Late 2014 Ethnographic Poetry

cmar.csiro.au

Journal of Language and Linguistic Studies, 2021

The land is a part of indigenous people's everyday life and identity. People and cultures are deeply rooted in the land. The coloniser's/whites' relationship with the land is anthropocentric, whereas the Aborigines' relationship is ecocentric. The Aborigines of Australia have a distinct culture that deals with the land in a biocentric way. Aborigines have world views, creation stories, beliefs, practices and myths rooted in Australia's unique bioregions. In Noonuccal's "Dugong Coming", Aborigines' relationship with marine life and their unique hunting laws shows their holistic way of dealing with the sea and its creatures. The story is set on Stradbroke Island of Australia, once stocked with natural beauty. The indigenous epistemologies and worldviews are significant to modern culture, essentially to address today's ecological concerns.

2003

1995

My greatest debt is to the residents of the southwest coast of Papua New Guinea who were so willing to share with me their understandings of the sea. I can't say it was always smooth sailing after I embarked on this research project, but I surely would have been shipwrecked early on without the navigational assistance of my committee members, Drs. Joseph Morgan,

World Archaeology, 2004

Anthropological research reveals that the scale and complexity of Australian indigenous seascapes correlate with the scale and complexity of spiritual engagements with the sea and use of its resources. Marine specialists see and represent themselves as Saltwater People – an identification spiritually embedded within seascapes rich in cosmological meaning. For Aboriginal people, this embeddedness is underwritten by a Dreaming cosmology that formalizes seascapes as spiritscapes engaged through ritual performance. Such maritime rituals occur on the water, on tidal flats or on dry land. Rituals are the social mechanism by which Saltwater Peoples (Aboriginal people and Torres Strait Islanders) spiritually manage and control their seas and ultimately orchestrate their seascapes. As such, an archaeology of seascapes is more than an archaeology of marine subsistence and procurement technology; it must also be an archaeology of spiritscapes and rituals that mediate human spiritual relationships with the sea. Because ritual sites often have a material expression, it is possible to investigate such sites archaeologically. This scope opens the possibility of investigating long-term developments in people’s spiritual attachments to the sea and how seascapes were cosmologically constructed in a broad range of cultural settings. A new hypothesis associating spiritual control of extreme tidal regimes with previously enigmatic marine stone arrangements from central Queensland illustrates the potential value of the spiritscape approach to seascapes.

2014

This research employs the concept of ‘archaeologies of attachment’, with its emphasis on material culture and intangible heritage, and applies it to an Indigenous Australian seascape – an approach rarely or thoroughly combined in maritime studies. The seascape investigated is the Wardang Island (Waraldi/Wara- dharldhi)/Point Pearce Peninsula (Burgiyana) area in South Australia. This region (and the wider Yorke Peninsula area) is the traditional country of the Narungga people. Collaborative fieldwork with Narungga people has revealed the importance of combining archaeological surveys with place-based oral history interviews to understand the extent of Narungga attachment to this seascape. In particular, place-based interviews conducted with Narungga elders contributed vital ‘lived experiences’ to the understanding of the archaeological record, providing a meaningful and textured account of the past.

The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology of Indigenous Australia and New Guinea , 2022

Indigenous Australia has a rich ethnographic record that provides opportunities for ar chaeology to better understand and appreciate past human-animal relationships and the worldviews in which they are based. These ethnographic accounts indicate that marine hunting of large prey such as dugongs and turtles was often highly ritualized. These ritu als increased hunting success but also included fecundity rituals to increase and/or main tain the distribution and frequency of particular taxa. Such rituals were founded on an understanding of fundamental kin relationships between hunters and prey that were vali dated cosmologically, authorized by ancestral power, enabled by mutually understood sentience and dialogue, and operationalized by a social and moral contract of respect, trust, etiquette, social obligation, and reciprocity. The richness of the anthropological record for Torres Strait in northeastern Australia has provided an opportunity for archae ology to explore past dugong and turtle hunting rituals via shrines of mounded stone and bone dating to the past 500 years. These sites provide rare windows into human-animal ontologies and associated sentient worlds and kin-centric ecologies.

Islands of Inquiry: Colonisation, …, 2008

Marine subsistence specialisation is a central theme in the archaeology of Oceania. Shell middens provide the main material evidence for marine specialisation through food remains (e.g. bones and shells) and technology (e.g. fishhooks). For the most part, middens are considered domestic refuse deposits and the byproduct of people living their daily lives. In contrast, sites such as houses and ritual structures are considered part of the built domain and architecture of settlements.Over the past decade or so, the role of refuse deposits as secular byproducts of society has been challenged by the concepts of ‘ritual rubbish’ and ‘ceremonial trash’ (e.g. Hill 1995; Walker 1995; Needham and Spence 1997; Chapman 2000; Cameron 2002; see also Hodder 1982:161). This reconceptualisation recognises the biographical and symbolic dimensions of ‘refuse’ and the embeddedness of midden materials in ritual behaviour, place-marking strategies, construction of cultural landscapes and maintenance of social identity. In Australia, appreciation is slowly emerging of the agency and symbolic value of domestic ‘refuse’ given monumental expression as curated mounds to inscribe landscapes with new and ongoing social meanings (e.g. Morrison 2003; Bourke 2005; Hiscock and Faulkner 2006; see also Meehan 1982). In the 1980s, Barbara Ghaleb (1990) pioneered Australian archaeological investigations into the ‘ceremonial’ and ‘symbolic’ role of mounded midden deposits with her PhD research on the ‘old village’ site of Goemu on the island of Mabuyag, Zenadh Kes. Since Ghaleb’s research, Mabuyag has been the focus of investigations into another type of ritual site constructed of food remains – dugong bone mounds (McNiven and Feldman 2003; McNiven and Bedingfield 2008). In light of new insights into dugong bone mounds and ritual treatment of subsistence remains, this paper reexamines conceptualisation and identification of mounded midden deposits at Goemu, based on excavations at the site by Harris and Ghaleb in 1985 and by us in 2005.

The Oxford Handbook of Global Indigenous Archaeologies, 2022

For over a century Torres Strait Islander Elders’ accounts about the adventures of reforming ancestors have been recorded. The pathways of these muruygul integrate a chain of Torres Strait islands, neighboring Papua New Guinea, and northern Cape York Peninsula (Australia). According to Islanders, these narratives (each segment of which is owned by different communities) encode important information about cross-community cohesion in the past and present; a mythological geography commemorated through stories, songs, ceremonies, and art. In this chapter, Cygnet Repu describes the process by which he routinely “navigat[es] between the reefs” to “read” these multistage stories, using various cultural data sets. This method of detailed assessment of oral histories, archaeology, and language is applied herein to a gidha (important story, legend, myth) sequence relating to the wandering cultural heroes, Naga and Waiat (Wayath, called Waiet in Meriam Mìr [MM], Waiati in Mawata-Daru Kiwai [MDK]). We demonstrate how greater than 700-year-old story-line pathways taken by these cultural heroes are marked by transportation of loanwords and songs, artistic endeavors and ceremonial exchange. Excavation results are presented for community-wide celebrations and rites of passage associated with Waiat in Western and Eastern Torres Strait. Finally, we reassess past human activities within this region and the important role living saga traditions may play within broader understanding of saga histories and storytelling.