Gamarragu - Towards Dharug Intermediary Practices
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 fellowship will expand my engagement with intercultural archives. I aim to advance value-based knowledges through my established experiential research model for practice-led research (articulated in my PhD).
My Dharug positionality grounds the postdoctoral research fellowship. I acknowledge an original Homelands archive of ancestral footsteps and voices walking with Ngurra, alongside more-than-human relations and neighbouring language groups for more than 65,000 years. I also acknowledge an Irish heritage, which opens the possibility of gleaning further essential value-based knowledges through my established model for practice-led research. My model for embodying deeply philosophical languages of Country includes sharing Indigenous-led theory through practice-led creative research outputs. For example, Ngurra Bayali (Country speaking) is my personal murugu (a path towards) acknowledging Country as my teacher. Likewise, global Indigenous knowledges, truth-speaking, and the preservation of Indigenous cultural values present a holistic learning path.
My new postdoctoral research will include a family heritage study, including insights into Dharug and broader Indigenous and Irish intermediary practices that are inherently relational. I am interested in how and why my Dharug and Irish ancestors found mutual understanding and innovative ways to communicate across cultures, dating back to first contact with settler colonialism in the so-called Sydney context. New research in Ireland aims to uncover shared cultural knowledges, including rich and ancient land-based values and signs of forced migration and diaspora. My contribution to a lesser-known theory of Indigenous intermediaries will include activating Dharug and Irish archives as connections to land, memory, material cultures and artefact collections, alongside written and graphic records. As such, an ancestral legacy of intercultural communications (Dharug intermediary practices) will continue to bridge knowledges and ignite old and new forms of relationality through Dharug visual art and critical Indigenous theory.
Page updated 11.09.2026