Kooramindanjie: place and the postcolonial

Kooramindanjie is 600 kilometres North West of Brisbane in the sandstone tablelands of the Great Dividing Range of Australia. It is an oasis in the desert plains and Aboriginal people would travel many hundreds of miles to visit this place for water, food, shelter and ceremonies. The caves were cool places in summer and warm places in winter, and offered shelter when the days were windy or when there was rain. They offered a safe place for the women bringing new life into the world. The perpetrators were seen as heroic pioneers who had entered into the place they saw as 'wild' but which we called home. Paul Carter tells us that the naming of places and the making of maps, created a colonized place out of a pre-modern Aboriginal space. A truly postcolonial land rights provision might accommodate such estrangements and presume its goal to be the provision of the means for places to once again be rendered familiar.