Eels traverse subterranean waterways beneath the bitumen streets of Naarm (the Wurundjeri name for the urban region we today call Melbourne), occasionally having to navigate pipes on the way. In doing so, they are remembering former rivers and creeks that once flowed toward the Yarra River, a water body recognized as a living entity with legal protections in 2017 whose Indigenous name is the Birrarung. They blithely make their way back and forth along migrational routes beneath the University of Melbourne campus located further north. Their movements can be witnessed as a resistance to settler-colonial development and destruction, and as nonhuman embodied ecological memories entangling pasts with presents and futures.
During their first weeks of school, architecture and design students at the university might be introduced to the ingenuity of the eel traps and fish fences crafted by First Nations Australians working intimately with the material flows of Country. But a brief slide or two to describe this aquacultural feat too often stands in for lost, pre-historic practices to which we are asked to pay passing attention. What can be overlooked in such cursory accounts is the aliveness of Country, and the currency of Indigenous practices that are continuous with an agentic vibrancy that has persisted over 65,000 years to this day.1
To learn with these practices requires a radical reorientation of conceptions of the environment, one that confronts a logic of “land as a resource for extraction,” and respects and celebrates a lively milieu demanding relations of care and responsibility.2 What also must be challenged is an intellectual will to capture this knowledge as yet more colonial plunder. First Nations Trawlwulwy woman Lauren Tynan issues a warning, arguing we are always at risk, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars and practitioners, of approaching Country with an “extractive mentality.”3 But there is much to learn when we follow the eels, when we follow the environmental art of bundling and knotting strands of vegetable materials into nets, fences, and carrier bags that gently sieve rather than strip-mine vibrant environment-worlds.
At the 2023 edition of the National Gallery of Victoria’s Triennial, a massive bronze eel trap was set in the ornamental moat outside the facade of the gallery’s locally renowned NGV International building. It still resides there today. While it does not function to catch eels—once a crucial food source for the Wurundjeri Woiwurrung and other language groups of the Kulin Nation and their trading neighbors—it stands as a powerful material-semiotic reminder of what contemporary non-Indigenous Australians prefer to forget: that technologies and complex modes of environmental management served to maintain Country in a delicate ecological balance before the colonial invasion made such a mess of things.
Inside the NGV, one of the galleries featured undulating layers of a finely woven fish fence. Both technologies work subtly with existing environmental flows. The splayed opening of the woven eel trap guides eels down a channel from which they cannot escape. The fish fence, installed in the shallows or between the banks of a stream, captures fish as the tide rises and falls, and by taking advantage of the fluid mechanics of the flow. The ancient Country that explorers and settler-colonials (better denominated as uninvited invaders) initially named Australia Felix (Happy Australia), with its 250 Indigenous language groups, has expressed such infrastructural inventiveness for millennia.4 Important dialogues have recently emerged between Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars eager to share practices of care for Country, yarning together when such opportunities arise.5 Some knowledge needs to be kept safe and not broadly circulated, some knowledge practices pertain to women’s business, and others to men’s, and this must be respected. But other environmental knowledge practices have been paid inadequate attention.
For the Western non-Indigenous imagination, it is hard to fathom the deep time and long, continuous cultural practice of Australian First Nations peoples, as we tend to focus our attention on the latest, hottest, fastest, and most destructive of technologies. Slow, careful, and inventive caring with Country engages Earth Country, Underground Country, Water Country, and Sky Country, understanding how each is associated with specific knowledge systems— if interleaved—and attendant material practices as well as stories to be told. Storying and environmental custodianship here work hand in hand. Furthermore, it’s not necessarily a question of allocating a fixed meaning to a given story, but rather an acknowledgement of a shared expression of learning and being with Country. That is to say, when a story, any powerful story, is told and retold, its impact shifts depending on the contemporary concerns and communities it engages with.
It was women, alone and in collectives, who undertook the work of creating the bronze eel trap and the maze of fish fences for the NGV. The eight-meter-long bronze eel trap, called Iuk bagurrk gunga (2023), is by Wurundjeri artist Aunty Kim Wandin. This material and agentic layering of ancient and enduring expressions of Country interleaved with the recent veneer of two hundred years of western urban development demand that we hesitate and look again, and then look and feel again for all that is humming beneath our feet. Indeed, the fact that eels still traverse the sewers and underground waterways of Naarm is unbeknownst to most urban Melbournians. In her own words, Aunty Kim says: “My weaving honours my Ancestors, my grandmothers and the Aboriginal women looking after family. iuk bagurrk gunga also honours the eel and their journey through waterways and across land. Just like the eels, we are still here and this bronze monument is showing continuity for my Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung Community.”6
The fish fence, Mun Dirra (Maningrida Fish Fence) (2023) was woven with pandanus leaves by thirteen Burarra women from the Community of Maningrida in Central-West Arnhem Land.7 It extends discontinuously over one hundred meters, and its layers were lit suggesting an aquatic milieu in which visitors would become engulfed. The pandanus palms from which the fish fence was woven are found in the tropics and subtropics, and lend themselves to diverse uses, from weaving to the flavoring of food, and to medicinal purposes. The thirteen Burarra women spent two years of labor on this task, with an eye not only on the pragmatics of how to catch fish, but the poetics of cultural knowledge and meaningful community engagement.8 Working with Country is a form of individual and collective expression, a sharing and a passing on, and a conscious resourcefulness in ecological relation.
It is important to pay attention to the labor of weaving that composes these technologies. It is a collective labor of keeping stories and thereby cultural relations and connection to Country alive. Weaving requires a knowledge of what plants work best and how they might be prepared; that is to say, a deep knowledge of the ecological milieu in which one finds themself. Zena Cumpston, a Barkandji woman with Afghan, Irish, and English heritage, discusses the significance of plants for Indigenous medicinal, technological, and nutritional applications. For instance, the spiny-headed mat-rush (Lomandra longifolia) is used by the Wurundjeri Woiwurrung for “weaving cultural items such as necklaces, girdles, baskets, mats and bags for carrying food, as well as making technologies like eel traps and hunting nets.”9 Its seeds are high in protein and can be pounded to make bread, and its roots can help in the treatment of bites and stings.
Neither the fish fence nor the eel trap can be engaged without an acknowledgement of the complex milieus in which they are situated and rendered active in conversation with Country. Eel traps, for instance, are often embedded within vast landscapes of managed waterways and flows, such as the UNESCO-listed Gunditjmara aquaculture system that is spread across 100 square kilometers and calculated to be over 6,600 years old.10 Working in collaboration with the materials of the volcanic fields of the western plains of what is today the state of Victoria, the Gunditjmara peoples have established an infrastructure of channels, weirs, and dams that enable them to capture as well as hold live eels and fish, for both sustenance and trade with other Indigenous language groups. Woven fences, baskets, and traps were included in the system of subtly realigned waterways composed through the artful redistribution of volcanic rocks.
Situating such technologies as eel traps and fish fences as infrastructures that are responsive to material flows, environmental relations, and ancestral beings, expresses infrastructural love. Infrastructures are frequently deployed with devastating effects by imperial powers to claim territories and oppress peoples and their ecological and cultural milieus. But there are other infrastructures that work as though in continuous variation with a lively Earth, supporting stories and structures that enable life to flourish. To place an emphasis on the powerful affect of love creates a relationship with infrastructure that draws attention to the structures that support rather than oppress a collective planetary thriving.11
Infrastructural love is dedicated to weaving relations rather than cutting them off. The net, the carrier bag, the eel trap, the fish fence, woven from materials gleaned from a local milieu, worked into strings and knotted together to shape a container technology, contribute to this material and conceptual labor. If we think of the way yarn is used to knit and to weave clothes, this fibrous art can be witnessed in Indigenous practices where yarning becomes a form of conversation and storytelling, one that takes the time that is needed for a group to build trust and share knowledge, material and spiritual. The eel trap, the fish fence, the carrier bag, and yarning (or sharing stories and experiences), as a means of building trust and sharing knowledges, are techniques and devices dedicated to the subtle shaping of environmental flows.
The carrier bag, understood as a container technology and device expressing infrastructural love, can be deployed in both material and conceptual ways. Popularized by feminist philosopher of science Donna Haraway and discussed by Haraway’s former student, the Australian cultural theorist Zoë Sofia (aka Sofoulis), Ursula K. Le Guin’s “Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction” powerfully unsettles habitual conceptions of technology.12 Drawing attention away from the heroic feats of the hunter and towards the humble containers that allow the bounty of the environment to be responsibly gathered, Le Guin draws on Elizabeth Fisher’s Woman’s Creation, in which Fisher suggests that: “The first cultural device was probably a recipient… Many theorizers feel that the earliest cultural inventions must have been a container to hold gathered products and some kind of sling or net carrier.”13 Fisher calls the carrier bag a “multiplier effect” that unfolds to embody the patterns of human settlement we recognize today, for better or worse.14
Women, Fisher stresses, were the basket weavers and makers of pots: the composers of container technologies of all sorts.15 Women, Fisher goes on, carried children, and this task of carrying lent itself to the invention of other devices for storing and transporting seeds, nuts, and berries that were gathered and gleaned. She cites the writer Jamake Highwater, who explains that when the Indian potter collects clay, she “asks the consent of the riverbed and sings its praises.”16 She praises the fire that binds the clay to form the vessel, she acknowledges that the container is not a mere utility, but a being. She becomes-with the agentic powers of the earth.
A similar story is told of appropriate ways to harvest resources from a living tree in the Australian context for use as a boomerang, a coolamon (a shallow dish or container), or to carry babies. Alison Page and Paul Memmott tell the story of a Palyarinyi man cutting raw wood from an Acacia alleniana tree to make a boomerang. The man apologizes to the tree for extracting a piece from it, explaining to the tree that the boomerang will hold some of the tree’s spirit.17 Importantly, the tree is not killed in the process. There is an acknowledged continuity here between the man, the tree, and Country: no component can be separated, nor considered superior; each depends on the other.
Memmott explains that in Aboriginal cosmologies, ancestral travelers of the Dreamtime created sacred sites as they journeyed across lands in formation, and that songlines describe these lines of travel with stories that speak to long practiced environmental relations. Furthermore, new songlines can always be created based on significant community actions and engagements, such as protest marches.18 The protection of sacred sites usually involves the maintenance of an ecological balance between species, based on a deep knowledge of habitats and reproductive habits.19 Material knowledge runs through environmental relations, bundling up a cosmological complex of Indigenous lore and law, respect for ancestral beings, and the incorporation of songlines to express the stories of the Dreaming and the emergent stories that can bring a community together. There is no us and them; no privileged subject and object of study; no “fact” available to be extracted ready-made for future vicarious use and profit. Rather, there are only practices of ecological relational engagement.
Botanical knowledge and materials foraged from the environment can be woven into carrier bags or to compose fish fences and eel traps. All of these are localized forms of technology that respond to locally available resources and the affordances of territories, where cross-generational material knowledge has accumulated over millennia. Less an extractive practice than an environmental one, Fisher argues that the carrier bag extends botanical knowledge, inviting experimentation with materials for consumption and use. But these are not the kinds of technologies we are in the habit of imagining. Le Guin takes up Fisher’s account of the carrier bag and argues that it holds stories to be shared and passed on across generations, much like the role of yarning and the songlines which carry knowledge and know-how related to the Dreaming.20
Entanglement is a related concept that has similarly infected our ways of attempting to make an account of our local environment-worlds. Haraway argues that entanglements are worldmaking and messy, and that complex patternings erupt from “entangled association.”21 She writes that “individual animals, human and nonhuman, are themselves entangled assemblages of relatings knotted at many such scales and times with other assemblages, organic or not.”22 Such environmental relational encounters are “material-semiotic nodes or knots in which diverse bodies and meanings coshape one another.”23 Much like woven carrier bags, fish fences, eel traps, or other means to glean from environmental material flows.
Karen Barad, taking her point of departure from theoretical physics, explains simply that “to be entangled is not simply to be intertwined with another, as in the joining of separate entities, but to lack an independent, self-contained existence.”24 But much like these thinkers, I am thinking from the outside of Indigenous knowledge systems. Here, as a non-Indigenous scholar, I pay respect to First Nations elders and communities and their material and cosmological practices, and acknowledge that sovereignty was never ceded in the settler nation-state that is Australia. Isabelle Stengers similarly grapples with her position when she writes about understanding how we are the inheritors of systems of thought that seek to divide and classify, working to think and learn with instead. While this knotty re-enchantment of the world might confront the Western mind with a mixture of surprise, delight, perturbation, and doubt, this deep knowledge is something that First Nations peoples globally have been intimately aware of and practicing for millennia.
We find ourselves today pulled in two directions, towards the habits of an unsustainable present constructed on a devastating resource-hungry past, or else, slowing down to learn and to yarn. The popularity of Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu, Tyson Yunkaporta’s Sand Talk, or Potawatomi ecologist Robin Wall Kimmerer’s book, Braiding Sweetgrass, demonstrates a mounting interest in such appreciations of a vibrant world in the face of the ongoing mass destruction of peoples, places and things.25 Rather than an enlightenment logic then, an entanglement logic might offer a path forward towards planetary repair.
During the NGV Triennial, a satellite event was taking place centered on the environmental devastation suffered along the vast coastline of the Gulf of Carpentaria in northern Australia. The Gulf of Carpentaria is shaped like a large bucket, a planetary container, and this means it catches all manner of resources alongside debris. Along the shores, mixed in with the plastic and other waste that is destroying sea life and sea Country livelihoods, are ghost nets. These are the fishing nets cut free when illegal trawlers are chased by coast guards or when the weather proves too perilous and a load of fish must be rapidly dispensed with. Over time the nets wash up onto the coast, and as the tide rises and withdraws, the so-called ghost nets are covered in sand.
The event features stories of Indigenous rangers, local community members, and well-meaning non-Indigenous participants undertaking the hard labor of cleaning the rubbish from the shores. You bend over to pull at what you believe is just a scrap of fishing net only to discover that hidden beneath the surface, like a tangled iceberg, a mass of woven nylon material has become stuck. Ingenious methods need to be concocted to dislodge all this material, such as pulleys and winches retrofitted onto the backs of utes (utility vehicles). Today the resources that the landscape throws up are of an anthropogenic origin, and they are overabundant and out of control. Feral material affordances might be captured and reformed as dilly bags (a bag usually woven of pandanus leaves and used to carry food), or other woven container technologies for carrying and catching. Such artful gleaning and repurposing are powerful gestures, but making do with the circumstances as best one can will not suffice to solve the problem of the tons of material waste deposited on ecologically delicate shores following material supply chains that have gone awry.
And yet, weave is what we must continue to do, working with, not against nor over, the environmental milieus upon which we depend, from which we cannot be extracted because we are so entangled.
Marcia Langton cites the archaeological research of Chris Clarkson, which determines the age of cultural evidence of First Nations material engagement with Country. Chris Clarkson et al., “Human Occupation of Northern Australia by 65,000 Years Ago,” Nature 547 (2017): 306–10, ➝. See Marcia Langton, 65,000 Years: A Short History of Australian Art (Melbourne: Thames and Hudson, 2024), 7.
Lauren Tynan, “What is Relationality? Indigenous Knowledges, Practices, and Responsibilities with Kin,” Cultural Geographies 28, no. 4 (2021): 1–14, 6.
Tynan, “What is Relationality?” 2.
Australia Felix, or happy Australia, was the explorer/invader Thomas Mitchell’s original name for the regions around Victoria which he was surveying in search of good pastoral land, that is to say, land conceptualized as resource.
See, for instance, Alison Page and Paul Memmott, Design: Building on Country (Melbourne: Thames and Hudson, 2021).
"NGV Triennial 2023: Eight-metre-long Bronze Eel Trap Sculpture by Wurundjeri Artist Aunty Kim Wandin Presented in the NGV Moat,” NGV, December 11, 2023, ➝.
Freda Ali Burarra-Martay, Freda Wayartja Ali Burarra-Martay, Maureen Ali Burarra-Martay, Cecille Baker Burarra-Martay, Michelle Baker Burarra, Bonnie Burarngarra Burarra/Yan-nhaŋu, Gabriella Garrimara Burarra-Martay, Doreen Jinggarrabarra Burarra Anbarra, Lorna Jin-gubarrangunyja Burarra-Martay, Indra Prudence Burarra-Martay, Jennifer Prudence Burarra-Martay, Zoe Prudence Burarra-Martay, and Anthea Stewart Burarra-Martay. See “Mun-Dirra (Maningrida Fish Fence),” NGV, ➝.
“For Burarra women, weaving is not just a means of creating functional objects, it is also a way for individuals to express their identity and cultural heritage.” See “Mun-Dirra (Maningrida Fish Fence),” NGV, ➝.
Katherine A. Daniell and Bradley Moggridge, “Indigenous Water Engineering and Aquaculture Systems in Australia: The Budj Bim Cultural Landscape and Baiame’s Ngunnhu (the Brewarrina Aboriginal Fish Traps),” Blue Papers, Water and Heritage for Sustainable Development 3, no. 1 (2024); Gunditjmara and Gib Wettenhall, The People of Budj Bim. Engineers of Aquaculture, Builders of Stone House Settlements and Warriors Defending Country (Heywood, Victoria: em PRESS publishing for the Gungitj Mirrung Traditional Owners Corporation, 2022). Juliana Kaya Prpic and Damien Bell, “Crafting an On-Country Learning Experience at Budj Bim” in Indigenous Engineering for an Enduring Culture, ed. Cat Kutay et al. (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2022), 178–215.
See Hélène Frichot et al., eds., Infrastructural Love: Caring for Our Architectural Support Systems (Basel: Birkhauser, 2022).
Ursula K. Le Guin, Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, intro. Donna Haraway (Ignota Books, 2022). Zoë Sofia, “Container Technologies” Hypatia 15, no. 2, (2000): 181–200. See also Marie-Luise Angerer et al., eds., Containment: Holding, Filtering, Leaking (Lüneburg: Meson Press, 2024).
Elizabeth Fisher, Woman’s Creation: Sexual Evolution and the Shaping of Society (New York: McGraw Hill, 1975), 56.
Fisher, Woman’s Creation, 60.
See Sue Green, “Why Are the Feminine Crafts Like Basketweaving Disparaged by Politicians,” The Conversation, May 17, 2018, ➝.
Fisher references Highwater as a Native American writer, but Highwater’s Indigenous identity was exposed to be fabricated in 1984. Writing in the 1970s, Fisher would have therefore been unaware of Highwater’s invented identity. Jamake Highwater, cited in Fisher, Woman’s Creation, 62.
Page and Memmott, Design: Building on Country, 22–28.
Paul Memmott, “Repair and Aboriginal Architecture,” in Mauro Baracco and Louise Wright ed., Repair (Actar, 2018) 52–63.
Memmott, “Repair and Aboriginal Architecture,” 56.
“The sung versions of the myths are encrypted or coded into some sort of minimalist code in order to memorise important and vital landmarks, as beacons or markers in the terrestrial and celestial landscape integrated into the songlines that become interconnected on the continent into a multitude of superimposed networks punctuated by sacred sites.” See Barbara Glowczewski, Indigenising Anthropology with Guattari and Deleuze (Edinburgh University Press, 2020) 16.
Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 4, 31.
Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, 88.
Donna Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 4.
Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2007) ix. For further discussion of the concept of entanglement see Hélène Frichot, Dirty Theory: Troubling Architecture (Baunach: AADR, 2025).
Bruce Pascoe, Dark Emu (Broome: Magabala Books, 2013); Tyson Yunkaporta, Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking can Save the World (Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2023); Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweet Grass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants (Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2013).
