Connections of Spirit: Kuninjku Attachments to Country

Abstract

When we camp by the creek it soothes our spirits and keeps us cool. We understand it at places where my father took us, and my grandfather, mother's mother and father's mother. Today we want to continue to teach each other these things so we can understand. We did not invent this ourselves. The first ancestors from long ago are the origin. (Namirrkki, 2004: 112) This is the way Ivan Namirrkki, born in 1961 and a Kuninjku language speaker from western Arnhem Land, describes his attachment to his country and its waters. Namirrkki is musing on his relationship to a camping place called Wakyoy on Manggabor Creek, a tributary of the Liverpool River, that is a short walk from his outstation at Kumurrulu. In a couple of sentences he has outlined an attachment which speaks to his understanding of creation and the intrinsic bodily link between himself and the place where he is living. The country was 'put there' by the Ancestral beings for Namirrkki's family and his continued maintenance of this country venerates these beings and the succession of human ancestors who have also lived there. There is a power in country that radiates to all those who live there and becomes incorporate in humans by virtue of their spiritual makeup. In this chapter I want to trace Kuninjku thinking about their connection to country to explicate Ivan's statement above. In doing so I wish to reveal the local conception of country that Kuninjku focus upon as important to their contemporary existence. Kuninjku cast this relationship as a spiritual one, as a direct connection with Ancestral creator beings, and this religious outlook shapes the beliefs and values which are the framework for interpreting the meaning of their actions in the world (Taylor, 1996). I wish to focus on one man's understanding of his interrelations with the Ancestral powers, landscape features, and species of his country as an example of the broader Kuninjku perspective. In examining these