Agencies of Weather in Promulgating and Defying Colonialism

• In Event: Unsettling STS 1

Abstract

In this paper, I will consider weather, and the ways diverse knowledges of and about weather have been active in both promulgating and resisting ongoing colonialism in Australia. On the one hand, devices and representations of weather-as-technoscience have been deployed to shape and shore up the colonial endeavour even as the ‘vagaries’ of weather confound and resist control. Working against the colonial endeavour, diverse Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander relationships with and as Country speak to very different ways of understanding weather that demand consideration of the embodied and affective ways sun, mist, seasons and other complex weatherings co-constitute people, place and time/s. Agencies of weather are fundamental in shaping who and what belongs to/with/as nations, both Aboriginal nations-as-Country and the settler-colonial nation of Australia, even as they help to constitute what these nations are, what they mean and how they conflict/co-exist. In this paper, I will consider a range of archival material and engage with Indigenous weather-songs that form part of my ongoing collaborative work with Indigenous knowledge authorities in Arnhem Land. I conclude this paper by positioning myself in relation to weather, thinking through what my relationships with and as weather mean as a non-Indigenous human geographer living and working on stolen land, committed to the complex, even intractable task of supporting decolonisation.

Author

• Sarah Wright, The University of Newcastle