ABSTRACT
This chapter explores an emergent ethic of care in an Australian Indigenous desert community. As survivors within a colonialist settler society, the Anangu Pitjantjatjara people in northern South Australia have long been struggling to avert endings – of their life-ways, their cultural knowledge and practices, and the wellbeing of their homelands. In Anangu thought, the past interlocks with the future, begging the question of what kind of thinking about time might be involved in looking after past, present and future lives. How, this chapter asks further, might the existential crisis the Anangu endure articulate with the intensifying planetary ecological crisis and a growing awareness of the precariousness of all life on earth? At this point in time when interdisciplinary efforts are well under way to forge a sense of planetary belonging within an inter-species web of co-existences, it seems urgent to look beyond the parameters of Western metaphysics, values and discourses and to engage in earnest with culturally different ideas and practices of care and caring for life.
