ngiyanhi-gu ngidyi-galia

● Matte Ager-McConnell, ■ Rhiannon Brownbill, ⁕ Roger Miranda Navarro

The backyard is a contested logic. A dream based on violent erasure and suppression… ¹

This continent colonially known as Australia has historically persisted with oppressive cartographic practices; processes of mapping reducing the physical realities of Country to arbitrary lots, lines and symbols on a page. These acts of cartography have resulted in the exploitation and essentialisation of Country to the architectural convention of “site”. This practice, entrenched in spatial discourse, discards Indigenous Knowledges, and contributes to the extractive capitalist project.² It values place only by its utility³ as an object worthy of possession.⁴

Country’s living spirit severs the colonial dichotomy of nature and culture. “… Ontologically embedded within [Country] are spectral traces of agency and resistance” which value embodied Knowledges, reciprocity and relationality in place.⁵

The backyard remains a site upon which the cultural erasure and wanton assimilation of colonisation has been spatially legitimised. These continual practices of possession and development fundamentally transform our physical realities and ways of being. This conditions us to see this continent as a series of backyards upon which we extract and manifest a singular identity of the “Australian Dream”.

By interlacing our three distinct stories we reject architecture’s erroneous perceptions of County as a submissive site. Our stories are not homogeneous, and neither are our backyards. They exist beyond binary distinctions and become both a site of colonisation and resistance; memory and erasure.

A “backyard” can assume a space controlled and dominated by human transcendence. An ego-driven ordering of life that is human-centric and disregards all non-human being — plants, animals, rocks, water, air, sky and more — as secondary.⁶ Underpinned by “enlightened” colonial logics, this notion of the backyard fragments Country down into manageable portions that can only exist because of these very same colonial logics that separate the mind, from the body and from the earth.⁷ This mind/body/earth split acts through colonial impositions of hierarchy, establishing a certain humanity as above “nature”, rather than an Indigenous relationality with Country.

While the backyard can be a static entity of control, Country remains ephemeral. Sustained since the beginning of time,⁸ Country decentres this human authority. Instead, we form only one part of the interconnectedness She entails. We belong to Her and the damage of colonisation “is not permanent because resilience built over 120,000 years is hard to break.”⁹

“From an Aboriginal perspective, non-Indigenous people, too, are always [within] the Country of Aboriginal people and hence always within Indigenous places”.¹⁰ Their being can either feed into these colonial logics, or act to resist. Country is sovereign, never neutral and multiple stories will exist within one place, the backyard too can become ephemeral to changing dynamics and power relations.¹¹ While still enmeshed within colonial logics, the contemporary presence of a backyard can also reassert caring as resistance¹² and fractures the singular identity of the “Australian Dream”.

The cartographic carving up of Country, whilst attempting to erase what has always existed here, can give place and space to multiple realities and connections to Country.¹³ Here, we build upon long-standing and evolving histories of Country and Indigenous resistances to colonisation. While intertwined within epistemic foundations of a “home-away-from-home”, the backyard operates as a continuation of cultures and defies the question of “who really made the nation and who holds possession”.¹⁴ In place of ownership and control, the practice of care becomes central to our stories of the backyard. Common across our realities is a sense of caring, not for what is “‘owed to” or “belongs to” us, but to who, what and where we belong and what is owed to them.¹⁵

How can we claim to belong and resist when our being here presents a constant struggle which others must also resist?

Place and space have never been neutral. It is only through the dispossession and de-territorialisation of First Nations people and the cartographical carving up of Country that non-Indigenous attachments and connections to place exist.¹⁶ While our developed attachment exists here, it can never erase Indigenous belonging with place, and more importantly their continuing Kinship, connections and Custodianship with Country.

Within Country multiple realities and connections to place will always exist. Colonisation imposes fragmentation and control over the self, the community and the “other self”—the obligatory and often overlooked connections and relations we hold with all (non)human beings. Within Indigenous epistemologies control is an awareness of otherness beyond the human: an act of love, care, reciprocity and connection.

“If you/we are to live together in a good way here—as Kin or as Peoples in alliance with reciprocal responsibilities to one another and to our other-than-human relatives with whose land, water, and animal bodies we are co-constituted—the [Australian] Dream in any form, whether white supremacist or “progressive” cannot be our guiding hope.”¹⁷

As the rivers are ephemeral, ever-changing and connected to Country, so are our backyards. Through remembering our stories we challenge the singular identity of the Australian dream. Our backyards become the manifestation of all things at once. A rejection of assimilated colonial logics. Endlessly layered and enmeshed. Not only sites of colonisation but also sites of resistance. Sites of care, of memory and of erasure. They are not only enclosed through cartography but can extend infinitely beyond: towards a sidewalk, a nursery, a chakra, a river, and Country(s); creating spaces and places of multiple contradictions and belongings.