Meeting Gurambai/Rapid Creek (and the practices by which it enacts itself)

There are many ways of knowing and doing Gurambai/Rapid Creek. Emerging in the mundane and everyday practice of enacting military security, tourism developments, airport operations, recreational activities and ecological management, Rapid Creek becomes a partial, fragmented, and plural participant in Northern Territory (NT) political life.

However, within an emerging TopEndSTS inquiry, we are beginning to worry with Larrakia elders about how Gurambai/Rapid Creek might be positioned as itself a central and politically agential actor within NT collective life, and in looking for means by which STS contributions might be made to such work, we begin by paying attention to the active in-place relations by which this ‘watery place’ constitutes itself.
Within this work, we are bumbling and uncertain, reaching for means by which we might become familiar with embodied practices as and in knowledge work as we likewise come to know and participate within the collective becomes of Gurambai/Rapid Creek and its many other buzzing and effusive human, non-human and more-than-human participants.

Here at the conference, we invite AusSTS participants to also ‘meet’ Gurambai/Rapid Creek - though listening to sounds, mapping fish lives, recalling histories, speaking stories, being led by Larrakia elders, and looking for juxtapositions. In doing so, we re-trace particular kinds of collectives which have emerged in this work, but in which relations of knowers and (un)knowns remain murky while recognising that all the while the (cosmo)political character of such experience as potentially evidentiary remains underdetermined.