ABSTRACT
This is a story of awful place harm. It began some time ago, and over the years has taken twists and turns, but never has the plot changed. The narrative of death, destruction and elemental decay has clung hard to this place. It is a big place, known as Bing Bong, but it is more complex than this name might convey. It is also a composite of places, scattered along the coastal margins of the southwest Gulf of Carpentaria, northern Australia (see Figure 2.0). In the local Indigenous language, Yanyuwa, these places are referred to as Makukula, Mawuli, Arrinyanda, Wimanda and Wurrulwiji. Each place is an important, living and breathing presence. Each has been formed by ancestral beings, which continue to reside in country, giving place its form and function. Due to the events that have occurred on this part of Yanyuwa country, many fear that these places are now dead or that they are slowly dying. Indeed many of the human kin associated with this area have died, first massacred by rogue settlers in the early colonial period, and in recent decades passing away from illness or accident, their demise believed to be linked to the decline of health in ancestral co-presences and as a result of the damage done to their ancestral bodies and esteems. Wilangarra and Yanyuwa, the Indigenous owners and kin for this place, didn’t ask for any of this to occur, nor have they contributed to or accepted the decline of these profoundly important places.
