September 6, 2021 | Report-Backs
Like so many events in 2020, last year’s Australasian STS (AusSTS) graduate conference moved online, and we weathered the initial stages of our new COVID reality. Reconvening in 2021, this year’s AusSTS was imagined as a series of locally organised gatherings in different sites around the country. Focussed around the theme ‘situated practices,’ each node in the conference would host a local event that suited the needs of their STS community and the site and situations in which the event would take place.
Zine cover: One of the many pathways along Rapid Creek. Credit: Matt Barlow.
For our TopEndSTS group, and the northern Australian STS community, activities that engaged the diverse collectives of our research practice and moved beyond the university walls and standard conference formats, seemed to be the right way to go. We named our Darwin node of the AusSTS conference ‘Encountering Gurambai/Rapid Creek’ and began working in different but interrelated sites connected to this important watercourse. The sites were chosen based on particular practices and concerns that arose there. Our ‘walkshop’ near the headwaters of Gurambai/Rapid Creek, had us encountering entanglements of country and everyday militarisms as as Larrakia Elders shared the name of this place ‘Gurambai’ and guided us through restored bushland under the roar of military aircraft and alongside sites of refugee detention. Finding connection within the aesthetics and narrative of Yolŋu and Michif filmmaking through Miyarrka media and Amanda Strong became the theme of our film night on the foreshore near the river’s mouth. And finally, it was the interdependencies of food cultivation and estuarine habitats, and ancestral and contemporary food sharing practices that emerged in the final event of our series at a community garden on the banks of Gurambai/Rapid Creek.
Here we present a ‘report-back’ on the situated practices of the Darwin node of the AusSTS conference in the form of a zine: a publication for online STS audiences to appreciate, which will also circulate in hard copy amongst other on-ground and dispersed communities and collectives of Gurambai/Rapid Creek. It has been collaboratively authored by TopEndSTS collective members Matt Barlow, Cathy Bow, Kelly Lee Hickey, Kirsty Howey, Leonie Norrington, Jennifer Macdonald and Michaela Spencer, with support and contributions also offered by other participants and collaborators.
A selection of pages from the ‘Encountering Gurambai/Rapid Creek’ zine. Credit: TopEndSTS.
The pieces collected within it oscillate between on-ground images and analytic reflections, working in various ways with images and words. Through a collaborative process of generating material, curating a collection, losing some elements and rearranging others, this publication emerged in a manner not too dissimilar to our events themselves. And as you now read this zine, consider yourself to be also drawn into the continuing life of ‘Encountering Gurambai/Rapid Creek’ and both serious and playful entangled relations of this place.
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TopEndSTS are a group of scholars, practitioners and friends who have an interest in both STS sensitivities and northern Australia. We regularly come together through various means and in different configurations to share stories, insights and collaborations. Our research spans many contemporary issues and concerns within collective northern Australian life, engaging with disparate climatic environments, complex interplays of connection and ‘remoteness’ and the co-presence of many differing Western and Indigenous modes of people-place making.
Published: 09/06/2021