Page 64 - 10th Annual International Charles Town Maroon Conference and Festival Magazine

June 2018 Charles Town Maroon International Conference Magazine

Weaving the land, the mountain,

the memories of place

Wendy Somerville

Wendy is an Aboriginal Australian, Yuin from the south Through a focus on this site the project goal was
coast of New South Wales, south of Sydney, Australia. to pilot a new combination of memory, place and
Here she follows up on the article published in the landscape methods to understand and commu-
Maroon Magazine last year about the local rela- nicate the entanglement of Koori people’s lives
tionship to the sacred Culunghutti Mountain, with an with the Mountain. The research project has a
article about the practice of weaving, its connection focus on how best to collect, understand and
to culture, memory and place. archive the relational entanglements of human and
nonhuman memories and resonances linked to
This article relates the story of a weaving project that places/landscapes.
was part of a larger research project which aimed to
include Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples In our fieldwork we walked parts of the mountain
in research conducted with, by and on, us/them. and were driven on other parts. We recorded the
Through this project we offered Aboriginal and Torres mountain and the researchers using sound
Strait Islander scholars experience in the dynamics of recorders and still and time-lapse photography. Our
research, to enable them to envision themselves as collective also rummaged through archives at a
researchers by being part of a research team. We and local museum and we yarned with local (Koori)
the University of Canberra Collaborative Indigenous people about family memories of the Mountain.
Research Initiative, the funding body that provided the
grant, believe that by being given the opportunity to Weaving memories
work on a research project Aboriginal and Torres Strait
Islander scholars would get hands on experience in On a visit to the Cullunghutti Aboriginal Area in May
conducting research and perhaps wish to go further 2017, a tract of land purchased by the New South
and undertake their own research projects. Wales Parks and Wildlife Service and gazetted for use
by the local Koori community, a pond containing
Our team is made up of equal numbers of Aboriginal cumbungi reeds (bull rush) was noticed. Later, a small
and or Torres Strait Islander people and non- handful of reeds was collected from the pond with the
Aboriginal people, academics and students. Wendy is intention of having a weaving day with women
co-Chief Investigator in the Cullunghutti pilot research involved in the Cullunghutti project. We were able to
project and her PhD is centred on place, memory and (finally) schedule a day to meet on 26 August 2017.
archives. The place is Cullunghutti which is a This is a partial story of that day.
mountain on the South Coast of New South Wales. The
mountain was colonised in 1822 and members of Our collective engaged in a cultural practice common
Wendy’s family lived there until the end of the 1950s. to indigenous women throughout the world. Although
Aboriginal oral histories describe Cullunghutti as a we were known to each other at some level prior to
meeting place connected to bora or male ceremonial our memory weaving project, closer relationships
cultural practices (Wright, T 2013), a place where the which built on our shared experience and
spirits of people slid from a rock to move over the sea similar/dissimilar cultural knowledges were forged.
into the heavens. For local Koori groups the top of the The way in which we came together to weave and co-
mountain is a sensitive area to be accessed only by create would be recognised by our Aboriginal and
males. Torres Strait Islander ancestors as part of the cultural
practices that forged connections to Country. In Koori

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