Place literacies.

Somerville, Margaret

In this paper I will explore the application of a place pedagogies framework to the development of new place literacies. The framework of place pedagogies has evolved from my long-term research about relationship to place, especially partnership research with Aboriginal communities (e.g., Cohen & Somerville, 1990; Somerville, 1999, 2005). This framework offers three broad and interrelated principles that underpin a critical place pedagogy: place learning is necessarily embodied and local; our relationship to place is communicated in stories and other representations; place learning involves a contact zone of contested place stories. The pedagogies developed within this framework offer deep insights into how we can learn about place in ways that address the necessity for 'decolonisation' and 'reinhabitation' (Gruenewald, 2003a). In this paper I will apply the place pedagogies framework to researching pedagogies of water in the Murray-Darling Basin. Through the application of this framework I will propose a new theory of place literacy that embraces Australian Indigenous and non-Indigenous environmental knowledges. This new theory of place literacy brings into question the epistemologies and ontologies of print literacy and proposes different pedagogies of place literacy learning.

Introduction

Place as a framework

The idea of place as an organising principle, introduced by an Aboriginal partner researcher in my first research project with Aboriginal people, turned my knowledge frameworks upside down (Cohen & Somerville, 1990). Place, that is, both a specific local place and a metaphysical imaginary place, was presented as an alternative lens through which to construct knowledge about the world. In my work with Aboriginal people place has come to offer a way of entering an in-between space where it is possible to hold different, and sometimes contradictory, ideas in productive tension. It is a meeting point for my own interest in ecology and body/landscape connection, and Aboriginal ontologies and epistemologies based on land. It is a site for the development of new theories of bodies and spatiality, and new place literacies.

Place has long been noted as an organising principle in Aboriginal ontologies and epistemologies by both Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australian scholars (Behrendt & Thompson, 2003; Muecke, 1984; Rose, 2000; Somerville, 1991). 'Aboriginal Australians regard the land as a totality, connection to country being the very essence of their belief structure and subsequent social organisation' (Ward, Reys, Davies & Root, 2003). This remains true despite dispossession, displacement, and genocide of Australian Aboriginal cultures since colonisation (Langton, cited in Behrendt & Thompson, 2003) and has profound implications for an Australian understanding of relationship to place (Somerville, 1999). 'For Aboriginal people, issues of community health, economic development, care for Country and culture are all intertwined' (Rose, cited in Ward et al., 2003). Place-based epistemologies relate to waterscapes as much as to land: 'Aboriginal waterscapes are construed not only as physical domains but also as spiritual, social and jural spaces, according the same fundamental principles as our affiliations to places in the landscape' (Langton, cited in Behrendt & Thompson, 2003, p. 1). For these reasons Australian scholars and researchers are in a unique position to articulate what it means to learn about place.

Place is productive as a framework because it creates a space between grounded physical reality and the metaphysical space of representation. This bridging of physical reality and representation has the potential to bring positivist paradigms from the physical and social sciences into conversation with post-positivist research in humanities and social sciences in such initiatives as 'ecological humanities' (Rose, 2004). Such a bridging of different disciplinary and subject areas is imperative in addressing questions about human interventions in ecological systems such as the health of rivers and waterways. While research in the physical sciences had typically been seen as offering solutions to complex environmental problems, 'the relationships among place, identity and culture are varied and complex and ... emerge in the terrain of culture, ideology and politics' (Gruenewald, 2003b, p. 627). Actual places are sites for the intersection of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal stories where important work needs to be done around subjectivity, identity and place. Writers such as Peter Read (place belonging and attachment), Tom Griffiths (environmental histories), Deborah Bird Rose (ecological humanities), and Heather Goodall (Aboriginal place histories) are contributing to the formation of this alternative thinking. Australia is well positioned to contribute to this field internationally, if we begin to articulate the elements of unique Australian place literacies and associated pedagogies that encompass the intersection of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal place stories.

Place also functions as a bridge between the local and the global. For Aboriginal people relationship to country is both local, based on daily life in a particular place (e.g., Somerville, 1999), and extends beyond the local, in storylines, ceremonial practices, movement, and exchange (Blair, 2001). This conceptual movement connects the intimate and local with vast tracts of country that cross local and regional jurisdictions. Through place it is possible to understand the embodied effects of the global at a local level (Somerville & Perkins, 2003). 'Place in other words, foregrounds a narrative of local and regional politics that is attuned to the particularities of where people actually live, and that is connected to global development trends that impact local places' (Gruenewald, 2003b, p. 3). It enables us to intervene in the global from the perspectives and understandings of the local (Soja, 2000) and to intervene in the local on the basis of global knowledges (Somerville & Perkins, 2003). Place has the potential to offer alternative storylines about who we are in the places where we live and work in an increasingly globalised world. This underpinning (re)conceptualisation of the relationship between the local and the global is critical to approaching environmental issues such as those arising in the Murray-Darling Basin.

Place is therefore profoundly pedagogical: 'as centers of experience, places teach us about how the world works, and how our lives fit into the spaces we occupy. Further, places make us: As occupants of particular places with particular attributes, our identity and our possibilities are shaped' (Gruenwald, 2003b, p. 621). McKenna (2002) articulates the pedagogical power of place as the necessity to confront the silenced stories of 'the history and culture of Aboriginal people' in our local places, histories that are intrinsic to Australian identity. Rose (2000) describes responding to the land with deep care and attentiveness and learning from her Aboriginal teachers (Rose, 2004). Steadman talks about Aboriginal community place learning from a special water story place: 'It's a teaching place that tells us part of the whole journey of where we came from. It's part of our ancestors. It's a place of respect and worship' (Goulding, 2005). A critical place pedagogy, according to Gruenewald (2003a) has two broad and interrelated objectives: 'decolonisation' and 're-inhabitation'. Decolonisation involves developing the ability to recognise ways of thinking 'that injure and exploit other people and place' (Gruenewald, 2003a, p. 9). Reinhabitation involves 'identifying, affirming, conserving, and creating those forms of cultural knowledge that nurture and protect people and ecosystems' (Gruenewald, 2003a, p. 9). Developing a possible pedagogy for place literacy addresses the question of how to operationalise these broad objectives for a place conscious education.

The Murray-Darling Basin

This paper has its origins in a deep concern for the destruction of the natural world and local communities and is motivated by a search for pedagogies that will change the way we relate to our places. It focuses our attention on the area of country that has been defined as the Murray-Darling Basin, stretching from southern Queensland in the north to the Murray River in the south; from the Great Divide in the east to the South Australian border in the west. It is a vast system of interconnected rivers and river catchments, lakes, wetlands and groundwater, flowing south from the Condamine-Balonne catchment in Queensland to the Darling in New South Wales and then into the Murray in Victoria and South Australia. Although sparsely populated, the health of this country has great natural, social and economic significance and is of immediate concern to the metropolitan populations of Adelaide and Melbourne, who ultimately depend on this ecological system for their food and water supplies. It symbolises an urgent need to understand place beyond the fragmented and immediate needs of any particular locality but, paradoxically, the urgent need to also learn to value the intimate and local in our place pedagogies.

In 1990 the Murray-Darling Basin (MDB) Ministerial Council launched a strategy of 'integrated catchment management', in response to the declining health of this system of waters. Over ten years later, however, they reported that water quality and ecosystem health are continuing to decline (MDB, 2001, p. 2). They emphasised 'the importance of people in the process of developing a shared vision and acting together to manage the natural resources of their catchment' (MDB, 2001, p. 1). Two years later, a scoping study on Aboriginal involvement in the Murray-Darling Basin initiatives found a 'chasm between the perception of the available opportunities for involvement and the reality experienced by Aboriginal people' (Ward et al., 2003). The study found that 'Aboriginal people are concerned and angry about the decline in health of the Murray-Darling Basin' (Ward et al., 2003, p. 21) and that there was a strong case for involving Aboriginal people because of the 'collective and holistic nature of Aboriginal people's concerns about the natural environment and their Country' (Ward et al., 2003, p. 29). The most significant barrier to Aboriginal involvement was identified as a 'lack of respect and understanding of Aboriginal culture and its relevance to natural resource management' (Ward et al., 2003, p. 8). In 2006 a worsening drought and fears of permanent climate change continue to bring the question of water in the Murray-Darling Basin to national attention. The challenge of changing our approach to water in the Murray-Darling Basin brings to the surface all of the issues that Australia confronts in responding to environmental crises which are simultaneously cultural crises. It confronts us with the 'deep and abiding questions of our times' (Rose, 2003) and requires from educators a new pedagogy through which to develop contemporary place literacies.

Elements of a pedagogy for place literacy

The elements of a pedagogy for place literacy, outlined below, have evolved from a number of partnership projects with Aboriginal communities. In particular, I owe much of this thinking to my work in two sequential projects over the last ten years with Gumbaingirr people on the mid-north coast of New South Wales. These projects have generated educational resources for use with both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal children and communities to learn about place. The elements of a place pedagogy, outlined as follows, are required to be simultaneously present in any pedagogical activity for place literacy learning:

* place learning is necessarily embodied and local

* our relationship to place is communicated in stories and other representations

* place learning involves a contact zone of contested place stories.

The purpose in this paper is to apply the elements of a pedagogy for place literacy to the urgent questions, outlined above, in relationship to water in the Murray-Darling Basin: How can places teach us about water? and How can we incorporate their pedagogical possibilities into a pedagogy for place literacies to ensure the protection of people and ecosystems?

Place learning is necessarily embodied and local

We learn about place through embodied connections in particular local places. This sense of embodied connection and the importance of the body in any place pedagogy is erased through the binary structure of Western thought in which mind is privileged over body. The development of a place pedagogy requires a reconceptualisation based on the body (Grosz, 1994). Rose (2002, p. 311) describes this sense of embodied connection between people and place as 'ecological connectivity', based on 'dialogical interpenetration between people and place'. This dialogical relationship between people and place opens Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people alike to the embodied materiality of places: 'The country that gets into people's blood invariably contains the blood and sweat of Aboriginal people as well as settlers. It may contain convict blood, and the remains of the dead. It will contain the blood of childbirth, and the blood and bones of massacres' (Rose, 2002, p. 321). Similar ideas about the significance of experiencing body-in-place have been proposed by Abram (1996) in his work on the sensual experience of place; in Merleau-Ponty's (1962) explorations of perception, and of language as 'the flesh of the world'; and Gruenewald's (2003a, p. 625) call for 'renewed attentiveness and rejuvenation of carnal empathy with place.'

A sense of embodied connection to place is represented in stories of everyday life in place--collecting water and food, moving through and dwelling in places in a daily, embodied way, over years and generations. Embodied connection can be embedded in a pedagogy for place literacy through a practice of body/place journal writing (Somerville, 1999). Body/place journal writing is based on the experience of the sensing body-in-place. What does this place smell like, sound like, look like, feel like when I move through it? In this journal writing the experience of the lived body is viewed as productive, both of place and of story. It illuminates processes of decolonisation and reinhabitation through journal reflections on ordinary states of embodiment throughout the rhythms of a day (Somerville, 2004). It is about being here, the experience of the body in this particular place at this moment in time. (Re)inhabiting place is a process of undoing and re-doing body/place relations, of disrupting many of the binaries around the body, especially the separation of body and place. Body/place writing foregrounds the central role of the body in place literacies.

Embodied sensory experience of place is primary to language and representation. However, until it is expressed or represented in some way, it is not available for communication, except by a tacit collective sharing of place practices.

Our relationship to place is constituted in our stories/representations

We express and communicate our relationship to place, including water, through the stories we tell. I use the concept of story here to embrace the expressions of visual artists, sculptors, and poets, as well as scientists, policy makers and agriculturalists. An Aboriginal story, for example, can incorporate song, music, dance, body painting, and performance, which intersect powerfully in a particular place (Somerville, 1999). Sinclair points out, in his work on the Murray River, that 'stories bring nature into culture and ascribe meaning to places, species and processes which would otherwise remain silent to the human ear' (Sinclair, 2001, p. 22). These stories about the natural environment are central to our cultural identities: 'Stories about nature make up a great part of public and private discourse in Australia' (Sinclair, 2001, p. 22). 'Language not only records people's empirical observations of the countryside, it offers some evidence, like bubbles on the surface, tracing out the creative ways people have tried to make sense out of their relationships with their environment' (Goodall, 2002, p. 37).

Through our storytelling, landscape, stories and people are mutually constituted in place: 'Landscape does not just shape language; the land itself is transformed by words' (Bonahady & Griffiths, 2002, p. 6). Changing our relationship to places means changing the stories we tell about places: 'If human beings are responsible for place making, then we must become conscious of ourselves as place makers and participants in the sociopolitical process of place making' (Gruenewald, 2003b, p. 627). We can use the concept of storylines (Davies, 2000) to analyse place stories and representations. A storyline is the backbone, or skeleton, of a particular story, 'a condensed version of a naturalised and conventional cultural narrative, one that is often used as the explanatory framework of one's own and others' practices and sequences of action' (Sondergaard, 2002, p. 191). In the stories we tell, we are positioned in particular ways and in particular sets of relationships. Analysing storylines enables the identification and deconstruction of dominant storylines and the generation of alternative stories about our places.

In Western cultures, dominant storylines of place have tended to 'deny our connection to earthly phenomena ... and construct places as objects or sites on a map to be economically exploited' (Gruenewald, 2003b, p. 624). The dominant cultural story of the Murray River, for example, has been part of a 'broader cultural and political narrative of technological and agricultural progress' (Sinclair, 2001, p. 240). Such stories of separation are shaped by a 'vision of barren land being made productive; of a silent and timeless place being transformed and brought into history by the energy of an industrious and resourceful society' (Sinclair, 2001, p. 43). Pastoralists' dominant storylines about land in the Murray-Darling Basin have been described as 'inescapably adversarial' (Griffiths, 2002, p. 240) because of the harsh dry conditions that European settlers found so confronting. These dominant storylines depend for their justification and legitimation on the suppression of alternative stories that already exist. Strategies of suppression include the 'uncoupling of past from present Aborigines' even when there are signs of Aboriginal presence in the actual places (Sinclair, 2001, p. 42) and the denial of pastoralists' emotional and aesthetic attachment to land, 'because it can weaken their right of occupation' (Griffiths, 2002, p. 240).

Our relationship to place involves multiple contested stories

Specific local places such as the Narran Lakes, in the Murray-Darling Basin, provide us with the opportunity to explore multiple stories about place and the power relationships between them. In Australia, the profound silencing over the struggle for land and meaning of country is at the basis of contested stories of place: 'the dispossession of Aboriginal people, both historically and in the present day, lies at the heart of Australian consciousness and identity, and is connected to every aspect of our past' (McKenna, 2002, p. 136). But this is not the only arena of contestation over land. There are powerful differences between conservationists and advocates of progress and development, and between the various groups who have interests in land such as pastoral, forest and eco-tourist industries. We have also seen the emergence of new struggles over territory in urban areas in crises such as the Cronulla riots where new migrants assert their rights of access to some of the more traditional Australian cultural spaces such as the beach.

This space where multiple stories collide has been described as a 'contact zone' (Pratt, 1999; Somerville & Perkins, 2003), and noted as a space of transformative potential (Bhabha, 1994; Hooks, 1990; Haig-Brown, 2001; Soja, 2000). Contradictory 'stories and histories of connection, exploitation and care continue to converge within public and personal spheres,' opening up possibilities for cultural transformation 'when individuals find the words and images that enable people to re-imagine familiar country' (Sinclair, 2001, p. 57). One of the strategies of the contact zone is to maintain the productive tension of difference, even to the point of suspending meaning (Carter, 1992). This is not an easy or comfortable process, however, and requires that we move beyond our comfort zones in order to confront the difficult questions (Haig-Brown, 2001) and engage with a critical pedagogy of place (Gruenewald, 2003). The 'borderwork' necessary to negotiate difference in the contact zone (Somerville & Perkins, 2003) involves precarious, risky and emotionally difficult work (Hooks, 1990) requiring movement within, between, and across boundaries. However, it is in the in-between space of excitement and struggle (Somerville & Perkins, 2003) that new possibilities lie. The process of making visible the contradictory and contested stories of 'connection, exploitation and care' is a step towards new place literacies.

Literacy

Literacy itself has been described as a colonising project: 'literacy pedagogy, in other words, has been a carefully restricted project--restricted to monolingual, monocultural, and rule-governed forms of language' (Cope and Kalantzis, 2000, p. 9). The concept of 'multiliteracies' was introduced by the New London Group in response to cultural diversity in an increasingly globalised world. While I have many concerns about the concept of multiliteracies, the need to reconceptualise literacy has been opened up in their articulation of the skills required for a new literacy:

 the most important skill students need to learn is to negotiate
 regional, ethnic, or class based dialects; variations in register
 that occur according to social context; hybrid cross-cultural
 discourses; the code switching often to be found within a text
 among different languages, dialects or registers; different visual
 and iconic meanings; and variations in the gestural relationships
 among people, language and material objects. Indeed, this is the
 only hope for averting the catastrophic conflicts about identities
 and spaces that now seem ever ready to flare up. (Cope & Kalantzis,
 2000, p. 14)

The general problem with the concept of multiliteracies is that it does not go far enough towards addressing fundamental differences in what it means to be, and to know the world, that is, in our ontologies and epistemologies. In the above quote, Cope and Kalantzis (2000) suggest that new learning needs to occur at the level of language, while acknowledging that 'catastrophic conflicts' are a struggle about 'identities and spaces'. If we re-configure this statement to counterimpose place in every phrase, that is to replace dialects, discourses, languages and registers with 'places', we can get some idea of how profound a transformation of our thinking is required.

When educators talk about a multiplicity of literacies--computer literacies, situated literacies, local literacies, eco literacies--it is as if there can be endless additions to the basic concept of (print) literacy without altering our fundamental understanding of literacy itself. In counterimposing the concept of place, I am not suggesting an addition to this multiplicity of literacies, or a subset of multiliteracies, but to engage in a fundamental recon ceptualisation of how we understand literacy itself, and what it means to be literate. I seek to speak from a third space, a space of 'decolonisation' and 're-inhabitation', to explore, not the position of the coloniser, or the Indigenous person, but to open up another more fundamental conversation about who we can be, and how we can know the world from a space in-between. I begin by asking: What does it mean to link place and literacy in this way and what pedagogies will it produce?

New place literacies in the Murray-Darling Basin

Bubbles on the surface: A place pedagogy of the Narran Lakes is a new research project exploring alternative pedagogies of water in the Murray Darling Basin. In this project the Narran Lakes is regarded as a signature or icon site for stories of connections between the upper and lower reaches of the Murray Darling Basin, between different sorts of waters and between people and place. Preliminary research has involved photographic and journal responses to the country around the Narran Lakes area; the recording of oral place stories with four Aboriginal partner-researchers who represent the key language groups in the area; and the production of art works by Aboriginal artists in response to the research proposal. In this section I will focus briefly on how the stories that we have collected illustrate the elements of a place pedagogy and so begin to articulate a pedagogy of water for a new place literacy.

The first example is the first and last stanza of a scanned 'poem' constructed from three oral place story interviews with Chrissiejoy Marshall. In these interviews we re-created the Lake of Chrissiejoy's childhood. Chrissiejoy, the daughter of an Aboriginal woman and a non-Aboriginal station owner, grew up on the Narran Lake. Unusually for that time, her birth was registered and she was fully acknowledged by her white father: 'I'd walk down the street with my dad and I'd be his daughter and that was it, his daughter full stop. And then I would walk down the street with Yungala and I'd be, you know, a little black kid, yeah'. Chrissiejoy's experiences of the Lake are from both her Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal inheritances in place, and the scanned lines below are created from the conversations between us; I am the learner, Chrissiejoy the teacher:

 I don't remember a time
 without the lake.
 There were times
 when it dried back
 but they were quite rare
 it was always full
 and in season
 there'd be thousands and thousands
 of birds
 so you'd wake up
 in the morning
 to birds getting a fright
 and taking off
 and making a terrible clatter,
 and then going to sleep
 of a night time
 listening to all the birds
 that lulled chatter
 that you hear
 of an evening.
 And the vastness of the lake,
 as a child
 I'd never seen the sea
 so I always imagined
 that this was what the sea
 would look like.

 I've got a vision
 in my head
 of how it was
 when I was a child,
 how the place was
 and I know
 it's not that way anymore
 and that's really quite distressing
 do you really want to go back there?
 It's a little bit like
 when people are in grief
 and you talk to them about
 do they want to see the body
 after someone has died
 because it is completely different,
 especially after an autopsy
 or something like that.
 Sometimes you think yeah,
 it would lay it to rest,
 that concern that it is so different
 now
 and then at other times
 you think no
 I just want to keep in my head
 what it was.

In this conversation, Chrissiejoy opens up the pedagogical possibilities of the Narran Lake itself. Through this process I am learning about the Lake through her experience. The images of the Narran Lake sit between us as a deeply shared enterprise. It is a personal process that involves embodied connection--between Chrissiejoy and the place, between Chrissiejoy and myself as people, and between the Lake and the many different stories that determine what has happened to the materiality of the place itself. The body is evident in all parts of the story. In these stories the Narran Lake is a site of deep contestation, for example, between the creation stories of the lake and all its creatures, and the stories of damming water for cotton which prevent the necessary 'environmental flows' to sustain the Lake. By maintaining a focus on the intimacies of the local, such as the coming and going of the migratory birds, we are woven into the web of ecologies of the lake itself. Throughout the recorded conversations, the local is present in intimate and infinite detail, such as the story of milinbu, the particular frog who signalled the return of the water when the lake was dry. We are also simultaneously connected to the global through both Indigenous creation stories and environmental ecologies. For Chrissiejoy, the thought of returning to the Narran Lake on our field trip is like deciding whether to view the body of a loved one after an autopsy. This exchange is contemporary and real, and takes place in a difficult and highly contested contact zone of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal stories of place.

The second example is from a similar series of interviews with Badger Bates who was born and grew up in Wilcannia on the Darling River. Badger is a Paakantji man deeply identified with the River: 'that's ... my really sentimental particular place,' and 'the Darling River, that's what I love the most, the river.' For many years he has been telling the story of water through his lino prints of the River and its creatures. He links his sacred stories of the River to the Narran Lake: 'that's where it [creation] starts, from Narran here [pointing to the Narran Lake on map].' His story map stretches over vast areas of country from Menindee Lakes in the south west, to the South Australian border in the north west, to southern Queensland in the north east, and Ivanhoe in the south east.

Badger draws two maps superimposed on each other to begin his story. As a fair-skinned Aboriginal child, he was moved from place to place to keep him away from the Welfare, making a huge circle by mail train and truck. He was moved from relative to relative, and with each relative he learned more stories of country. He learned his country through this movement. His map of country follows the songlines of ngatjyi, the rainbow serpent, as he created the rivers and creeks, waterholes, and springs, underground and surface water, all connected through his stories. It is difficult in this short space to even give a sense of the breadth and depth of these stories and their significance in how we think about water. The following extract is from a scoping interview where we sat with a map and marked the special places in the songlines with numbers so that when Badger returned to Wilcannia and continued the project work of art making and recording his stories, I would be able to follow what places he was referring to:

 These will be the main stories here (between Wilcannia and Bourke
 on the Darling), if you've got Bubbles on the Surface, this is what
 I want. That's Tilpa and Louth, when the ngatjyis came from Jandra
 and they formed the country. This is where the ngatjyis travelled,
 they went right down over here to White Cliff and across that way
 to the South Australian border. Then they turned and came back into
 NSW near the Queensland border and they got back to Yancannia Lake
 or Pirrie Lake where they went back underground and they went back
 home to Jandra.

 Gulawarra, another person from the Dreaming came through, caught
 a giant kangaroo near White Cliff and went to Mt Poole then up into
 Queensland a bit then he turned and came back to Pirrie Lake where
 his sister and her husband was. The people fed him a lizard and he
 thought they tried to poison him. So he took his sister and family,
 turned the other people into stone, clogged the mound springs up
 and he came up somewhere towards Bourke and Louth where he met the
 kingfisher from the Dreaming. He had to pull a tree root out of the
 ground. When the root was coming out he was swinging the tree root
 and the tree root was all wriggly. When he was pulling it out, he
 was singing, and making the depression where he was pulling the
 root out go bigger and sink down, and then he poured the water he
 got from Mt Poole and Pirrie Lake and the mound spring, so he
 poured the water from there into where he made the tree root
 depression, and he made the river, the Darling River. That's why
 the Darling River got a lot of bends in it, it's like a tree root.

These stories that create embodied connections between special water places in vast tracts of country, between people and place, and between people and people, have been recorded over long periods of time in various forms. They do not exist, or inform, our school curricula and are elusive even in informal and community learning spaces. They are fundamentally pedagogical and have a critical role to play in changing the way we think about water and in developing new place literacies.

The third example is from Lorina Barker, a young woman with Murawarri inheritance from Weilmoringle on the Culgoa River. Weilmoringle is a sheep station where people in the community lived and worked side by side with the white pastoralists. Many of Lorina's stories are about playing at the river with gangs of kids from the small community nestled in the curve of the river with its huge old trees. The kids met at the old cars, swam in the waterholes and were always aware of the presence of muttgata, the rainbow serpent. Muttgata guards the waterholes when the river is drying up and lets them know when the flood waters are coming down the river by his bubbles that appear on the surface of the water. Even though the language names in Badger and Lorina's stories, ngaytji and muttagatta, are different, the storylines are connected. Lorina's grandmother lived at Brewarrina on the Darling River where the fish traps are an important link in the great journeys of Biaime the creator:

 the fish traps are the stepping stones to the heavens. Biaime
 created the fish trap and that story sort of relates to a lot of
 the different groups of people. Biaime not only created the fish
 traps in Brewarrina, he also created the Gundabooka mountain and he
 created a waterhole where he did his carvings and stuff. Then he
 moved around the area and then he went to Brewarrina and created
 the fish traps and the fish traps are like his stepping stones back
 into the heavens. That's how I think all the tribes are
 interconnected because the one creator created the different
 places. So Gundabooka which is the mountain, is between Cobar and
 Bourke and then comin' towards Brewarrina, so he travels sort of in
 a circle.

People from the different language groups are linked through the stories and rituals of the fish traps. Lorina is a young woman with a Western education working in a university and the ceremonies linked to these creation stories are no longer practised. They continue to be passed on, however, and reveal important ontologies and epistemologies of place knowledge. Lorina was taken by her grandmother to Mt Gundabooka, hundreds of kilometres away, and shown the marks of Biaime there that are linked through story to the footprint at the fish traps and the prints made by Biaime at the Narran Lake. Lorina also talked about a family tree of the River, showing the connections between people and place as her relatives moved down the Darling to the Murray River. In this way connections are created and maintained through childhood experiences, inheritance in stories, and the contemporary lives and movements of family members. I learn these place literacies through many layered stories, including creation stories, childhood experiences, and stories of daily interactions with the water such as food gathering. They are all filtered through the contemporary personal life (his)stories and concerns of the individual partner researchers. We visit places together and the physicality of place also tells its own story.

This very small trajectory of transcript quotes from Bubbles on the Surface is a lens on the place literacies involved in an alternative understanding of water in the Murray Darling Basin. It serves to make evident the application of the place pedagogies framework in opening up the possibilities for an alternative pedagogy of place literacies. The processes of the research enact these place pedagogies through which we collectively develop a new place literacy. The research is still relatively new and so this paper is a work-in-progress that begins to articulate these ideas.

Conclusion

I began this paper with the need to develop a pedagogy for new place literacies to address the ongoing destruction of the natural world and its local communities. The elements of a place pedagogy were articulated from previous research in response to Gruenewald's call for 'a place conscious education' that addresses the objectives of decolonisation and re-inhabitation (Gruenewald, 2003a). These elements, or principles, of a place pedagogy have evolved from my own deep place learning through place-based research, particularly with Aboriginal communities. In this paper I focus on environmental imperatives in the Murray-Darling Basin, symbolised by an icon site, the Narran Lakes, the site of a current study. I propose place as an organising principle and ask what does it mean to link place and literacy in this context and what pedagogies will it produce?

In a preliminary analysis of stories that have been recorded in Bubbles on the Surface, I have identified how the place pedagogies framework has been applied to generating new water stories in the Murray Darling Basin. These alternative water stories create connections between different water places, between people and place, between different types of water, and between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal histories, stories, and place practices. Through the application of the principles of body, story and contact zone, new pedagogies of place have been enacted in the space between Indigenous and non-Indigenous stories and identities. In this application of new place pedagogies new place literacies are evolving.

Our conventional and colonising notions of print literacy are challenged by linking place and literacy in this way. In Steadman's comment that 'Biaime's footprint at the Narran Lakes is a sentence in the Aboriginal story' (Steadman, pers. com, 2003), place and literacy are linked. The physical marks of the creator in the landscape become a segment of place literacy, juxtaposing the material place and the creation story with the idea of a sentence, a small segment of a larger understanding that can embrace both literacy and place. A place pedagogies framework, speaking from this place between Indigenous and non-Indigenous identities and place, challenges our understanding of both literacies and multiliteracies. Place literacy cannot be conceived simply as another subset in the endless additions of multiliteracies. It is necessarily underpinned by a new epistemology and ontology, a new way of understanding what it means to be (in), and to know our places.

Acknowledgements

The comments of anonymous reviewers have been very helpful in the development of this paper.

The ideas in this paper are based on two projects funded by the Australian Research Council: Somerville. & Beck, W. (2000-2004). Connecting the Dots: Local and Regional Place Knowledge in Gumbaingirr Nation, ARC Proposal; Somerville. (2005-2008). Bubbles on the Surface: A Place Pedagogy of the Narran Lakes.

References

Abram, D. (1996). The Spell of the Sensuous. New York: Vintage.

Behrendt, J. & Thompson, P. (2003). The Recognition and Protection of Aboriginal Interests in NSW Rivers. Sydney: Healthy Rivers Commission.

Bhabha, H. (1994). The Location of Culture. London & New York: Routledge.

Blair, S. (2001). Travel routes, dreaming tracks and cultural heritage. In M. Cotter, B. Boyd & J. Gardiner (Eds.), Heritage Landscapes: Understanding Place and Communities (pp. 41-51). Lismore: University of Southern Cross Press.

Bonahady, T. & Griffiths, T. (2002). Landscape and Language. In T. Bonahady & T. Griffiths (Eds.), Words for Country: Landscape and Language in Australia (pp. 1-14). Sydney: UNWS Press.

Cope, B. & Kalantzis, M. (Eds.). (2000). Multiliteracies: Literacy Learning and the Design of Social Futures. South Yarra: Macmillan.

Carter, P. (1992). The Sound In-between: Voice, Space, Performance. Sydney: UNSW Press.

Cohen, P. & Somerville, M. (1990). Ingelba and the Five Black Matriarchs. Sydney: Allen and Unwin.

Davies, B. (2000). A Body of Writing, 1990-1999.Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira Press.

Goodall, H. (2002). The river runs backwards. In T. Bonahady & T. Griffiths (Eds.), Words for Country: Landscape and Language in Australia (pp. 35-51). Sydney: UNWS Press.

Goulding, M. (2005). Byrock rock holes: Aboriginal place nomination background investigation. NSW Unpublished Report. Sydney: NPWS.

Griffiths, T. (2002). The outside country. In T. Bonahady & T. Griffiths (Eds.), Words for Country: Landscape and Language in Australia (pp. 222-244). Sydney: UNWS Press.

Grosz, E. (1994). Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana Uni. Press.

Gruenewald, D.A. (2003a). The best of both worlds: A critical pedagogy of place. Educational Researcher, 32(4), 3-12.

Gruenewald, D.A. (2003b). Foundations of place: A multidisciplinary framework for place-conscious education. American Educational Research Journal, 40(3), 619-654.

Haig-Brown, C. (2001). Continuing collaborative knowledge production: Knowing when where why and how. Journal of Intercultural Studies, 22(1), 19-32.

Hooks, B. (1990). Yearning: Race, Gender and Cultural Politics. Boston: South End Press.

McKenna, M. (2002). Looking for Blackfella's Point: An Australian History of Place. Sydney: UNSW Press.

Merleau-Ponty, M. (1962). Phenomenology of Perception. New York: Humanities Press.

Muecke, S. (1984). Introduction. In K. Benterra, S. Muecke & P. Roe (Eds.), Reading the Country: An Introduction to Nomadology. Fremantle: Fremantle Arts Centre Press.

Murray-Darling Basin Ministerial Council. (2001). Integrated Catchment Management in the Murray-Darling Basin 2001-2010: Delivering a Sustainable Future. Canberra: Murray-Darling Basin Commission.

Pratt, G. (1992). Imperial Writing and Tramsculturalism. London and New York: Routledge.

Rose, D.B. (2000). Dingo Makes us Human: Life and Land in an Aboriginal Culture. Melbourne: Cambridge University Press.

Rose, D.B. (2002). Dialogue with place: Toward an ecological body. Journal of Narrative Theory, 32(2), 311-325.

Rose, D.B. (2003). Dance of the ephemeral: Australian Aboriginal religion of place. In M. McDonald (Ed.), Experiences of Place. Religions of the World Series 1 (pp. 163-186). Cambridge, Ma: Harvard University Press.

Rose, D.B. (2004). The ecological humanities in action: An invitation. Australian Humanities Review, 31-32. Retrieved January 14, 2007, from www.lib.Latrobe. edu.au/AHR/archive/Issue-April-2004/rose.html

Sinclair, P. (2001). The Murray: A River and its People. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press.

Soja, E.W. (2000). Postmetropolis: Critical Studies of Cities and Regions. Oxford: Blackwell.

Somerville, M. (1991). Life history writing: The relationship between talk and text. Australian Feminist Studies, 12, 29-42.

Somerville, M. (1999). Body/landscape Journals. Melbourne: Spinifex Press.

Somerville, M. (2004). Tracing bodylines: The body in feminist poststructural research, invited publication. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 17(1) 47-63.

Somerville, M. (2005). Wildflowering: The Life and Places of Kathleen McArthur. Brisbane: University of Queensland Press.

Somerville, M. & Perkins, T. (2003). Border work in the contact zone: Thinking Indigenous/non-Indigenous collaboration spatially. International Journal of Intercultural Studies, 24(3), 253-266.

Sondergaard, D.M. (2002). Poststructural approaches to empirical analysis. Qualitative Studies in Education, 15(2), 187-204.

Ward, N., Reys, S., Davies, J. & Root, J. (2003). Scoping Study on Aboriginal Involvement in Natural Resource Management Decision Making and the Integration of Aboriginal Cultural Heritage Considerations into Relevant Murray-Darling Commission Programs. Canberra: Murray-Darling Basin Commission.

Margaret Somerville

MONASH UNIVERSITY