Sea Country: Plurality and knowledge of saltwater territories in Indigenous Australian contexts

Abstract

There are distinct bodies of cultural knowledge attached to the sea. In this paper we orient the focus towards the nature and extent of cultural framings of sea territories, as inclusive of submerged landscapes, for Indigenous maritime peoples in northern Australia. This approach is distinguished by a pluralist methodology and reorients the primal focus of a human geography and broader geographical scholarship concerning submerged landscapes to begin with an Indigenous perspective. Engaging ethnographic accounts of Indigenous Australian knowledges of Sea Country, as inclusive of ancient pre‐inundation landscapes that lie out‐of‐sight on Australia's continental shelves, highlights the potential for a more expansive vision of human connections to the past and present continental landmass of Australia. Indigenous oral traditions, Dreaming Ancestor narratives and songlines provide extensive detail to assist in understanding these parts of the greater Australian landmass and in this paper are brought into relation with recent sea floor mapping efforts which operate to draw back the water and reveal commensurable geographies upon which to envision possibilities for socialised realms of human emplacement. Both bodies of knowledge generate information of submerged landscapes that call for an expansion of thinking on where the land ends and the sea begins and how submerged terrestrial landscapes are understood across cultures as part of human geography. The approach outlined here calls for a habit of bringing principled systems of understanding to stand together as part of an explanatory schema for a world populated by and yet differentially known by people.

Decolonizing ocean spaces: Saltwater co-belonging and responsibilities

“…Such talking has produced a language of crises, which exacerbates racial injustice, climate colonialism, capitalist extractivism, and multispecies extinction with material consequences (Sultana 2022; Whyte 2021b). These consequences unfold when Indigenous rights to govern and manage seas, seafloors, and fisheries are denied (Kearney 2018, Kearney et al 2022; Mehta, Parthsarathy and Bose 2022; Reid 2015; Richmond and Kotowicz 2015), or the state places hurdles, making it difficult for Indigenous Peoples and ethnic/ethnoreligious minorities to participate in processes of marine spatial planning (Lobo et al 2022; Parsons et al 2021; Diggon et al 2019). Or, when “sacred energies” (Marawili 1999, 54), laws, creation stories, songlines of ancestral beings, and interspecies kinship that weave responsibility through Sea, Land, and Sky, are broken by climate change, extractive capitalism (oil, gas, fish), and the pollution of oceans by nuclear waste, plastics, and toxins (Bordner, Ferguson and Ortolan 2020; Bradley 2010; Bundle, Rushton and Wade 2022; Fuller et al 2022; Liboiron et al 2021).…”