Upside Down Country

• In Event: Finitude in Other Terms: Uncommoning Extinction - I

Abstract

For some, it seems, the concept of the Anthropocene has delivered a welcome dose of universalism. We must put aside the differences which previously proscribed the very existence of a ‘we’ – the ethics which outlawed such pronouns as a presumptuous act of capture – and see that beings on this planet are unified by their inevitable geological materiality; the dark anthropogenic end of their stony fate. This is the view of the Anthropocene as ‘a shared catastrophe that we have all fallen into’ (Chakrabarty 2009, 218), the living, the non-living, the culpable, and the blameless alike. In responding to this universal catastrophe, Indigenous peoples have been variously called upon to provide some guidance, whether in form of their traditional practices and knowledge or their experiences of having ‘lived through the ends of their worlds’ once before (e.g. Danowski and de Castro 2016). In this paper, I offer a critique of these universalist and redemptive manoeuvres by exploring the temporality, offered by several Dja Dja Wurrung interlocutors, of ‘upside down Country’. What practices and horizons are meaningful in a place where Country – or, the emplaced and providential order of things – has been churned and flipped?

Author

• Timothy Neale, Deakin University