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In this article, we centre the voices and experiences of children engaged over several years in Indigenous tourism initiatives on Dharug Country (Dharug Ngurra) in Western Sydney, Australia. As Dharug and non-Indigenous researchers within the Dharug-led Yanama Budyari Gumada collective (Darug Ngurra et al, 2019, 2020a, 202b, 2021), we dialogue with our gurung, our children, who walked so patiently and with such great curiosity alongside us as we hosted over 25 Darug culture camps involving over 900 participants at Yellomundee Regional Reserve between 2017 and 2022. We dialogue on our experiences of hosting visitors and of learning together for many years on-Dharug Ngurra – learning in myriad ways from each other and from Dharug Ngurra – in a process we call 'spirals of connection'. This dialogue contributes to addressing the critical gap of children's voices in tourism literature. Given childhood education is understood as "an important site for the circulation of discourses pertaining to colonisation and reconciliation" (Maddison & Stastny, 2016), we also contribute towards understanding the ways that kids being, loving and learning together on-Country might influence their relationships to Country, culture, and to each other. As we follow how our gurung are learning their respective responsibilities to Dharug Ngurra, we argue governments and corporations alike have much to learn from our gurung. As our gurung tell us, all kids should have the opportunity to learn on-Country. We argue one important way that governments and corporations might step up to their responsibilities to Country is by supporting kids being and learning on Country. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Australia, urbanisation is synonymous with ecological and cultural fragmentation. In places that became cities through deeply colonising processes, this destruction is imbricated with the relegation of Indigenous Lore/Law below English-derived law. In this article we argue for appropriate recognition and respectful intercultural engagements with Country-as-Lore/Law as a counter to the conception of land as a passive subject of anthropocentric law. Weaving together autoethnography, historical research and more-than-human geographies we identify the colonial practices that perpetuate ecological and cultural fragmentation in Sydney, Australia, while providing a novel, situated engagement with the humans, animals, plants, lands and waters that co-become to co-create particular and overlapping more-than-human legal landscapes. We show how Indigenous-non-Indigenous collaboration grounded in Darug Country-as-Lore/Law refracts and disperses the colonial logics of the state on urban Country that is ostensibly held, yet certainly neglected, by the Crown. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. Burarrwanga. 2013. 'Caring as Country: towards and ontology of co-becoming in natural resource management.' Asia Pacific Viewpoint 54 (2): 185–197). Caring-as-Country is an idea that encapsulates the entangled, reciprocal relationships that people have with, and as part of, agentic more-than-human worlds. In more urbanised places, however, practices of caring-as-Country are often unrecognised, undervalued and undocumented. In this paper we make explicit practices of caring, healing and rejuvenation at Yellomundee Regional Park, Darug Country in western Sydney. Our discussion of care, entanglement and reciprocity at Yellomundee focuses on two specific activities that embody caring-as-Country: the return of cultural burns and sustained presence on Country in the form of Darug-led culture camps. The Darug principle of yanama budyari gumada, to 'walk with good spirit', embodies and invites new ways of thinking and practising intercultural caring-as-Country in heavily colonised, urban places like Yellomundee. As we document the practices arising from this invitation, we consider its far-reaching implications for NRM and planning, and we expand on the importance of geographies of care for unceded urban places. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]