Stories of Rapid Creek: Voicing transdisciplinary methods in caring for NT people-places

There are many stories of Gurambai/Rapid Creek. Focussed on this culturally, socially, geographically, and biologically important Darwin waterway, this project works under Larrakia/Gulumoerrgin authority eliciting multiple voicings that are important in this place being itself, and being and active ‘participant’ in Darwin’s environs.

Who might speak? Are words the sole way to ‘tell stories’? What about the visual and the aural? And how would such voicings be recorded in order to re-present rather than represent? How might responses elicited by such re-presentations be responded to?

Acknowledging many practices of land management, conservation, development and environmental services accounting begin with cartographic conceptions of place and its governance, we start instead with questions around how to walk, speak, show, share and celebrate Gurambai/Rapid Creek as a Gulumoerrgin people-place. We are interested in how Darwin people do their knowledge and culture work in caring for the Creek albeit often expressing ways of ‘knowing and caring’ that are part of one sort of institution or another. From such a grounded position we will be working towards innovative methods and approaches for showing what contemporary Larrakia practices of either working alongside of, or in active engagement with, modern knowledge forms in caring for country might be, when guided in proper ways by elders, but also involving other partners and collaborators.