We sing the land: researching for, with and as Country in North East Arnhem Land, Australia

This chapter discusses our work as an Indigenous-non-Indigenous, more-than-human research collective, focusing on our work sharing songspirals. For Yol?u people, the beauty and purpose of songs and songspirals are always multilayered. Songspirals are sung by Yol?u to awaken Country, to make and remake the life-giving connections between people and place. The depth of the spirals is in their meanings; in the patterns, relationships and connections they create again and again. Songspirals are relational; they are a co-becoming with Country, with land, sea, and sky, with all the beings, all the processes, all that is tangible and intangible, that emerge together. In this chapter, we focus on our understandings of research as co-becoming, and discuss some of the pitfalls, silences, and dangers in sharing Yol?u knowledges of songspirals in the context of colonial invasion, including the importance of understanding art and song in terms of Yol?u sovereignty. This means that while our work together can be framed as PAR, with a focus on art-based practice including intergenerational and intercultural sharing through song, painting, weaving, and writing together, it is always more. It is more beautiful, more layered, more-than-human, more political, and always more challenging as processes of injustice and recolonisation continue to be both enacted and resisted.