Voice of Citt Williams
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Filming Jilba:

Sensing beyond the exclusionary fictions
of climate science
Citt Wiliiams
Jarramali Kulka
Acknowledgement and thanks to 

Kuku Nyungkal and Kuku Yalanji bama
families and friends
The smoke surrounds the body
My nose, thick fumes, my nose.
The leaves crackle the ears
My drum, the sizzle, my drum.
The smoke scents the skin
My cloak, an odour, my cloak.
The smoulder cakes the hair
My eyebrows, the sap, my eyebrows.
The heat warms the feet
My sole, a guard, my sole.
The smoke fills the mouth
My tongue, the wood, my tongue.
The rasp enters the lungs
My blood, his story, my blood.
His voice tells them not to disturb
My dreams, so real, my dreams.

It is Wungariji 2017

Hot sun time

Jarramali and I are waiting patiently to be warmed up by
old man Junkin. We are planning to make a visit to Kalkajaka (Black Mountain), a sacred mountain for Jarramali and his people, the Bama. For the science community, the place is also highly significant as a climate refuge harbouring special species of lizards and frogs vulnerable to climatic change. I carry a video camera and the hope of verifying the presence of these critters with-and-through sensory aspects of Jarramali’s custodial practice, jilba.
As we drive towards the drop-off point, a map bounces around in the back of my battered 4WD. Its creased laminated surface is covered in car grime and coffee stains from many on-country workshops. Bought from the marine shop in Cairns, Jarramali and I roll it out occasionally, largely for me to plan and get a visual sense of where I am on country. As always, Jarramali plays along, working with ease amongst
its text and colour-coded features. Meanwhile in subtle meaningful ways, he teases, corrects and by example
shows me how to feel rather than read country.

On the map, the name BLACK MOUNTAIN is printed in capitals. Its Roman letterings like a fresh coat of white
paint, overwriting a collective memory of Kalkajaka’s
rich co-existence.
Previously, in planning this bushwalk, I had diligently
studied all I could find known about the mountain: its slopes and tributaries, its mining history and settler diaries, its rainfall datasets, its ecology, geology, hydrology, and climate trajectory. At night in my ranger base room, I had studied and gazed upon it as a map, detached and aloof, on paper as an inanimate object, by name, classification and association. Convinced its landscapes were under rapid transformation,
I was eager to go, survey, record, write up and ground truth whatever was waiting in the field, literally plunging myself into its descriptive fibres.

Now arrived I stand and puzzle over this map whilst Jarramali stuffs his little backpack. A communication of cockatoos fly over the parked car and perch in a far off tree, they are wary and curious about the unusual company. Jarramali finishes packing, lights a smoke and calmly peers out across to
the hills.
I am reminded of Jones and Jenkins:
Mapping the world is an expression of a Western enlightenment desire for coherence, authorization and control… [it is] central to liberal White identity desire for racial harmony, collaboration and understanding. The assumption held… that everything is knowable forms our being, knowledge, fantasies and desires for a better less fragmented world.1
Somehow, I feel reassured that the containment of that laminated map is both a beginning and an end. Yet, the mountain had begun to show itself in my dreams. In thinking that I had come to know that mountain all those ways, nothing would prepare me for when that very mountain
came to intimately sense me.
To help clarify this point, clearly observable in our Western imagination, climate science aesthetics combine remote-sensing satellite images with data-driven computational models. The aesthetic structures a statistical gaze—detached, pixilated and mechanically replicable.2 This representational logic is an augmentation of what Timothy Mitchell refers to as the modern Western imagination’s ‘cognitive habit of world-as-exhibition’, that is an attempt to stand apart from reality and grasp the world ‘as a picture’.3 This imagination is traceable from colonial ‘world exhibitions’ and Dutch geo-graphic atlas rhetorics of the 17th century, where a marvelling and enlightened ‘individual could master the globe at a single glance’.4 More recently, driven by big data and computational surveilling developments, remote sensing relates us through
a detached and objective ‘view from nowhere’,5 a calculative centreless viewpoint assembling a space-age militant
mastery of the globe at a single glance.6
Global warming from 1880 - 2022, NASA
Challenging this imagining of the world as ‘remote, detached and cold’, Porteous argued in 1986 for the need to sense worlds as ‘complex, difficult and often filthy, ... untidy rather than neat, rich, warm and involved’.7 He sought a ‘ground truthing’ in the form of an ‘intimate-sensing’ capable of countering second-hand quantitative experience ‘fraught with dangers of interpretation’ and reification.8 Porteous wrote with passion:
Do we need to be told that remote sensing is above all, remote? Could it be fieldwork demands skills (languages and empathy) which [researchers] are no longer willing to learn?... perhaps there is a fear that foreign work might invalidate the assumptions of culture-bound models?9
Alongside my candle-lit studies during early fieldwork,
I would go walking with a barefoot Jarramali after he had completed his ranger work for the day. First, he took me
on tracks. But as we hung out more he responded to my capabilities and willingness, showing me favourite more
far off places. Places he wanted me also to experience.

Soon we were pushing through the scrub proper, off-the-beaten track literally. Indeed, much of our walking became hunting. Jarramali cutting with a machete or hunting knife through walls of trees, vines and grasses in pursuit of
‍minya (meat).

During one of those times, I mentioned my night studies of the mountain, its lizards and frogs and my peculiar dreams. Jarramali answered,
The bama-bama don’t visit Kalkajaka because it is dangerous.  But I’ve known that land all my life, and will take us to one really good hunting spot.

Considered the ‘big boss’, Kalkajaka is one
of the most revered terrains on country

In appearance, Kalkajaka resembles two facing pyramids
of piled broken rocks. Jumbled and stacked granite boulders. Inside each mound are treacherous labyrinths of cold tunnels and caves, their entrances windy and black. At Wungariji (hot sun time), Jarramali relays, the granite boulders sometimes explode with loud cracks reverberating across the surrounding valleys. At these times, Kalkajaka’s startling gesture pierces through the body’s inner sense of security.
In Yalanji, Kal-ka-ja-ka translates as ‘place of spear’ and the area is a landscape of many significant and restricted sites.
A sacred site on country, writes Black, requires diplomatic approach.10

Like when visiting a revered sandstone library or a hallowed church, a Western sensibility follows protocols that respects the ‘divinity of power that dwells within the walls of the establishment’. Similar but different, Jarramali’s approach
is steered by family kinship relations and ancestral action. Fundamentally, family who have passed away are not ‘removed to some dead zone, forgotten in time’ but are everyday participants in place ‘fully employed in the
affairs of humans’.11

As ‘physically dangerous’ places holding ‘the animating
power of ancestral beings’, sacred sites are construed and described in English as ‘disturbances in the space-time continuum, where ancestral energy is transformed in matter and can be released again as energy’.12 For returning countrymen like Jarramali, ancestral actions throughout the landscape structure an intimate sensibility—epistemically rich with ongoing memory-making, co-evolution, belonging and identity. With-and-through these resonating gestures and actions, countrymen perform as living agents—reincarnate realizations of ancestral energy.13
Catherine, you are a stranger, and these places are only approachable in the company of a TO [traditional owner]. The country doesn’t know of you, it’s dangerous, possibly making you sick and making the TOs sick as well, maybe physical, mental. Imagine visiting a place where that spirit bird lives, unannounced, that bird is territorial, it doesn’t like you there and is worried for its nest. He will swoop you, attack you until you go away.
According to UNESCO, these ‘sacred natural sites’ are
globally important. Studies indicate conservation practices arise where there are strong links between rich biologically diverse places also culturally upheld as dwelling places of ancestral beings and deities.14 Many studied ‘sacred forest groves’, ‘sacred sites’, and ‘culturally sensitive areas’, indicate
a diversity of unique biological traits (genetics, species, systems) that are also reflected in localised cultural traits like codes, behaviours, symbols and specific social institutions.15 For UNESCO, globally safeguarding special sites in connective ways—like moving, acting and thinking as part of a co-evolving socio-ecological fabric—underpins our species resilience and ongoing survival.16

Kalkajaka is one of these special site of bio-cultural resilience echoing sacred places elsewhere. Sitting at the northern most edges of the Wet Tropics, Kalkajaka is an intersection of ecological and climatic flux clearly discerned in the landscape. Quaternary paleo-ecological studies suggest that during cooler wetter regimes (think Pleistocene Ice Age times 200,000-12,000 years ago), the madja (jungle rainforest) would expand and colonise the drier ngalkal (woodland savannahs). Whereas, in warmer drier regimes (think our more recent Holocene 10,000 years ago), the madja would slowly contract and fragment into Kalkajaka’s moist gully pockets and wetter upland terraces.17
The decline in distribution of species richness of regionally endemic terrestrial vertebrates with increasing temperature. (Krockenberger, A.K. et al. (2004), p.9)
As a warming atmospheric regime shapeshifts with the madja (jungle rainforest) territory, scientists argue many madja-ji species lacking evolutionary adaptability also lose or gain distribution range. For instance, certain mammals like the green ringtail possum are not tolerant to temperature extremes. Lacking thermal heat dispersal abilities, it is shown the critters die within 4-5 hours of exposure to extreme temperatures above 30 degrees.18

It is no surprise then that sheltered in the cool, moist, rocky armpits of Kalkajaka’s huge 781 hectare black body are a number of endangered endemic inhabitants: the Black Mountain rainbow skink (carlia scirtetis), the Black Mountain slender-toed gecko (nactus galgajuga) and the Black Mountain boulder frog (cophixalus saxatilis).

With ecological studies heralding ‘low dispersal potential, fragmented populations, low fecundity rates and narrow ecological range including temperature, habitat, moisture
and foraging requirements’,19 Kalkajaka’s milieu is considered globally significant and one of Australia’s most restrictive fauna habitats at risk from an unprecedented warming and drying climate.20 Equally concerning, many flora communities are statistically forecast to change form—increasing in foliage toughness, decreasing in nutrient content, digestibility and shifting in trophic timings. Rapid changes to the ecological food calendar such as these contributing to localized species extinctions estimated between 7% and 58%.21
Map data: Google ©2022 CNES/Airbus
Today, dynamic annual and decadal rainfall variability
makes it hard for scientists to replicate and forecast the region’s longer-term climatic trends.22 However, statistically Wet Tropics climate projections indicate that average temperatures rising across all seasons will bring more warm spells and hot days. Models suggest that whilst annual and decadal rainfall patterns are still unclear, there will be an increase in the intensity of extreme daily rainfall and heightened sea-level events. Tropical cyclones, whilst
fewer, may be more intense.
Hey Catherine, stop thinking about it so much!
Jarramali has taken to calling me by my childhood name
after overhearing me talking to my parents on the phone
days earlier. Apparently, he intuitively worked out that
for me, ‘Catherine’ is a sound that when spoken pierces
through all incoming sound.
The parked car is partially hidden amongst Kalkajaka ngalkal scrub (woodland savannahs) next to the highway and we now stand side-by-side looking through the head-high guinea grass. Both our bodies and clothes still hold the woody smoke from Junkin’s warming ceremony back at camp. I sense clearly through Jarramali’s respectfully held stance—chest puffed out, eyes like a wandi (eagle)—this whole place is to be negotiated by the experienced only. Sensing his rising energy, I feel a little scared. The silent grass ahead and the heat-hazed slope of Kalkajaka in the distance seems to be waiting for our move. Overwhelmed, I’m unsure if I want to get up close and just be with such a dominating place.
We’ve done everything right. Just be open and let it speak
you through.
Vulnerable but trusting, I take a deep breath in openness and acceptance. Standing for a time to watch him which way it all, he speaks softly over his shoulder,
Stay close to me. Walk with strong steps and quickly… 

only in my steps…
Carrying a small sling bag with my massive camera tripod strapped to his back, he promptly disappears into the wall of tall grass. With only his black hair showing, I mark him via a moving shimmer of trembling grass stalks. His swift steps are carving a clear conduit, his vibrating thump, ripple and rustle letting the snakes know that we are just moving quickly through. But we think better not to mention them again or rouse them in this story.

Now he is gone and I am frozen, trying to muster the courage to move. I hold my breath, a sense of absurdity and anxiety rising up hard, thumping my throat glands, chest and the vision in my eyeballs. Against everything anyone had ever told me about walking in high grass, I step off—way beyond my limits—into his imprinted track of bent grass.
Australian cinema has a long history of representing the figure of the Aboriginal tracker and follower. Australian colonial period films flicker with depictions of dusty black trackers at the forefront of survey expeditions, stoic presences with agency ‘shadowing the white Australian
spirit of nation-building’.23

The black tracker and follower trope is complicated and confronting. Highly skilled, defiant yet structurally reliant upon the invaders for a colonial livelihood, the black tracker
is cinematically portrayed as a hard-to-grasp character employing legacies of territorial knowledge against his 

own people.
Black trackers from the Cape will always be sovereign Aboriginal countrymen made complicit in the systematic brutality of the colonial project. Police archives reveal that black tracker recruits were members of survey expeditions, supplying route security or operating as a native police force. Richards speculates that many countrymen were just trying to survive the changing times by assisting the invaders.24
High numbers of trackers deserted after only a short time.

Unpicking these kinds of colonial legacies and practices within climate change disciplines requires an attention to
not only to how one accesses Country (and the limits of that access), but the transformative potential of such encounters under the front-facing guidance of landowners.
Sergeant James Whiteford and trackers, Cape York, 1896.
Courtesy Qld State Archives
In everyday interactions, including filmmaking practices, not acknowledging the limits to accessing knowledge reinforces the colonial paradigm. It reproduces the extractive mode of access complicit in the invasion of Aboriginal cultural landscapes. Through the researcher’s intimate acknowledgment of themselves enclosing and moving ‘into, onto and through someone else’s already culturally inscribed’ world, the once-legal fiction of terra nullius rings hollow.25

Yet the myth of terra nullius and its legitimising forms of taking possession is still ingrained in film school practices (in Australia and elsewhere). Students are taught the person with a documentary camera must gain access and—with signed release forms—can use all the material filmed in whatever way they choose. Students are taught how to gain trust with the project collaborators and participants, whilst also surveying a scene to capture the emotional heart of the moment 

they see.

Structurally by way of filming and editing, the documentary filmmaker has artistic control over the participants’ voices and in-situ creations of useable cinematic materials. To the point, documentary filmmaking has never been a mere recording of reality. The intentions and ethics of the filmmaker will always shape the ‘reality’ eventually created.

In 1994, Doreen Massey wrote about places as open manifolds, ‘porous networks of social relations’, and a ‘thrown together’ collection of stories that are contested, unfinished, fluid and uncertain rather than fixed units of territory.26

Places like Kalkajaka already pulse with intersecting stories woven with ‘an archive of endangered memories’.27 Relinquishing power, the follower finds themselves in a liminal space and time ‘outside of mapped history’,28 in a ‘somewhere-ness’ of place accessible only through sensory logics closed off and unknowable.29 Access becomes an ongoing and at times difficult diplomatic practice of relationship: the negotiation of co-creation, exchange, consent, activity and resource management, meaningful benefit sharing and collaborative governance of the project. Secret/sacred knowledge shared in the relationship is deeply private unless authorised for specific performance.

In our research performativity is where sensory divergence,30 dis-identification,31 and relations to sensory accountability can have transformative possibilities for climate change research. Primarily, the body as a site of perception and its embodied sedimentation of the past
is key in the bringing forth of ‘counter-memory’—a practice which Lipsitz argues ‘forces the revision of existing histories by supplying new perspectives about the past’ particularly discourses, ‘rephrasing consensually accepted realities from the perspective of the oppressed’.32

Recognition of counter-memory acknowledges that in Western worldviews, history is a master narrative, a linear top-down universal story where all stories must fit or perish [including climate change].33 Made evident in counter-narratives like those by Silko are the basic systemic flaws of Western thought—namely trivialisation and exclusion—Western cultural practices make insignificant many ‘anecdotal’ expressions, memories and feelings [including about climate change]
that are grounded in local consciousness and conveyed by marginalised groups who have ‘had to develop dual and triple consciousnesses, who have had to live with the consequences of history, and who have had to find their identities in stories that never mentioned them’.34  Ongoing performances of counter-memory continue to haunt the logics of the official archive and index significant knowledge that is not officially written. As Lipsitz writes, ‘counter-memory is not a rejection of history, but a reconstitution of it’.35

For a follower in the somewhere-ness, performative expressions
of counter-memory are significant because as divergent forms of
life-energy—animals, plants, viruses, minerals, mountains, rivers, humanimals, cyborgs and emerging intra-acting kinetic forms (both known and undisclosed) all share a common insensibility to Eurocentric modernity, with expression ‘neither translated or heard by the dominant political order’.36 Doing jilba, Jarramali’s presence on country refreshes productive sensory dialogues and epistemologies assembling in place. Filming jilba speaks to performative film theory of Muñoz, where through disidentification a subject ‘resists and confounds socially descriptive patterns of identification’ instead inhabiting a screen object or process
in a divergent way, with the active viewers filling up, transforming and restructuring stale identification patterns within the media.37
With-and-through jilba, we nurture a specific form
of intimate sensing as a performative practice-based methodology.  In working across epistemologies and with
the body as a site of climate perception, we draw forth an emplaced notion of climate change, and complicate remote sensing’s authority in climate change research. Through the perceptual insights of jilba, our working mode transforms from an established participant observation native title audio-visual method to a diplomatic cross-cultural research activity burdened as well as strengthened by the ancestral epistemologies Jarramali has emerged from.38

As Jarramali iterates, the right way is learnt through visiting places with authoritative elders—watching and being taught how to deeply observe, feel and respond in-situ, time and time again. Attuned to the country’s body language and its ecological performativity, these senior people are teachers carrying a ‘legacy of knowledge of particular places’.39

Jarramali moves us quickly

The guinea grass has patterned out, and a rocky yet grassy hillside emerges. As the adrenalin wears off, my legs and arms are intensely itchy from the guinea grass. I ignore my inflamed skin, choosing to only focus on everything Jarramali indicates. A road-train passing on the highway is far behind us, its industrial motor drowned out by the crescendoing cicadas of a midday late-dry season heat.

Carrying the big camera bag on my back, I am already exhausted and way out of my comfort zone. This powerful hunter could easily get the shits and leave me here, I worry. How would I get back? How do I not think about those dangerous things in the high grass? Did I make a mistake coming this far to a strong place? My experiences of walking Country to date are no match for this experience. Jarramali, on the other hand, is cucumber cool and knows exactly
where we are.
Dad used to take us here when we were kids.

We’d all jump out of the car,

all the brothers and cousins, 

we’d go hunt with the kaya (dogs),

he’d come across or wait in the car to pick us up.

I’ve caught pigs all through these areas.
And I trust him on this. Once during Kambarji season (wet season) we had been hunting with kaya (dogs) deep in the madja. In the rush of prepping, hauling and shouldering the pig carcass, Jarramali had left his hunting knife behind. A week later it was needed, so we set off in the same direction to get it. Like a stroll through a familiar neighbourhood, he walked us directly straight through the thick jungle scrub and picked it up, one tiny item in the huge expanse 
of Country.

Old man Junkin once said, Wungar jarra-jarra, the sun is at the top of the sky. It’s a beautiful day. I feel an inner joy from Jarramali’s presence, his responsive glances and encouragements making a good feeling jilba. Later when we look over the daily footage, he tells me that although he was having fun, cruising along with a good energy and without much effort—
the tripod was too bloody heavy, it kept getting
caught on everything!
Fortuitously, opening up research about the sensing body
of the camera, it was to be our last jilba with the tripod.
Given the circumstances of the country, it feels inappropriate to stop Jarramali’s flow to get out my humongous camera, set up the tripod and spend at least ten minutes filming our surroundings. Instead, I reach for my mobile phone, turn it side on and press record. I frame Jarramali’s back and film him from the behind. Acknowledging the bama cultural preference to view his front, I am recording for our notetaking only.

I follow his stocky frame down into a watery gully. He jumps across slippery rocks and moves on through a small patch of madja. Instantly, we are hit by a curtain of moist air cooled by broad leafed trees overhead and a shrill of whirring cicadas’ legs. From one of the trees, Jarramali produces a pandan fruit, its red juicy flesh is ripe for eating. A pig has left diggings and Jarramali goes into hunter mode. Like a praying mantis, his feet shift weight like a tripod, enabling his body to interpret the different sensory vectors of the scrub in silence.

Within earshot, a drift of pigs are noisily fossicking, and digging up the muddy black madja soil for roots and tubers nearby. Without a knife, he indicates there is danger for us.
The mum sow might charge us.
His eyes indicate that direction that we move. We creep past them downwind, scampering over the next adjacent ridge then across a sloping flank.
In planning my camera technique, I did not properly anticipated the country’s texture. Quite frankly, off-trail jilba is a full-body assault. If filming, it is easy to fall onto your face. You simply cannot be across the rocky-jungle-angry-pig reality your body is negotiating, whilst also observing and feeling the subject in focus, trying to anticipate their
next move.

I quickly come to the conclusion, that unless you are working for the BBC or in a team of more than two, any traditional observational filmmaking work in the rainforest jungle has significant technical limitations. Holding a large camera with a protruding microphone during a bush-bash or even a mobile phone camera produces informative yet mediocre results. My commercial documentary eye is disappointed and only sees a shaky reduced quality.

Yet, in slowly attuning to our shared context, jilba filmmaking presents
us unexpected ways to investigate and assemble a larger sensing body. Through bush-wacking, we start asking new questions: How is the madja scrub speaking with us, sensing through us, performing through us? In what ways do Jarramali and I share and talk about these ‘borderland epistemologies’ intimately forming an ‘us’ through our collaborative practice? In which ways do they assemble ‘what we might become’ together?40

Something is happening intimately. Through the viewfinder, I recognise my body’s immediate relationship with the bush in the moving frame of Jarramali likewise hacking through the bush. As a human tripod behind the camera, my body is vitally present in the frame, its residue a co-presence with agency.41 It is revealing off-camera information in its indexical gestures. The country’s body and language is contextually there, sensorially implicated. Will this move the audience’s body too, and what might this movement identify and give them access to?

I direct my camera’s eye. My artistic sensibility directs my choice of cutaways. It is my choice to centre Jarramali in frame. But something in this human-centric approach frustrates me. Clearly emerging within the footage are human-directed, human-centric encounters. What is missing or oppressed?

It isn’t until later when we watch the footage together that Jarramali offers his philosophical and creative critique, attuning me to an altogether more encompassing force framing and shaping us.
As we come over the next ridge, an overgrown marra (cycad) grove greets us. A jiwurrmal (pheasant cuckoo) sings out and I watch Jarramali swiftly turn his head. He rotates and stands looking directly at the grove, hands on hips catching his breath. The marra stand tall in the thick low scrub, all twenty or so of them. Emerald fronds poised like open hands ready to receive the rains, fingers feeling the day, a centre not yet pregnant with nuts.
This place needs a good burn,
Jarramali says over his shoulder.
It’s way overdue.
I look about at the shaggy north-west facing slope where
they grow, basking like ancient dinosaurs in the warm wungar jarra-jarra. Across the ages, these marra groves have been systematically fired for health and harvested by women.42
All the way up the flank those marra grow, around them the ngalkal broadening out, jujubala (ironwoods) swaying in rhythm along the ridgeline’s sunny bright breeze. Beside
the grove, a tangled madja gully of strangler figs and foxtail palms shroud a creek quietly trickling out of the mountain.
Healthy clumps of native kangaroo grasses softly swipe Jarramali’s pumped calves as he picks his way through rocky terrain. The place is a mass of sharp quartz encrusted rocks. We turn and venture towards the creek area. He pauses in
the scrub and calls out in language.
The alert gully responds back with a poised silence.
He calls out again, pausing for a while longer. We start moving again. The parallel ridge is steep. We are climbing over small boulders covered in kangaroo grasses and small scrubs. We keep moving, I mirror Jarramali’s body gesture—gently, quietly. Edging closer towards the edge of the scrub and the beginning of the rocks. Signs of bushfires are present, fallen blackened logs lie all around, their charcoal twigs marking
my trousers like a life drawing.

A huge mountain of black rocks now
juts up directly in front of us

Jarramali silently motions me to sit down amongst a huddle
of boulders. I negotiate my heavy camera bag, the fabric of my jeans catching on the sharp quartz rocks covered in a black lichen. I rest on my hand, the quartz cutting and dimpling my palm. Jarramali places the tripod beside me on the rock, then on an adjacent boulder proceeds to half lay down on his side. Mirroring his calmness and breathing, like a sponge, my body also draws in the world.

The midday buzzes with insects and a soft breeze shifts about my sweat-matted hair tickling my earlobes. A feeling of deep peace comes over me, a feeling like everything ever in the world had led up to that feeling.
The rocks around us are quietly clicking and chinking and
I soon became aware, the place is moving with little critters. Bit by bit and with cheeky waving tails, little skinks come out to better smell us. Curious, they move closer and closer. Jarramali speaks to me clearly in body language indicating
to stay very still. We watch for a long time and then with Jarramali’s slight nod giving consent, I shift into standard observational doco mode, ever so quietly setting up the tripod, locking in the big camera atop.

Still cautious but seemingly calm about the newness of 
our presence, the skinks eventually look about elsewhere beginning to hunt again chasing small winged insects and each other. I act respectfully, as if I am visiting for tea with my old grandpa. We are sitting in the lizards' intimate home, family has brought a stranger to this place, stirring 
things up.
In all directions, I begin recording locked off observations
of the place. I look to create thick depictions of objects and materials that might support later footage viewing discussions. Slender ferns grow from the rocks. Lizards play. Clouds form and disappear over the summit. We sit back eating a cracker snack from our bag. I hear the loud crunching inside my head. The day passes slowly.

Later some elders examining the footage indicate that we were in a special area and that we would have known this from what we were feeling. Jarramali had taken me was a strong place, a dangerous place. They relayed the story of
a ‘scientific’ group that the rangers had caught red-handed preparing a whole heap of black mountain frogs extracted for transport in tuppaware containers. With the intervention of bama authority, those poor dehydrated frogs were eventually returned to country. Returning into the mountain side, their performative presence there to relate and make sense with.

Resting on his side, warming in the sun, Jarramali’s voice breaks our silence.
All this land belongs to us Bama, and we belong to the country. Where else are we supposed to be?

The bama aren’t walking this country now, no one is checking on these places. It’s too far for them from the road. But it’s our home.

I respect this country. I can come here, I hunt, I come check it out.

This place is important it charges me up, gives me energy, makes me feel strong in my heart. The old people now, they’re speaking to me.

My great grandfather Bujil-kabu - old man Wulbar, Binjimba Kitty’s brother, he took on the waybala for this mountain. Old Henry Walker told me. The waybala was trying to set up a quarry and Bujil-kabu he stayed up there on the mountain and was protesting. For days, he stood up there with a big spear, stopping them fellas from taking these stones away. We are lucky, he was stopping them from taking the rocks for gravel. Taking this country away for the roads and buildings. Old man Walker told me, he stopped the white man from disturbing this place, he stood up for this country with strong spirit, kidja too, even way back then. He stopped those waybala standing with his spear, for home, our lore, our ancestors.
His words resonate off the nearby rocks and I let each one of them sink into my ears. I look around at where I am. I consider his lesson about the lore of that action, the risk and the defiant grounded-ness of that old lore man, a police tracker in those early colonial days. I look up and imagine that old wiry man still up there on that rocky hillside, looking down on Jarramali and me. The arches of his long bare feet moulded into the rounded boulder. Alongside his worn trousers and belt bucket, his hand clutching a set of darra (spear sticks), their stingray-barb tips scratching the clouds above, the shaft shiny with bloodwood sap slender ready and waiting to whistle through the air like a bullet. Through the heat shimmer, up there. The old man’s deep set brow gazing out as we park the car, as we approach through the rocky kangaroo grass, a presence sensing what we are doing. The camera, those special little lizards, all of it. Connecting with that youthful hunter grandson, carrying that shared story, approaching with me cautiously.
The ambience sonically shifts in my ears slightly. I look to Jarramali and he nods. My hair stands on end. I wait for the beats to come back normally into my heart.

ALERT

All of a sudden, an unusual croak emerges rhythmically
from the depths of a darkened windy hollow not far from us. Jarramali looks knowingly at me again, and then with his eyes points down at our equipment bag. I quietly unzip the audio recorder, feel for the power button and press record. I put in one headphone, everything is working—not always the case with equipment in energetic places I’ve learnt.

We sit motionless. The sunrays warm our hair. The cool rocky crevasses amplifying the bleating all around us. A little frog, that scientists identify as climatically endangered, is voicing
a timely presence. An anticipated voice performing its part in our ongoing sensory formation. We listen with responsibility. As the camera’s timecode ticks over, I sense the timeliness—
a cyclic gathering of country’s sensory gestures sedimenting as an embodied memory. I listen into the eternity of repose, feeling a kind of existential buzz with the rhythmic presence of each croak.
It’s a healing place, you respect it, you be quiet, don’t make noise. You respect the
spirit in the land and do jilba in a nice manner. As we got closer we were more careful. It wasn’t just natural, when we got up higher to these rocks, the energy you feel it, you know you gotta be careful.

It’s not just about the spirits and all that goes with the spiritual, it’s about being careful, there are the snakes and the holes. We were walking on grass… but underneath it is all rocks and big tunnels. They looked after us, the spirits, we could’ve got sucked up into the caves. Or fell over into the cave. It’s full of tunnels and caves that you can fall in. There is a certain way and path that you take.
Voice of Black Mountain boulder frog
To further explore this research and its motivations visit the Wiley TAJA platform to read the AUTHORS’ COMMENTARY.
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