An archipelago of learning events: By the Birrarung

Seeded through the Local Alternatives platform, this project involves an ongoing collaboration with children and teachers from an alternative public school in the inner urban north of Naarm (Melbourne). The project centres children's walking and creative engagement in urban forests along Birrarung river and its tributaries as guided by Indigenous Cultural Custodians from the Koorie Heritage Trust. The word 'Birrarung' means 'river of mists and shadows' in the Wurundjeri and Boonarung languages spoken by the sovereign Cultural Custodians of the lands, skies, and waterways in which this project takes place.

Working collaboratively with children as artist-researchers, the project explores relationships with Indigenous sovereignty and questions settler colonial claims to the ‘commons’ as it relates to unceded lands, skies, and waters. The project has included river walks with Indigenous knowledge holders, hikes into the upper catchments and tributaries, and engagement with 'Wild Hope', a local exhibition of environmental artworks by Indigenous and non-Indigenous artists.

The unexpected clearing of a site of cultural and ecological significance on the school grounds also led to the co-creation of an immersive installation which gave voice to the relationalities of the river in the wake of this loss. Children named this multi-sensory installation 'By the Birrarung'. It included a sound work expressing the forest ecologies along the river using their own voices and found materials.

Drawing on Édouard Glissant’s archipelagic philosophy, we are exploring how these irruptive events connect Indigenous, diasporic, and settler histories of place-relation while preserving their right to opacity as diversely shared knowledges. This offers pluralistic ways of working with educational communities to develop pedagogies of regenerative history making within sites of colonial trauma and loss.