Ready or Not: Silence Archives, Yamaji History, Art, and Resistance
摘要
‘Silence listening’; a term coined by Dr Charmaine Papertalk Green to describe the process of tending to the difficult histories that have been actively denied, destroyed, or disremembered. The late Dr Brian McKinnon used the methodology of talking circles, an Indigenous cultural practice, and utilised it throughout his PhD candidature as a truth-telling practice of history. Silence Listening is the name of an upcoming collaborative truth-telling exhibition to be held at the Museum of Geraldton in 2025, which utilises silence listening, talking circles and inter-cultural collaboration as methods to discuss and confront the complex histories of Jambinu (Geraldton) Mullewa, and the Midwest region. The three authors are from, or have family connections to, the Midwest region of Western Australia; Aunty Charmaine and Crystal are both Yamaji, and George is a settler of British ancestry with early settler heritage in Greenough and the Midwest. The exhibition is being co-curated by Ron Bradfield Jnr, a Bardi man who grew up in Jambinu, and George. This chapter will discuss some of the silenced histories of Jambinu (and Mullewa) which are not known, and often denied by the wider white settler community, along with how the exhibition Silence Listening is grounded in Yamaji cultural and artistic practices, enabling truth-telling of histories of the region. The whole idea of Silence Listening, a grassroots exhibition and public program, is to offer a way forward of confronting and challenging mostly historical invisible Aboriginal narratives of truth-telling in order to heal as a community and nation.