Fluid waters: cultural exchange in the land of the Ngarrindjeri, a poetics and a politics

Abstract

In this article I examine the fluid dialogic relationships, inherent in storytelling modes and women’s lived practices across cultures, as a political economy of kinship and exchange between  cultures sometimes present at the  intersections  of Indigenous and settler Australian women’s lives. This project is part of a larger micro-history of women from  Lake Alexandrina  in the  lands and waters of the Ngarrindjeri Indigenous peoples in southern Australia. Here I reflexively explore the politics and poetics of exchange relationships that not only shape the writing of history but reinscribe the persona of the historian to produce histories  that are not merely cross-cultural, but cross- culturalised (1). I further discuss how the hints and revelations in the  Lake Alexandrina women’s stories present an alternative reality, in post- Apology Australia, the richer tapestry  of a still possible mutually constituted world.

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