Weaving "lifeworkings": Goanna walking between humanism and posthumanism, Dharug women's way

When Dharug Country, as Ancestral place of belonging and connection (physically and metaphysically) for millennia, becomes the colonized, cosmopolitan, and urbanized city of Sydney, Australia, how do Dharug custodians continue cultural practices and obligations around caring for Country? It is proposed this happens by de-centering humanist values and re-centering Indigenous ways of knowing and doing into daily lives, including work and leisure, which helps invert systems that compartmentalize selves into fractured roles. Re-centering the human as dependent upon and one-within-a-multitude of species, repositions the Self as interconnected, non-hierarchical and evolving, while deconstructing human-centric hierarchies that leave legacies of disintegration.

From the context of the doctoral project, Country Tracking Voices, this paper shows how seven Dharug Australian Aboriginal women are de-centering humanism by demonstrating cultural continuity through custodial practices by sharing stories in site-related significant places. By weaving work, family, community and custodial obligations, they demonstrate existential interconnectedness and belonging to presences, places and people. From core belonging resilience and wellbeing are interwoven.

Methodologically, the project privileges Indigenous ways of knowing and doing. Participants identify with other-than-humans and the researcher-participant ‘goanna walks’ between Western and Indigenous knowledges and practices. Accordingly, it is proposed humans can mitigate the colonizing, corporatizing and destructive excesses of unfettered capitalism in the era of the Anthropocene, and concomitantly create ‘Lifeworkings’.

Weaving lives where Self is de-centred, and Indigenous values are re-centred, repositions the debate from seeking the illusive ‘work/life’ balance to reweaving the human into the fabric of a 65,000 years old system of knowledges and belongings. Implications arise around the crucial role of education in supporting humanist values and the consequences we see playing out across the globe.

* ‘Goanna’ is the Australian term for a monitor lizard.