Story 1: Encountering absence and implication with/in Country

I go walking on Kaluna Island, a traditional women’s island formed by the Poodumbia (King) River and one of its anabranches on Bpangerang Country in regional Victoria. The island is accessible by footbridge when the river isn’t flowing too high. It is filled with red river gums that are over 300 years old and scar trees of cradles that tell the story of Bpangerang women who birthed their babies and cooked up eels from the dam to nourish themselves. I was born in the nearby public hospital, setting into motion my own entanglement with the land and its stories even before I was conscious of it.

Signage at the entry to Kaluna Island, which is claimed as crown land, does not mention its Bpangerang connections. Instead, my knowledge of the island comes via stories shared by a community Elder who walked the island with the local Landcare group and wrote up a report that includes documentation of the island’s history, flora and fauna. Passing through the threshold of reviewer feedback, I was asked to consider the appropriateness of including my time on Kaluna Island in this article and whether I had permission to be there. The question unsettled the narrative I had been constructing about locating a sense of belonging with/in Country. Like the rest of Victoria, the near-erasure of Bpangerang people under colonial violence complicates what “permission” can mean. The Bpangerang Uncle who walked the island with the Landcare group did not frame it as prohibited space, but this nonetheless poses a deeper question of what it means to walk on Country as a settler who is implicated in dispossession. Country leaves me in tension: wanting to write with its stories while remaining attentive to the ethical complications of doing so. For non-mob in particular, attuning to this tension offers one pedagogical entry point for listening to Country.

The connectedness I feel to my hometown’s history, beauty and power is a marker of my adult life and constitutes knowledge that is separate from anything I learnt in my formal education during primary or secondary school. For years, I knew nothing of its stories and so was illiterate to Country, with no capacity to attend to the spiritual and ancestral energies of place that can counter stories of human (settler) exceptionalism (Malone et al., Reference Malone, Logan, Siegel, Regalado and Wade-Leeuwen2020). The extent of my formal education was such that I wasn’t even aware of my own illiteracy. Despite a 1989 government policy commitment to “provide all Australian students with an understanding of and respect for Aboriginal traditional and contemporary cultures” (Department of Education Employment & Training, 1989, 2), I don’t remember learning anything of the sort during my schooling across the 1990s and 2000s. No doubt my own teachers’ limited preparation in this area reflected broader systemic silences within Australian education (Rose, Reference Rose, Rogers and Price2012).

When I walked on Country as a school student, I experienced brittle brown grass and grey-bare gums that I framed negatively against the lush European woods of Enid Blyton’s Faraway Tree stories, a staple of my childhood reading diet. This saw me positioning my home country as a place of lacking in terms of what it could offer my imagination and cultural compass. It is for this reason that First Nations author Tony Birch (Reference Birch2025, n.p) stresses the need for Aboriginal stories to be told as a way of avoiding a cultural terra nullius. He argues that “If young, non-Aboriginal people are not growing up exposed to, and learning about, Aboriginal storytelling and Aboriginal history, they also have a terrible deficiency to deal with in their own life.” The stories I consumed were nearly all Euro-centric. The hills of the nearby Warby Ranges held the story of the infamous Irish outlaw Ned Kelly and his gang but were otherwise a-historical and inanimate to me.

Country may be “our first and most important teacher” (Fricker, Reference Fricker2025, 5), but without formal education guiding learning with Country, there is no capacity to engage it as a co-constructor of knowledge and identity. Belonging may be imagined in relation to land, but as Moreton-Robinson (Reference Moreton-Robinson2015) demonstrates, colonial understandings of place are structured through possession and absence, rather than reciprocity. The Gay’wu Group of Women (Reference Burarrwanga, Ganambarr, Ganambarr-Stubbs, Ganambarr, Maymuru, Wright, Suchet-Pearson and Lloyd2019) teach that “you don’t need to look somewhere else for answers, to go away and explore” (p. 111): a relationship with Country, and a meaningful learning from Country is always there to be experienced. While this affirms belonging with/in Country as an always-was potentiality, if its teachings are not located in mainstream education, the capacity to read Country differently is positioned as specialised knowledge rather than a foundational literacy practice.

Story 2: Encountering literacy with/in Country

Part of my teacher training was conducted in an Aboriginal community in central Australia. This placement was a programme run through the university that facilitated small numbers of pre-service teachers to do their rounds in communities such as the one I visited. As is representative of the teacher workforce, the cohort selected for the programme were non-Indigenous, and the programme was a western delivery of education to the communities. Arriving in Garramilla/ Darwin in the Northern Territory and then driving hours by car, the community was referred to and understood as remote. However, following Prout Quicke (Reference Prout Quicke2020), this concept is a settler-colonial spatial logic that reads such communities as inherently remote, rather than being remote relative to western conceptions of geographic and cultural centrality. Guenther and Osborne (Reference Guenther and Osborne2020), for example, use the term Red Dirt schooling to reframe this colonial reading of space.

A diary entry from the time recollects my arrival on the first night:

It occurs to me now, in a way that it didn’t at the time, that this Country I had positioned as remote was in fact central on its own terms, and that the density of the night sky exceeded the spatial logic of centrality that I had brought with me. Literacy here was an assemblage of spatial perception, colonial language (the Southern Cross), and misrecognition of remoteness. Country was teaching, but my literacy education had not sufficiently prepared me to read with it.

In the morning, the Country revealed itself – red earth stretching out beyond the shelter of a long snake hill. Once in the classroom (a single portable for the entire secondary cohort), learning barriers presented themselves. Microphones were used to offset the hearing difficulties which affected the majority of children. Despite best intentions from the teacher, I soon learnt my first word in the community language (“boring”). I remember the heavy scent of mice that clogged the back of your throat upon entering the classroom – the plague that the community was experiencing seemed as fitting a metaphor for colonial-induced damage as you could hope for. English literacy lessons that included worksheets featuring culturally distant concepts such as microchips and premiums on vintage cars sat uneasily within this context. The broken interactive whiteboard on the wall, alongside a sticker that proclaimed, “Public schools: Worth funding well,” seemed to symbolise both the aspirations and deficiencies that shape Red Dirt schooling (Beresford et al., Reference Beresford, Partington and Gower2012).

I went for a walk one afternoon with some of my students to the dry creek bed to watch them do backflips and go digging for bush onions. Afterwards I sat with them while they explained family connections in the community. A stick was used to draw lines in the red dirt, linking one family member to another. When the drawing got too big it was wiped clean and the learning began again. I had learnt that the community didn’t like too much direct eye-contact, so the mediator of the earth provided space for them to talk in a way that I hadn’t experienced in the classroom. Sitting on Country with these students constituted a dialogic and reciprocal teaching moment (Edwards-Groves & Davidson, Reference Edwards-Groves and Davidson2020) and an example of where Country moves beyond the context of the learning to become its core. Rather than mastery of decontextualised symbols, literacy was enacted as Country-mediated meaning-making: the stick was a writing tool, talk emerged through Country, the sand was a temporary text, and kinship lines were living archives that were renewed through the wiping of sand. This encounter destabilised literacy as something to “grasp” and reframed it as movement. More than this, the body moving on Country with the stick was inseparable from the story being co-constituted. Literacy here exceeded the traditional notion of the individual (Barad, Reference Barad2007). Stepping into this threshold – both on the dry creek bed and conceptually – literacy moved away from curriculum delivery, English worksheets and content mastery, and was instead encountered as relational mapping, embodied listening and Country-mediated reading.

It is important to acknowledge that the school was working to bridge community educational priorities with their institutional mandates. There were local cultural aids in the classrooms, afternoon bush-learning with Elders, community-building initiatives and apprentice-based practical learning for senior students. What unfolded in that dry creek bed was not an alternative literacy programme. It was a different ontology of literacy – one in which meaning is read, spoken, and listened to in relation to Country (Bishop et al., Reference Bishop, Ladwig and Berryman2014; Martin, Reference Martin2008). In this encounter, literacy did not simply transmit knowledge; it reoriented attention, making visible the interconnections between human and more-than-humans, and challenging deficit framings of learning in Red Dirt communities (Guenther & Osborne, Reference Guenther and Osborne2020). In this encounter, literacy was reconfigured as relational, embodied, and inseparable from Country.

Story 3: Encountering curriculum with/in Country

In this final story I examine an experience of working to engage Country-as-curriculum, this time tracing possibilities and tensions as an experienced teacher working in an urban schooling setting. This experience was prompted by the introduction of the 2023–2027 Victorian Certificate of Education Literature study design, which included a unit of study titled “Voices of Country.” The study design states that students will “consider the interconnectedness of place, culture and identity through the experiences, texts and voices of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples” (VCAA, 2023, 14). The curriculum thus signals a commitment to what Martin-Booran Mirraboopa (Reference Martin-Booran Mirraboopa2003, 211) frames as “matters pertaining to the protection and preservation of [First Nations] country and its Entities and the protection and preservation of [First Nations’] Ways of Knowing, Ways of Being and Ways of Doing.”

Prior to teaching the course for the first time, I wrote an email to a network of Victorian literature teachers, part of which is included below:

Passing through this threshold once more, the first thing that strikes me is my reference to initial hesitation with the curriculum mandate. The curriculum acted within the assemblage of institutional schooling – text selection, compliance, curricular sequencing, pedagogy – exerting its agency and limiting my own. (Re)viewing this moment, the agency of curriculum can be experienced as imposition and invitation. It can feel like constraint on teacher responsiveness to local contexts, but at the same time can act as a catalyst to overcome hesitancy in teaching Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander history and culture – a hesitancy that is rooted in affect, knowledge gaps, and structural constraints (Andersen et al., Reference Andersen, O’Mara, Auld, Corcoran, Delphine, Hicks, Moss, Riele and Rudling2025). In this case, curriculum compelled me to research the Country on which I taught (a metropolitan government school in Naarm/Melbourne). This was a task I would likely never have undertaken without the curriculum mandate. Literacy-policy thus propelled me to rethink my practice, complicating curriculum mandate as purely colonial imposition.

Introducing my class to the Voices of Country unit, I organised an excursion to the nearby Maribyrnong River, a site known as Pipemakers Park on Wurundgeri Country. The aim was for students to learn about First Nations perspectives within their local community (Harrison, Reference Harrison2011) and to situate these experiences within the broader historical and social legacies of settler colonialism (Seawright, Reference Seawright2014; Tuck et al., Reference Tuck, McKenzie and McCoy2014). My attempt to engage with the “voices” of Country took the form of researching a local heritage study and bringing archival voices into proximity with students’ embodied presence on the land. One example is below – an extract from an Aboriginal manFootnote ¹ , Steve Johnson, who was interviewed for the project given that he was a member of the Stolen Generation who spent his adolescence on the same Country as the students:

Sitting on the bank of the river in a circle, the students and I discussed the excerpts from the heritage study, noticing the overlap and dissonance of the connections to Country with their own. One limitation of the excursion was the absence of consultation with the local Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung and Bunurong community in its planning or facilitation, an absence that was shaped by institutional structures such as timetabling, budget, and limited opportunity to build community relationships. While the archival documentation of voices is understood as having ongoing storied presence with/in Country, there was a risk that students would perceive such voices as remaining archived. While structural forces do not inhibit such community consultation, they condition the thinking, prioritisation and practicality of everyday schooling. The unit’s subsequent study of the poetry of Samuel Wagan Watson, a contemporary Munanjali poet, was therefore a crucial but partial follow up. Nonetheless, my Country-responsive literacy must encompass a reckoning with the limitations that can arise from individual efforts. The partiality of this encounter is not resolved or absolved here, but I hope that it will resonate with readers in their own contexts, as it continues to in mine.

After reading the excerpts, the students had time to move through the Country on their own terms as they processed, bodily, what had been discussed. They were informed that this experience would be drawn upon to later write and perform their own Acknowledgement of Country. This was a slow pedagogy (Payne & Wattchow, Reference Payne and Wattchow2008) that deliberately resisted the neoliberal push to cover content quickly. The introduction to the unit, which could have otherwise been covered in a five minute teacher explanation, was instead expanded to a half-day excursion. Moreover, its pedagogy was experience rather than delivery. Certainly, the valuing of such slow pedagogies could pave the way for future First Nations consultation and therefore strengthening of relationships with community and Country. As it was, one outcome of the excursion was discomfort. Time was constrained by the school bell schedule and the walk to and from the park, and students were disoriented by the change in style; I could see some of them walking through the park and wondering what exactly they were supposed to be doing. To move students outside of the classroom and into dialogue with Country does not automatically dissolve dominant understandings of literacy, but it does unsettle the assumption that literacy unfolds independently of where it is taught. Country-responsive-literacy in this story was not an excursion. It was an altering of relations, emerging under constraint and lingering as a question of how to read and listen differently.