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In the distressing midst of global extinction and environmental crises, changes to the ways that places are managed and cared for are vital and urgent. We offer here an Indigenous-led model of cross-cultural collaboration based on lessons shared by Darug custodians in Sydney, Australia, embedded in the making of buran nalgarra (stringybark rope). The Buran Nalgarra model of collaboration is not a simple cut-and-paste model nor panacea for effective collaboration. Rather, embedded deeply in Darug Ngurra (Darug Country), we share what we have learnt and value through our Caring-as-Darug-Ngurra project in the hope that others will find our guiding principles and processes useful, and perhaps adapt our learning to their own places. We strive for strength and learning through togetherness.

Sydney is an Indigenous place – Indigenous Country – infused with Indigenous stories and lore/Law. Yet as the original site of British colonisation in 1788, Sydney today is also a deeply-colonised place. Long-held narratives of Sydney as a colonial city have worked hard to erasure Indigenous peoples’ presences and to silence Indigenous stories of this place (Rey and Harrison, 2018). In recent years, however, Indigenous-led tours on Country are emerging in the Greater Sydney region, whereby Indigenous guides share with visitors stories of place, history, culture, language and connection. We write together as Indigenous and non-Indigenous researchers, in conversation with four Indigenous tour operators in the Greater Sydney region to reflect on their experiences of conducting Indigenous tours in this Indigenous-yet-deeply-colonised place. We document the kinds of ‘deep-colonising’ (Rose, 1996) narratives and assumptions the operators encounter during their tours and within the tourism industry, and highlight how Indigenous tour operators facilitate many non-Indigenous peoples in taking their first steps towards meaningful interactions with Indigenous Sydney-siders. We conclude that Indigenous tour operators undertake incredibly complex, confronting and challenging emotional labours trying to change the pervasive and deep-colonising narratives and assumptions about Indigenous peoples in the Greater Sydney region. In a world where the histories of thousands of cities ‘lie in dispossession and genocide of Indigenous peoples’ (Porter, 2020: 15), we argue for further and careful analytical attention on Indigenous tourism encounters in Indigenous – yet deeply-colonised – places.

New learning and teaching methods such as 'blended learning' are increasingly promoted within higher education institutions. Such methods – especially those which replace slow scholarship and/or people with digital technologies – run the risk of reinforcing neoliberal learning spaces and perpetuating processes of 'deep colonization' (Rose, 1996). We argue that these new learning and teaching methods must be grounded in critical pedagogies to avoid extending neoliberal agendas in the university context. Furthermore, we propose these methods require careful student and teacher reflection, coupled with conscientious attempts at decolonising existing educational institutions and pedagogies (Radcliffe, 2017). In this article we explore the intersections and disconnections between critical pedagogy, attempts at decolonising the classroom, and flexible learning approaches like blended learning. We draw on our collective experiences as both teachers and students who are continuously learning – learning-teachers and learning-students – within the context of a higher level subject entitled 'Rethinking Resource Management' which is taught at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. A blended learning approach is practiced by the learning-teachers of this course, in an effort to situate their responsibilities and shift their pedagogy towards decolonizing approaches. In this dialogue between learning-teachers and learning-students, we argue that while blended learning can provide opportunities to improve learning experiences and support decolonising pedagogies, constraints that arise from a neoliberal university context, such as the reframing of students as clients and the prioritisation of money-saving approaches, can moderate such promise. Further, decolonising education requires more than what can be delivered by blended learning approaches in isolation. They also fundamentally require a careful reconfiguration of responsibilities in a relational and multidirectional manner, of learning-teachers, learning-students and the broader learning-institution context. So while the learning-teachers' efforts at decolonising the classroom and better engaging with learning-students remain partial, they are deeply valued by many learning-students and are important tentative contributions towards nurturing more 'care-full' decolonising learning spaces. The article offers a critical discussion of the issues raised in a dialogue between learning-teachers and learning-students of Rethinking Resource Management, and considers what we can contribute to broader debates in decolonising learning, the blended learning trend and structural changes in universities. We offer this instance of care-full teaching and learning as a case study that emphasises dialogue, in multiple modes, to renegotiate power relations, and to advocate caution in moves toward top-down entrenchment of digital teaching modes.

In non-urban places of Australia, caring-as-Country frames natural resource management (NRM) as a practice of reciprocal, more-than-human care-giving (S. Suchet-Pearson, S. Wright, K. Lloyd, and L....

The flipped classroom approach, a form of blended learning, is currently popular in education praxis. Initial reports on the flipped classroom include that it offers opportunities to increase student engagement and build meaningful learning and teaching experiences. In this article, we analyse teacher and student experiences of a trial flipped classroom application in a third year undergraduate human geography course that challenges conventional thinking and practice in resource management, including an explicit focus on the marginalization of Indigenous knowledges in that context. The flipped classroom trial included empirical research with teachers and students to gauge the strengths and weaknesses of this mode of learning. Interviews, focus groups, surveys, reflections and participant-observation activities were conducted before, during and after the course. The research shows that this particular implementation of the flipped classroom approach generated multiple experiences for teachers and s...

In this chapter, we reflect on ways in which we yanama budyari gumada, “walk with good spirit”, at Yarramundi, a Darug place at the edge of western Sydney’s intense residential development. Though heavily colonised, Darug Ngurra, Darug Country is, and always has been, a place of immense connection and meaning to its Aboriginal custodians, the Darug people. Sharing our learning through yarning and dance circles, we invite the reader to listen in to our personal reflections on what it means to try to embody, model, and advocate intercultural more-than-human environmental stewardship. Documenting how Darug Ngurra actively shapes research methods as she teaches, we share what we encounter through these more-than-human relationships, the joyful ways we co-emerge together as well as the challenges and mistakes made. In “walking our dreaming together now” (Uncle Lex Dadd) we are trying to listen carefully to Darug Ngurra, to begin to heal ourselves and Country.

Environmentalists, Indigenous rights activists, and academics are rightly called to account for imposing romanticised and essentialised versions of Indigenous peoples and their world views, and for mobilising these identity politics for their own political ends. This chapter discusses the generative romance of co-becoming Country and how the collective understands romance and romanticisation. It reflects on how the work embraces risk and vulnerability. The chapter also discusses the all-too-real dangers of romanticising and essentialising the identity positions and relationships that accompany the work. Romanticisation has long been seen by Indigenous people and postcolonial thinkers as a deeply colonising process. Imagining colonised peoples in a stereotypically 'romantic' vision denies their diverse agencies, identities and lived experiences, and has served to validate colonial policies of expansion and appropriation. Marr is multi-sensory and more-than-human. Marr is the specific feelings of being on, with and as Country.

In a time of biodiversity loss, conservation management literature in Cape Town focuses on biodiversity preservation and top-down management responses. Contributing a more nuanced and politicised understanding of conservation management, this paper examines the challenges of everyday nature conservation and collaboration that occurs nearby Cape Town’s persistently racially-segregated and historically neglected townships. The analysis is based on in-depth interviews with on-ground nature conservators and participant observations in collaborative conservation arrangements with local township residents. Examining the literature on Cape Town’s colonial and apartheid conservation histories, I also consider how manifest through the identified everyday challenges are persistent colonial legacies—including deeply racialised relations, exclusionary conservation practices, and a focus on biodiversity conservation to the neglect of community needs. However, on-ground relations and everyday practices also reveal significant contestations to and transformations away from colonising legacies. The analysis contributes towards a discussion of what it means to be a ‘postcolonial’ nature conservator in Cape Town.

The diverse residents of the urban global South experience insecurities in everyday, immediate and subjective ways. Lemanski argues these insecurities relate not only to physical concerns like fear, crime, and violence but also to stressors like insecure tenure and financial situations, and threatened and contested lifestyles and cultures as cities rapidly change. This paper considers how diverse ‘everyday human (in)securities’ manifest through urban nature and shape collaborations around nature conservation. The focus is on protected coastal dunes in Cape Town and collaborative conservation participants, including municipal nature conservators and community representatives from the adjacent apartheid-era ‘townships’. The diverse ‘everyday human (in)securities’ perceived and experienced by these participants manifest variously in physical threats to bodies and biodiversity, but also in relation to the insecure tenure and financial situations experienced by residents and conservators alike, alongside differing cultural values of nature. Through attention to diffuse power relations and everyday experiences, divergent perceptions of (in)security are shown to be frictional and sometimes paradoxical in nature. Yet identifying these (in)securities also holds potential for exploring hopeful and productive negotiations around what ‘security’ might mean, and how it might be realised through the collaborations – bringing into dialogue contested spaces of urban nature in cities of the global South and North.