Dinawan Dreaming: seeing the darkness or the stars

Dinawan Dreaming: seeing the darkness or the stars

This chapter uses Indigenous research methodologies of walking together, yarning about our experiences and critically analysing the meanings of conversations and writings created by three women. We are a university educator and recent migrant to Australia; an artist and educator of Aboriginal Australian heritage, and a woman of the Kamillaroi people; and a pre-service teacher whose family migrated from Europe in the last century to farm the land in Queensland. The chapter builds upon traditional Indigenous Australian ways of knowing and understanding as the authors share their understandings of an immersive experience during a day visit to Gummingurru: a ceremonial site of cultural importance to the Jarowair Aboriginal people. An art work created by Donna Moodie becomes a key and a metaphor for understanding the different ways of seeing and understanding land, self and culture, as the authors walk together on and through a site of spiritual and cultural significance. Film of their yarning about the day and a critical revisiting of the transcribed interviews allows a three-way re-framing of the day so as to generate new understandings of identity and culture, the land and time. The interwoven voices of the three highlight differences but also embody the potential for re-connection and transformed understandings through walking, yarning and writing together.

© 2014 Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Accepted version deposited in accordance with the copyright policy of the publisher.