Introduction: The Scene for a Reflexive Practice

This book is a story of relationships. It is a story of intersecting lives and experiences, as they have taken place in a remote township in northern Australia, between local Indigenous residents and a group of researchers who have long visited and collaborated with them. We write here as anthropologists, an artist, archaeologist, and literary scholar, each of us having shared in the documenting of Indigenous people’s lives through the interface of ethnography, relational encounters, and knowledge sharing. Presented as six discrete chapters, this book should be read as a “big story,” revealing the complexities that run through these relationships. It is, at its core, a story of learning and friendship across cultures.