Maps that move: representations from a phenomenological counter-mapping investigation of Gummingurru, a Jarowair-Wakka Wakka stone arrangement landscape

Abstract

The social complexities of the cultural heritage of places and landscapes are often not well served by the outputs of archaeological representations, particularly maps, as presented in research and heritage reports. Traditional cartographic expressions of places, sites, and landscapes are usually two-dimensional (2D) plots of fixed dot-points (representing sites) and polygons (representing landscapes) that do not show the living, changing, and moving entangled relationships that exist between places, between people and places, and between the tangible and intangible knowledge of places. Archaeologists need to approach Aboriginal landscapes as the holistic entangled complexities that they are, and as such, maps need to be rethought and remade into representations that reflect such complexity, rather than the ‘fixity’ of one version of an interpretation of a moment in time and space. The overt and covert impacts of maps on non-Indigenous public perceptions of Australian Indigenous cultural heritage creates a fixed, static picture of a single culture that stopped at 1788. Living cultural heritage is ignored and devalued due to the lack of understanding that standard forms of mapping representations engender.In this thesis I provide a hermeneutic case study of phenomenological mapping engagement with one Aboriginal cultural landscape: Gummingurru, a Jarowair-Wakka Wakka stone arrangement site in south east Queensland, Australia. Gummingurru was a secret-sacred male initiation site prior to the 1890s when cultural practices were disrupted by settler colonialism. Partial knowledge of the place was passed down by various means to the current Traditional Custodians. In 2000, the site was handed back to the Traditional Custodians for management and the land was purchased by the Indigenous Land Corporation in 2010. Gummingurru is now a place used for new and resurrected cultural practices as a Reconciliation Place, welcome to all.The cartographic methods I use to document, map, and represent Gummingurru in its past and present heritage, challenge conventional mapping tropes used in archaeology. The evolution of the phenomenological maps that emerge from the hermeneutical cycle of changing representations of Gummingurru culminates in the exploration of animated 3D outputs, that are themselves phenomenologically entangled representations of the tangible and intangible heritage of the place. Specifically, the representations I explore and create need to recognise that the stones that make up the site are not fixed or static: they move. Movement of the stones occurs as a result of: past and present narratives of the place; management practices conducted on the site; and taphonomic processes. Most importantly, the intangible heritage of the motifs that make up the site involves understanding their constant movement, and their connection to wider journeying landscapes of multiple cultures in northern New South Wales and south east Queensland.Gummingurru is a place that moves and changes, both as part of its history and in its present and continuing life. How we as archaeologists communicate this to the public is also changing. Computer screens are now reaching ubiquity and offer a moving, flexible, complex method of representation of all types of heritage places and are particularly suited to conveying non-secret Aboriginal cultural knowledge and places.Please be advised that images of deceased persons are present within this thesis.