiradjuri, suggesting that ‘Wiradjuri subjectivity is shifting’, linking this with ‘the bush’ now being ‘associated with new meanings of country and land ownership’ (: 426). Rather than manifesting agency, the river and ‘the bush’ surrounding it has become ‘less a relational part of the Wiradjuri self’ (: 422).…”

“…Burbidge, too, writes of generational change amongst Wiradjuri, suggesting that ‘Wiradjuri subjectivity is shifting’, linking this with ‘the bush’ now being ‘associated with new meanings of country and land ownership’ (: 426). Rather than manifesting agency, the river and ‘the bush’ surrounding it has become ‘less a relational part of the Wiradjuri self’ (: 422). With respect to Arrernte Aboriginal people of Central Australia, Austin‐Broos refers to an ‘ontological shift’ in which there is a change ‘from subjects, understood preeminently as relatives, to market individuals’, in conjunction with ‘the reinterpretation of ritually defined country as private landed property and its cumulative effect on Arrernte's own views of country’ (: 266).…”

The Returns of Recognition: Ngarinyin Experiences of Native Title, Encounter and Indeterminacy in the Kimberley Region of Northern Australia

“…The vesting of social and cultural capital in remote places feeds romantic discourses that reproduce the idea that authentic Aboriginal selves are located in remote Australia (Bessire :470). Yet, as other scholars describe for Aboriginal people in various parts of Australia, the attenuation of connections to country has had a range of impacts, particularly on cosmologies and personhood more generally (Burbidge ; Glaskin , ; Kearney ; Vincent ). Challenging ‘nostalgic views’ of Aboriginal personhood has meant moving beyond analyses which construct country as a cultural vestige, while at the same time elevating Aboriginal people's phenomenological and relational experiences (Hinkson ).…”