Rhythms of Law: Aboriginal Jurisprudence and the Anthropocene
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Rhythms of Law: Aboriginal Jurisprudence and the Anthropocene Kate Wright1 Accepted: 24 September 2020 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract On 1 December 2019, over one hundred Aboriginal nations performed ancestral and creation dances in synchrony across the Australian continent. One of the communities that danced was the Anaiwan nation from the north-eastern region of New South Wales, Australia. Since 2014 I have been working with Anaiwan people in a collaborative activist research project, creating and maintaining an Aboriginal community garden on the fringes of my hometown of Armidale as a site for land reclamation and decolonising, multispecies research. The community garden is adjacent to the site of the old East Armidale Aboriginal Reserve, where over one hundred dispossessed Aboriginal people were forced to live on the municipal town garbage depot in the mid-twentieth century. This paper positions both the Nation Dance 2019 movement, and the Armidale Aboriginal Community Garden, as rhythmic events that activate Aboriginal Law and sovereignty that is held enduring in the land but that has been buried alive by the settler-colonial state. Focusing on the tensions between deep Indigenous ancestral temporality and colonial territoriality, I argue that the emergence of the Anthropocene reveals a dangerous dissonance between the rhythms of Aboriginal Law patterned through present-day Australian environments and the grid-based structures of colonial governance imposed upon them. Keywords Aboriginal jurisprudence · Anthropocene · Community gardens · Decolonisation · Property On the first of December, 2019, the Anaiwan community from the northern tableland region of New South Wales in the continent now known as Australia gathered in a community garden in Armidale to perform a creation dance—Darigari Njinga Nyami. Arms painted in white ochre waved eucalypt branches and leaves against the earth to the beat of a collective chant. While bare feet left hundreds of foot prints in the soil the percussive rhythm of clap sticks carved patterns in time. * Kate Wright [email protected] 1
PO Box 66, Armidale, NSW 2350, Australia
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After months of prolonged, severe drought the garden itself was mostly dirt. The grass had died and the soil shattered, each little piece of earth hardened and split apart from the next until the ground looked like a thousand fractured continents broken up by tectonic forces. Dallas Ramage, who helped to organise the dance in Armidale, explained that the ceremony would begin to heal song lines ruptured by centuries of colonial violence and dispossession. ‘We haven’t had a Corroboree on this land since 1883’, Ramage said to the local newspaper, ‘This day is going to break history, and hopefully break the drought’ (cited in Green 2019). As the Anaiwan people danced their creation dance abiding rhythms of Aboriginal Law reverberated across the entire Australian continent. The Anaiwan nation was one of over one hundred Aboriginal communities performing ances
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