No Need for Flinders

Dr Bradley with the Forget About Flinders atlas

The sacred knowledge of an Aboriginal community living on the shores of the Gulf of Carpentaria has been turned into an important new atlas.

When British explorer Matthew Flinders mapped the shores of the Gulf of Carpentaria almost 1000 kilometres south-east of Darwin in 1802, he named only three places.

After 23 years of research, University of Queensland academic Dr John Bradley has mapped the same part of the south-west Gulf of Carpentaria, turning the sacred knowledge of an Aboriginal community into an atlas.

In Forget About Flinders, a 380-page atlas of Yanyuwa country in the southwest Gulf, more than 150 places are named. It is the first time the knowledge of an Aboriginal community has been recorded in such a way.

The atlas comprises hand-painted maps, photographs, illustrations and text and is the work of Dr Bradley, an anthropology lecturer in the School of Social Science, artist Nona Cameron and the Yanyuwa people.

Yanyuwa country is 970 kilometres south-east of Darwin and outside the area of north-east Arnhem Land. It is on the shores of the Gulf of Carpentaria, which Flinders named when he charted the area.

The Yanyuwa people live in the town of Borroloola, which has a population of between 600 and 1000, mostly comprising descendants of the Yanyuwa, Marra, Garrwa, Gudanji and Binnigka language groups.

"The aim was to map the sacred knowledge of the community into atlas form so future generations of Yanyuwa people could learn, in part at least, some of the knowledge their ancestors used to manage life and affairs on the savannah lands, islands and sea they call home," Dr Bradley said.

"The atlas is not a white man writing about matters Aboriginal, rather a side-by-side collaboration, exploring and finding ways in which the oral can be made visual and hold its vibrancy."

"The atlas is equivalent to Western common law, exploring Indigenous views of geography, weather, landscape and spirituality, with text explaining each map's story, argument of law and intergenerational wrangling."

Dr Bradley said its title, Forget about Flinders, was not an insult, but a comment made by a Yanyuwa elder when viewing one of the maps in the atlas.

He said the atlas was drawn from a moral imperative to survive the pressures created by loss and exile, land rights claims, the need to keep families together and the desire to find ways to identify with the law.

"There are only 10 full speakers of the language left and amid this heartache is an attempt to hold on to things from the past by creating new texts based on the old and by asking whether any text can hope to bridge the gaps," Dr Bradley said.

On this site