Allured by the sound of Australian Aboriginal music, some twenty years ago I first arrived on Miingimbi Island in the Northern Territory (NT) to study the language and culture of Aboriginal Australia. Adopted by a family who are traditional custodians of the island, I became a novice inquirer enthusiastically learning the ways in which Yolngu Aboriginal people know and speak their world.  

Working several years as a community worker in remote communities and then as a coordinator of the Yolngu language and culture program at Charles Darwin University in the NT, I slowly began to sense a metaphysical difference being worked in places across the NT. In that jurisdiction English has become a lingua franca after colonisation yet most of the land area is now recognised as owned by Indigenous Australians.

Grappling with unknowing experiential moments and carefully cultivating narratives about them helps me write from them and later about them, to tease out useful analytic accounts in knowing them well-enough. This constitutes my decolonial ethics as a field philosopher living and working in Aboriginal northern Australia.