Connecting People, Place and Design

By Angelique Edmonds

Connecting People, Place and Design examines the human relationship with place, how its significance has evolved over time and how contemporary systems for participation shape the places around us in our daily lives. Divided into three parts – place, people and participation – this interdisciplinary volume examines people, place and design across the fields of architecture, design, cultural studies, sociology, political science and philosophy.

Part I, on place, considers the cultural, political and philosophical shifts in our historical relationship to place. Part II, on people, considers movement and migration and how it affects place relations. Part III, on participation, examines forms of public engagement and cultural systems for collaborative contribution to the design and creation of place. Improving people’s relationships with place requires connection, and in Connecting People, Place and Design, Edmonds demonstrates the importance of connection, underscoring that working together to nurture and sustain places that celebrate the diversity of our human species is one of the most critical issues of our time.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Release date: Dec 31, 2019
• ISBN: 9781789381337

Angelique Edmonds

Angelique Edmonds is a Senior Lecturer in Architecture at the University of South Australia and founder and creative director of the School for Creating Change.

Book preview

PART 1: PLACE

It is difficult to overestimate the importance of place. Consider your current experience of reading, you are somewhere, sitting, lying or standing – and that place – its stability as a ground to support your body, is the fundamental condition that makes your reading in this moment possible. Despite this importance, place has become taken for granted, as it appears to be always already there.

Place is foundational to our existence and we shape it according to our cultural histories and beliefs.

The way different communities make places reflects the different ways they relate to one another; places reflect different systems of Law, different ways of making decisions. To see this you must watch, listen and wait. Sometimes the symbols used to depict places disguise these differences.¹

This first part of the book explores the changes that have occurred in our relationship to place over time, in order that we might look closely at the contemporary opportunity for framing our relationship to place in ways that are broad, sustainable and inclusive of our multiple pasts together with our vast potential futures.

Part 1 does three things that are necessary in order for the reader to understand the approach taken throughout the book in relation to the importance of place and how we frame our understanding of our relationship to it. First, Chapter 1 introduces the complexity, diversity and ever-evolving nature of the human relationship with place. Two particular situated examples are considered, which contrast with contemporary trends to demonstrate the diversity and change over time.

Chapter 2 looks at a significant period in history when human relations with place were radically altered, with impacts across the globe, affecting many Nations and cultures in ways that continue to influence contemporary times. Examination follows of three major factors, which precipitated these shifts, and four critical implications of those shifts that continue to influence the relationship humans have with place.

Chapter 3 considers a handful of contemporary debates and discussion resulting from the shifts described in the previous chapter. These include regarding place as property, place branding and growing realizations of how place affects people and how place is implicated in human wellbeing and sustainment. The second half of the chapter includes discussion of social sustainability, measures of progress and the emergence of ‘wellbeing’ as an aim and policy concept. We will also consider the range of interpretations of wellbeing, each of which informs how it is defined or measured both individually and collectively, and how wellbeing relates to place. Thus, the final chapter on Place aims to examine contemporary issues in relationships to place and consider how these contemporary perceptions of place affect people.

Chapter 1: Significance of Place

Role of Place Premodern: Neolithic, Aboriginal, Ontological Significance

This chapter examines some of the ways an understanding of place and its role in our lives has been approached. As humans, it has been our conceptual constructions of place that have changed over time. As noted, physical place remains constant over time but our perceptions of it evolve. To demonstrate and give depth to this observation, we will examine two examples of significant orientations to place that predate the contemporary approaches; one lost to us and interpreted mainly through archaeological evidence, and the other embodying the oldest living culture in the world, whose occupation of that Land has been constant through tens of thousands of years. These two examples offer relatively different approaches to understanding the significance of land and its import in our lives, and for broader human understanding of being.

One of the examples for discussion is Avebury, a henge monument containing three stone circles located in England. The construction of Avebury’s standing stones is attributed to Neolithic times (2600 BC). The landscape itself is formidable and contains the largest megalithic stone circle in the world and is listed as a World Heritage Site. Despite indication of significant intent in the way it is laid out, the continuity of culture since its construction has been sufficiently interrupted that, consequently, our contemporary understanding of its original intent and importance is tentative. The interpretation of Avebury’s importance as a ceremonial and scared landscape is also inescapably influenced by contemporary biases, privileging time and temporal distinctions as the basis of organizing our self-understanding.

The other example, by contrast in Aboriginal Australia, offers a less interrupted cultural continuum, such that the land, landscape and culture are attributed to be older, and current occupants of that land maintain responsibility and ability to describe the nature of the relationship with and connection to land. Despite colonization of much of the land in Australia by Europeans over 200 years ago, the specific region of discussion has maintained a (relatively) unbroken² lineage of cultural practice and thus the ancestral beliefs are described by current occupants with authority and conviction, informed by ancestral knowledge and tradition. By contrast, in Avebury such descriptions are offered speculatively via documents at the ‘visitors centre’ marking the World Heritage Site. The structure of social relations derived from the Land in the Aboriginal Australian example will be discussed as they inform the basis of rights in property and display an alternative understanding to place or land as ‘property’ in contrast to the dominant contemporary western approach. These examples are offered to ensure that our discussion regarding the importance of the embodying dimension of place is grounded in particular examples and resists the contemporary predilection for discussion of place in conceptual or abstract terms. This is an important distinction because it is the latter that we aim to cast in relief and to question, to reflect and highlight the impact of its influence in obscuring our attunement to the significance of embodied place in our lives. The following chapter will explore how, in philosophical terms, the shift privileging a conceptual approach to place occurred.

The following introduces the chapter’s themes, to assist in framing the subsequent exploration of ancient orientations to the natural world, evident in the two situated examples that demonstrate the embodied significance of place.

Multiple Perceptions

Places are everywhere. Thomas Gieryn suggests that place ‘can be anything that has the following necessary and sufficient features’: geographic location (whether spot, area or linear form), material form (physicality) and investment with meaning and value (positive or negative).³ Contrary to Gieryn’s listed features, there is also often talk of virtual places, the body as place and ‘place’ as any site of human engagement or activity. Since there are multitudes of people holding varying views on the meaning of place and thus how it is defined, it is clear there is no single definition that will satisfy all. Rather there are pluralities of place and place remains fundamentally important to our sense of identity, our sense of community and our humanity. Because it is so fundamental and plural, there is no singular academic discipline or professional practice that has a monopoly on place. As a result, discourse on place and approaches to understanding place draw on contributions from many sources including human geography, environmental sociology, environmental psychology, environmental health, environmental economics, design and architecture, urban and regional planning, landscape architecture, anthropology, philosophy, natural resource management, environmental history, ecology and cultural studies. Place is also a major topic of interest for the arts and there are numerous artists who engage in site-specific creative practice, which takes place as its starting position. Each of these approaches has its own language or discourse for discussions regarding place and despite using different terminology, sometimes they speak of similar meanings. For example, it has been said that ‘place attachment’ is the environmental psychologists’ term for the geographers’ concept of a ‘sense of place’. A recurrent research seam concerns the extent to which place can be both visceral (embodied) and cognitive (intellectual). As the exploration of place unfolds within this book, we’ll discuss some of these differences and how selection of one interpretation or term might privilege certain perspectives. The privileging of one interpretation over another is closely linked with cultural perspectives and systems of knowledge, otherwise considered the context of the thinking.

Enduring Change

It is important to remember that the context of thinking and experiencing place that we have in contemporary life is a result of our history – of the many previous contexts of thinking. It has undergone enormous change over thousands of years. The term ‘nature’, for example, is not a static phenomenon, the way it is currently understood is a product of a particular context of thinking – the Enlightenment – that occurred a few hundred years ago and to which the mainstream context of human thinking still subscribes. There are however, cultures, indeed civilizations whose relationship to the natural world predates the Enlightenment understanding of ‘nature’ as the two examples following demonstrate. Chapter 2 examines the philosophical shift of the Enlightenment that influences our contemporary approach to place, the shift of modernity. The following focus is upon how human relations with the natural world were understood prior to that shift.

Ancient Orientations to the Natural World

Whilst the dominant contemporary delineation of the world occurs through a separation between what is ‘nature’ and what is man-made, this separation was not always the case. To discuss the changing relationships between humans and nature, we will need to consider how the relationship between them is understood. Most strikingly and as a point of departure for this exploration, our understanding of what nature is, occurs through our experience of being and the order of being, otherwise known as ontology.

As Voeglin describes, ‘[b]eing is nothing but a network of relations of order under the primary experience of things given in the cosmos’⁴ (not in the world). It is important here that as Voeglin later explains philosophy becomes senseless if it isolates one of its parts without regard to the others.⁵ The order of experience, that is my experience, your experience and the experience of the world around and between us, is the basis for our understanding of what we call ‘nature’.

With respect to the evolution of the relationship between humans and the natural world, it is useful to consider Only One Earth, the official title of the report from the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in 1971 in Stockholm. Its authors articulated the change in consciousness that has occurred in the modern era. ‘As we enter the global phase of human evolution, it becomes obvious that each man now has two countries, his own and planet earth’. If each of us now has two countries to care about, we also have two histories to write, that of our own country and that of ‘planet earth’. A comprehensive history of our planet is beyond our current purpose, but even the most brief summary of it reveals at its core is the evolution of the relationship between humans and the natural world. For this reason, in what follows we will examine two examples whose origins in different locations and eras demonstrate the variation and contemporary contrast with respect to the connections and relationship between people and place, between humans and the natural world.

Aboriginal Australian Perspectives

The following discussion regarding Aboriginal Australian orientations to Land is structured in four parts. First, the significance of Land and the particularity of place are introduced. Following that we will consider the agency with which country is invested and how that leads to a perception of the landscape as animated. Third, we will briefly explain how country and custodial obligations are inherited and finally we will briefly describe the nature of property rights and how that leads to a privileging of investment in relatedness and kinship.

Introduction to the significance of and connection to Land and the particularity of place

For Australian Aboriginal people, the so called – ‘inanimate’ world is alive with ‘being’. Hills and mountains are manifestations of creation beings – creatures from ancient stories, each with lessons to teach about the right way to live with the land and its people. The wind is alive with the spirits of the dead, and the plants and animals are in constant communication with us about both our lives and theirs.⁶

Aboriginal Australia is made up of over 350 different language groups and territories, each of which identify as a different ‘tribe’ or group. Whilst there are similarities of custom and belief across the groups, there are also particularities relative to the geographic location, climate and customs that evolved in particular places. For that reason, it is important that knowledge is situated and presented in a manner that grounds and reflects the ‘country’⁷ and group of people where it originates. In 2004, I spent a year living in a remote Aboriginal community in Australia’s north. Much of what is presented over the remainder of this chapter relates to that place, the Roper region of Northern Australia.

This is proper safe place here in Ngalakan country […] we got culture out here. That culture it give you backbone otherwise you gonna swim all round like jellyfish.⁸

The expanse of country in the Roper region of Arnhem Land in the Northern Territory of Australia is breathtaking. The vast open horizon, where the land appears to touch the sky, constitutes a deep background of continuity. As an ever-present reference point, the horizon grounds you where you stand, yet within reference to the context of all there is. For residents belonging to the seven language groups in the Roper region, all country is bound in an interrelated network of connected relationships. This includes the ground on which you stand, the country you are looking across and the country on the horizon, and each place has its own particular identity, life forms who call that spirit country their home and custodians whose job it is to keep everything ‘standing up alive’.⁹

This way of seeing the land, as a network of relatedness and interdependency between people and places, was confronted by the colonial mapping techniques that German explorer Ludwig Leichhardt applied when he first encountered this country in the late nineteenth century. On the assumption that the region was ‘uninhabited’ he promptly proclaimed his ‘discovery’ by naming it after another person in his party who had encountered that country weeks before. Yet in the Indigenous cosmogony of the region, the foundation of names, spirits and ontological structure had already been established. This imposition of naming in terms derived from another culture, as with the imposition of Christianity that followed it, was overlaid upon that which was already there. Despite the impositions of the colonial encounter, these foundations continue to provide enduring significance. As Diana James has described:

The Australian landscape is mapped by two laws. The songlines of her Aboriginal peoples move deep beneath the surface following the dips and curves of the land itself, while the borders imposed by more recent settlers are straight lines cutting the surface of the land.¹⁰

I undertook research in Ngukurr because I wanted to understand this sustained encounter of difference in ways of seeing the country.¹¹ Situated on the Roper River, which is the border to Arnhem Land in its southeast corner (see Figures 1 and 2), the contemporary settlement of Ngukurr stands at a crossroads of cultural approaches to living and the Land. On the south side of the river, pastoralists of the colonized cattle country see the Land as a means to facilitate their cattle enterprise. By comparison Aboriginal custodians of Arnhem Land to the north of the Roper River, an area of Land that was never colonized, maintain the ontological primacy of Land. I sought to understand the impact that this sustained encounter of difference in ways of seeing the country continues to have on daily life for those who live in the Roper region. Understanding relationships to country was crucial to understanding how people related to their environment and what they wanted for the future – how they wanted to live. The settlement of Ngukurr and its formation will be discussed further in Chapter 4, however as brief context for now, it was established in 1908 as Roper River Mission. Many distinct Aboriginal language groups who would not ordinarily live together for a sustained time, sought refuge in the Christian Mission when it was established, and over successive generations of cohabitation since then, the groups have maintained an uneasy and often contested balance. The population fluctuates seasonally between 800 and 1500 people, moving between the 100 houses in the permanent settlement and regional outstations. Ngukurr is remote, accessible by four-wheel drive (4WD) only on heavily corrugated dirt roads, a four-hour drive from the nearest town.

A line drawing depicting a map of Australia and locating the area of study in Australia’s remote Northern territory

Figure 1: Map of Australia, locating the area of study in northern Northern Territory, indicated by the area circled. Image drawn by Angelique Edmonds.

A detailed road map of the north of the northern territory of Australia. Large portion of the page is Arnhem Land, an area owned in Trust for Aboriginal people and thus it has very few sealed roads. The map gives more detailed indication of the location of Ngukurr in the South East of Arnhem Land

Figure 2: Detail of the location of Ngukurr (circled) in North Australia. Ngukurr lies within the south eastern border of Arnhem Land. The nearest town, Katherine, lies 350 km west; in a journey by car only 200 kms of road are sealed. Image courtesy of Hema Maps.

The following description from James of Anangu country in the Western Desert in central Australia is also true for the Roper region:

the rhythms of deep time of this land are the rhythms of the songs and dances of the original people, those who first heard the voices of this place and encoded it in their song cycles. Listening to their voices tunes the ear to hear the composed ontology of place, the songs and stories that tell the nature of its being. Place is performed by storytelling, singing and dancing at each site along the creation ancestors’ travels that crisscross the continent. The voices of the ancestors that sung the world into being are heard today as their descendants sing the land anew and their feet pound ancient rhythms on its stretched skin. These songs of the land have been heard since the beginning of human presence in this vast landscape.¹²

In the Roper region, as in the Western Desert, during ceremony the people of the place sing the songs of their ancestors who created these places, and each person traces their descent from a specific moiety¹³ group each associated with the action and stories of particular creation ancestors from the beginning of time. This creation time and the ancestral creation stories and events have been called the ‘Dreaming’ in English. The manner in which inheritance of ancestral dreaming operates will be discussed later, what is important is that the life force of an individual is understood to originate at a particular place and the individual shares substance with that place, and responsibilities for maintaining the health of the place. Through family individuals are also responsible for other places. An intricate kinship web connecting people to places, animals, plants, rocks and water patterns the country.¹⁴ This ontological connection between people and place structures all of life.

In this manner time is ever present as the past is contained within the present. For Aboriginal people in the Roper time had not developed as a determinative quality of being. Ancestral events are themselves coterminous with the present through place and act as the primary means of orientation. Elkin made the useful analogy that Aboriginal time could be understood ‘not as a horizontal line extending back through a series of pasts but rather as a vertical line in which the past underlies and is within the present’.¹⁵ Stanner explains that neither ‘time nor history as we understand them are involved in the meaning of Dreaming’. He states that he has ‘never been able to discover any Aboriginal word for time as an abstract concept. And the sense of history is wholly alien here’.¹⁶

A particular site of significance is simultaneously the evidence of ancestral action in creation times, and their continued presence in that place. Thus time is not understood as cyclical, chronological or linear, but perhaps best analogized as a spatial or seasonal field, or rather simply as Land itself – where past and present can occur simultaneously through the continuity of the Land. Place provides people with connection to the past, present and future simultaneously. It is possible to speculate that a deeper meaning and significance of spatial field is embodied in the landforms of Avebury (to be discussed shortly), yet the cultural connection there has been interrupted, the stories weren’t written down and as a result the best we can manage is to interpret and speculate. In Aboriginal Australia the culture has also been interrupted yet resilience has afforded a greater proportion of the understanding still available to share.

Living as a Response to Place

The dwelling practice in the Roper region of Northern Australia prior to the colonial encounter responded to the changing seasons, rainfall and climatic changes as they in turn impacted upon the Land, plant and animal species. Knowledge of the particulars of country was valuable and imperative in order to discern which places made good living environments in particular seasonal conditions. The following quote from Joseph Reser describes dwellings in central and northern Arnhem Land before European occupation. It illustrates the detail of response to the changing seasonal conditions:

In the dry season, from May to November, there is typically little need of an extensive structure. There are in fact decided advantages to a minimal one. With the onset of light rains in November, needs change. Late dry season camps are often situated in low lying swamp areas. At this time of the year such areas yield a rich variety of bush foods. The type of dwelling in such locations is determined by the available material and the extent of rainfall. With the approaching wet season and heavier rainfalls, the mosquito population becomes formidable and very radically determines living arrangements. Shades roofed with paper bark are quickly converted to more enclosed structures which trap smoke and seal out mosquitos. Perhaps the most striking type of house built in the Arnhem Land region is the stringybark wet season dwelling. Such structures are built when torrential downpours begin, and when the bark can be stripped from trees. These structures can take violent rains, cope with wind, fire and mosquito control, and keep people and possessions high and dry. They fit people’s needs and are in any objective sense, a model of functional design. These materials are in themselves a statement of self-sufficiency and appropriateness. Virtually no tools are needed to work bark, other than fire and water, nor are tools required for construction.¹⁷

Writing of his experiences in outstations in the Roper region in the 1970s, Reser stated that ‘in a number of Arnhem Land communities all of the dwellings are constructed of bush timber and bark’.¹⁸ He goes on to describe that this stands as indication of people’s relationship to their surrounding environment, since what people create as their physical environment reflects their values and attitudes toward the larger natural environment.

For most cultures dwellings constitute the principal and most dramatic way in which man structures his environment; the dwelling is the interface where man’s technology directly mediates between the natural environment and his own comfort, security and well being.¹⁹

As these descriptions make evident the particularity of place, and knowledge of its seasonal variations was paramount to Aboriginal life prior to the colonial encounter, and a deep connection, attachment and attunement to place remains vital to Aboriginal lives in the Roper region (as with other areas of Aboriginal Australia) in contemporary times.

Animated Landscapes and Agency of Country

Given that time is ever present (as the past is contained within the present) and that ancestral events are themselves coterminous with the present through place, this means places within the landscape are animated and country is invested with agency. The stories that follow, from my year living in Arnhem Land, illustrate this further.

As the sun began to sink one evening in 2003 sitting in a Ngukurr yard, surrounded by camp dogs, kids and family, looking south over the Roper and beyond – somebody said ‘might be something’. This observation concerned more than the sunset – whilst I sat gazing upon a relatively static landform, animated and illuminated by the changing light, my companions saw detailed changes in that landscape that alerted them to much more, in this case, an imminent arrival. It was not my failing eyesight but rather an absence of this accustomed training to read the details of the country, perceiving incremental change from a distance. The country is always alive and communicating with those who can read her.

On a separate occasion on a dry season weekend fishing trip a few hours north of Ngukurr, a car load of us were sitting on the bank of a waterhole. Suddenly we heard a splash and a strange noise from nearer the opposite bank yet we knew when we arrived that we were the only people visiting at that time. In response to the splash, John Joshua immediately called out ‘who you?’ There was no question that the noise had been made by a person, but the source of the noise was invested with an identity nonetheless; as a noise made by the place itself, or by an animal of that place. The agency of the place made itself known, and John naturally responded in acknowledgement of its presence.

The relationship with country ensures an enduring dialogue of communication between an animated place and those who present themselves to that place. Out of courtesy and respect, permission to visit another person’s country must always be sought, since country is alive to a visitor’s presence and thus a visit will not go unnoticed, even though a visitor may think they slipped ‘under the radar’.

On a trip to Boomerang with Alan Joshua (Snr) and his family, he greeted the country in language on arrival, stating we were all hungry and wanted plenty of fish and turtle to eat. We dispersed, fishing along the bank. In a poor performance, I was the only person not to catch anything all day. Alan took me aside and apologized to me, explaining ‘that country probably shy for you’. He explained he felt that he was to blame for me not catching anything, because he had not introduced me properly to the country, to the ancestors living there. When we arrived he had called out in language to the old people who reside spiritually at that place, announced that we were hungry and asked them to give us plenty to eat. But since it was the first time I had visited that place, he explained that perhaps that country was shy and wondered who I was. Had the place recognized me, apparently it would have shared itself with me. ‘Don’t worry my daughter’, he explained ‘if you come back to visit this place in the future, as this place becomes familiar with you, it will give you plenty of food’.

As described, country is invested with agency and the agency of country can also express itself through cheeky games for those who are impatient. Whilst travelling to a Women Ranger’s conference on the Blythe River (near Maningrida, further in north Arnhem Land), I began to fatigue. I had been driving nearly nine hours and my co-pilot, Valmai Roberts, had been a visitor in that country before, so she knew the track and was directing me. For the first time during that trip I asked how much further it was to our destination. Valmai was not pleased and immediately berated me, for she said since I had asked – it would now take longer. She explained to me that from an early age children are taught not to ask: ‘How much further?’ when undertaking a trip. The reason for this is that the place you are travelling to might hear you ask, and decide to hide or move, which means it will take you longer to get there.

Thus, an understanding of locations as fixed, as the anchor of reality, is insufficient, unless coupled with an appreciation of the manner in which a person’s lived experience interacts with place. It may well be that one does not ask simply to avoid confirming collective impatience and thus making the trip seem longer. Yet, in anchoring the reason for this within an understanding of the role the place itself may play, it invested place with an agency. This agency elevated the place from a static, mute background, to the position of another entity. The place could communicate or choose to respond to human action, or speech. The place could move if it chose to and our experience of the trip would be elongated in time, if not in kilometres. The length of a journey then is not exclusively measured in Cartesian terms of measured kilometres or metres, nor by hours and minutes. This indicates much about the orientation to understanding the dialectic of reciprocity between people and places in understanding the nature and role of experience.

Country is the deepest background to experience, and this is highlighted at night when the distance from city lights reveals the richest blanket of overhead inky darkness punctuated by a seemingly limitless assemblage of stars. On an overnight camping school excursion of both local students and female students from a private school in Melbourne 4000 km away, a teacher was aiming to calm the evening antics of students in preparation for the following day’s activities. She announced a lights out time, to which Karmi, a local Aboriginal student, replied using the stars as her watch, ‘when that star gets to there (indicating an arc of movement and thus period of elapsed time), we will go to sleep’. The connection and relationship to the surrounding country that people in the Roper region enjoy stands as the foundation for all order in their lives. This order determines who will look after whom, who is responsible to whom, who can marry, where one can hunt, with whom fishing spoils and shop bought produce must be shared. The network of relatedness that governs the order of life is derived from country. Thus sustaining connection and relationship to country is imperative to ensuring the maintenance of life.

Custodial Obligations for Place and Inheritance

Sustaining relationships to country is imperative because country is understood as the origin of life. As previously described the life force of an individual is understood to originate at a particular place and the individual shares substance with that place, and responsibilities for maintaining the health of the place. Reciprocal roles of responsibility for country and ceremony are inherited from one’s parents (and grandparents).²⁰ In the Roper region the roles indicating membership of a Landholding group carry the names Minggirringi, Junggayi and Darlnyin. As these roles confer the basis of how individuals’ connections and relationships to land are structured, it is necessary to explain these roles further. In most cases an individual occupies each of these roles within different sets of relationships, relative to different contexts of country and ceremonial business. In each of these contexts these roles confer different responsibilities. Authority over a place is held in a dynamic reciprocity between these three roles, and this ensures that the authority to make decisions for a place remains a collective and reciprocal responsibility and cannot be unduly monopolized by an individual alone. The terms are frequently translated into English as ‘owner’, ‘manager’ and ‘ranger’ respectively, though it must be noted that these are only loose translations for terms, which in English do not have an adequate equivalent. (All Aboriginal groups in Australia have equivalent names for these roles, expressed in their own language.) For a further description, let us take each of these roles briefly in turn.²¹

The term Minggirringi is sometimes translated into English as ‘owner’, ‘traditional owner’ or ‘boss’. An individual is Minggirringi for the sites, ceremonies, ancestral beings and country associated with his or her father and father’s father. The Minggirringi’s roles in the customary system of Land tenure are clearly revealed in the spheres of ritual and ceremonial performances, access to and care of sacred sites and general care and use of the country. The Minggirringi are connected spiritually to the substance of the ceremony, to the songs, dances and paintings. It is their deceased ancestors who are commemorated in the songs and sacred names; it is they who are named after those ancestors; and it is they who are placed in a state of ritual danger should anything go wrong with the performance.²²

The term Junggayi is often translated in English as ‘manager’, ‘caretaker’, ‘master of ceremonies’, ‘policeman’ or ‘boss for Minggirringi’. An individual is Junggayi for sites, ceremonies and ancestors associated with his mother’s and mother’s father’s country and father’s mother’s (brother’s) country. The characteristic duty of the Junggayi associated with the ritual and ceremony is to paint the Minggirringi’s country designs onto the bodies of the Minggirringi and ensure that ceremonies are carried out in the manner deemed by the ancestral beings. If ceremonies do not proceed in the appropriate manner, they can punish the offenders. Ceremonies may not be performed without Minggirringi and Junggayi carrying out their complementary responsibilities.²³ The Junggayi can restrict the entry of Minggirringi to particular sites and have responsibility to train both the next generation of Minggirringi and Junggayi. The Junggayi also play a role in secular matters. When there are dealings, for example, with mining companies, the Junggayi always attend and often speak on behalf of the Minggirringi. Decisions about the resource utilization of a country area cannot usually be made without the Junggayi being consulted and their agreement being obtained.

The classification of Darlnyin applies to Traditional Owners who trace their descent to a country through their mother’s mother’s (brother), thus they will be Darlnyin for sites, ceremonies and ancestral beings in his mother’s mother’s (brother’s) country.²⁴ (It is less of an operative category than the last two, but is rather called into effect in response to complexities in the operation of the other two roles discussed.) In summary, the complex arrangement of kinship structure, the roles of Minggirringi, Junggayi and Darlnyin relations and custodial responsibilities provide the social framework that ensures responsibility is taken for maintaining balance and care of the Land, all species and each other, and that political authority cannot be unduly monopolized. No visits to major ritual sites, decisions about country or decisions about ritual performance associated with a given country can be made without Minggirringi, Junggayi (and often but not always Darlnyin) being present or consulted. Their relationship operates in reciprocal terms that ensure that through their interrelated dialectic, power and authority cannot be unduly monopolized. This will be explained further through the moiety system.

Moieties and Semi-Moieties

All of society, including country (and the natural world), is divided into two categories: Dua and Yirritja.²⁵ Elkin describes the moieties thus:

Moiety means half, and over quite a large area of Australia, each tribe is divided into two halves or moieties. This division, known as the dual organization, is a definite social and ceremonial grouping. Moreover, it is usually extended to embrace all things in heaven and earth so that it is totemic in nature, bringing man and nature into a common scheme, which is animistic or even ‘personal’ in character.²⁶

In the Roper region, individuals are linked via their moiety, with the major ceremonies. Each moiety has within it two semi-moieties, and all flora and fauna, ancestral beings, natural phenomenon, sites and Land belong to one of these categories. An individual belongs to the same semi-moiety as his/her father and their marriage partner should come from a semi-moiety from the opposite moiety.²⁷ The choice of marriage partner is particularly important since a violation within moiety differentiation renders one’s identity impossible (in a manner akin to the impossibility of being both female and male simultaneously). As these descriptions evidence, one’s relationship and responsibilities to country are vitally important and subject to strict customary observance. Such roles also contribute to the broader network of kinship and the rights and responsibilities that flow between individuals since each individual is in affect an embodiment of country.

Property Rights, Investing in Relatedness and Kinship

As Sutton explains,

In classical Aboriginal traditions, use of material resources of the country is not neatly separable into an ‘economic domain’ […] a number of claimant witnesses in land claims over the years have given hunting and gathering of bush tucker as their first answer to questions from counsel as to how they ‘look after’ and ‘care for’ country under claim. This may arise from the fact that custodial actions such as burning off undergrowth, talking to ancestral spirits near camp sites, cleaning out fouled wells or checking recent tracks near sacred sites were typically part and parcel of days spent foraging on the move, but it can also derive from a perception that to live off the land is to exchange substance with it.²⁸

Sharing substance with country and continuing practices that enact that reciprocity is a crucial part of ensuring balance is maintained in a sustainable manner and that as each individual ensures these obligations are met in his/her own country, the group as a whole is ensuring its responsibility for maintaining the health of the region as a whole. This includes recognizing kin as embodiments of nearby and related country and observing obligations to ‘look after’ them as well, since kinship and protocols surrounding its observance originate in the order of the land. Kinship is the core component of the social structure through which relationships in country become expressed through relationships between people. Kinship is the enduring expression of the reciprocal nature of the connection and relationship between country and Aboriginal people. The importance of kinship relatedness will be discussed further but first, it is necessary to explain how property rights are understood for Aboriginal people, as with the reciprocal roles of owner, manager and ranger reveal, there is a sharing and expectation of mutual responsibility that is differentiated from a European perspective on ‘property’ (informed by Locke’s 1690 Second Treatise on Civil Government).²⁹

Property