Jilba Kalkajaka-da, walking in dialogue
In this short story, Jarramali and I visit Kalka-jaka, a sacred and scientifically significant climate refuge. It introduces our ongoing documentation of Jarramali’s Bama custodial practice, jilba.
‘All this land belongs to us bama, and we belong to the country. Where else are we supposed to be?
‘The bama aren’t walking this country now, no one is checking on these places. It’s too far for them from the road. But it’s our home’.
‘I respect this country. I can come here, I hunt, I come check it out’.
‘This place is important it charges me up, gives me energy, makes me feel strong in my heart. The old people now, they’re speaking to me’.
For returning bama like Jarramali, the jilba process is serious business; detailed, focused and highly skilled, the walking is a direct dancing of country. Each place, animal call or rock crackle a characteristic utterance belonging to the stories of country, revitalising through an attuned cultured body. Importantly though, this skill of jilba is not something that just anyone can practice. As Jarramali says, it is observed and learnt through visiting places with authoritative elders in a proper way, watching and being taught how to observe, feel and respond.
On my ordinance map, the name BLACK MOUNTAIN has been typed in capitals. Its Semitic Roman letterings like a fresh coat of white paint, the map territorially draining and depriving the collective imagination of Kalkajaka’s rich memory and existence.
Sensory aspects of Jarramali’s jilba performance run counter to official history and its archive, bringing Euro-centric notions of terra nullius in climate sensing into critical focus.
At the symbolic heart of cinematic depictions of skilled Aboriginal tracking and trackers lies aboriginal sovereignty and (un)acknowledged limits to knowledge. In everyday interactions, including many filmmaking practices, lack of cross-cultural diplomacy continues to reinforce the colonial paradigm, and the complicity of filmmakers in the invasion of Aboriginal cultural landscapes.
Probyn (2005) argues that through the follower’s recognition of walking ‘into, onto and through someone else’s already culturally inscribed land’, the legal fiction of terra nullius rings hollow. With a recognised sensitivity to sovereignty and a countrymen’s evolutionary familiarity, Probyn's follower finds themselves in a liminal time ‘outside of mapped history’, acknowledging the ‘somewhere-ness’ of places that are already being sensed and accessed through different kinds of logic closed off from the follower’s sensibility (Moreton-Robinson, 2002; Probyn, 2005).
