A Place of Substance: Stories of Indigenous place meaning in the southwest Gulf of Carpentaria, northern Australia

This article is dedicated to a close examination of how stories of Indigenous place meaning come to light, and the pathways by which they travel, both physically (as tangible expressions) and intellectually (as intangible expressions). It offers a reflection on the epistemic habits that render these stories audible, visual, and otherwise sensual in the context of one Indigenous Australian community. Appreciating the communicative pathways that exist in place, and which reveal the nature of place, is what motivates an ethnographic commitment to Indigenous knowledge in reading meaning in place. We conclude that opening up both anthropology and archaeology to plurality in “knowing the place world” illuminates a “poetics of fit” for certain people in certain places, highlighting the extent to which place has its own empirical order, and identity, which, with certain epistemic habits, may be read, felt, and known.