ABSTRACT
Once upon a time there is an island off South Australia which the wadjela/whitefellas2 call Hindmarsh Island, but which the Indigenous Aboriginal Ngarrindjeri people call Kumarangk. How many stories begin with ‘once upon a time’? But what is time? As Umberto Eco beautifully illustrates in The Island of the Day Before (1995), it is an ungraspable social construction. So, how can we waste time, lose time, run out of time, turn back time? These constructs, such as the preexistence or irreversibility of time, are simply appearances relative to the ignorance of our Newtonian-and Cartesian-based western ‘knowledge’ and an inability to put things in place. As I attempt to demonstrate in this chapter, however, our accepted western construction of time stands in tension with other accepted constructions, exemplified by the 1990s development applications for a marina resort and bridge to Kumarangk in South Australia. I offer the case of Kumarangk as a detailed empirical example which illustrates multiple times and spaces in practice.
