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SCARRED TREES AND BECOMING-WITNESS

SCARRED TREES AND BECOMING-WITNESS Abstract What happens when the landscape looks back? How is it that the landscape sees? This essay goes in search of material-semiotic signs of Australian Indigenous Country, overlooked and actively unseen through the history and enduring violence of European invasion. Whether in the form of eel traps, fishing weirs, remnants of stone huts, scarred trees, or else discovered in the notebook sketches of early explorers who wondered at the park-like composition of the landscape they were newly encountering, such evidence offers testimony to an Indigenous environmental knowledge we are in great need of today, grappling as we are with the concatenating effects of the climate crisis. The acknowledgement of sites of Indigenous significance across Australia, often threatened by mining interests and infrastructural projects, is discussed here in relation to the cultural and ritual artefact that is the scarred tree. This article explores the entangled act of witnessing via the more-than-human becomings of the landscape, or what Indigenous custodians call “Country,” and through the protean figure of the becoming-witness. Drawing on the theories of feminist ethnographers and philosophers while paying crucial heed to the voices of Indigenous scholars, I situate myself as a non-Indigenous scholar between the fields of architecture and philosophy. Venturing into the deceptively mundane suburban hinterlands of Melbourne, Australia in search of scarred trees, I attempt to broach a careful dialogue between Indigenous and non-Indigenous modes of what Deborah Bird Rose and Thom van Dooren call “Storying” as a process of learning with Country. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Angelaki: Journal of Theoretical Humanities Taylor & Francis

SCARRED TREES AND BECOMING-WITNESS

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SCARRED TREES AND BECOMING-WITNESS

Abstract

Abstract What happens when the landscape looks back? How is it that the landscape sees? This essay goes in search of material-semiotic signs of Australian Indigenous Country, overlooked and actively unseen through the history and enduring violence of European invasion. Whether in the form of eel traps, fishing weirs, remnants of stone huts, scarred trees, or else discovered in the notebook sketches of early explorers who wondered at the park-like composition of the landscape they were newly...
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Publisher
Taylor & Francis
Copyright
© 2022 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
ISSN
1469-2899
eISSN
0969-725X
DOI
10.1080/0969725X.2022.2046378
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

Abstract What happens when the landscape looks back? How is it that the landscape sees? This essay goes in search of material-semiotic signs of Australian Indigenous Country, overlooked and actively unseen through the history and enduring violence of European invasion. Whether in the form of eel traps, fishing weirs, remnants of stone huts, scarred trees, or else discovered in the notebook sketches of early explorers who wondered at the park-like composition of the landscape they were newly encountering, such evidence offers testimony to an Indigenous environmental knowledge we are in great need of today, grappling as we are with the concatenating effects of the climate crisis. The acknowledgement of sites of Indigenous significance across Australia, often threatened by mining interests and infrastructural projects, is discussed here in relation to the cultural and ritual artefact that is the scarred tree. This article explores the entangled act of witnessing via the more-than-human becomings of the landscape, or what Indigenous custodians call “Country,” and through the protean figure of the becoming-witness. Drawing on the theories of feminist ethnographers and philosophers while paying crucial heed to the voices of Indigenous scholars, I situate myself as a non-Indigenous scholar between the fields of architecture and philosophy. Venturing into the deceptively mundane suburban hinterlands of Melbourne, Australia in search of scarred trees, I attempt to broach a careful dialogue between Indigenous and non-Indigenous modes of what Deborah Bird Rose and Thom van Dooren call “Storying” as a process of learning with Country.

Journal

Angelaki: Journal of Theoretical Humanities – Taylor & Francis

Published: Mar 4, 2022

Keywords: scarred trees; becoming-witness; testimonial landscape; storytelling

References

  • An Examination of Indigenous Australian Culturally Modified Trees in South Australia
  • Terra Nullius: Temporal Legal Pluralism in an Australian Colony
  • Becoming-With and Together: Indigenous Transgender and Transcultural Practices
  • Indigenous Subjectivity in Australia: Are we Queer?
  • Lively Ethnography: Storying Animist Worlds
  • When is a Scar a Scar? Evaluating Scarred and Marked Trees at Sydney Olympic Park
  • Rock Art and Modified Tree Tracings Digitisation: Background, Sites, Issues and Access
  • Firsting in Research
  • (Not) Royal Park: Recovering the Enduring Importance of a Kulin Nations Gathering Place for Culture, Health, Wellbeing and Healing
  • Culturally Modified Trees in the Pacific Northwest
  • The Future of the Witness: Nature, Race and More-than-Human Environmental Publics
  • What is Relationality? Indigenous Knowledges, Practices and Responsibilities with Kin
  • Sovereign Spaces, Caring for Country and the Homeless Position of Aboriginal Peoples
  • Trees on the Border between Nature and Culture: Culturally Modified Trees in Boreal Sweden