Deep mapping connections to country

Abstract

Maps both represent and shape the places of our world. The practice of deep mapping involves Indigenous and non Indigenous people working together to create processes by which to re-imagine relationships to place. This practice began during long term partnership research with Aboriginal communities in settled Australia in which together we sought ways to represent contemporary Aboriginal place knowledges that challenge how relationships to land, or the environment, are generally understood and enacted. The maps represent both past relationships and contemporary stories about how places have come to be as they are. They reinscribe stories of deep time, a time when the earth and all its creatures were made, but a time that exists in the present as well as the geological past. Each time a story is told or represented through deep mapping the deep time stories of creation are re-enacted. Deep mapping becomes a way that one's responsibilities to care for country continue into the present and can be shared by all who inhabit that place. These maps guide us towards an ethical future of living in the Anthropocene