ABSTRACT

This chapter considers what it might mean to move towards a decolonising understanding of place. Engaging with, understanding and living with and as place is always political. The contours of these politics are deeply imbued with relations of colonisation, positionality and survivance. As a non-Indigenous academic, a migrant-coloniser living on unceded Gumbaynggirr land in Australia, I seek to attend to the calls from Indigenous scholars and community leaders to rethink relationships with place, acknowledging the importance of place in nourishing Indigenous self-determination and survivance, and trying to move beyond Western dominant framings. I do this with particular attention to my place, and the particular limits, privileges, challenges and responsibilities it entails. Rather than thinking about place, I aim to work towards practices of thinking, doing and being decolonisation in, with and as place.