The Children's Country

In North-West Australia, between 2009 and 2013, a major Indigenous-environmentalist alliance waged a successful campaign to stop a huge industrial development, a $45 billion liquefied gas plant proposed by Woodside and its partners. The Western Australian government and key Indigenous institutions also pushed hard for this, making the custodians of the Country, the Goolarabooloo, an embattled minority.

This experimental ethnography documents the Goolarabooloo’s knowledge of Country, their long history of struggle for survival, and the alliances that formed to support them. Written in a fictocritical style, it introduces a new ‘multirealist’ kind of analysis that focuses on institutions (Indigenous or European), their spheres of influence, and how they organised to stay alive as alliances shifted and changed.

Stephen Muecke is professor of creative writing at Flinders University, and is a fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. Recent books are Bruno Latour and the Humanities, edited with Rita Felski, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2020 and The Mother’s Day Protest and other Fictocritical Essays, Rowman and Littlefield International, 2016.

Paddy Roe, OAM (c1912-2001) was a Goolarabooloo Elder and Law man from Broome. He published, with Stephen Muecke, Gularabulu: Stories from the West Kimberley (1983) and with Krim Benterrak and Stephen Muecke, Reading the Country (1984). He started the famous Lurujarri Heritage Trail in 1987 as a way of protecting Country by teaching people how to understand it.