Learning to Live Lawfully on Country

Abstract

“I acknowledge that I live and work on the unceded lands of the Wurundjeri and Boonwurrung peoples and pay respects to Elders and Country”. Acknowledging, indeed coming to know , this simple fact as a white settler woman at home in the place now called Melbourne seems unremarkable. Yet such an acknowledgement surely demands more than simply uttering the statement. It should activate both response, and responsibility. What are the possibilities of response and responsibility of settlers in the Indigenous-settler relation? How can non-Indigenous people think and practice a relationship of responsibility, and becoming response-able, in relationship with Indigenous sovereignties? How in particular can these responsibilities be reconsidered in light of current Treaty negotiations, underway in Victoria as I write? In this chapter, I trace some of the faultlines of my own journey toward a practice of learning to live lawfully on Country and in relationship to Indigenous sovereignties. This is a journey experienced in coming to unlearn my own disciplines of urban geography and planning. These faultlines, as they track across these disciplines, reveal some of the dimensions at play in contemporary Indigenous-settler relations, which remain firmly bound into settler-colonial orders: whiteness and its privileges, the obligations of a treaty relationship and the importance of place-based systems of law to imagine decolonial relations of belonging.