Dancing up Dharug: caring as country through dancing on/with/as dirt

We are Yanama Budyari Gumada, a more-than-human, Dharug-led, intercultural research collective, and we join you from a dance circle, that we weed and stomp together at Yarramundi Regional Park, Western Sydney. This paper explores what caring as Country can look like for Dharug Custodians. We assert that Dancing up Dharug is Caring as Country, a dance that is expanded through its inclusion of more-than-humans. We understand dirt as both a guiding presence and a material manifestation of dance and explore weeding, stomping and co-becoming as ways of dancing on/with/as the dirt of the dance circle. On/with/as are used as reference points to position ourselves in relation to dirt. Dancing on Dharug speaks to the sensuousness and materiality of weed-dancing. Dancing with Dharug highlights the agency and affects of dirt – how dirt communicates, when we stomp. Dancing as Dharug emphasises that we are Ngurra (Country) and magnifies the generative, multidirectional care (caring as Country) that this entails. Spotlighting the fluid and emergent relationships between the weed-dancing and stomping, we co-become on/with/as the dance circle. We recognise that we are the dirt both in its softening and its hardening and we feel our own softening as we come together in this place.