A designer takes responsibility to learn about the landscape and the Aboriginal languages that describe it. WORDS AND ART Kathryn Morgan . In this body of work, I explore the role language can play in honoring lives of the past and the present-day sovereignty of First Nations people. I’m trying to learn about the precolonial

Walking through ancient cultural and spiritual landscapes inspires reverence, respect, and a sense of ethics of place. WORDS AND IMAGES    Michael Davis  . Can we perceive landscape as more than “mere” topography, land, or landform? By engaging with landscapes in multidimensional ways, we can reshape our relationships with them, embracing them ethically and respectfully

Three people from different backgrounds weave together their personal and collective histories, deeply intertwined with Country. Sophie Zaccone, David Doyle, and Mark Lock In sunburnt Australia struggling with climate change, land degradation, and biodiversity loss, three people connect to reinvigorate Country — a First Nations Australian way of being. Dave and Mark are First Nations

Faith Baisden, Thomas Dick, Carolyn Barker, and Kristina Kelman . . For tens of thousands of years, the rich and beautiful sounds of hundreds of different languages washed across Australia. Over all of the continent it is believed there were more than five hundred languages at one time. Around two hundred years ago, a new

This page complements the photo essay “Yamani: Voices of an Ancient Land,” which presents a unique musical project by the same name, developed by six extraordinary Australian Indigenous women. They came together to support the revitalization of Aboriginal languages and the strengthening of Indigenous identity by creating, singing, and recording songs in their six different

Mark Lock interviewed by Stephen Houston Stephen Houston: Can you please introduce yourself? Mark Lock: I am Mark Lock from the Ngiyampaa people, an Australian Aboriginal tribe from rural Australia. You can see that I have “fair” skin and blue eyes because of my mixed heritage (Latvian, Scottish, English, and Scandinavian, in addition to Ngyampaa).

by Michaela Jeannaisse Carter . . In July 2017, I abandoned my Pacific Northwest summer break in North America in favor of a tropical winter internship a little closer to home. I flew across the Pacific Ocean to join a small but ambitious effort that was about to begin on the ancestral homelands of the Bama

Text and artwork by Colleen Corrigan “Without language you can’t describe your Country.” —Melinda Holden (Gurang Elder) . I was sitting across from Maureen at her kitchen table, with the lens of my video camera focused on a bowl of fruit because she didn’t want to be filmed in her housecoat. Her mannerisms and humor

by Stephen Houston “We have survived the white man’s world.” —from the song “We Have Survived,” written and performed by Bart Willoughby with the Aboriginal band No Fixed Address, 1981 Despite the intensifying market pressures on land and the lifeworld, the power of Country as a living and sustaining force is re-asserting itself in Australia—that

by Michael Davis In the tropical north of Queensland, Australia, at the mouth of the Trinity River that runs into the Pacific Ocean, lies the city of Cairns. Here, at this “edge of the region,” a long coastal stretch of mudflats and mangroves, rich in birdlife and other fauna, gives way to a major harbor