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Long before it has even been thought about consciously, a film idea starts deep within country-Booroo,2 with Nyikina custodians, and liyan. Liyan is a Nyikina word, which can be translated as 'feeling, emotion, spirit'.3 Some also refer to it as 'intuition'. Liyan is the 'life force of place', it enables people to 'feel' their environment.4 Physical boundaries of country are not to be found on maps, but within oneself, as Paddy Roe explained to Frans Hoogland in 1992: Frans: This whole country is mapped out. Now each area is like a human being, got feeling, got the liyan, that's the liyan of the place. The liyan is like the life force, it's like your spirit, like your essence. Now the only way to make contact to those locations, to those sites, is through our liyan. To Paddy: How do I make that liyan work for me? Paddy (laughs): I know. Because that's the hard one. That's the hard one. My people straight away when we go from camp, we start from the camp. We think about therewhich way we got to go? All right, we go this way. When we get half way, something make me feel liyan wrong

The report seeks to examine the impacts of colonisation, more particularly pastoralism, on the Martuwarra Country and its people and concludes with the contemporary voices of Martuwarra people. In doing this, one must note the at times highly disparaging tone of the European explorers, the dark deeds they committed, and their racist expressions and bias, which may offend some readers. This report provides an extensive, period-specific historical account of the Martuwarra people’s connections to their Country as a point of departure and a premise for discussion contrasting Aboriginal perspectives and the development lens of the State. In doing so, this report also juxtaposes the events of the past with the continued contemporary imposition of development strategies still at odds with Aboriginal life-ways

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