“Our story is in the land”: Why the Indigenous sense of belonging unsettles white Australia

In Australia, the sense of belonging, home and place enjoyed by the non-Indigenous subject — the coloniser or migrant — is based on the dispossession of the original owners of the land and the denial of our rights under international customary law. His perennially popular song, “I Still Call Australia Home”, points to the current of movement and migrancy which runs through conceptions of belonging among non-Indigenous white Australians and is at the heart of Australian colonial history: I’ve been to cities that never close down, from New York to Rio to old London town but no matter how far or how wide I roam; I still call Australia home. Indigenous people owned, lived on, were taught to know and belonged to particular tracts of “country” — which is the term used to refer to one’s territory/land of origin or a person connected to the same piece of land. Indigenous people’s sense of belonging is derived from an ontological relationship to country derived from the Dreaming which provides the precedents for what is believed to have occurred in the beginning in the original form of social living created by ancestral beings. As the descendants and reincarnation of these ancestral beings, Indigenous people derive their sense of belonging to country through and from them.