FORM

This audio-visual essay works with the epistemic imperatives of our research
subject—the sands and saltwater of a small stretch of coastline in northern Australia. Orchestrating a series of sounds and images together with a gentle rhythm of text-based Yolŋu (human) elaboration, we seek to enable others to attune to a material dynamics of collaboration and co-creation made manifestly palpable in the kinetic zones of coastal life. Rather than either simply telling, or showing, we invite our ‘readers’ to enter into a slow process of attuning to the forms of sensuous instruction offered directly from the wänga (environment). In this way we orientate towards research as a shared and emergent processes of becoming knowledgeable with more-than-human worlds. The result is a Yolŋu-led digital experiment in sovereign knowledge production: a modelling of a site-specific, participatory onto-epistemics intended to inspire others towards the possibilities of creative, relational modes of more-than-human research.

The south-eastern corner of the Australian continent was once criss-crossed by the nomadic flight paths of the Regent Honeyeater. For hundreds of thousands of years, they winged their way up and down this vast continent. Today, however, the species is listed as critically endangered and is just clinging to existence. This multimedia essay tells the story of this decline, exploring the complex, co-shaping, relationships between individual birds and their flocks, their songs, and their forests. While these are relationships that might be glossed as being social, cultural, and ecological (respectively), and so belonging to separate domains of life, they are in reality delicately interwoven elements of what it is to be a Regent Honeyeater; relationships that, taken together, have been integral to the emergence and ongoing life of this species. In attending to the breakdown of these relationships in our present time, this essay seeks to develop new resources for storying loss in a time of ongoing extinctions. Bringing text into conversation with images and audio, the essay works to draw the reader/viewer/listener into an encounter with an unravelling world. Ultimately, our aim has been to create an essay in which the conceptual ideas, the design, and the biology of the species described, are brought into some sort of alignment that allows them to become mutually reinforcing elements of a storied encounter. Our reflection on the process of creating this essay are provided in the accompanying exegetical commentary.

Khrop khru—'covered by the guru’—is an annual rite in Thailand’s craft and vocational academies which binds artisan-initiates to their master teachers, to their patron deity Phra Witsanukam (Vishwakarma), and ushers them into spiritual-vocational “craft lineages.” The haptic core of the rite involves the covering of the initiate’s working hand by the master teacher in manipulating an emblematic craft tool, an empowering ritual gesture that with
the god’s assent consecrates and protects the student’s techno-affective sensibilities and their vocational belonging. More broadly, khrop khru sacralises the collaboration of human, non-human, and divine beings in the worldly work of making things. The rite has further and deeply profound significance within Buddhist cosmology, for it opens up an expansive ‘far-futurity’ for craftspersons, putting them on a path of auspicious future rebirths, which
in the view of some may include a possible rebirth as Phra Witsanukam.

This experiment builds from long-term ethnographic research in northern Australia to ask what fire is becoming as its everyday urban manifestations are tethered to the diacritics of catastrophic bush fire, on the one hand, and to Indigenous expertise and cultural fire, on the other. In exploring both menacing and mundane facets of urban fire in northern Australia, the piece offers a way to see and hear fire’s capacities spilling beyond these enduring axes of public concern to differently animate and illuminate a city’s eco-acoustic vitality, complexity, and Indigeneity. The essay makes use of a multi-modal methodology, deploying photography, sound recording, and ethnographic exposition to facilitate movement across disparate phenomena–following fire’s doubles as they take shape in relation to one another and across political, aesthetic, and conceptual landscapes. In this I ask readers to listen to Larrakia country as it catches fire, to trace the ways these fires are made into different sorts of image, and to begin to glimpse what different images may afford or omit.