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Co-becoming Bawaka

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Co-becoming Bawaka: Towards an emergent understanding of place/space

Published as:
Bawaka Country including. Wright, S., Suchet-Pearson, S., Lloyd, K., Burarrwanga, L.,
Ganambarr, R., Ganambarr-Stubbs, M., Whitehead,B., Maymuru, D. and Sweeney, J.
(2016) Co-becoming Bawaka: Towards an emergent understanding of place/space, Pro-
gress in Human Geography, 40(4): 455-475.

Abstract
We invite readers to dig for ganguri (yams) at Bawaka, an Indigenous Homeland in northern
Australia, and, in doing so, consider an Indigenous-led understanding of relational space/place.
We draw on the concept of gurrutu to illustrate the limits of Western ontologies, open up pos-
sibilities for other ways of thinking and theorising, and give detail and depth to the notion of
space/place as emergent co-becoming. With Bawaka as lead author, we look to Country for
what it can teach us about how all views of space are situated; and for the insights it offers
about co-becoming in a relational world.

Keywords:
Indigenous geographies, place, space, relational, more-than-human, post-human, becoming, co-
becoming, Yolŋu, Bawaka, Arnhem Land, Australia

1
Introducing

Is that gukguk calling? When we hear gukguk [a type of pigeon] calling us, here at Bawaka,
we know it’s time to go digging for ganguri, yams (Burarrwanga et al 2013: 173)

Come, it’s time to dig for ganguri (yams) at Bawaka, our Homeland in northeast Arnhem
Land. Will you join us? We’ll get our wires and a bag to carry the ganguri and we will seek to
trace the fine vines with their heart-shaped leaves to where they meet the sand. Then we will
dig. As ever, though, when we are at Bawaka, we’ll be doing more than just digging and get-
ting food. We will be bringing ourselves and Bawaka into being, we will be living our history,
our ceremonies, and our future, and we would like you to join us. We want you to experience
what it might mean to understand space and place from an Indigenous Yolŋu perspective. We
would like all geographers, all people, to learn what they can from us, about what it might
mean to live in a world that is relational, that co-becomes with us and each other, that is know-
ing, that is alive - even in its death. But first, as is appropriate in a Yolŋu world, we must intro-
duce ourselves and introduce you to Bawaka, our Homeland.

We, who invite you on this journey, are Bawaka Country including [Author 5], an Indigenous
Datiwuy elder and caretaker of Gumatj (including Bawaka) Country, her sisters [Author 6, Au-
thor 7, Author 8], their daughter [Author 9], and, [Author 2], [Author 3], and [Author 4], three
academic geographers who, through their work at and with Bawaka, have been adopted into the
family (Bawaka Country including Suchet-Pearson et al 2013, Suchet-Pearson et al 2013,
Wright et al 2012). We are also [Author 10], a research assistant, who worked with the material
from Bawaka and helped draft the written version of the paperi. Bawaka Country is the lead
author and heart of this paper. Bawaka enabled our learning, our meeting, the stories that guide
us, the connections we discuss and has, indeed, brought us into being, as we are, and continue
to co-become, today. Bawaka Country is a known place/space, located in northeast Arnhem
Land, a large area of Aboriginal land in the far north of Australia. Richly nourished and attend-
ed, Bawaka is Country, as encompassed by the Aboriginal English term Country. Country in-
cludes humans, more-than-humans and all that is tangible and non-tangible and which become
together in an active, sentient, mutually caring and multidirectional manner in, with and as
place (Rose 1996; Hsu et al accepted; Bawaka Country including Suchet-Pearson et al 2013).

We hope that, in inviting you to dig ganguri at Bawaka, we are contributing to geographical
understandings of place, space and relationality. We draw on a notion of co-becoming (see
Bawaka Country including Suchet-Pearson et al 2013). Co-becoming is our conceptualization
of a Bawaka Yolngu ontology within which everything exists in a state of emergence and rela-
tionality. Not only are all beings - human, animal, plant, process, thing or affect - vital and sa-
pient with their own knowledge and law, but their very being is constituted through relation-
ships that are constantly re-generated. In this paper, we extend the notion of co-becoming to
place/space. We argue that more-than-humans and humans co-become as place/space, in deep
relation to all the diverse co-becomings that also constitute it. Space/place is its doings, its be-
ings, its knowings, its co-becomings. We also argue it is not only possible but an ethical imper-
ative to include place/space as lead author on this paper. Bawaka is indeed the author-ity of this
piece. We cannot definitively separate the contributions of the humans from the contributions
of Bawaka Country – be that the ganguri that we dig together or the gukguk that calls.

2
We turn to, and learn from, Bawaka and Bawaka Yolngu ways of knowing, to enact our argu-
ment. We introduce you to the concept of gurrutu to illustrate the limits of Western ontologies,
open up possibilities for other ways of thinking and theorising, and give detail and depth to the
notion of space/place as emergent co-becoming. Gurrutu is the complex Yolŋu kinship system
which underlies digging ganguri and all relationships in, around and with Bawaka. We do not
present you with an in-depth ethnographic account of this system as if three knowing academ-
ics as part of a collaborative effort could delve into and describe a discrete Yolŋu world - ana-
lyse and wrap it up in a definitive, authoritative way. Rather, certain insights into gurrutu help
us grapple with some of the challenges facing academics as they try to understand place/space
in relational, material and more-than-human ways. Gurrutu, and the fundamental cyclical pat-
terns this embodies, helps us conceptualise, talk of, dream of and practice place/space in its
emergent relationally.

This paper is written as an Indigenous/non-Indigenous, human/more-than-human co-

construction of knowledge, not an ethnography. We see this as a major contribution of our
work. We work together to challenge notions of separate Indigenous and non-Indigenous, aca-
demic and non-academic knowledges, and human and more-than-human worlds (Hinkson and
Smith, 2005: 161). We work to dismantle a hierarchy of knowledge that would place human-
centred, academic understandings as more legitimate than the forever-knowledge of Yolŋu El-
ders and their more-than-human kin (Wright 2008). We work to bring to the academic world -
a world where Indigenous peoples and knowledges are so often ignored, belittled, singularized
or made to justify themselves against superior, correct Western ways of knowing - some as-
pects of Yolŋu ways of knowing and being. In doing so, we contribute to ongoing challenges,
often led by those working in the area of Indigenous geographies, aimed at the persistent An-
glo-centrism of geography (Coombes et al 2012, 2013, 2014; Louis 2007).

As we share appropriate layers of Yolŋu knowledge with you here we are sharing the results of
our research collaboration which began in 2007 and has taken shape through multiple visits
where we have been together in Arnhem Land, in cities down South and overseas, as well as
through Skype calls, emails and text messages. We started co-researching and co-authoring a
book in 2008 (Burarrwanga et al 2013) and it is the material of this book which we draw upon
for our digging ganguri descriptions. The paper is then, quite literally, led by ganguri and by
Bawaka. The paper is written from recollections of our digging, it emerged with our hands in
the sand. Even revisions to it came from an afternoon in 2014 spent digging ganguri to feed
our Mums, sisters, grandmothers and children. Its structure comes from these experiences, and
from discussions we had around them. Even when the human authors are not physically at
Bawaka, Bawaka Country continues to shape their interactions and understandings - their co-
becomings. This paper is thus shaped and enabled by us paying close attention to Bawaka
Country – it has led us all.

And we don't do this digging alone. In this paper we engage with some important trends in the
academic literature that have productively pondered relationality and relational space. We
make no claim to thoroughly review this huge literature. It would not be possible in this space
and importantly, it is Bawaka and ganguri who are guiding us here. Rather, we engage with
what we see as the most fruitful trends, with those who have worked at the edges of feminism,
post-humanism and Indigenous studies, to help build understanding. We look to the work of
geographers such as Doreen Massey and Richie Howitt who have powerfully challenged us to
understand space in contingent, complex and relational ways, to anthropologists Debbie Rose
and Tim Ingold who have learnt so much from working with Indigenous peoples, and to femi-
nists and post-humanists such as Karen Barad, Jane Bennet and Sarah Whatmore who have

3
challenged us to centre relationality, decentre the human and attend to the vibrant agency of
more-than-human beings.

In engaging with these theories and theorists, Bawaka, in turn, contributes and extends under-
standings of relational space/place. While feminist and post-structuralist geographers have
grappled fruitfully with relationality, revealing that people do not and cannot exist in isolation
from each other, Bawaka as a co-constituted and constantly emerging space/place prompts us
to attend to the more-than-human, and indeed more-than-human-centric aspects of both rela-
tionality and ethics. While anthropologists have drawn upon Indigenous perspectives to chal-
lenge dominant Western theoretical understandings, we extend on this with our particular en-
gagement with Bawaka Country and the knowings and doings that constantly co-create this
very particular and situated space/place. While post-humanists have delved into more-than-
human agency, Bawaka invites us to go further, to challenge the notion of active agents exist-
ing within Country and conceptualise a more-than-human co-becoming of space/place that is
not human-centric. In doing so, we, the human and more-than-human authors elucidate a place-
space that co-becomes – that is constituted through human-more-than-human relationships.
This is a place/space that is co-emergent and that is active and sentient, a space/place that
draws attention to the ways in which dynamic, ongoing, intense webs of connection actually
author an academic paper. In drawing attention to how ganguri and Bawaka lead us in our
journey together we are legitimising the very author-ity of Country. Come.

Digging: relational place/space

Ah, here is a good spot, let’s put the wapitja [the digging stick] into the sand to see if it is
soft enough.

Yes, that’s good, nice and soft and look you can see some ganguri vines and leaves ... Dur-
ing [the season of] Midawarr the ground is not too wet and therefore the yams are not sog-
gy or waterlogged. They are also their most nutritious in Midawarr, loaded with starch.
Later in the season they get hard and don’t taste very good ...

Let’s sit down and follow this vine, look carefully for snakes, spiders and ants first. We’ll
start digging using the point of the wapitja. We can also use our hands and arms.

One person starts digging but they’ll need to rest. someone else then has a go. We take
turns because getting the sand out and digging a deep hole is hard work. One person keeps
going until they reach the depth of their arm, then you get someone with a longer arm - we
usually take Sasha, Djawundil’s daughter with us because she’s got such long arms! (Bu-
rarrwanga et al 2013: 177-178)

There is no abstract space of Bawaka, just as there is no place that we dig into, walk across or
otherwise act upon. In digging ganguri, Bawaka becomes Sasha and her long arms. Sasha and
her long arms become Bawaka. Yet Bawaka becomes in other ways too. Bawaka co-becomes
with the rain and the hole and the song of ganguri, Sasha’s sweat and [Author 5]’s instructions,
the humans taking a rest, the spiders spinning their webs. Sasha too is in relation to Bawaka,
she is not reducible to it. She has responsibilities and a kinship relationship to Bawaka’s entan-
gled co-becomings. This is difficult to convey in words, in writing, and particularly in English.
The ways that places and beings co-become, after all, are so wildly diverse, more-than human,
more-than words, more-than thought, more-than feeling, more-than dream.

4
We are not alone in grappling with the idea of a relational, agentic, and emergent place/space.
Geographers have increasingly sought to attend to relationality. Calls to understand the nature
of relational space and place abound (Jones, M. 2009; McDowell 1993; Massey 2004) as do
discussions of relational scale (Howitt 1993; McGuirk 1997; Marston 2000), relational econo-
mies (Boggs and Rantisi 2003; Yeung 2005), the construction of ourselves as relational beings
(Bondi 2005), and for relational understandings of human/non-human interactions (Bawaka
Country including Suchet-Pearson et al 2013; Head and Gibson 2012). And it is not just geogra-
phy. In physics (Smolin 2008), science studies (Barad 2008), ecology (Ens and Mcdonald
2012), feminism (Barad 2008; Kirby 2008) and the ecological humanities (Griffiths 2007; Slife
2004; Weir 2008), researchers grapple with what it might mean to understand the world rela-
tionally. Leading physicist Lee Smolin, maintains that understanding politics and society with-
in the context of a relational universe is the key question facing all the natural, human and so-
cial sciences in the 21st Century (Smolin 2008).

Indeed, throughout geography, notions of space as a stable, pre-existing framework in which

events unfold have in recent years given way to post-structuralist approaches which view space
as dynamic, emergent and participatory. Specifically, there has been a significant push to think
space relationally, as co-constituted by the associations, networks and interactions of diverse
agents and materialities. Thrift (2004:59) argues that ‘what counts is connectivity’, while Jones
(2009:487) characterises relational thinking as insisting on ‘an open-ended, actor-centred and
mobile politics of spatiality'. Innovative discussion in geomorphology draws on similar themes
of connectivity and emergence (Baker and Twidale 1991; Brierley 2010, Wilcock et al 2013).

Certainly, relationality has long been a concern of feminist theorists both within and beyond
geography (Lawson 2007, Barad 2008, Tuana 2008, Kirby 2008, Haraway 2008). Barad
(2008), for example, elaborates a relational ontology based not upon a world of ontologically
separate entities acting upon each other (interactivity) but upon intra-activity. Looking to phys-
icist Niels Bohr’s work in quantum physics, Barad’s work challenges the separation of subject
from object, knower and known. As she explains (2008, 146), 'Matter is not a fixed essence;
rather matter is substance in its intra-active becoming - not a thing but a doing, a congealing of
agency.' Nancy Tuana’s (2008) work on Hurricane Katrina destabilises 'questionable ontologi-
cal divisions' between human and more-than-human. She evokes the many ways that non-
humans inform, provoke and indeed co-constitute humans through a process of ‘emergent in-
terplay’ (189) which include plastics that permeate flesh and phthalates that pass into the lin-
ings of our intestines.

Within geography, Massey (2005, 2006) powerfully argues for a notion of space as not only
constitutive of, but constituted by relations. Here, relations are understood as embedded prac-
tices. They are not things that happen on a plane or stage, but rather they constitute space.
Space itself does not, cannot, exist prior to the interaction. In this way, representations of space
as static, predetermined and independent are problematised by the recognition of objects as
powerful actors-in-space - agents embedded within a spatial context which they themselves
help to produce, disturb or persist. Contextualising agents in this manner serves to highlight
their place in a set of relations which are multiple and developing, and are thus, along with
space, ‘always in the process of being made’ (Massey 2005:9).

While the central importance of interrelations in producing space is widely reiterated, there re-
mains much disagreement over what this means for the ways space, or place, should be under-
stood and articulated. In particular, criticisms have been leveled at accounts which are set away
from structuralism only to view space as absolutely fluid, open or conceptual - that is, moving

5
from one abstraction to another. Marston et al (2005) for instance have taken issue with what
they see as ‘the increasingly popular practice of representing the world as strictly a jumble of
unfettered flows’, noting the strange absence of materiality in ‘claims to pure flow and absolute
deterritorialisation’ (2005:423). Baldacchino (2010) also believes that ontologies of mobility
and fluidity insufficiently account for materiality: ‘what these approaches tend to have in
common,’ he argues, ‘is a tendency to make the material world disappear’ (2010:764). Build-
ing on such concerns, Jones (2009) points out that far from being entirely open and dynamic,
space can be structured and constrained. He cites Cochrane and Arredondo (2005) in saying
that ‘relational thinking implies openness that often belies the lived-experience of many. Con-
textual forces within advanced capitalism (such as class, race, gender and location) are consid-
ered important for framing and allowing certain possibilities and opportunities to exist’ (Jones,
M. 2009:493, emphasis added). Framing concepts such as territory, boundaries and landscape
likewise remain not only useful but can be seen to have social and material presences.

This then, is a conundrum, one that digging at Bawaka can help understand. Must relational
space be open ended and fluid? Might relational space be bordered, placed, material? Might we
co-become in ways that do not require us to dissolve into one another? The specificities of dig-
ging, the sweat, and the texture of the sand, soft enough to dig through, have much to offer
these discussions. For Bawaka, understanding space, place and its co-becomings, means under-
standing gurrutu. We discuss the Yolŋu concept of gurrutu for its insights into understanding
space in emergent, relational and fundamentally placed ways. Gurrutu is a system of kinship
that underlies and creates the Yolŋu world. Gurrutu brings everything together within an infi-
nite pattern of kinship, obligation and care. Gurrutu encompasses who is related to whom, who
is related to what and how. It underpins and gives rise to Yolŋu social and governance systems
and, along with Rom which encompasses the fundamental Law and systems which underlying
Yolŋu being, is the basis of Yolŋu ontology (Williams, 1986, Keen 1994, Burarrwanga et al
2013). When Yolŋu say related to, they do mean who is your aunty, your cousin, your step-
mother, but it goes beyond this. Relation here includes humans and more-than-humans, and
how they are connected to each other, how they fit, where their ties and obligations are, where
their responses and responsibilities lie. Critically these patterns of kinship include everyone and
everything in a bounded relationship to each other in, through and as a part of place/Country.

Gurrutu reveals place as relational, as always emerging, as human and more-than-human, and
as both bounded and constituted through flows and relationships. While in much literature, re-
lationality is implicated in a notion of openness, gurrutu’s relationality is strongly place-based.
It flows, it emerges, but not in an infinitely open way. There is structure, pattern, meaning to its
emergence. For example, one of the fundamental patterns of gurrutu is Yirritja and Dhuwa.
Everything in the Yolngu cosmos is either Yirritja and Dhuwa. Together they make up the uni-
verse - in a bounded yet intensely relational way. Everything, Yolngu and non-Yolngu who are
adopted into family, more-than-humans including songs, land, ceremonies, winds, minerals,
animals, people, tides, rocks and spiritsii, is either Yirritja or Dhuwa.iii

The Dhuwa-Yirritja pattern interrelates with another fundamental gurrutu pattern - the yothu-
yindi (mother-child) relationship: each stems from the other. Everything is not only bounded by
being Dhuwa or Yirritja, but each bounded thing is related - related as mother-child. The child
of a Yirritja mother is Dhuwa. The child of a Dhuwa mother is Yirritja. If a person is Yirritja
and a rock is Yirritja, that rock would be their sister. The ritjilili, choppy water, which is Dhu-
wa would their mother or child. Bawaka is Yirritja and its neighbouring Country is thus Dhu-
wa. Places are related in mother-child relationships that recur throughout the Yolŋu homelands.
A person will know if they are mother (caretaker) or child for each place - gurrutu determines

6
how they co-become with place and how place co-becomes with them. They will know their
relationship to the yam, the sand, the hole, the digging stick, the story, the sunset and the shade.
There is an infinitely recursive pattern that links places with other places, people with other
people, and humans and more-than-humans in relationships of co-becoming. Yirritja cannot
exist, does not make sense without Dhuwa and vice versa. And neither makes sense without the
yothu-yindi relationship. Through gurrutu, including many inter-related patterns not discussed
here, Yolŋu can name their relationship to people throughout Arnhem Land and to plants and
winds, rocks and animals, spirit beings and celestial bodies, languages and land (see also Rose
2005).

Gurrutu is what makes humans and more-than-humans what they are. It brings with it specific
responsibilities, questions of governance, and rules for living, of Rom. Everything fits and
makes a whole in an incredibly complex, everlasting web. It holds pain in relationship with joy,
diminishment in relationship with growth. If one unpicked it, everything to do with gurrutu
would link to everything else. It is the Yolŋu core and essence. Gurrutu shows how a person or
a yam or a stick can be both part of Bawaka, can in fact co-become with Bawaka, and still be
distinguishable from Bawaka’s other co-becomings with their own songs, stories, Law and
knowledge. Gurrutu, and its building blocks of Yirritja and Dhuwa, are intra-actions (Barad
2008). They are components of a whole acting, responding to each other. The yam, after all, is
not the stick, the mother not the child, while the season of Midawarr is not the rain or its song.
Gurrutu means both diversity and kinship. A person, more-than-human, indeed Country,
comes into being through relationships, but is not reducible to, or subsumed by, any relation-
ship or particular set of relationships. Balance in all things must be maintained. These are rela-
tionships of care and of obligation.

With gurrutu a place/space binary no longer makes sense (see also Massey 2005). Place/space
are abstract in that they are brought into being through patterns and relationships but these very
abstractions are ultimately grounded in kinship, in responsibility, in Bawaka. There is no
‘higher’ (or for that matter, ‘lower’) space that is not part of gurrutu, that is not connected to
that yam and Sasha’s arms, or for that matter her ancestors and unborn children, her joy and
anguish. There is no space in Bawaka outside those things. There is no space that is not full of
more-than-human meaning, that is not bound up with how we are all continually created, how
we co-become, that exists outside our essential co-becoming. Here, as Harrison (2007), points
out, silence and absence play an important part. Unlike Harrison (2007), however, we do not
see this as a question of non-relationality but of a wider, more inclusive, more-than-human, af-
fective co-becoming. Absence has no meaning without presence, silence without speech, life
without death, tractability without intractability. And so, within gurrutu, both silences and ab-
sences are held, as are things that cannot be spoken, felt, experienced or thought by humans.
Humans may not understand, indeed cannot understand, or even be aware of all Bawaka’s co-
becomings, but the meanings are there, the relationships are there. The yam fits; it exists in re-
lation to Banumbir, the morning star, to waŋgany rulu, the number five, to a ceremony for a
loved one who has passed away, to a direction, to knowledge or concepts of life and death. All
of these are Yirritja or Dhuwa. All are related to each other, none exists meaningfully without
the other. Ultimately, place/space is doing; it is the real emotions, thoughts, starch, spiders, wa-
terlogged yam and wind, that co-become as Bawaka; the real words, computer screens, fingers,
eyes, PDF files and paper that co-become as we share the place of these words over time and
space. This enables a reconceptualisation of space/place binaries, a recognition of the diverse
patterns through which space/place is constituted. And as discussed in the following sections,
these patterns emerge through human-human and/or human-more-than-human, and/or non-

7
human centered relations. Yolngu understandings of space/place enable a foregrounding of re-
sponse and responsibility as the emerging co-constitution of spaces/places is embraced.
,

Attending: more-than-human co-becoming

Midawarr is the ideal season for gathering yams – after the heavy rains have ceased at the end
of the wet season, and before the proper dry season. Gukguk is telling us to remember to take
water because it’s hot, hard work digging ganguri. So let’s get our wapitj [ digging stick] or
baki ki [wire], and our dilly bag, and call the children.
Make sure you cover up the babies, there are lots of flies and mosquitoes around. The flies are
the owners of the earth during Midawarr, they’re everywhere. They’re sending out the message
that the stingray are ready to eat now, and that there are lots of fat fish too, small and big. The
crabs are soft now too, small but with lots of meat. You can keep eating those crabs until the
gum tree has the orange flowers - yes, the one you see at Garma Festival time, in August. Then
the crabs grow big and have eggs. This time of year the north-east winds blow, the sea is calm
and it’s a good time to hunt miyapunu [turtle] and djununguyanu [dugong] and for harvesting
dhalimbu (clams). During Midawarr the plants grow and the animals are fat. It is [Author 5]’s
favourite season. (Burarrwanga et al 2013: 173 - 174)
Yolŋu women get out their digging sticks when they know it’s a good time to dig ganguri.
How do they know this? They pay close attention to what’s happening around them and listen
carefully to the messages that are sent out. As the messages emerge, we emerge, we co-
become. As we write this paper, too, attending the messages of flies and mosquitos tells us it is
time to discuss more-than-human agency, to centre Bawaka’s agency more fully. Attending to
the messages is important, the messages tell us what to do and make us who we are. The wom-
en hear gukguk and they remember to take water; they shoo away the flies and know it is Mid-
awarr. A certain configuration of knowing, doing, being and telling emerges. Everything is
entangled in a web of connectivity which is constantly entangling, constantly in motion, con-
stantly co-becoming.

This is an agentic world, one constituted by human and more-than-human agency. Here, we
can usefully turn to posthumanist work that grapples with the active role of non-humans in the
world (see for example Braun and Whatmore 2010; Coole and Frost 2010; Grosz 2010). Ben-
net’s (2010) work, for example has been very influential in thinking through matter as more
than passive, senseless. For Bennet, and for many new vital materialists (Aliamo and Hekman
2008; Gregg and Seigworth 2010), matter is animate, it has the power to change itself, to con-
tribute to humans and their society, to be political. A disease, for example, may disrupt interna-
tional travel, a hurricane may topple an administration, geophysical changes may shape coloni-
al encounters, worms regenerate agricultural land (Bennet 2010, Cruickshank 2005). Stengers
(2010) points out that rocks crystalise, curve out the landscape, make soil. Rocks, a discarded
aluminium can, a cigarette butt are active participants in the world.

The messages that remind us of Bawaka’s agency, of more than human co-becoming can con-
nect and contribute to this post-humanist work through its animate, vitalist understanding of
matter which underpins Yolŋu understandings of their universe. Animals, such as the gukguk,
communicate, while seasons, like Midawarr, play an important role in constituting Bawaka.
The seasons emerge through ongoing, material processes of co-becoming including through
lived experiences of the everyday. Seasons cannot be mapped definitively onto Western calen-
dars. They are not fixed, they do not correspond to Gregorian time expectations. Midawarr be-
gins when the flies tell us and when the calmness of the sea sends its message. Yolŋu, animals,

8
plants, everyone co-become with the different winds and rains – they attend and respond. This
is a lived place/space, one which comes into being through doing and living and the act of be-
ing. Bawaka Country co-becomes through these connections, through the sending out of mes-
sages, the attending to them.

The call of the gukguk not only calls attention to more-than-human aspects of co-becoming but
also reminds ‘us’ (Bawaka Country including its human relatives) that co-becoming is not hu-
man centred. It is not only humans who listen to these messages. The miyapunu, turtle, also pay
attention and respond. As do the crabs and the gum trees. Gukguk may be calling to humans, or
maybe not. Yet, to say the gukguk does not always call to humans, and that humans do not
completely understand, is not to suggest the gukguk lives in a completely different world. This
world is differentiated, often incomprehensible, but the air still passes between us, the meaning
of the world is still co-defined, the sound of the gukguk is woven into the sensory universe, the
relationally remains. And humans also send out messages. What humans do is attended to by
many others.

Indeed, gurrutu itself is not only the domain of humans. Through gurrutu, humans come into
being through their relationships with each other as well as their relationships with non-
humans, and vice versa, humans play a role in the co-becomings of others. Depending on
gurrutu relationships, Yolŋu may be related to particular plants and winds, rocks and animals,
spirit beings and celestial bodies, languages and countries. Everything has gurrutu. The land,
the animals. A child says, ‘Look at that rock’. We answer, ‘Oh yes, that is your märi, your
grandmother.’ Another might say, ‘Look at that whale.’ We answer, ‘That is your yapa, your
sister.’ Whales, though, have gurrutu beyond humans. The whales have their own law, their
own relationships, their own language. They know how to move together and look after their
families. They know when to migrate, they attend to the messages of other beings and they,
too, send messages to the world.

Part of what we aim to do in attending to Bawaka as a co-author is to respect and acknowledge

both our co-constitution and the active role that Country plays in shaping what we know, who
we are and what we do. It is in doing that knowing and being emerges, it is by knowing and
being that one does. And this includes telling stories, sharing knowledge. Digging in the sand is
a sensory experience; it is also engagement with the sand. This engagement is what allows
someone to hear the sand’s language and develop an understanding of its unique material pres-
ence, its patterns and place. In this way embodied engagement fosters knowing - specifically, a
form of knowing that is based on a recognition (perhaps conceptual, perhaps sensory) of more-
than-human agency. It is more than this, however. Yolŋu frame this agency in terms of the land
knowing. Digging in the beach at Bawaka is a spatial practice and at the same time a
knowledge-making practice: a way of knowing, actively constituted by both the digger (and the
digging) and Country itself. And as we have invited you to dig with us, we invite you too to
participate in this knowledge-making practice. The actions and ways of knowing of each party
- the ganguri, the sand, the humans (Yolŋu and non-Yolŋu, writer and reader) - are richly con-
tributing factors. Thus Yolŋu co-becoming underpins an engagement with the more-than-
human world which nurtures a vitalist sense of co-existence, emplacement and knowledge.

This represents a marked shift from dominant, ocular-centric Western perspectives of place in
which visuality and a certain kind of knowledge are conflated, so that a (human) onlooker can
understand and appropriately value a place through the act of viewing or writing it from a suit-
able distance (Dixon and Jones 2004; Wright et al 2012). Yolŋu tell us that knowing and valu-
ing place comes from living within it, learning (hearing, feeling) the language of its soils and

9
winds and birds, and in becoming together (as do Howitt 2011, Howitt and Suchet-Pearson
2006; Martin 2003, Moreton-Robinson and Walter 2009; Rose 2007, 2011, Ingold 2007, 2008).
It provides for how to live in that place and why, and frames Yolŋu understanding of the pat-
terns of everything in place and the connections between those things. It is an active knowledge
of everyday life.

What, though, does this mean for understandings of place itself? Place is increasingly under-
stood as constituted by and through social relations (Massey 2005; Lefebvre 1992). Bennet and
others (Philo 1991) help us understand that this sociality is by no means an entirely human
event. Sociality is not the sole domain of humans. It follows that notions of space and place as
socially embedded and socially constituted may be extended to incorporate and acknowledge
the more-than-human world. Thus, not only, as Bennet and others suggest, is matter animate,
but matter and people, more-than-humans and affects, co-constitute place.

Recent work within cultural geography and anthropology makes an effort to understand places
as sites of multi-faceted, embedded relations amongst and between humans and non-humans
(Lorimer 2006; Rose 2006; Rose & Wylie 2007). Ingold’s concept of dwelling (1995) for ex-
ample, which originates from the work of Heidegger and his discussion of Being-in-the-world
(1962; 2001), positions place as a relational, embodied achievement: a recognition of ‘the rich,
intimate, creative ongoing togetherness of beings and things’ (Jones, O. 2009). Here, place
emerges as a ‘world which is known to those who have dwelt there, who do dwell there and
who will dwell there’ (Cloke and Jones 2004:340).

This is not a place inhabited by lively matter, by things with power. Rather, animate, lively
matter co-becomes with place (Barad 2008). As Ingold reminds us, 'in a world reduced to peo-
ple and objects, interaction would be impossible. We cannot, then, restore this world to life
simply by endowing these objects with ‘agency’’ (Ingold 2007:S30, emphasis in original).
Places and lively matter, diverse beings, and all manner of processes and dreams emerge rela-
tionally. Indeed, focusing too heavily on the agency of a contained ‘agent’, ‘being’ or ‘thing’
may diminish the richness of co-constitution, co-becoming. Bawaka, and gurrutu, are much
more than networks of beings and things.

Gurrutu: place/space as emergent

Now the hole is deeper, you need to lie on your belly and dig. Then sit in the hole and keep
digging. You find the vine at the top and keep following it down, very, very carefully clear-
ing around it so you don’t break it. See we followed this one all the way down and here is
the top of the yam tuber. Keep digging. There we got it, see, it’s a good one. Put it in the
dilly bag with the others ... The foods have their own cycle of living and growing. We don’t
water them, they don’t need us to water them. They have their own knowledge and they can
grow by themselves. When we come back next year, ganguri is still there. The rain carries
the sand back to cover the ganguri again. We usually keep digging until we have enough
ganguri to feed the family and to share. We don’t pull everything out or take it all. We just
carefully go and get what we want.. (Burarrwanga et al 2013: 178)

Each time the women come to dig for ganguri, the women are different. Here then, we come to
the importance of understanding the emergent nature of co-becoming. Co-emergence manifests
in very tangible, and of course intangible, ways. Every season the ganguri is different, Bawaka
itself is different. The process of digging changes us; the women’s thoughts and the memories
that they generate, the sweat they lose, the ache in the knee stretched for too long, the air that
has gone into their lungs and through to their cells, the laughter that they share, the additional

10
layer of intimacy that they have with each other, with the mosquito that bites them and the spir-
it woman Bayini who watches and guides them or leads them astray, the feelings of the new
season, the knowledge that the sand has generated by their hands digging, and the knowledge
that they generate of where the ganguri are, their shape, their aliveness, or of their absence.
Throughout the day they spend digging, the dawu tree will shed leaves, its roots will have
thickened, green ants will have died, others will be born, the bodies of the women will have
gotten a little older, perhaps sickness has set in, the young will have grown. We, Bawaka and
the humans and the ganguri, will never be the same again.

This description is not meant poetically. Or rather, it is not only meant as poetry. These de-
scriptions are tangible and are there to help us think. When we say the ganguri and the women
have changed each other, are connected together, we mean this as a fact, a fact of cells and his-
tory influencing each other, becoming each other, changing each other. At Bawaka, the mun-
dane is the spiritual, the emotional is the conceptual. And vice-versa. Bawaka, as space/place,
as Country, becomes through a relational ontology just as a relational ontology becomes
through Bawaka, through digging and the ganguri and the sand.

Gurrutu itself is always emergent; it co-produces a world which is living and interconnected.
It maps and co-produces connections between agents and materialities, based on relationships
between and across places and times. Through gurrutu bonds of kinship are performed, they
are practiced in ways that confer certain rights, responsibilities, behaviours and affections.
Such rich connections not only destabilise the hard notions of boundedness decried by Cloke
and Jones (2004) but they ensure Bawaka is continually emerging. Spirits and memories of
those who have died, for example, and who once dwelt in Bawaka continue as affective
presences that constantly co-become and co-constitute the landscape. These lasting connections
are made possible by the relationships which underpin them and by Bawaka itself. Gurrutu
suggests that place may be understood as more than living with(in) the physical landscape, it
has a certain mobility; it is embodied and thus travels with the academic researchers as they
return home (through their kinship relations and thus enduring emplacement within the Yolŋu
landscape) and it reaches out to incorporate distant stars and space.

Gurrutu explains and performs an emplaced and distinctive place/space which incorporates the
past, the present and the future. In this way gurrutu echoes an ontogenetic form of cartography
(Kitchin and Dodge 2007), a continual mapping of not only space but the particular combina-
tions of practice, materiality, temporality and conceptualisation which constitute dwelling in a
more-than-human world - that is, a knowing co-existence (Howitt 2011). Understanding time
in non-linear ways, in seeing the past in the present and the future in the past, echoes work in
Indigenous geography and Indigenous studies that insists on a situated understanding not only
of space but also of time (Larsen and Johnston 2012a, b; Martin 2003). Gurrutu thus suggests a
view of place which is both dynamic, always shifting toward an emergent and imagined future,
and coherent, being reproduced and sustained through the practices and ways of knowing of
past dwellings, through Rom.

The emergent nature of place is understood in very tangible ways through gurrutu. Gurrutu is
recursive. It is cyclical. Take a basic family pattern of a märi, a grandmother, her waku, daugh-
ter, and her gutharra, granddaughter and then a mother, amala again. The daughter of a grand-
daughter is a mother. The little baby is a mother of an old woman. Here then, is an infinite pat-
tern. A Yolŋu woman is a grandmother, a mother, an aunty. It doesn’t matter how old she is,
whether she physically has children, she is connected and a relative to someone else, to every-
one else. Even if a baby is not there yet, Yolŋu know who it is related to, who are its mothers,

11
daughters, aunties and grandchildren. In place of a line going in one direction from old to
young the patterns of gurrutu are configured differently. Any one cycle is also preceded by
other cycles so that [Author 5] has mothers and grandmothers and daughters back in time too.
And she has daughters and mothers and grandmothers still to come as her great grandchildren
grow up and have children of their own. Gurrutu’s patterns bind all beings and Bawaka itself.

Similarly, gurrutu exists between beings, between humans and ganguri, between ganguri and
sand, between song, sunset, ceremony, art, digging sticks and Bawaka itself. Bad things,
difficult things, unmentionable things are held by gurrutu tooiv. And as Yirritja and Dhuwa,
those most fundamental of gurrutu relationships, give rise to each other, so a yam may be the
mother of a song, a sunset may be the child of a painting. Bawaka too has kinship relations
with all the beings that co-constitute it, with all its mothers and its children. They thus emerge
from each other, become together, not as beings in a network or beings in a place but as beings
that are place, that co-become with it. Place is irrepressibly alive. In the words of Ingold, ‘[the
wind] is its blowing, not a thing that blows’ (2007:S31, emphasis in original). The world is its
living, its connecting, its gurrutu. A world with no kinship is a world that does not have a true
existence. Kinship gives the world meaning, order and balance. This happens in enduring
ways: Gurrutu links all things in a way that lasts forever. In Yolŋu Country, there is bauxite
mining. Yolŋu campaigned against the mining, but it proceeded regardless. Now, many trees
and some Country have been removed. Those trees aren’t there anymore but Yolŋu still sing
them, Yolŋu still keep them alive remembering them. Like a young person who took their own
life, or an ant crushed thoughtlessly under a human foot, their gurrutu still holds them. These
are the present absences of gurrutu, of Bawaka’s co-becoming.

Gurrutu thus makes sense of relational spatial production through multiple dimensions, attend-
ing to the materialities and temporalities that can sometimes be washed away in contemporary
accounts of space and place. The silence of the temporal element in many accounts of place,
space and spatial relations represents a failure to recognise that temporality, like spatiality, is
contextual, knowing/knowable and affecting/able to be affected. Langton (2002: 265), drawing
on research on eastern Cape York Peninsula describes this as sentience, explaining how 'The
Old People [deceased ancestors] and the Story beings have the same senses and emotions. They
are sentient'. Indeed, Cloke and Jones (2001:652) argue that ‘landscape is where the past and
future are co-present with the present - through processes of memory and imagination. Past,
present, and future are continuously reprocessed while the materiality of landscape is worked
by, and marks, this process.’

It is thus not only places/spaces which emerge, are co-created, and which in turn create, but
also times (Ingold 1995). Nowhere might this be more evident than for Bawaka which co-
becomes with ancestral spirits, stories and knowledge developed over countless generations (of
people, of ants, of wind). It is impossible to talk of Bawaka and the relationships therein with-
out recognising time as a dynamic yet constant and familiar companion. In Bawaka, messages
are generated through material shifts in Country, which both mark time’s passage and repro-
duce times past and future through the evocation of knowledges and practices.

Nanukala and the ants: ethics

Look, Nanukala is crying. What’s wrong? ‘Oh it’s the ants, they’re biting your arm. Here, let’s
swipe them off.’’

12
It is okay. It is important for her to know the ants and for the ants to know her. It’s by
living in Nature that we build and understand our rich relationships with the animals,
the seasons and with each other. (Burarrwanga et al 2013: 177)

Benson (2010:71) suggests there is a need to examine the processes ‘through which embodied
knowledge is developed, focusing particularly on the interrelationships between vicarious
knowledge and social practice.’ For Yolŋu, there is no clear separation between experiencing
Country and knowing it; Yolŋu co-become with Country as a presence in itself. Indeed it is in
becoming with Country that Yolŋu get to know Country and Country gets to know Yolŋu.
Nanukala, [Author 5]’s granddaughter, needs to be bitten by the ants in order for the ants to get
to know Nanukala, and Nanukala to know the ants. The ants and Nanukala come to know each
other through their actions. Indeed, Nanukala’s skin is taken into the ant. The ant’s secretions
come into her arm. It is through everyday life that humans, animals, the seasons, everything
interact and come to know, to be and to understand each other. And all actions are underpinned
by gurrutu and the Yothu-Yindi relationships enshrined by the Yirritja and Dhuwa moieties.
Yirritja and Dhuwa ‘give rise’ to one another whilst remaining distinct, and together form a
whole. Nanukala and ganguri hence become known to each other, they co-become, through the
ants’ bites, but they also know each other, co-become, through their kinship relationships. And
this is underpinned by Rom, Yolŋu Law, and in this case Yuwululŋurra, a man whose travels to
the island of Burralku, the land of the spirits, the land of the dead, brought ganguri to the main-
land in the first place.

And through this active knowing, this co-becoming, an ethics of care and responsibility
emerges (Bawaka Country including Suchet-Pearson et al 2013). It is not enough to attend to
the messages, to know the ants, to listen to the sand’s language. Yolŋu must also respond and
respond with care. In elaborating an ethics of attention, Rose (2007) considers the need to
attend to the world’s communicative nature, and to the way humans can both understand and
become part of it. For Rose, such attentiveness must be based on presence and on experience. It
is an ‘embodied responsiveness’. And not only humans, it is imperative for everything to attend
with care and to take responsibility for their co-becomings. Everything is a part of the web of
gurrutu and this means everything has an obligation. Humans may become knowledgeable
about some of these responsibilities and obligations, many they may not. But everything has
gurrutu and as everything co-becomes so do relationships of care and responsibility.

Part of attending to these connections means attending to questions of justice and of power. For
those grappling with the agency of non-humans and pointing to the essential co-constitution of
human and more-than-human worlds, power has been somewhat a thorny issue (Castree 2002,
Head and Gibson 2012). Critics have suggested that post-humanist work (and Actor Network
Theory in particular) can imply a flatness, an equal valuing of agency of humans and non-
humans that ignores the disproportionate impact of humans on, for example, living systems
(deforestation, climate change, overfishing, extinction, a long and dismal list). Yet as Mitchell
points out, acknowledging the agency of more-than-humans does not ‘mean introducing a lim-
itless number of actors and networks, all of which are somehow of equal significance and pow-
er. Rather, it means making this issue of power and agency a question, instead of an answer
known in advance’ (Mitchell, 2002: 52-3). Indeed, to attend deeply requires both an attentive-
ness to diversity and to power but, beyond this, a responsiveness. To say lives of humans are
partially constituted with non-humans, that humans emerge and change, is largely uncontrover-
sial. We, after all, breathe, we have bacteria living in and on us, we eat, shit, shed skin cells, get
old, die, decompose or are burnt, feed worms or become air for others to breathe. It is what we
do with this, how we care, attend, respond, that is important.

13
In many ways, gurrutu speaks directly to Lawson’s call for care ethics that begin ‘with a social
ontology of connection, foregrounding social relationships of mutuality and trust’ (Lawson
2007: 3). Such social relationships in gurrutu are understood in the broadest more-than-human
sense, the sociality of the ants, the sand, the digging stick, the number five, the season, dreams,
sunsets, rocks, the dead. Here then, relational place/space meets relational ethics; relational
place/space is constituted by/with/through relational ethics and care (Whatmore 1997; Slater
1997; Popke 2004; Lawson 2007). As Popke suggests, ethics are not predetermined but come
into being through knowing, doing, being. Nanukala and the ants, in knowing and becoming
together, are working with an ethics of care in place and with place. Bawaka, as it co-becomes
with Nanukala and the ants and the care they produce, as it co-becomes through gurrutu, is
absolutely and always enacting/being/becoming ethics. Bawaka is not only in a state of ‘being-
with’ (Nancy 1991) but rather in ‘becoming-with’ through a wildly heterogeneous set of more-
than human beings and becomings. Relationality in this context, must be understood as an
emergent relationality of care where care is not for a discrete separate object (in Barad’s words,
an interaction) but for a part of oneself (an intra-action). It is, as Bawaka Country including
Suchet-Pearson et al (2013) have pointed out, not a matter of caring for Country, but caring as
Country.

Gurrutu, in that it points to space/place as co-becoming, indicates a way to begin re-imagining

geographies of co-existence based on an integrated notion of the self. Recasting our
geographical imaginations away from conceptualisations that produce colonising and
imperialist projects means attending differently, attending to the gukguk’s call, to Bawaka’s
author-ity (Bawaka Country including Suchet-Pearson et al 2013), and understanding both
place/space, and ourselves, in new ways. In place of the 'mythic landscape of separation and
extinguishment' of colonialism (Howitt 2001: 238), can there be geographies of co-becoming,
of relationality and enchantment?

Enough?
We have enough now, lete enoughaka’s author-ity (Bawaka Country including Suchet-Pearson
et al , all the children are good at helping, they are working together to bring home all the
things we have collected.

It is very important for us to walk through the land, to walk together, to see Nature grow
by itself, to know there is food for us, waiting. We don’t ask someone is the food ready?
No, we can see for ourselves, through the cycle of the seasons, the knowledge has been
there for thousands of years. We don’t read it in a book or paper. We read it every day,
every minute, every moment. We share that knowledge with the children, and now with
you, it’s a part of us. (Burarrwanga et al 2013: 179)

This paper would not have be written the way it is, would not include the words it does, if
Yuwululŋurra had not brought ganguri back from Burralku. Yes, the academics in the research
collective reshaped our words for the paper, submitted it and responded to the reviewers and
editors. However, this paper was authored by Bawaka Country. Bawaka Country, as lead au-
thor of this paper, guided, inspired and enabled. It empowered learning, opened avenues of dis-
cussion and made us – human and more-than-human - who we are. The experiences, under-
standings and learnings this paper contains would not exist if not for Bawaka Country, for Rom
which underlies it and gurrutu, which shapes it. And as you will now realize, this fundamental-
ly includes its nine human co-authors who co-become with and as a part of Bawaka – not indis-
tinguishable from it, but continually shaped by their inter-relationships.

14
With this in mind relational place/space takes on a new meaning – place/space becomes author,
humans become place/space. In asserting this, we have responded to Howitt’s (2011) call for
‘radically contextualised’ research that ‘nurtures social theory that is situated, engaged, and
based on the relationships and processes that occur in the lived experience of places’ (p133).
We have also responded to the many calls for Indigenous-led theory, for Indigenous authorship
in the academy, and for theories that might emerge from beyond the Anglo-American nexus
(Louis, 2007; Martin, 2003; Moreton-Robinson and Walter 2009; Smith 1999; Chakrabarty
2000). Like Howitt, we are not abandoning the call for ‘big stories’ (p134). Rather it is to look
for big stories that emerge from the richness of context, to look to ‘smallish stories’ to build
more nuanced understandings of people and place.

Our big story here is about place/space, relationality and a more-than-human, material co-
becoming. This work is not only relevant in the immediate realm of Indigenous knowledges
and rights but also for all geographers as they work with the complexities of co-becoming in
different places, localities and sites. For example, understanding place/space as co-becoming
has the potential to inform discussion, around global environmental change as it may “signifi-
cantly expand people’s sense of what Earth futures are desirable and achievable. This alterna-
tive contribution to knowledge involves trying to change – rather than conform to – the intel-
lectual framing of anthropogenic environmental change” (Castree 2015: 2. See also Wilcock et
al 2013). For while climate change may appear as a quintessential ‘unbounded’ phenomenon,
gurrutu will tell us that it is only ever manifested in grounded ways, such as cyclones, storm
surges, government reports and protest marches, that are themselves linked to enduring place-
based patterns of kinship and responsibility. This kinship, as always, cycles outwards and, far
from leaving climate change unbound, binds coal mines to cyclones, and decisions in Washing-
ton to Vanuatu and to Bawaka. If we were to get that, we would see that climate change is not
abstract, it too is part of a more-than-human co-becoming which is part of ‘us’ (in the broadest
more-than-human understanding of that word) and as such demands response and responsibil-
ity.

We have looked to Bawaka not as a case study of a ‘different’ way of understanding space, but
for what it can teach us about how all views of space are situated; and for the insights it offers
about living in a relational world. Gurrutu helps geographers and others to get at the bound-
ed/unbounded, contingency/coherence tensions within geographers’ debates about relationality
by highlighting that relations are always becoming yet have diverse definitive underlying rela-
tions that guide and structure their becoming (e.g. Yirritja/Dhuwa, yothu/yindi). It also com-
plements discussions about belonging (Poe et al 2014; Mee and Wright 2009; Wright 2014)
proposing ways to rethink human and more-than-human belonging as both contingent and in-
tra-emergent. It denies humans the fabrication that they may stand aside, act on each other or a
discrete non-human environment. It places us all squarely within an ethics of co-becoming and
demands that we attend to the connections that bind and co-constitute us.

What we have offered is not a guideline for how people might be expected to embrace and un-
derstand gurrutu and Yolngu ways of knowing in all its complexity. Indeed, for non-Yolŋu, we
would argue that it is simply not appropriate or possible to fully live the ontological realities of
gurrutu. Rather, we hope our discussion of gurrutu can help shed light on what Smolin (2008)
has called the most compelling topic of our times. That our paper may enable geographers to
attend to their co-becomings more acutely, to open new windows on the human and more-than-
human beings that co-constitute their worlds and importantly may shift relationships of power
away from an (Anglo) human-centred dominance towards a reconceptualization of a co-

15
emergent world based on intimate human-more-than-human relationships of responsibility and
care.

When you peel the skin off the ganguri, after it’s baked in the fire, it has a wonderful starchy,
texture. That texture becomes Bawaka, Bawaka becomes that tasty ganguri. Through the co-
becoming of ganguri and Bawaka this paper challenges separations between conceptual and
empirical work. It argues that no work purporting to be conceptual occurs without being firmly
shaped by the empirical – in place. The most philosophical of ramblings are shaped by the
work of someone who is sitting (walking, dancing, eating, breathing, writing, reading) doing
something, somewhere. Rather than ignore, hide, forget about these interactions this paper tries
to pay full attention to place (the places of Bawaka, though there are other places that do re-
main invisible, our offices, the train, home couch, cafe, walks to the toilet. And your places,
where you are reading this now). We attend to how the authors, with these places and as a part
of Bawaka, become place and place becomes this paper. We have contended that it is not pos-
sible to write about knowing place without doing place.

Of course, while our aims in this paper are vast, our ability to really, truly attend, and to com-
municate this attention through the written word, is partial, infinitely incomplete. Our discus-
sion of space/place as emergent relationality, as co-becoming, will hopefully open possibilities,
raise questions, offer glimpses. The richness of gurrutu, the communication sent by more-than-
human becomings to each other and to us, even the very messages we send, transcend our abil-
ity to understand, to articulate. Attending to Bawaka has revealed much, the we who conclude
are indeed different to the we who started this paper, there is no easy understanding. It has been
our intention to make more visible (see Callon, 2002), to attend to more, not to everything, but
to more, and in different ways. We have tried to tell a big story of sorts, from our partial per-
spective, about the importance of understanding our co-constitution not just with each other,
but with and as a part of place itself.

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 i
The three academic authors are the first human authors on this paper, indicative of the lead they took in writing
this paper.
ii
We include a range of lists throughout this paper to help the reader understand the diversity of the various
domains we are referring to. We recognise the inclusion and exclusion of specific elements within these lists is
arbitrary while a full list of more-than-humans involved would extend well beyond a human’s capacity to
comprehend or enumerate. We none-the-less feel it is important to communicate some sense of the diversity to
assist readers to go beyond more limited understandings (for example limiting the category of ‘more-than-human’
to non-human animals) as well as give a sense of what is involved specifically for Bawaka.
iii
Yirritja and Dhuwa are what anthropologists call ‘moieties’, a foundational relation of the Yolngu cosmos in
which everything is interconnected and interdependent (Burarrwanga et.al. 2014).
iv
Discussing in depth what happens when the Rom, Laws of gurrutu, is broken is beyond the scope of this paper.
Suffice to say this can be incredibly destructive. What we do argue is that these actions are still held by the Law.
For example, many acts of creation involve breaking the Law and the consequent repercussions of doing so. These
are still part of the inter-relationships of co-becoming.

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