Abstract
On 1 December 2019, over one hundred Aboriginal nations performed ancestral and creation dances in synchrony across the Australian continent. One of the communities that danced was the Anaiwan nation from the north-eastern region of New South Wales, Australia. Since 2014 I have been working with Anaiwan people in a collaborative activist research project, creating and maintaining an Aboriginal community garden on the fringes of my hometown of Armidale as a site for land reclamation and decolonising, multispecies research. The community garden is adjacent to the site of the old East Armidale Aboriginal Reserve, where over one hundred dispossessed Aboriginal people were forced to live on the municipal town garbage depot in the mid-twentieth century. This paper positions both the Nation Dance 2019 movement, and the Armidale Aboriginal Community Garden, as rhythmic events that activate Aboriginal Law and sovereignty that is held enduring in the land but that has been buried alive by the settler-colonial state. Focusing on the tensions between deep Indigenous ancestral temporality and colonial territoriality, I argue that the emergence of the Anthropocene reveals a dangerous dissonance between the rhythms of Aboriginal Law patterned through present-day Australian environments and the grid-based structures of colonial governance imposed upon them.
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Notes
For more information about decolonising history at the Armidale Aboriginal Community Garden see Wright (2019).
The word ‘humpy’ comes from the Jagera language, and refers to a small temporary shelter traditionally made out of branches and bark, but following invasion and colonisation it may refer to any temporary building made from available material, including corrugated iron, canvas, metal drums etc.
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Acknowledgements
I would like to acknowledge and thank Uncle Colin Ahoy, Aunty Pat Cohen, Uncle Richard Vale, Uncle Steve Widders and the Nēwara Aboriginal Corporation for their help with this research and with the Armidale Aboriginal Community Garden itself. Thank you to the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society in Munich, particularly Carson Fellows Ajit Menon, Anna Pilz, Anna Varga, Bettina Stoetzer, Danielle Scheil, Louis Warren, Ron Doel, Sevgi Mirakova, Stephen Hasley and Tom Lekan, whose helpful feedback and stimulating ideas helped me to write this article.
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Wright, K. Rhythms of Law: Aboriginal Jurisprudence and the Anthropocene. Law Critique 31, 293–308 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10978-020-09279-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10978-020-09279-3