[Download] "From Wiluna to Kalgoorlie with GB (Georgina Brown): Death, Life and Community (Essay)" by Hamish Morgan * eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: From Wiluna to Kalgoorlie with GB (Georgina Brown): Death, Life and Community (Essay)
- Author : Hamish Morgan
- Release Date : January 01, 2010
- Genre: Reference,Books,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 95 KB
Description
What I try and do here is work that place where we are prepared to be interrupted, where we cannot stand-back, but are thrown towards others in community. This is something I learnt from spending eighteen months with the Jackman family in an Aboriginal community called Ululla. The Jackman family have made Ululla a home (among others), not as an ideal place that would hold and centre an identity, but rather as a place one leaves and returns to, stays for awhile, goes, and then comes back again. Ululla was always changing from week to week, month to month, year to year; it was never the same. There was always a different collection of people, forces and contingencies working away. The Jackman family have vast regional networks of family that connect to other sites of community: Wiluna, Cue and Meekatharra; Leonora and Kalgoorlie; Warburton Ranges and Alice Springs; Jigalong, Mt Newman, Port Hedland and Cotton Creek. And from these places, further afield again; Perth, Geraldton, Broome. With similar experiences in mind anthropologists working in the central and western desert have noted that what Aboriginal people emphasise is regional relatedness and extensive social ties rather than exclusive or restricted groupings (Myers, 1986; Rose, 1992; Poirier, 2005). There is no centring as such, rather relations are pivotal, turning one towards another without rest. This extensive nature of relations demands that people travel vastly and imperatively to maintain kin relationships--leaving and returning without rest as a condition of being. What I came to understand was that to think community was not to think of a place, 'a people' nor an object, but rather a practice of interrelation. The Jackmans were not keen to objectify 'the community' nor present 'higher level' structures (shared destiny, immutable values) as a transcendental realm beyond the contingent and changing forces and relations that were constantly happening. People seemed to direct my attention not to what community is (as if it could be defined through certain objective characteristics) but would give examples of how community takes place, how it happens: