About the Project

Through a focus on one particular site, Cullunghutti Mountain, this project aims to pilot a new combination of Indigenous memory, place and landscape methods in order to understand and communicate the entanglement of Indigenous people's lives with the Mountain. The research project is designed to broaden the toolkit of Indigenous methodologies with a focus on how best to collect, understand and archive the relational entanglements of human and nonhuman memories and resonances linked to places/landscapes.

The documents and materials held in archives, whether personal or public, can provide information that serves to illuminate and contextualise how people lived in certain places in certain eras. For Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples the material kept in archives can be used to build on understandings of connections with people, places and things often ignored in the telling of nation building historical narratives. Connection to place, people and things is significant in the social/cultural lives of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. 

Cullunghutti Mountain is conceived of as an actor within local Indigenous conceptualisations. This research aims to collect, and celebrate contemporary Aboriginal memories of this site to counter the overwhelmingly 'white' histories of the area by focusing on the liveliness of the mountain in the present for local Indigenous populations. The mountain provides a focus for exploring ways in which we can shift conceptions of land/earth from the white-western dominant conception as both a resource or something that humans are charged with caring for, to a perspective that showcases the human/nonhuman entanglements that animate our worlds. 

This is a pilot project that uses a case study approach to develop a rigorous and supportive mentoring and research-training scheme for Indigenous students. The case-study focuses on memories, resonances of place/landscapes and archives.

Tangible Benefits and Impact of the research to Australian Indigenous Communities

Colonisation had far reaching effects on Aboriginal and Torres Strait People. The effects and impact of dispossession of land to cultural continuity and well-being is felt today and is manifested in communities through such things as intergenerational transfer of trauma (Atkinson 2002), and the theory of lateral violence which Social Justice Commissioner Mick Gooda described as "internalised colonialism" (http://www.humanrights.gov.au). The locus of this project, Cullunghutti Mountain, is an important part of the Dreaming of local Aboriginal groups and by drawing on memories, stories and soundscapes we aim to shape a history and contemporary reflections that centres Aboriginal people and place. This project, by identifying similarities and differences of memories and stories about the Mountain, will build a picture in which local Aboriginal peoples will see their culture, beliefs and lived experiences reflected in a positive way that will enrich well-being. This project is about one place, however as more local memories and stories are gathered together across Australia it will become a part of the archive that will be used to build a more inclusive Australian history. Furthermore, the methods developed will also be adaptable to other sites so greater numbers of Indigenous peoples can see their culture, beliefs and lived experiences reflected in a positive way that will enrich well-being.

Outcomes

This research will directly benefit the Nowra Indigenous community by adding knowledge about Cullunghutti Mountain to the collective knowledge base about Indigenous place histories in the NSW South Coast region.
It is likely that this adaptable model of Indigenous memory, place and soundscape research will also benefit other Indigenous researchers who wish to uncover Indigenous knowledges about their own places and tell their own embodied Indigenous place histories.

This project will impact upon the official Indigenous historical archives of the Nowra area held at the State Library of New South Wales. The State Library holds an album of employees and inhabitants of the Berry Estate (Nowra) which was presented to John Hay, esq. by his employees in November 1891. The people in the album are not named and people taking part in this project will be asked if they can identify anyone in those images. Any information collected will be passed to the Indigenous team at the State Library and also supplied to the Nowra area Aboriginal communities. A similar project to identify the non-Indigenous people appearing in the album could be undertaken at a later date, thereby inverting the usual research paradigm.  Furthermore, the PhD researcher has a film made in 1994 with a senior man and senior women from the area, none of whom are named. This project will seek to identify those people with a view to distributing the film more widely and depositing a copy with the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies for use in future community research, thereby creating tangible benefits to Australian Indigenous research.