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Song about Feeling: River-led relational practice for belonging with Country
Dissertation   Open access

Song about Feeling: River-led relational practice for belonging with Country

Marianne (Ria) Jago
University of the Sunshine Coast, Queensland
Doctor of Philosophy, University of the Sunshine Coast, Queensland
2025
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.25907/00968
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ThesisCC BY-NC V4.0,  Open Access

Abstract

Indigenous methodologies Human geography Philosophy River song-theory deep law relational practice Indigenous-led River-led kin-centric Ancestral memory Belonging Wahlubal Country
This dissertation relates my continuing experiments with listening and song-making with place, with a focus on the Upper Southern reaches of the Clarence River in northern NSW, particularly Wahlubal Country. It is an autoethnographic multi-modal account of an Anglo-Celtic descended woman’s River-led learning journey, guided by Wahlubal Elder Uncle Lewis Walker, into relationship with place. The research was precipitated by my personal experiences of withdrawal from a professional life of legal and social activism, loss, and the sensory deprivation of solitary Covid lockdown in Melbourne in 2020. Asked from within an onto-poetic relational worldview, the central research question is: what is my response-ability as, for and with Country, and how is it enacted? Engaging Co-operative Inquiry in its Country-led variant, my methodological framing is retrospectively applied, and flows from a single instruction from Uncle Lewis: to go and sit on Country, and wait until I recognise and learn to trust the feeling of Country communicating with me. With River I explore our co-arising sacredness, agency and telos, though song-making, Zen meditation, photography, field-journaling, and field recording. As we listen and create new stories and songs together across seasons and lunar cycles, I experience River as re-awakening my own Ancestral and Spiritual lineages as pathways to deepen in knowing-with and belonging-with, through feeling-with place. Through a River-led journey I experience River as beloved teacher and Cosmological Being, in contrast to the predominantly extractivist stance that industrial capitalism demonstrates toward Rivers in Australia and globally. In “just sitting” I discover a method-led pathway toward embodied, relational theory-making, deeply informed by the emplaced, storied, song-law articulated in Country-led scholarship, that serves—in a practical sense—an always-already-arising telos in place that is balance-restoring, life-preserving and meaning-creating. Drawing iteratively on decolonial, kin-centric theoretical framings, I experience River as teaching me an ethic of reciprocal care, and mutual response-abilities that were always-already revealing themselves. Through my collaborative song-making with the worlds of River, I experience River leading me in a healing journey to reawaken the feeling body, and to surface the multiple and continuing traumas of European colonisation, and immediate and escalating threats to River from extractive mining. Overall, the research explores regenerative, relational pathways to hear and activate the voice, agency and concern—in Country, in River, in me—and to learn with Country to remake kin-centric life on Earth. It describes practices of introduction, respect and permission-seeking that deepen relations between River and researcher. Those practice-knowledges allow an experiential recognition that the Western human consciousness that lives once more its reciprocal relations, or its co-becomings with place, is always-already here.

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