The River as Bloodline: from A Book that Opens

The Darling River is not that waterway’s name. We call it Baarka. It means my love, my darling. This is Barkindji country. We speak to the Rainbow serpent and we say Baarka. Rainbow spirit made the river. That waterway, Baarka, is our spiritual bloodline. It runs through us, in us. This is an excerpt from a book that speaks its words before it’s written. It’s about doing culture. It’s not like any other book, it’s not an audio book, it’s audio written. It’s creating a way for others, by writing culture through speech. The images included here, shot in and around Bourke make their own contribution to the conversation. Intentionally non-descript, while still retaining signifiers of place, they aim, as documentary maker Bettina Frankham (2018) suggests, “to create spaces of possibility (where new and spontaneous connections between onscreen [photographic] material and individual experience may be provoked).” Called A Book That Opens, the larger work from which this chapter is drawn seeks to break from limiting, linear and single-author narrative frameworks in favour of more pluralistic, collective ownership of stories (Heiss 2019). It is rich in connection, metaphor and poetry, and conveys dialogue somehow at once ephemeral and permanent. Its accompanying images seek to do the same (Palmer 2019), as further invitation to the listener viewer reader to see the speakers’ words in a multi-dimensional context.