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She died in 2008. We got to know Raymattja during our research visits to Yirrkala, land of the Yolŋu peoples in remote North East Arnhemland, Australia. There, she made our presence comprehensible by assigning us tribal names.

Four words, Raymattja said, the elders use to speak about learning. First, dhin’thun, “identifying the tracks of animals and following the tracks to find the animal. As we learn, we learn to recognize what we see in the environment.” This speaks to investigation, history, and deliberative decision-making. Then lundu-nhäma, “to see,” “footsteps or gait,” to journey and to see patterns in the journeying. Next dhudakthun, where past meets present, “more than just copying what the ancestors have done.” Rather, it is “the effect of bringing our spiritual past to life again through our modern behavior … putting us ‘in tune with’ our spiritual past, shaping us like our ancestors.” And finally galtha, “a connecting spot,” which might be a place, a sacred ceremony, people coming together for the preparation of bread from cycad nuts, or sitting on the ground to negotiate collective purpose.

Galtha is the name the elders gave the Aboriginal curriculum in the community school. Galtha is the possibility of people acting properly. “Galtha is everywhere.”⁴⁷⁴

Michael Christie was a school teacher in Yolŋu country who became a long-time co-worker with Raymattja Marika. Later he was to become a professor in The Northern Institute at Charles Darwin University, where Raymattja was awarded an honorary doctorate. Christie compares galtha to modern thinking in the following terms. Instead of atomizing things and persons into neatly separated discontinuities as is our wont in modern thinking, fixing and counting these as components into structures of meaning, galtha establishes deeply interconnected, fluid and negotiable meanings.

And instead of separating the subjects and objects of history and living experience, galtha is the embedded truth of a unified subject-object, the material-ideal. “The objective world attains reality only through the received meanings through which, in negotiation, we choose to foreground the pattern of our relatedness.” Then, “freedom is no more nor less than the freedom to explore one’s environment, regulate one’s own behaviour and to negotiate with all others the construction of one’s self, and one’s individually distinctive and creative vantage point in the web of negotiated meaning.”⁴⁷⁵

Trying to make sense of Yolŋu ontology, anthropologist Ian Keen came to realize that the intricate structures of Aboriginal meaning confounded the categories that he, as an anthropologist, had been trained to use. “Concepts such as lineage, clan, descent group, and corporate group depend on images of segmentary structure, external boundaries, and taxonomic hierarchy. These constructs go hand in hand with concepts of land and country, which also entail spatial metaphors of enclosure and boundaries which imply hierarchies of small bounded places contained in larger ones of a different type.” He concludes, “none of these tropes fit Yolŋu modes of ‘group’ identity and relations.”⁴⁷⁶

Galtha describes a layered connectedness that defies neatly bounded spatiality. It denies the possibility of signifiers that speak with persistence to their signifieds. Instead, says Keen, in Yolŋu language “[t]erms for two similar body parts, the elbow (likan) and knee (bon), connote connections among ancestors, persons, places, and ceremonies.”⁴⁷⁷ Galtha is a point of negotiation, and no two points of negotiation are the same.⁴⁷⁸

Keen and Christie say that the differences between Aboriginal and Western ontologies can be traced to the metaphors they use. But we want to use the word “transposition,” because we think metaphor is too associated with language and the idea of similarity.^§AS1.4.4a In Yolŋu epistemology, transposed meanings are not similar to each other; they are each other in their manifest identity and difference. A person is a totem, is a sacred object, is a place is an animal or plant is an ancestor, is another same-named and kin-located person. “Is” means immanent; immanent bodes imminent.

The connection is not the word, but the meaning. By transposition, meanings take quantum leaps^§AS1.4.4b that are at once the self-same meaning, and for the transposition, an always-new meaning. The designs of meaning are in their redesigning. Meaning always and necessarily requires the recreation of the world. When a Yolŋu person dies, the world does not only have to be renamed. It has to be changed.

On one of our visits to Yirrkala, we’d brought Courtney Cazden,^§AS1.4.1c researching indigenous literacy and bilingual education in the community school, and the learning resources that had been created in the Bilingual Literature Production Centre.

A funeral was happening at the time. All day and most of the night for several weeks, the relentless beat of clap sticks and the singing of Yolŋu voices threaded apprehension through the tropical air. The funeral was happening in galtha, an open air ceremony ground, a meeting place of tribal groups, of past and present, of life and death.

For the cover of this book, we have used an image created by Yolŋu artist Rerrkirrwaŋa Munuŋgurr.⁴⁷⁹ The center of the image is the ceremonial ground used for funerals, a time and place where people meet to make sense of life and death. The crosshatching encloses what would be, without it, a barely comprehensible black space. The ceremonial space is within the image, but also ambiguously it is constituted as such by its frame. The crosshatching marks an outside as well. It is there to add sense to the black. Among its many references: the shimmering surfaces of the freshwater lagoons that surround the ceremonial site, providing food and life. Across this threshold, the deceased soul returns to the sacred waters. And less abstractly, the spears with which fish are caught, and in the crosshatching, the patterns of the fish nets. Then more abstractly, meanings where a person is a place is a sacred totem, and where a place is a song is a ceremonial dance and now also a bark painting.

The day after the funeral, the Yirrkala band Yothu Yindi flew to Darwin, capital of the Northern Territory. As it happens, so did we. Yothu Yindi was going to Darwin to play at the Darwin Showgrounds, the same singers who had participated with their kin in the funeral, and we joined them there. The band’s lead singer was the school principal, Mandawuy Yunupingu, and the band’s members were his former students. For nearly a decade, the Yothu Yindi had traveled the globe, a dazzling exemplar of “world music.”

Introducing the song “Tribal Voice,” Yunupingu says, “The thing that we always believe, as Aboriginal People, Indigenous People of Australia, is that … we don’t own mother earth, the earth owns us.” Another transposition.

All the people in the world are dreaming (get up, stand up)

Some of us cry for the rights of survival now (get up, stand up)

Say c’mon c’mon, stand up for your rights

While others don’t give a damn

They are all waiting for a perfect day

You better get up and fight for your rights

Don’t be afraid of the move that you make

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⁴⁷⁴ Raymattja Marika-Mununggiritj and Michael J. Christie, 1995, “Yolngu Metaphors for Learning,” International Journal of the Sociology of Language 113(1):59–62.

⁴⁷⁵ Michael J. Christie, 1994, “Grounded and Ex-Centric Knowledges: Exploring Aboriginal Alternatives to Western Thinking,” pp. 24–34 in Thinking: International Interdisciplinary Perspectives, edited by J. Edwards, Highlett, Australia: Hawker Brownlow Education, pp. 32–33.

⁴⁷⁶ Ian Keen, 1995, “Metaphor and the Metalanguage: ‘Groups’ in Northeast Arnhem Land,” American Ethnologist 22(3):502–27, p. 502.

⁴⁷⁷ Ibid., p. 511.

⁴⁷⁸ Raymattja Marika, Daynawa Ngurruwutthun, and Leon White, 1990, Always Together, Yaka Gana: Participatory Research at Yirrkala as Part of the Development of a Yolgnu Education, Yirrkala, Australia: Yirrkala Literature Production Centre, p. 17.

⁴⁷⁹ Elina Spilia, 2007, “Shark People: Djapu Painting and the Miny’tji Buku Larrŋgay Collection,” Art Bulletin of Victoria (47):7–16.

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Kalantzis, Mary, and Bill Cope. 2020. Adding Sense: Context and Interest in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press. pp. 332–335. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108862059

Raymattja Marika-Mununggiritj’s “Yolngu Metaphors for Learning” §AS2.5.2b