Yanama budyari gumada, to walk with good spirit: co-becoming with weeds and fire on/with/as Yarramundi, Dharug Ngurra, Western Sydney

Recognising urban and peri-urban places as unceded Indigenous Country brings forth opportunities and responsibilities to centre place-led, Indigenous-led care. This thesis is based at Yarramundi, Dharug Ngurra, a peri-urban regional park nestled on the fringe of Western Sydney’s suburbs. Here, the reawakening of Dharug-led caring as Country practices is invoking conversations on ways people are co-becoming interculturally on, with, and as peri-urban place. These conversations are critical. As the world’s climate crises increase, there are growing calls to foreground place-led, Indigenous-led relational practices of care as a culturally appropriate antidote. However, in the context of settler-colonial so-called Australia, much of the existing research focuses on ‘remote’ or regional Countries. Yarramundi—a complex entanglement of native and non-native flora and fauna, fraught with the ongoing settler-colonial legacies of land use and management, sitting at the intersection of the city and the Blue Mountains—presents a timely peri-urban example of this. In drawing on Indigenous-led more-than-human theorising, this thesis contributes to Bawaka Country et al.’s (2016) notion of 'co-becoming’ by walking with the messy, emergent entanglements that make up peri-urban Yarramundi. I also make explicit the ways in which care is enfolded within these co-becomings. I do so by weaving multiple threads together: I walk with the ways some Dharug Custodians are inviting non-Indigenous people to come into relationship with Yarramundi, the ways in which myriad more-than-humans are entangled within these invitational relationships, and how these relationships are fostering opportunities and responsibilities to place. This is done by situating weeds as agentic more-than-humans who co-become in complex ways on Yarramundi; here, weedy presences form important relationships for many people’s connections to and understandings of unceded peri-urban place. I also walk with the revival of cultural burns, their messy entanglements with settler-colonial bureaucracy, and the embodied ways these burns impart knowledge on the humans who partake in them. Through this, I attend to and advocate for the ways Dharug-led practices of care are guiding a rethinking of non-Indigenous people's conceptualisations of natural resource management and, further, what these embodied practices could offer in terms of building and maintaining relationships in similar unceded places.