ABSTRACT
People living on the coast share similar fascinations with their environment, expressed through cosmology, ritual and religion. Tangible cultural heritage often signifies ritual landscapes— those places where magic or religion motivates behaviour— yet, in Narungga culture, intangible heritage is instead foregrounded. Cosmology is the transformation and enculturation of chaos into order to arrange the everyday world. The key difference between the ritual and cognitive landscape is that the former is ‘more marked by “actions”, by manners and customs’ while the latter, associated with the mind, is the mental map of remembered places. Cognition is ‘the way people in the past and present have thought about themselves in relation to their environment and how they have represented this relationship. The topographic landscape includes the study of natural topography such as contours, the various physical approaches to the coast from the sea and the location of harbours. The cognitive landscape of Burgiyana comprises the ritual, toponymic and topographic landscapes.
