Venessa Possum
(nee-Starzynski)
djubi

Gamarragu - Towards Dharug Intermediary Practices

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Gamarragu – Dharug Intermediary Practices: A Legacy of Intercultural Relational Archives (Country, Kinship, Memory and Institutional Records) is the title of my Macquarie University Fellowship in Indigenous Research (MUFIR), beginning in late 2025 and concluding in late 2029. As an established artist and early-career academic, the postdoctoral fellowship will expand my engagement with intercultural archives, advance my visual art practice, and deepen my contributions to critical interdisciplinary Indigenous theory and diverse understandings of kinship languages and Country.

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Dharug positionality is grounding my own intermediary practices. I articulate original archives as ancestral footsteps and voices walking with Ngurra for more than 65,000 years and a heritage of intermediary practices, defined as intercultural communications that facilitated understanding between my Dharug and Irish ancestors from the point of contact with settler colonialism in so-called Sydney. My contribution to a lesser-known theory of ‘Indigenous intermediaries’ will include innovative activations of Dharug and Irish archives as connections to land, memory, material cultures and artefact collections, alongside written and graphic records.

I am interested in how and why my Dharug and Irish ancestors found mutual understanding and ways to communicate across cultures, dating back to first contact with settler colonialism in the so-called Sydney context. New postdoctoral research will include a family heritage study, seeking insights into Dharug, broader Indigenous intermediary practices that are inherently relational. I also acknowledge an Irish heritage, which highlights a potential to engage with Éire (Ireland) archives to access further value-based knowledges, including ancient material cultures, formal records, traditional knowledges and stories and to develop my global Indigenous exemplars.

 

I aim to uncover shared cultural knowledges, including rich and ancient land-based values, forced migration and diaspora.​​ I also aim to advance my experiential approach to practice-led research (PhD). For example, Ngurra Bayali (Country speaking) is my personal murugu (a path towards) Country as my teacher. Likewise, imagination, intuition, mentorship and truth-speaking all contribute to my site-responsive creative practices, ensuring a holistic continuity of Homelands values. My embodied approach to archival research ignites visual languages of Country and includes sharing an interdisciplinary approach to Indigenous-led regional curatorial practices. As such, an ancestral legacy of intercultural intermediary-communications will continue to bridge knowledges and ignite old and new forms of Relationality.

 

Updated 11.09.2026