'It's that reflection': Photography as recuperative practice, a Ngarrindjeri perspective

A thick winter mist floats above the Coorong waters at the end of the road, spreading through the mallee scrub to Camp Coorong, the Ngarrindjeri Culture and Education Centre, near Meningie, South Australia. The Ngarrindjeri are a South Australian Aboriginal nation, comprising several peoples with a common language, whose land and waters (ruwe) take in the River Murray, lakes Alexandrina and Albert, the vast Coorong wetlands and the Southern Ocean coast, all part of Ngarrindjeri traditional land and sea country (yarluwar-ruwe). While Ngarrindjeri bore the harsh brunt of first-wave invasion in the South Australian colony (and in the unruly decades that preceded formal colonisation), as a nation they have managed to survive, and today flourish and nurture strong cultural connections to their land and waters, and to one another.