Wirriyarra Awara : Yanyuwa Land and Sea Scapes

Identity and landscape are integrally related. People draw on landscape to give meaning and significance to their lives. This is enacted through the identification and naming of particular topographic features with descriptive geographic terms as well as place-names. Sites are signified by this means, and localities become entwined with notions of individual and group identity. The naming and ordering of the landscape transforms the purely physical, geographic environment into something—a place—that becomes embedded within a history, a spirituality, a lived experience.¹

The Yanyuwa people are a community of Indigenous Australians who inhabit a scape that spans both land and sea—the southwest Gulf of Carpentaria region in northern Australia. They define their country as the delta region of the McArthur River and the saltwater limits of the McArthur and Wearyan Rivers, along with the Sir Edward Pellew Islands. My exploration here of the Yanyuwa people’s perceptions of their homeland is based on journeying with them through their place-scapes for many years.

Yanyuwa country.

Animated Landscapes

The Yanyuwa perceive their environment as cosmological. It is a universe whose ecology consists of many diverse forms, including spirit beings, or the spiritual aspects of flora, fauna, and phenomena, each of which is able to interact with all the others. The complexity of this environment infuses any Yanyuwa discussion of its life-forms and geography. When traveling with Yanyuwa people, for example, I have often observed their continual commenting on the landscape and the living things that inhabit it. Sandbars shifted by recent floods, a newly established patch of mangroves, a dried-up freshwater well, sightings of large tiger sharks or whales, and unseasonable downpours of rain could all become topics of conversation, sometimes referred to as “might be something.”² These “somethings,” whether well-defined or vague, would always lead to explanations of a natural world profound with spirit and meaning, sometimes benign, but full of potential danger and indescribable power. “Might be something” is an oblique way of referring to what may prove to be more than meets the eye.³

As this example indicates, landscape can become the center of human meaning.⁴ The meaning of a place is constructed by human beings engaged in continual negotiation with the environment they call home. The environment becomes a place which can be described in purely geographic and biologic terms or in ways that involve a sense of spirit. (The word spirit is, of course, open to many interpretations; another “slippery term” is spirituality —neither one should be used lightly.⁵) In addition to the relations among landscape, place, and spirituality, it is important to note that people have relationships with the other creatures that share the same environment. When Annie Karrakayn, a senior Yanyuwa woman, remarked—on seeing a white-bellied sea eagle— “They make me think about my country, my island, my mother, poor thing,” she was expressing the deep and enduring emotional links between a people, their country, and its other life-forms. The ways in which Indigenous people relate to their country are now widely known. Annie Karrakayn’s statement typifies the evocative and emotional attachment of the Yanyuwa to “things.” The notion of Indigenous people as being “at one with the environment” is another commonplace, but that is not to say it lacks substance or even richness, especially in the context of a phenomenological rendering of the Yanyuwa landscape.

The Yanyuwa people operate within an ecological system in which human agencies, special knowledge, and power are significant components. Their environment is enlivened by “magic.” In terms of Yanyuwa relationships to their landscape, this magic has to do with the interaction between particular Spirit Ancestor sites or beings and human song and chant. It also entails acts of will and the mystical relations of natural species with natural events, such as the association of snakes with wind, whales with waterspouts, or the naturally revivified landscape with the Pleiades constellation. As these associations show, human agency plays an integral part in ecological processes. The Yanyuwa believe that...