Resurrecting the power in the stones, developing a modern narrative of the agency and sentience of powerful stones, and recreating shared knowledge encounters at Gummingurru and its associated site architecture

Abstract

Prior to European settlement, the Gummingurru stone arrangement was a place of man-making and knowledge sharing for Aboriginal people from across vast areas of what is now southern Queensland and northern New South Wales, Australia. One of the most powerful sites of ritual and exchange en-route to the Bunya Mountains, Gummingurru was the place at which boys became adults, were assigned “yurees” (totems), and given Law to inform their roles in society for the rest of their lives. We argue that the stones themselves had agentive power in the creation of men. European invasion brought access to Gummingurru to a temporary end. The site lay dormant for many generations until it was returned to the Jarowair clan of the Wakka Wakka Nation in 2008. Since this time, the Gummingurru stone arrangement and its associated site architecture have been resurrected through the combination of applied archaeological and ethnohistorical research and Aboriginal knowledge. Today Gummingurru is at the centre of a major cultural revival on the Darling Downs. It is the locus of the development of Aboriginal control of reconciliation activities and the establishment of a power-base for the management of both the Gummingurru and Bunya Mountains landscapes, with the stones themselves acting to control the process.