Paper short abstract:

Fighting for rights that were never ceded & returning to a home that was never lost. These apt descriptions of Indigenous people's encounters with colonisation and land/sea rights in Australia are explored through an account of one group's fight for sea country and their saltwater lives.

Paper long abstract:

Journeying has long been synonymous with sea travel and ocean voyages, romanticised in classical literature which brought to life the evocative stories of those beyond the limits of earthly writing. Yet, journeys across oceans and arrivals upon unknown shores also reveal emotionally fraught encounters with separation, diaspora and longing to return. Longing remains a powerful encounter in the lives of coastal and saltwater peoples whose rights are contested, and those for whom oceans became barriers between home and afar. Unlike the experiences of diaspora and those peoples dispatched and transferred afar by sea, Indigenous Australians have been alienated from their territories, without ever leaving them. For Yanyuwa, a saltwater people of northern Australia, their alienation from sea country transcends physical estrangement, and takes hold as a deep wounding, achieved through a relentless colonial campaign to deny people's rights and knowledge and the moral ecologies that entwine them with their maritime world. Land and sea tenure arrangements in the settler colonial space of Australia have demanded of Indigenous peoples a protracted fight for rights. This paper tracks Yanyuwa experiences of such a battle. As li-Anthawirriyarra, people of the sea, Yanyuwa have rejected attempts to alienate them from the salty world that distinguishes and defines them. Discussion will reflect on how people have retained a saltwater identity in times of rapid change, the conditions in which they sought restitution, tracked through the paradox of returning to something that was never ceded and never lost, but to which the pathways of connection were blocked by colonial presence.