Land Back
I’ve just come from a whānau yarn, and felt drawn to write this. I learned from this yarn it’s best I don’t stop until I’ve exhausted myself, so why not write a 3,000 word essay at 11pm. And hell, maybe I just made a wish upon a satellite1 but I feel there could be good in the world despite the massive quantity of shit.
Werte.
In 2025 I had the words ‘land back’ tattooed on my arm. I had it done on Arrernte Country. I was called there by ancestors, and I went with the support of my partner. Three, urrpetye, things called the words to be with me forever, and my continued hope is that it will grow with me as a movement (to which I subscribe, and of its own).
First, cultural reclamation. Second, as a connective tissue to its activist sentiment2. Third, as a reminder of my commitment to a goal bigger than me.
That goal embodies a way of being for me that has been hard found. It encompasses what I want to see, how I want to act, what I want to manifest, in the active sense, and how I want to be seen.
The mark is on my skin so it stays with me. But it provides a literal glimpse into the life, beliefs, and values I wish to embody. It’s not a slogan to shout at others. At most it is a conversation starter, if noticed by others. It’s firmly a reminder for the body that wears it, made on the Country that called for it, witnessed by the person who walks alongside me living the practices it invites. We wish for a state of ‘land back’ in so many meaningful ways.
After being on — by any account — a traumatic journey for the past five years, I felt that I wanted to solidify a version of myself that lives my values3 and takes up the space those values ask for4. I have come to believe in earnest that the mahi which I have to contribute for land back is something which may genuinely make small change in the world. I am not, alone, exceptional. I am one flawed person, however, I am part of a community which fosters strength through connection5.
In this practice, that this mark symbolises for me, I am reminded: by sharing in yarns, letting myself have the space for my story to exist, acknowledging the enduring hardship I, and my people face, yet still reaching for better, that I hope to say hope is eternally possible. That more, less, better, bigger, smaller, whatever form of hope is necessary is humanly possible, even when we have been ground down to the smallest speck by the colonial capitalist system.
My emerging story, my aspirational place, is to support those people who have been ground down by the same system; and join them in refusing to reproduce its grinding. Even if I can’t find the strength to see the good in everyone just yet. I know, for me, for those who identify with what land back embodies, there is hope, and we can craft or summon better, together. The people who have inherited, and been beaten with grief and trauma still choose reciprocity. This is hope.
The tattoo names the position I am taking and the mahi, the ahentye, I am committing to. This is what I wish to sustain and commit to – in personal ink.
To me, then, land back is the active restoration of reciprocal relation between people and Country. It is the recognition that Country holds law (hereinafter deliberately ‘lore’), holds kin, holds knowledge, and we owe Country our responsibility, the agency it allows us to be turned to: its care and nurturance. It is our teacher, it is our provider, and it is the ultimate collective treasure. Land back pushes for a return to a way of being that can never be lost by anyone because it is nature, and we are nature.
Capitalist corruption attempts to bury this nature and poison us with noise, demanding we forget this. It tells us we are Cartesian creatures, master manipulator of “god’s kingdom on earth”. Bad news everyone, god is a dyed-orange bloated sociopathic paedophilic rapist megalomaniac with irrevocable genocidal power. The system tells us ‘men’ have the power because it profits from our forgetting about Country. But, the good news, it can never erase nature. Not while it exists in this universe. And it is the universe – kwerralye and ahelhe. Indeed, this is because of the nature of Country and the fact that all humans carry and are carried by Country – even when they choose a path in wrong story6.
That said, let’s get some right story on the page. Country is not a ‘resource’, property, or abstract. It is not a backdrop. It is not a setting solely carved for human ‘productivity’. It is a living constellation of relations that includes people, ancestors, animals, water, sky, story, and lore. Life giver, and life taker.
Law (capitalist) and lore (Country). One means money, the other much more7. The latter is the only one which recognises all Country is, was, and will be.
Lore recognises these relations continue without interruption. And even with ‘interruption’, like those of ever-petulant capitalists, Country forever humbles, and will eventually teach us all the hard way if it has to.
Colonial law – the law of money – has tried to obscure this reality from us, and it is up to us all to realise this and act differently.
Human to land. Animal to land. Cosmic to land. Cycles of future and past, these are all features of the true lore, one taught by listening and watching — in our place, on our Country, wherever we feel that is.
These relations predate any property system and persist through it. They exercise their own sovereignty against the extractive order. The river that floods the highway. The tree that breaks the footpath. The bankrupting of extractive farmers, reclaiming land through drought and sudden forest regrowth once they leave. Through the collapsing of mines, and the failing of wells fuelling for-profit water hoarding. Country shows us its enduring agency, a record longer than any passage of title deed by “common law”. Through it all the ancestors are speaking, keeping watch, and offering those that choose to listen true wisdom.
Kinship, custodianship, ceremony, language, and lore aren’t metaphors. These actual relations bind people and Country together. This will carry forward in spite of capitalism’s destructive relations, even if it means the human ‘species’ ends and another form of humble existence rises in our place. Then we may join the chorus of ancestors offering gentle guidance across the universe reminding of the power of reciprocity and the dangers of ignoring what we are made of. Yet that ignoring is precisely what the present order has pressed us toward, and the cost is already inter-generational.
The ceaseless march toward capitalism’s innate individualistic cancer has cost us what land has taught for thousands of generations. For many of us that knowledge, that active part of the relation, has been violently taken. For others it has been generationally forgotten, traded away for promises that turned out to be meaningless papers. And for yet more it remains now, despite massive adversity, and is being passed on; this mahi is hard fought and defended.
Against that endurance, capitalism’s claim is that land is property: something which should be possessed, owned, alienated, improved, mortgaged, extracted from, and passed between strangers through paperwork. Through control of land comes control over almost everything else. Labour, food, housing, time, knowledge, the conditions of our twisted modernity. This capitalist claim is flatly wrong and anti-human.
Moreover, we must never forget capitalism’s claim isn’t something natural that has existed forever. It is no more than 350 years old at most. Even if it manifests to us as “capitalism or ‘what else, mate?’”. This is well documented, even by the capitalists themselves in an ouroboros existentialist boastful circlejerk 8. Their distorted hegemony is anything but legitimate, it benefits a privileged few - a count of just hundreds - on the pain of the remaining billions. It continues to be imposed through dispossession and falsified division. It was designed to harm us all, deployed differentially, felt and noticed differently, and unequivocally raced, gendered and classed, but harmful to us all nonetheless.
To make us ignore its twisted presence in our lives, we are all kept just unfulfilled enough to work and just frightened enough to fight each other instead of the system that grinds us against each other for profit.
Land back, for me, refuses that position.
It refuses capitalism as universal. It holds that ideologies have existed before, valid ideologies — real lore — coexist now, and new ways will ever be birthed. Whether they are humanistic, reciprocal, custodial, and collective9 remains an open question to us all. That is the mahi, the kaupapa, the akwetethenhe of land back.
The refusal, though, is the small part of it. What I’ve always known was wrong with our world, innately at first in my body, academically later in my journey through the institutional hell that is higher education.
The bigger part is what comes when the property frame is set down. To me it is the reminder that we are already in relation, accountable, implicated in Country, with each other, and our survival, as well as our potential thriving. We’re there right now. Admit it or not, as the dispossessed billions, we hold the power to (re)turn to Country.
What I hold onto through land back is hope. A deep undefeatable hope. That a (re)turning to Country, and a (re)turning of land, by more than just those already knowingly living the pain of dispossession, will open more eyes to where capitalism has blinded us and led us. As lambs to the slaughter. And that we can, at first through fellow Indigenous change makers and with the guidance of our Elders and knowledge holders who’ve never strayed, all ‘stray’ back. To reciprocity. To respect. To collectivity. To land back.
The mess of the world today is not a mystery. It cannot be blamed on an ‘unpopular’ ethnic or gender identity holding minority and it cannot be simplified to a solitary angry ‘god’ exacting some untold vengeance for a decades gone ‘crime’. It is what happens when relations of obligation are replaced with relations of contract. When custodianship is replaced with title. When the question is no longer ‘what do we owe each other’ but ‘how can I benefit’. This is led, deliberately, by the same one per cent that benefits from it. They instigate us to fight each other so we do not look at them.
A return to land, in any direction, makes that visible. You cannot stand on Country and tell yourself the story that the world is made of separate, self-interested individuals entrepreneurially bettering us all with their solitary gains. The story falls apart in the presence of what is already there, not intellectually. Literally in direct observation. From flocks of birds, to schools of fish, from ecosystems of trees that rely on one another for continued existence, to the winds and rains that carry the seeds of life. We are woven of this same cloth. We were and are an integral part of Country, and we have a place, rights, needs and responsibilities.
Juxtaposed to this, I noticed it again recently in Melbourne, watching people. A city with a vibrant, if predominantly westernised, culture. Everyone is still ‘just going to work’ on a Monday morning — often uttering protestations on phone calls or coffee catch ups at 7am – “another fucking week in the office”. A demonstrable commitment to a grind that gets them nowhere and harms Country and their own communities perhaps slightly less than the next community “down” from them, endlessly, until someone starving is robbed of a meal. Abstracted just far enough away that the suffering is never fully realised and their role is never completely obvious. The blueprint deployed at full volume.
People reproducing harm at small scales, in ways most of them cannot register, because the system has taught them to call it normal. To strive for individual success at any cost.
I do not say that with contempt. Most of those people are caught in the same machinery I am eternally working to step out of. This is hard and slow work. We are wired to stay ‘in’. The point is not to indict them. The point is that the alternative is already available, and it is not outside us, it is in the relations we walk past every day without seeing. Country is right there, through concrete, through trees, through birds, through waves, through rocks. So what we have is an agentic chance to slow down and notice.
==Why are you going to work?==
My own developing response is one that tries to more frequently recognise hope. Not by preaching at people. Not by demanding they adopt a worldview. By having conversations that start where they are, with the challenges they face in their lives, and following those challenges to root. And no points for guessing what causes of their symptoms usually are.
Most of what people present as personal problems turn out to be structural problems wearing personal clothes. Loneliness, burnout, the sense of being on a treadmill, the suspicion that your work is making the world worse - or at least not making it better, the difficulty of caring for family while staying employed. Not being able to be present in the world, needing to keep up on socials. Driving past the limits our bodies feel they can handle. These are not individual failings. They are systemic consequences. And they have a shape. The shape is extraction.
Once the shape is visible, reciprocal and local action starts to look possible rather than naive. Caring for a neighbour. Learning a language. Sharing food. Showing up to a picket. Listening to an old person. Walking on Country with attention. Refusing a promotion that would cost you your life. None of these alone will dismantle anything, and I do not wish to pretend they will. But together they make a different kind of life possible, and they open the door to a potentially larger transformation we might imagine together. This is amplified tenfold when we hold these doors for others, we allow them grace and space for life and struggle — rules be damned.
This is what I mean when I think ‘peace and love, man’. Not in a hippy sense (no disrespect to the boomers.). I mean it in the genuine community fostering sense. The sense that rejects the militant individualism, the hateful propaganda, and the rhetorical devices the capitalist system runs on, and that we all enact in small ways we cannot even recognise. Peace and love as a practice. As discipline. Something done, not only felt. Land back.
I act in my own way through self-reflection. Learning how stories from Elders and knowledge holders continue to build me into the person I am long after they were told, or told again and again and again until I really listened. Appreciating what comes through watching, listening, learning from Country and our old people. Returning to the Country I am of, in body where I can, in attention always. Tyurretye, Larapinta, Ntaria. The story and song lines and landforms made by serpent. The ranges that hold Caterpillar story. The rivers that carry water and lore together. These places are not abstract to me. They are where the mahi of remembering happens. Kaurna Country where I frequently reside. Tarnda moves across these plains, and Ngangkiparri carries women’s lore in its waters and at its mouth, a place I am drawn to for cleansing. I am here as guest, learning to listen. Aotearoa, Ruatoki, te kāinga o te hapū o taku wahine, he wāhi tau ki ahau.
I have collected a great many traumatic experiences in my life. Some ‘chosen’, most not. The thing trauma does, if you can find a way to let it, is open you to the suffering of others. Not as projection. As recognition. The wish that comes out the other side is to show people a way that enables love and compassion. For place. For people. For ancestors and creators. For the Country that holds us all regardless if we can feel it. That kind of love will never be found in the deliberately rushed endless reproduction of capitalist harm. It is found in the relations the system tries hardest to break.
So when I say ‘land back’, I mean all of it. The literal return of land to the peoples who honour the lore it maintains. The end of the property frame as the only way to think about Country. The recovery of relations the colonial order tries to obscure. The return to land as a greater-than-human relation for those of us displaced from it. The return of land to itself, as something more than an idle resource awaiting use.
And underneath all of this – a quieter thing. A reminder, written on my arm so I cannot forget, that the world we have is not the world we are stuck with. That reciprocity is older than property. That Country is always here. That ancestors go on speaking, reaching out. That my practice, however small, is one act of remembering inside a much longer remembering that began long before me and will continue long after.
That is what I want to ‘manifest’. That is what the tattoo is for. That is what I was called to Arrernte Country to mark, and what I am choosing, day by day, to live into.
Urreke areme,
A.
Footnotes
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https://genius.com/Stella-donnelly-feel-it-change-lyrics#:~:text=I%20made%20a%20wish%20upon%20a%20satelliteThat ↩
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as my Uncle often says: “If you can’t connect, you can’t collect.” ↩
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https://www.griffithreview.com/articles/all-our-landscapes-are-broken/ ↩
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https://genius.com/27628320/Spinifex-gum-yurala/Different-business-and-a-different-law-one-means-money-and-the-other-much-more ↩
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Friend of the show Fraser wrote an excellent book on this https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/products/2685-cannibal-capitalism ↩