Dr Lara Daley

In Indigenous/settler colonial contexts, cities are both rich and lived, multitemporal Indigenous places/spaces and sites of ongoing Indigenous dispossession. In this paper, we aim to unsettle linear notions of time associated with mainstream constructions of colonisation. We suggest that doing urban politics on stolen land requires a reconstitution of the when of urban struggles to engage with colonising pasts, presents and futures, and with multi-temporal survivances of Indigenous peoples and Country, in the here and now. Time in and as city-as-Country is multiple, non-linear, active, and made through/as relationships. As we engage with the gifts and responsibilities of non-linear time, we are led by Meanjin [so-called Brisbane, Australia], the teachings of activists from the Brisbane Aboriginal Sovereign Embassy and week-long protest actions that took place to coincide with the G20 Leaders' Meeting in 2014. We do this as two settler geographers, with complicities and responsibilities in/to the present, past and future as uninvited guests on unceded Aboriginal land. We signal a need to deepen the engagements of urban geographical and anti-capitalist politics with the specificities of the urban as Indigenous place/space/Country in order to complicate geographical conceptualisations of the urban and work towards decolonising the city in Indigenous/settler-colonial contexts.

On Gumbaynggirr Country (mid-north coast New South Wales, Australia), an act of violence against the sacredness of life and Country resulted in Wirriiga, the Two Sisters, making the sea. When the waters rose, the people made their way back to their homeland by following a gut-string bridge made by Dunggiirr, the Koala Brothers. While the people were on the bridge, mischievous Baalijin, the eastern quoll, threatened to chop it down and made waves that nearly washed them off. Baalijin challenges complacency and forces change, and on that understanding in this article we consider what it means to be living this present time of instability and changes wrought by coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19); ours is a perspective grounded in story and Gumbaynggirr Law/Lore. We write as Yandaarra, a research collective guided by the Old Fellas (ancestors) and led by Aunty Shaa Smith, storyholder for Gumbaynggirr Country, and her daughter Neeyan Smith, a young Gumbaynggirr woman. Learning from a Gumbaynggirr-led understanding of COVID-19¿as one manifestation of Baalijin and relationships fallen out of balance¿re-situates the pandemic in wider and longer histories of colonisation and destructive patterns of existence and broken agreements. Those learnings prompt us to call for Juungambala¿work involved in setting things right as a way to heal. Let Baalijin and COVID-19 be the wake-up call that forces the change that Country (and we) need.