Barddabardda Wodjenangorddee:We're Telling All of You. The creation, history and people of Dambeemangaddee Country Dambeemangaddee People with Blundell, V., Doohan, K., Vacon, D., Allbrook, M., Jebb, M.A. and Bornman, J., 2017, Dambimangari Aboriginal Corporation in association with Fremantle Arts Centre Press, Derby, WA, $44.99, ISBN: 9780646967646 (pbk).

Songspirals: Sharing Women's Wisdom of Country through Songlines Gay'wu Group of Women: Burarrwanga, Laklak, Ganambarr, Ritjilili, Ganambarr‐Stubbs, Merrkiyawuy, Ganambarr, Banbapuy, Maymuru, Djawundil, Wright, Sarah, Suchet‐Pearson, Sandie, Lloyd, Kate, 2019, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, $34.99 (release date: 5 August 2019), ISBN: 9781760633219 (pbk).

Despite generations of colonising representation as hostile, primitive, and existentially threatening, Australia's cultural landscapes have always been woven by the many peoples who made the continent their home from the threads of narrative, place, and connection. The ignorant violence of colonisers who saw Australians as similarly hostile, primitive, and existentially threatening and as inherently inferior to their own Eurocentric, Christian sense of entitlement and destiny was cataclysmic socially, environmentally, and cosmologically across the continent. It underpinned their failure to see that Australians loved these landscapes as home, hearth, and family. It imposed trauma on Country and its people that continues to echo across generations. Yet so much else also echoes across those generations. The narratives of Australian geographies, the connection to and between places, people, and meaning maintain power to recontextualise the recent histories of primitive barbarity and well‐intentioned but deeply flawed paternalism. The Indigenous geographies that constituted the cultural and environmental mosaic of the continent were never embodied in the trinkets whisked away to museums and collections as exemplars of some imagined deep past of humanity. They have always been a contemporary presence in the everywhen of the here and now. The living cultural landscapes that constitute a treasure of immense antiquity and contemporary significance underpin the understanding that this continent always was and always will be the Country that is woven from the narrative threads of connection, belonging, and accountable to place.

As the presence of these Indigenous geographies is increasingly acknowledged, Australian geography is undergoing a significant transformation. Change in our discipline was conventionally referred to in terms of revolutions, turns, and paradigm shifts—radical breaks in orientation that welcome in something new. A little over 20 years ago, in response to a regrettable celebratory editorial in Australia's first geography journal that had repeated the assertion from its first edition in 1928 that ‘Australia still had an Aboriginal “problem”’ (Biddle & Aplin, 1996), Sue Jackson and I reflected on the discipline's slow progress towards respectful engagement with Indigenous Australia. We argued at the time that there had been ‘substantial change in the relationship between geography in Australia and indigenous people. Further, we suggest that the relationship is of great value to the discipline and the nation as we move towards more equitable and sustainable futures’ (Howitt & Jackson, 1998, p.155).

Twenty years further on, Australian geography is somewhat changed. Engaging with powerful critiques of its complicity in colonial (and still colonising) occupation, neglect, and abuse of a continent and its human and non‐human communities, Australian geography's engagement with Indigenous Australia is less tentative, less marginal, and more influential in terms of directions of research and teaching. It is expected that Country will be acknowledged as a matter of routine. While much of that acknowledgement is limited, ignorant, and tokenistic in ways that are offensive, it is also commonplace to find geographers doing more than acknowledging Country. Many now acknowledge our disciplinary entanglement with Country, its mistreatment, its care, and its future in complex ways that carry both culpability and responsibility much more readily than in the past. Australian geographers have pushed significant conceptual and commercial boundaries in publishing as Country in various configurations (Bawaka Country et al., 2013; Bawaka Country et al., 2014; Bawaka Country et al., 2016; Smith et al., 2018; Tebrakunna Country & Lee, 2017), and Indigenous geographers are increasingly recognised as integral to the discipline's future.

Engagement and entanglement with Indigenous geographies, however, are complex and uneven across the discipline. The responsibilities that come with being welcomed to or acknowledging Country involve more than applying geographical analysis to Indigenous issues or delivering geographies of Indigenous characteristics or patronisingly gifting geographies for Indigenous groups. In 2008, at its inaugural conference in Taiwan, the International Geographical Union's Indigenous Peoples' Knowledges and Rights Commission adopted a threefold agenda:

• to encourage Indigenous geographers,
• to develop geographical research in collaboration with and in support of Indigenous peoples' knowledges and rights, and
• to tackle the task … (of) bringing ‘international disciplinary attention to Indigenous geographies’ (Frantz & Howitt, 2012, p.728).

For Australian geography, that sort of agenda has been transformational. In grappling with the diversity, complexity, and realities of Indigenous Australia, the discipline has largely avoided turning towards an imagined singular Indigenous. Instead, we find deeper connections being woven, deeper critiques of discourses and practices of colonisation, possession, and exploitation, and attention being given to something other than the continent's 231 years of colonial history.

And yet Indigenous geographies and Indigenous scholarship are blossoming and longer, deeper threads of entanglement, connection, and understanding are emerging from long‐standing relationships between colleagues in interesting collaborations that warrant careful attention from Australian geography (and more widely) because they have the capacity to genuinely shift the way the discipline is both Australian and geography.

Two new books mark the transformational opportunity in important ways. Both represent radical engagement with Indigenous geographies in ways that should be celebrated, treasured, and nurtured as foundations for new relationships between Australian geography and Australian geographies. Both should become foundational texts for introducing twenty‐first century students to the entanglement of people, place, and environment in Australia. Where recent texts such as Dark Emu (Pascoe, 2018) and Deep Time Dreaming (Griffiths, 2018) offer a framework to rethink continental scale geographies, the two books reviewed here—Barddabardda Wodjenangorddee: We're Telling All of You and Songspirals—take readers on intimate journeys to particular countries and the stories, knowledge, wisdom, and people who belong there. They bring alive geographies that are so much more than cultural landscapes. They introduce readers to places that are loved and have been loved for thousands of generations. They introduce places whose stories entangle us with the everywhen (Stanner, 1969), the past–present–future continuous of particular geographies. They present stunning and scholarly Indigenous geographies that challenge the discipline's colonial entanglements conceptually, methodologically, and practically. They invite the transformation that they present in text and image—a transformation towards a discipline that cares for rather than simply describes Country. They invite us to love and respect places rather than simply study them.

In Barddabardda Wodjenangorddee: We're Telling All of You, the traditional custodians of Dambeemangaddee Country speak of their geographies directly to a wide audience. For the Dambeemangaddee authors, the first audience for the book is their own children, grandchildren, and future generations:

Janet Oobagooma: They have to know about country and the old people, and where they really belong …

Donny Woolagoodja: … It is important for young people to know … their country is where their ancestors come from … ( p.12)

Despite the recognition of the Dambimangari native title claim in May 2011, few Australians are aware of the people and their Country on the north‐west coast of the continent. For most Australians, this Country, dambeema, is virtually an empty part of the map. It is an imaginary of potential for colonisation, exploitation, and development. It is a tourism wonderland—out of reach except in flights of fancy to all but the wealthy (see, for example, Scherrer & Doohan, 2013). Like so many other places across the continent, these peoples' much‐loved homeland has been an imagined geography already claimed, owned, and occupied by right of colonisation and the power of White privilege. Yet this dambeema is the home of people whose history ‘goes far beyond … written historical sources, into the history of the land itself, the events that shaped its formation and the intense longstanding relationships between people and the land’ (p.30).

Barddabardda Wodjenangorddee: We're Telling All of You is, in every sense, an Indigenous geography. It is an ‘Indigenous history of place’ (p.29). It is a reminder that Australian geographies and history ‘did not begin when white men and women came’ (p.31). This is a geography that opens itself to a transformation of time by attending to Lalai, Stanner's everywhen, where ‘linear time is of little value in comprehending the longer history’ and where ‘linear time fades’ and ‘landscapes, memory and expressions of time are tied together in a way that dissolves time’, and ‘Lalai is not a moment or an event, nor is it a thing of the past; it is a set of doctrines and values that give meaning and significance to everything, determined for all by forces beyond linear time that are alive and evident in the land (and sea)’ (p.31).

And so, Barddabardda Wodjenangorddee: We're Telling All of You refuses to introduce its readers to a singular authoritative account by scholarly observers of a people and their homeland. This is a brilliant work of scholarship. It is, however, not a detached ethnography but an intimate geography. And it is not a singular geography presented by a detached observer. It is not a map to be collected and displayed as if that were enough to allow the observer not just to observe but to also possess what is shown. Part I introduces readers to the people and the place of Dambeemangaddee Country under the heading of “The Country and its Culture.” This part provides a broad account of social organisation, relationships to place, the key creative forces of landscape, seascape, and skyscape, and the determination of native title in the area. The Wandjina and Woongudd who figure in the accounts of Lalai across this Country are part of the landscapes, seascapes, and skyscapes of these places. Chapter 3 explicitly engages with the cultural geography of the Country. This a landscape where relationships between people, place, spirit, and life is ordered by forces encountered in Lalai. The social order, the relationships between family groups, territorial groups, people who share traditions, but retain distinctive accounts, languages, and perspectives, is guided by responsibilities, risks, and obligations put in place for all beings in Lalai.

Part 2 provides an account of encounters with outsiders as a series of intrusions on ‘the history of deep time as recorded in the stories of the Lalai’ (p.89). It records encounters with Aboriginal people from other parts of Northern Australia and Macassans from the Indonesian archipelago. Early European intrusion was met with confidence and without fear, but the assertion of White colonising privilege in other places influenced British behaviour in the region and ‘the British proceeded to explore for future land settlement on the assumption that Europeans could maintain control of the land and its resources against Indigenous people, who would become used to settlers and eventually would become useful servants and Christians’ (p.101).

Unlike intrusions into other Countries across Australia, the formal occupation of this region came with instructions to draw: ‘a line … around your camp and distinctly marked, inside of which line no natives should, on any pretence whatever, be admitted’ (quoted on p.104). The settlement at Camden Bay was abandoned in the face of resistance from the people of Dambeemangaddee Country. But pearlers, police, and beachcombers established camps along the coast from time to time, and some ill‐fated pastoral ventures also sought to effect occupation, and ‘as the twentieth century unfolded that were increasing pressures on Dambeemangaddee people to conform’ to the expectations of the largely absent colonisers (p.127).

Containing beautifully reproduced images from mission, state, and other archival sources, the book illustrates the very powerful presence and activity of Dambeemangaddee people on the Country. The emergence of leprosy in the 1930s in Australia's north‐west saw establishment of an institution that operated from 1936 to 1986 at Bungarun, with special police patrols removing people ‘on suspicion of having leprosy’ (p.149) for incarceration in isolation at the leprosarium.

But again, this book shifts the ground of occupation back to the presence and activity of the people, telling the stories of particular families in the leprosarium and then, in Parts 3 to 6, moving into detailed accounts of who the families are, what they want their audiences to know, and why the outsiders' characterisations of their history, art, and culture is limited and often inaccurate. In over 200 pages of beautifully crafted text and amazing photographs, the cultural landscapes of Dambeemangaddee Country come alive with people, families, travels, narratives, connections into Lalai, and the places they create, the responsibilities they impose, and the lives that weave a social fabric that maintains lived relationships to known family members back into the mid‐1800s and through cultural knowledge, narratives, and connections, back into the deeper cosmological histories of these places and their ancestors.

In this presentation of their lives, Dambeemangaddee people demonstrate the depth and breadth of their scholarship and knowledge and reveal to a wider audience the extraordinary demands made upon them by Native Title processes to demonstrate “connection”. In Barddabardda Wodjenangorddee: We're Telling All of You, the living culture delivers the evidence that the coloniser courts in their arrogance and privilege imagine it is their right to demand in order to allow Dambeemangaddee people to demonstrate they comply with the Australian Parliament's act of begrudging and limited recognition.

The book's epilogue reports on current initiative to ensure ‘the wellbeing of their youth and the health of their culture and country’ (p.403). This is an amazing work of scholarship and partnership between Dambeemangaddee people and their trusted and long‐term collaborators. It is a book that every Australian geographer should read—indeed every Australian should come to understand that this story, this geography of belonging, responsibility, and care is reflected in the narratives and knowledge of the many countries that make up Australia's lands and seas and which the arrogance of White privilege still imagines as if the fiction of terra nullius was never erased by the High Court's Mabo decision.

Further east, in Bawaka, the Yolngu‐academic collaboration has been pursuing a different representation of Indigenous geographies. In their forthcoming volume, Songspirals, the Gay'wu Group of Women presents an important culmination of their work. This collective has never been simply a community–academic research collective. Rather, this innovative group of Yolngu and non‐Yolngu scholars has always tested, challenged, and transcended boundaries that most researchers avoid because they are too hard to address. The Gay'wu Group of Women has never simply done research simply—or perhaps has never simply done research. Like any research with world‐shaping impact, their work starts from an unexpected place, asks its readers to traverse unexpected terrain, insists that readers begin to recognise how their own hidden assumptions, biases, and prejudices have imposed blinkers on vision, feeling, and understanding, and then opens readers to genuinely new insights.

In other words, like Barddabardda Wodjenangorddee: We're Telling All of You, Songspirals shifts the terrain of academic discourse by creating a new sort of space in which Indigenous geographies are considered not as objects for study, analysis, and representation by non‐Indigenous academics but as places of belonging, meaning, and significance to be engaged with, responded to, and recognised through Indigenous scholarship, and deep listening, feeling, and understanding across the conventional representations of academia to produce genuinely new knowledge, understanding, and insights that lays foundations for new responses and futures in which the conventional Indigenous–settler binaries are profoundly challenged on terms set by Indigenous parties.

Songspirals foregrounds Yolngu scholarship and acknowledges the Yolngu audience for this scholarly work as an appropriate primary audience for scholarship. As for the Dambeemangaddee authors who led the work presented in Barddabardda Wodjenangorddee: We're Telling All of You, the intention to produce Indigenous scholarship for Indigenous audiences is clear. In doing so, both of these important volumes refute the patronising respect that is too often begrudgingly offered to co‐authored academic–Indigenous collaborations by “academic” audiences and instead recognises that the challenge of intercultural collaboration is perhaps best met at this time by understanding just how intercultural audiences might be engaged with. In the process, these books bring academic and wider Dambeemangadee and Yolngu (and wider Australian and international) audiences together on a shared journey of experience and understanding.

Songspirals presents a scholarly Indigenous geography in every possible sense of this term. It immerses the reader in Yolngu concepts, terms, and relationships and accepts that for the key elements of the audience, moving to even a basic understanding of the thinking, the research and knowledge underpinning its insights will be a slow and difficult task. Australian education curricula have generally performed poorly in allowing the book's conventional academic readers even basic building blocks for intercultural understanding. Indeed, a lot of academic scholarship uses other sorts of conceptual building blocks to create walls without doors or windows to access understanding of Yolngu scholarship. The book, therefore, has to do a lot of work in bringing readers to a point where Yolngu ontology as an intellectual and experiential foundation for understanding can become accessible. As the Bawaka Collective, the Gay'wu Group of Women has spent more than a decade negotiating how to deliver to both Yolngu and other audience new ways of engaging with Yolngu scholarship. In Songspirals, they succeed in taking that effort to new levels.

The beautiful prose of Songspirals immerses the reader in to the lives, lifeworlds, and deep experience of the Yolngu women leading the work. They offer pathways to some of the unlearning that the reader needs as they guide the building of incremental understanding as the book's narrative unfolds. That pedagogical task is pursued with rigour, patience, and love. The opening words of the text evoke the challenge: they are in Yolngu‐matha rather than English, and they present an invitation to a “final destination” that seems more theological than scientific. While the translation of the Yolngu‐matha text follows immediately upon the written form of words whose sounds have echoed the North Australian landscape for thousands of generations, the journey referred to in the opening stanza of text needs the support not only of family, ancestors, and place, as explained in the manuscript, but also the whole cycle of the text. I urge readers to return to this stanza when they have finished the whole text, as this is an opportunity to realise just how profoundly their understanding has been guided and transformed along a spiral path through language, culture, family, place, and knowledge to reconsider how things are connected and how we understand the worlds we live in, the worlds that support us, and the worlds that we affect.

Songspirals invites readers to join members of the Bawaka Collective on several interconnected journeys. ‘Come with us on our journey’ (p.xvi), the invitation reads. But the “us” referred to in this opening, spirals around different modalities. “We” are the daughters whose mother's journey offers the foundations for starting the journey to understanding the Indigenous geographies of the Bawaka Collective. “We” are also the academics. “We” are also the ancestors and future generations of Yolngu along with the wider connections to human and non‐human kin.

The fluid modality of who the “we” referred to in the text demands careful attention to context, but that is never problematic. In fact, the work's fluid modality is part of the journey that this careful scholarship takes its readers on. This is an appropriately relational “we” in which context and purpose always need to be considered in deciding who is meant to be embraced by the first‐person plural and what the intent of such inclusion is. What is certain is that the “we” in this text is NEVER the academic “we” speaking for, speaking over, or speaking instead of a Yolngu‐inclusive‐and‐welcoming “we”. This is always a contextually negotiated “we” that is constructed by a group of women whose scholarly credibility is attested by their ability to speak together as Country, and to have that exceptional honour and responsibility acknowledged and respected in the scientific literature. This is a powerfully coherent, intellectual, and scholarly “we” who have worked through how to hold each other accountable and (perhaps even more impressively) how to be held accountable to each other and the wider contexts in which the diverse elements of this collective entity work. This always‐contextualised‐and‐negotiated collective voice accepts and exercises responsibility together.

Songspirals struggles—and succeeds spectacularly—to find ways to present and explain a reality, a set of experiences, a system of knowledge, an understanding of reality that has engaged and entangled with time and space, with geography as a scholarly discipline and as a set of material realities, over generations. It works within the Yolngu ontology of place.

Songspirals thus invites its readers to join a journey full of tears and surprises and wisdom. Like much geographical research, it grapples with the entanglements of space, place, time, and culture. Unlike anything else I have ever read, however, it does so from an unapologetically grounded Yolngu ontology in which Yolngu scholarship, Yolngu experience, and Yolngu interpretation of experience lead the conversation.

I want to be careful here not to glamorise or romanticise the achievement of the Gay'wu Group of Women in producing Songspirals. For example, I do not want to overstate, overgeneralise, or oversimplify possible connections between Yolngu ontology and scholarship and relational traditions in philosophical traditions from other places. Indeed, reading Songspirals and Barddabardda Wodjenangorddee: We're Telling All of You together reminds us that such comprehensive and geographically referenced ontologies of place belong and become in every part of the continent and its sea and sky Countries. Recognising that such traditions exist in many places is important in framing the book's challenge to academic traditions rooted in positivist imaginaries where tasks of separation, classification, and causality are prioritised. In an increasingly divided and divisive academic politics, Songspirals demonstrates and delivers a scholarship of connection. We glimpse the continuities that nurture human timeframes that stretch across thousands of generations and dwarf the ostentatious Eurocentric claims of the origins of philosophy, theory, and method in academic traditions. In a context where calls to take Indigenous knowledges seriously in reshaping human understanding of connections to the complexities of earth systems and cosmology are either championed or ridiculed, Songspirals simply takes its readers on a journey that shows why this issue matters and that explains how it can transform what we understand about the cosmos and our places in it.

But this is no dry academic text—although it has much to teach. Dr Laklak Barrawanga, the lead intellect in this group of women who characterise their relationships as a dilly bag, has drawn together a diverse and talented group of thinkers, actors, and writers to explore how Songspirals co‐constitute the relations and processes that make life, death, and meaning possible. The writing weaves between the intimacy of family, and the cosmos, and everything between. In the opening section, Wuymirri, we journey with the Yolngu sisters' mother as she guides them on her last passage. With and as mother, whale, and family, we are drawn to recognise that the salt water that is conventionally imagined as isolating the Australian nation from the rest of the world (and in the process as shaping an imaginary of separation) is an arena of connection. We share the milkarri, the women's keening that tells a story, creates connection, renews relationship, and weaves Country together.

The opening section follows Gaymala Yunupingu's whale songspiral as she passes. The text explains how deeply personal and meaningful the Wuymirri milkarri is to the researchers but reminds readers that in this sharing, the reader also has responsibility:

The words in this book are our own knowledge, our own property. You can talk about it, but don't think you can become the authority on it. You can use our words for reflection. You can talk about your own experiences and think about how to take lessons from our book into your own lives. You need to honour the context of our songspirals, acknowledge the layers of our knowledge. You can talk about the very top layer but you need to be respectful and aware of the limits of what we are sharing and what you in turn can share. (pp.xxv–xxvi)

In case the narrative of the text is insufficient to guide the reader, Songspirals includes a range of quite comprehensive and impressive notes that guide the more academic reader to more conventional (“Western”) academic texts by way of extensive footnotes, references, and discussion. This extensive appendix to the narrative text offers opportunities to calibrate the Yolngu scholarship reported in the text with a range of other bodies of knowledge; it is presented not in order to “verify” the Yolngu scholarship by way of a comparison with “Western” academic research. Indeed, in places, there is quite critical engagement with claims and propositions of academic research. This section of the text presents a valuable and thoughtful opportunity for readers to draw their own studies in Yolngu studies, Australian history and geography, and Indigenous studies more broadly into their learning the narrative text invites. We find that the songspiral that the whale sings connects Yolngu places through saltwater. It is:

a long songspiral that goes to Papua New Guinea and into the Pacific, to Fiji and beyond. Every place shares things with other places through the connections of the songspirals, but the combination of beings that pass through any one place at any one time is always unique. (p.34)

We also learn that:

Songspirals are a university for us. They are a map of understandings. We have to learn how to walk on the land. (p.33)

Songspirals are often called songlines. In this book, we call them spirals as they spiral out and spiral in, they go up and down, round and round, forever. They are infinite. They spiral, connecting, remaking. They twist and turn, they move and loop. This is like all our songs. Our songs are not a straight line, they do not move in one direction through time and space. Rather everything is connected, layered with beauty. Each time we sing our songspirals we learn more, go deeper, spiral in and spiral out. (p.xvi)

Songspirals are maps, but they are more than maps too. They are about how a person and a clan connect and relate to, with and as Country. How people and Country are always emerging in relationship with each other. Everything within Country is alive and sentient and people are part of this vibrance. So the songspirals, which bring Country into existence, are deeply connected to people. (p.39)

In Songspirals, the women of the Gay'wu Group of Women discuss clouds, messengers, the Wititj (Rainbow Serpent), and fire. They weave together academic and Yolngu universities, culminating in the recognition of Laklak Barrawanga in both domains in 2016 (pp.181–93). Songspirals insists on making and respecting connections. It reminds us that measurement is not the only way to judge value and value judgement and that words are not the only way of communicating meaning, understanding, and value: ‘That memory is there, I just cannot sometimes be shared in words, only in tears’ (p.187). Songspirals thus is a major contribution to the literature on Yolngu culture, law, and history. But it is much more. It is a major contribution to Australian geographical scholarship, an important demonstration of the challenges and value of intercultural research, and appropriate recognition of Yolngu knowledge and scholarship.

Taken together, these two books provide a new vantage point from which to understand Indigenous geographies in Australia and the profound significance of Australian geography coming to new terms with Country in Australia. In 2012, the annual conference of the Institute of Australian Geographers (IAG) was presented with a message stick by my Dharug colleague Chris Tobin. The message stick was created by Barkandji Elder Uncle Badger Bates at the request of the IAG Indigenous Peoples' Knowledges and Rights Study Group (IAG, n.d.). The message stick celebrates the collaboration of communities, researchers, teachers, and activists who come together in Country in IAG conferences to talk about Country. The message stick passes from conference to conference, creating a web of connection across the continent as geographers acknowledge Country and its customary custodian and contemporary advocates.

Australian geographies are deeply embedded in the cultural landscapes that reflect more than 65,000 years of civilisation, study, and connection. I have advocated the importance of listening and becoming an audience to Country (Howitt, 2019). In Barddabardda Wodjenangorddee: We're Telling All of You and Songspirals, Australian geographers are given an extraordinary opportunity to listen and become a more informed and respectful audience to learned colleagues whose engagement with Country echoes an understanding built on generations of connection. They are highly recommended as an opportunity to begin learning differently and perhaps acting differently—as citizens, stewards, and geographers.