Introduction
Universities situated on Indigenous lands are increasingly being called to reconsider their relationships with place and their responsibilities to the Countries on which they operate. Across Australian higher education, this imperative has generated growing interest in working with Indigenous knowledges in ways that honour the relational and place-based commitments carried by Country and community. Recent work in environmental and Indigenous education highlights that such engagements call for practices grounded in reciprocity, responsibility and more-than-human relations, rather than approaches based solely on content inclusion (Poelina, Paradies, et al., Reference Poelina, Paradies, Wooltorton, Guimond, Jackson-Barrett and Blaise2023; Warden et al., Reference Warden, Duthie, Speed, Steele, Stead and Siodmok2025; Williams, Reference Williams2023; Wooltorton et al., Reference Wooltorton, Guenther, Poelina, Blaise, Collard and White2022; Wooltorton et al., Reference Wooltorton, Stephenson, Ardzejewska and Collard2025). Within this context, this article asks: In what ways might Indigenous-led, place-based provocations open possibilities for reconfiguring research, learning and institutional practice toward culturally regenerative university practices? We ask this question from within a grounded, situated inquiry shaped by Noongar knowledges, practices and teachings.
As a team of co-researchers, our work was guided by a Whadjuk–Balardong Noongar cultural knowledge holder, Rohan Collard, whose offerings of smoke, song, storying and other experiences structured a Cooperative InquiryFootnote 1 (Heron & Reason, Reference Heron, Reason, Reason and Bradbury2001), undertaken at Murdoch University’s campus that sits on Whadjuk NoongarFootnote 2 Boodjar (Country)Footnote 3. Rather than treating place as background, our inquiry worked with Country as teacher and method, drawing on Indigenous-informed approaches that recognise places and more-than-human entities as participants in knowledge-making (Kimmerer, Reference Kimmerer2013; Poelina, Perdrisat, et al., Reference Poelina, Perdrisat, Wooltorton and Mulligan2023; Tynan, Reference Tynan2020; Wooltorton et al., Reference Wooltorton, Collard, Horwitz, Poelina and Palmer2020). These provocations unsettled our institutional habits, repatterned our attention and moved the inquiry toward responsibility and reciprocity (Kimmerer, Reference Kimmerer2013; Merewether et al., Reference Merewether, Blaise and Giamminuti2026; Rousell et al., Reference Rousell, Ryan, Bauer-Nilsen, Lai, Burnard, Mackinlay, Rousell and Dragovic2022).
We use the terms Indigenous-led, Country-led and Noongar-led deliberately rather than interchangeably. “Indigenous-led” signals leadership grounded in Indigenous epistemologies; “Noongar-led” locates this leadership within specific cultural authority; and “Country-led” emphasises the ontological positioning of place as teacher and participant in knowledge-making. In this study, these distinctions are not hierarchical but relational, emerging through practice on Whadjuk Noongar Boodjar.
Our study is grounded in Australian Indigenous philosophies that understand perception, language and knowledge as co-constituted with the living world (Bawaka Country et al., Reference Burarrwanga, Ganambarr, Ganambarr-Stubbs, Ganambarr, Maymuru, Lloyd, Daley, Suchet-Pearson and Wright2023; Kwaymullina, Reference Kwaymullina, Morgan, Mia and Kwaymullina2008; Poelina et al., Reference Poelina, Wooltorton, Harben, Collard, Horwitz and Palmer2020). New materialist scholarship offered a complementary vocabulary for articulating aspects of this relationality within Western academic contexts, particularly in relation to entanglement, responsibility and embodied knowing (Barad, Reference Barad2007; Haraway, Reference Haraway2016; Merewether, Reference Merewether2019).
Methodologically, Cooperative Inquiry’s extended epistemology (Heron & Reason, Reference Heron, Reason, Reason and Bradbury2001) enabled ceremony, movement, song, material engagement and creative practice to be understood as epistemic acts. Through cycles of experiential, presentational, propositional and practical knowing, we enacted a relational ethics in which permission, reciprocity and refusal were integral to how knowledge was generated, circulated and held (Poelina, Perdrisat, et al., Reference Poelina, Perdrisat, Wooltorton and Mulligan2023; Wooltorton et al., Reference Wooltorton, Collard, Horwitz, Poelina and Palmer2020). These ethical commitments were shaped by Indigenous-led and Indigenous-informed research that refuses tokenism and instead enacts co-becoming with Country (Bishop & Tynan, Reference Bishop and Tynan2024; Tynan, Reference Tynan2021).
This paper makes two contributions. First, we show how Noongar-led experiences can reconfigure academic rhythms and relations and open possibilities for culturally regenerative university practices that honour Country’s agency and guidance. Second, we describe methodological and ethical changes across protocol, temporality, language and more-than-human participation. We then outline our methodological commitments, present six Noongar-led experiences and consider their implications for culturally regenerative university practice.
Indigenous relational philosophies
Indigenous relational philosophies understand knowledge as arising within obligations to place, kin, story and more-than-human beings, rather than as content that can be separated from the relations that sustain it (Bishop & Tynan, Reference Bishop and Tynan2024; Rose, Reference Rose1996). Across Australia, such philosophies foreground Country as a communicative presence that teaches through story, song, movement and seasons (Poelina, Paradies, et al., Reference Poelina, Paradies, Wooltorton, Guimond, Jackson-Barrett and Blaise2023; Williams, Reference Williams2023). On Noongar Boodjar, this is articulated by the interdependent trilogy of Boodjar (Country), moort (kin) and katitjin (knowledge), orienting us toward responsibilities of care, reciprocity and respectful conduct (Collard et al., Reference Collard, Harben and van den Berg2004). Collard et al.’s (Reference Collard, Harben and van den Berg2004) interpretive history documents local obligations, protocols and custodial relations associated with the Murdoch University campus and surrounding wetlands. More recently, Noongar scholarship (Collard & Martin, Reference Collard and Martin2019; Wooltorton et al., Reference Wooltorton, Collard and Horwitz2018) further illustrates how these obligations are lived and carried through placename analysis, oral history, walking and language, revealing how story, law/loreFootnote 4 and seasonal knowledge are embedded in landforms, waters and more-than-human kin.
Parallel Country-led research collectives elsewhere in Australia also highlight the ethical force of relational responsibility. These groups demonstrate how consent, refusal, protocols of care and more-than-human agencies shape research design, knowledge circulation and decision-making when Country is treated as teacher and participant (Murphy-May et al., Reference Murphy-May, Smith, Marshall, Daley, Wright and Hodge2026; Yandaarra including Smith et al., Reference Yandaarra including Smith, Smith, Murphy-May, Daley, Wright and Hodge2026). Collectively, these contributions provide the ontological foundation for this study, establishing culturally regenerative practice as grounded in place-specific law/lore, relational accountability and obligations to Country.
Posthuman and feminist materialist contributions
Posthuman and feminist materialist scholarship offer complementary resources for articulating how learning, perception and responsibility arise within more-than-human relations. Geophilosopher David Abram’s (Reference Abram1996) phenomenology describes perception as a sensuous reciprocity between humans and the living world. Physicist and philosopher Karen Barad’s (Reference Barad2007) agential realism theory offers a Western academic vocabulary for understanding knowledge practices as materially and ethically consequential, framing research not as interaction between pre-existing entities but as participation in entangled relations that shape what comes to matter. Read alongside Indigenous philosophies these perspectives help articulate entangled, embodied ways of knowing. Feminist philosopher Donna Haraway’s (Reference Haraway2016) call to “stay with the trouble” foregrounds situated, partial, more-than-human world-making, inviting researchers to cultivate response-ability (the ability to respond) in specific places and to work through arts-based, collaborative and experimental approaches that honour entangled lives rather than abstracting from them. Posthuman perspectives complement rather than supersede Indigenous relational philosophies. They show how embodied practice, multimodal artefacts, presentational work and diffractive reading function as substantive ways of knowing, carrying ethical responsibilities for how such materials are handled and shared (Fox & Alldred, Reference Fox and Alldred2023).
Regenerative worldviews and place-responsive universities
Scholarship on regeneration proposes reorienting university purposes and practices toward relationships with living places, multispecies kin, intergenerational responsibilities and the living systems within which universities are embedded (Wahl, Reference Wahl2016; Warden et al., Reference Warden, Duthie, Speed, Steele, Stead and Siodmok2025; Wooltorton et al., Reference Wooltorton, Stephenson, Ardzejewska and Collard2025). Knight et al. (Reference Knight, Poelina and Wooltorton2025), for example, describe a regenerative worldview as one grounded in “feeling, hearing, and healing Country”; it is a way of seeing, experiencing and participating with the world’s capacity “to heal, to renew, to revitalise and to return its vigorous, life-giving capacities” (p. 755). Regeneration, in this sense, is not a discrete programme or institutional aspiration but an ongoing practice of renewing relationships with place as kin, communicating with Country and responding with care through everyday embodied, creative and practical action.
In this paper, culturally regenerative university practice refers to practices that strengthen relationships among Country, Indigenous knowledge systems, institutions and the people who work and learn within them. Rather than focusing on inclusion alone, culturally regenerative approaches cultivate responsibilities to place, support Indigenous custodial authority and reshape how knowledge is generated, shared, governed and withheld within institutions embedded in living social and ecological systems (Warden et al., Reference Warden, Duthie, Speed, Steele, Stead and Siodmok2025). This aligns with a wider concern with how universities might act as regenerative forces by working with local, place-based cultures and the living systems that care for and sustain them (Wooltorton et al., Reference Wooltorton, Stephenson, Ardzejewska and Collard2025). This practice also resonates with Knight et al.’s (Reference Knight, Poelina and Wooltorton2025) insistence that regeneration involves walking with Country, sitting with Country, conversing with Country and responding-with Country, rather than acting upon place from a distance.
Recent work on the “Living University” (Warden et al., Reference Warden, Duthie, Speed, Steele, Stead and Siodmok2025) similarly argues for universities to understand themselves as embedded within and accountable to the living systems that sustain them, requiring cultural and relational capacity-building rather than isolated initiatives. Warden et al. (Reference Warden, Duthie, Speed, Steele, Stead and Siodmok2025) identify place-based learning, relationality, Indigenous knowledge holders, embodied learning and cultural capacity-building as central to regenerative university practice. They frame universities as potential catalysts for place-based regeneration, hubs for relationality, evolutionary spaces and holders of complexity and holistic work.
These accounts suggest that culturally regenerative universities require more than new programmes or statements of commitment. They require the repatterning of institutional time, space and accountability. This includes orienting university practices toward slow and deep time, centring protocols of reciprocity, consent and refusal and creating conditions for embodied, place-responsive and relational ways of learning. In Western Australian higher education, the Kaartdijin Bidi (Learning Journey) approach proposed by Wooltorton et al. (Reference Wooltorton, Stephenson, Ardzejewska and Collard2025) exemplifies this orientation. It describes iterative cycles of practice, reflection and attunement that bring governance, pedagogy and research into relation with Country. These commitments align with slower, care-oriented academic temporalities (Mountz et al., Reference Mountz, Bonds, Mansfield, Loyd, Hyndman, Walton-Roberts, Basu, Whitson, Hawkins, Hamilton and Curran2015) and with higher education scholarship that highlights the institutional conditions required to support embodied, place-responsive learning within higher education (Arts et al., Reference Arts, Roncken, Buijs and Wals2025; van Tol & Wals, Reference van Tol and Wals2025). This scholarship points to the need for universities to re-pattern time, space and institutional responsibility in ways that exceed conventional academic formats.
Indigenous-informed inquiry and multimodal methods
Indigenous-informed inquiry positions research as relational, situated in place and accountable to Country. Rather than treating knowledge as abstract or representational, such inquiry understands knowledge as emerging through embodied and relational engagements with place, people and more-than-human kin (Poelina, Perdrisat, et al., Reference Poelina, Perdrisat, Wooltorton and Mulligan2023; Wooltorton et al., Reference Wooltorton, Collard, Horwitz, Poelina and Palmer2020). Within this orientation, research practices must attend to ongoing consent, reciprocity, refusal and the communicative agency of Country – a focus of this study. Ethical practice attends to permissions, restraint and conditions of sharing within relational contexts (Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies [AIATSIS], 2020; Murphy-May et al., Reference Murphy-May, Smith, Marshall, Daley, Wright and Hodge2026; Yandaarra including Smith et al., Reference Yandaarra including Smith, Smith, Murphy-May, Daley, Wright and Hodge2026).
In this study, these commitments shaped how we generated, held and circulated knowledge through multimodal practices. Positioned within Cooperative Inquiry’s extended epistemology (Heron & Reason, Reference Heron, Reason, Reason and Bradbury2001), such forms supported experiential, embodied and relational modes of knowing that could register shifts in attention, affect, relation and ethical stance.
Noongar-centred scholarship: song, protocol and water law/lore
In the southwest of Western Australia, Noongar scholarship offers place-based understandings of knowledge, responsibility and relation that illuminate how learning unfolds with Boodjar, story and kin. Research on Noongar song, for example, shows how repertoire, language and performance act as modes of remembering, transmitting and regenerating ways of knowing, where singing in language is both pedagogical and archival and where relations with ancestors, places and seasonal rhythms are renewed (Bracknell, Reference Bracknell2014, Reference Bracknell2017, Reference Bracknell2020). Complementary work on Noongar water law/lore describes wetlands, groundwater systems and estuaries as living, storied presences requiring ongoing respect and relational care (Wooltorton et al., Reference Wooltorton, Collard and Horwitz2018). Noongar language encodes deep interdependence between social, ecological and spiritual domains; ancestral beings remain active within cycles of time; and obligations to water shape conduct and custodial practice.
Murdoch University, the immediate context of this project, sits on Noongar Boodjar interpreted through a detailed account of relational obligations, water law/lore, ceremonial practices and seasonal presence (Collard et al., Reference Collard, Harben and van den Berg2004). Read alongside contemporary Noongar scholarship on language, placenames and cultural bidi (pathway) approaches (Collard & Martin, Reference Collard and Martin2019), this literature offers a locally grounded understanding of how inquiry on the Murdoch University campus is already entangled with Country and shaped by Noongar knowledge systems.
Gaps and tensions
Across the scholarship just reviewed, several gaps and tensions become apparent. First, although Indigenous relational philosophies and Country-led methodologies are increasingly recognised, they are often discussed at the level of principle rather than explored through empirical studies that follow how such commitments unfold in lived settings. While the literature highlights reciprocity and consent, few studies trace how these unfold in practice (Murphy-May et al., Reference Murphy-May, Smith, Marshall, Daley, Wright and Hodge2026; Yandaarra including Smith et al., Reference Yandaarra including Smith, Smith, Murphy-May, Daley, Wright and Hodge2026). This creates a gap between conceptual articulations of relational accountability and the lived methods and choices researchers enact on the ground.
Second, while calls for culturally regenerative approaches to higher education emphasise place-responsiveness, slow time and ethical relationality (Warden et al., Reference Warden, Duthie, Speed, Steele, Stead and Siodmok2025; Wooltorton et al., Reference Wooltorton, Guenther, Poelina, Blaise, Collard and White2022), these frameworks remain under-developed in relation to specific university contexts. The literature tends to articulate what regeneration should mean aspirationally but offers limited insight into how particular places, protocols or knowledge systems shape responsibilities for universities situated on Indigenous lands (Knight et al., Reference Knight, Poelina, Wooltorton, Penteado, Chakrabarty and Shaikh2024; Wooltorton et al., Reference Wooltorton, Guenther, Poelina, Blaise, Collard and White2022). Even where localised interpretive histories exist, as in the case of Whadjuk Noongar Boodjar and the land on which Murdoch University stands (Collard et al., Reference Collard, Harben and van den Berg2004), these accounts are rarely taken up within broader discussions of university practice or governance. This reveals a tension between generalised commitments to Indigenous engagement and the place-specific obligations that remain largely unacknowledged.
A third tension concerns the methodological possibilities afforded by multimodal, embodied and creative forms of evidence. Although posthuman and feminist materialist perspectives offer vocabularies for recognising the entangled and affective dimensions of inquiry, these approaches are seldom aligned with Indigenous epistemologies in ways that respect custodial authority or the relational status of materials. As a result, creative and presentational forms are often positioned as supplementary or illustrative rather than integral to knowledge-making, despite their centrality in Country-led research (Fox & Alldred, Reference Fox and Alldred2023; Poelina, Perdrisat, et al., Reference Poelina, Perdrisat, Wooltorton and Mulligan2023). This produces a methodological ambiguity: multimodality is valued, yet its ethical and institutional implications remain under-examined.
This study addresses these tensions by showing how a cooperative inquiry group worked with place-responsive, Indigenous-informed and multimodal methods within a specific university setting and how these engagements opened possibilities and frictions that speak to the broader challenge of cultivating culturally regenerative institutional practice.
Cooperative inquiry
Our research deployed Cooperative Inquiry (Heron & Reason, Reference Heron, Reason, Reason and Bradbury2001) as a participatory, relational methodology suited to the project’s focus on place-attuned, Indigenous-informed and multimodal inquiry. Cooperative Inquiry enables participants to generate knowledge through cycles of experience, reflection, dialogue and action, drawing on an extended epistemology that values experiential, presentational, propositional and practical ways of knowing. This framework supported the group to engage with the embodied, creative and relational modes of inquiry central to the study, while sustaining iterative dialogue through which emerging insights were refined.
Our inquiry group consisted of seven participant-researchers: six non-Aboriginal academic colleagues from Murdoch University’s School of Education and one Noongar knowledge holder and Principal Researcher (Rohan) from the Ngangk Yira Institute for Change, Murdoch University. We met weekly for two hours across six weeks. The six cycles corresponded with these weekly gatherings. Each gathering began with an experience led by Rohan (Figure 1) that attuned us to place, time and the more-than-human world. These experiences included walking together, sensory noticing, seasonal attunement and arts-based engagements, followed by individual and collective reflection, dialogue and documentation. In keeping with Cooperative Inquiry, we all were positioned as co-researchers who contributed to the generation, interpretation and articulation of our insights.
Rohan and Kulbardi.
We also met regularly before and after the six formal cycles. These gatherings provided time to build relationships, attend to emerging questions, support the slow, iterative orientation of the work and anchor the six experiences within a broader relational process. While some of us had existing professional relationships, the inquiry was also an opportunity to develop new collegial and research relationships through our shared engagement with Country.
We acknowledge that our inquiry emerged within a broader institutional context supportive of place-responsive and Indigenous-informed work. Murdoch University has a longstanding commitment to environmental challenges, while more recent institutional priorities emphasise relationships with First Peoples (Murdoch University, 2023). Our inquiry brought together colleagues with interests in environmental education, Indigenous knowledges, the arts, relational pedagogies and teacher education. These orientations shaped how we participated in the inquiry and interpreted its implications for university practice.
Experiences were documented using fieldnotes, individual journals, photographic documentation, audio recordings, creative artefacts and written reflections. These materials were treated as relational traces arising from encounters with place and more-than-human beings. Presentational forms such as drawing, movement, assemblage and poetic response were integrated into the analytic process to surface tacit, affective and embodied dimensions. Analysis proceeded iteratively throughout the cycles, with transcripts, images and artefacts revisited and discussed by the group to hold interpretations accountable to the relations within which they emerged.
Creative works were shared during collective reflection sessions as part of each Cooperative Inquiry cycle, although each researcher retained control over their subsequent circulation. Artefacts such as paintings, movement responses, poetic reflections and other presentational works informed our analysis but are not included here, primarily due to the practical constraints of a journal format. Consequently, this article privileges a conventional academic register that does not fully convey the sensory, affective and embodied dimensions through which much of the inquiry was experienced.
Care for shared knowledges and documentation required careful ethical consideration. We did not collect or keep Aboriginal artefacts. Rather, we worked with stories, language and song, as well as documentation arising from our work together: fieldnotes, images, audio and creative responses. We understood this as a trialogical approach (Paavola & Hakkarainen, Reference Paavola and Hakkarainen2005), in which learning occurred through interactions among people, place and the mediating artefacts. Treating such documentation as relational traces, not objects for extraction, meant specifying the conditions under which it could be created, shared or withheld. Rohan reminded us that documentation, particularly photography, can be understood as a form of taking. Protocols therefore involved not only deciding what could be recorded or withheld but also attending to reciprocal practices that return respect, care and acknowledgement to Country. Smoking, singing, calling to Waugal and working with ochre were such reciprocal acts: they acknowledged Country, offered respect and helped restore balance within the relations through which knowledge was shared.
Tiered permissions, negotiated refusals, co-custodianship and attention to relational accountability aligned with Indigenous research ethics (AIATSIS, 2020) and Country-led ways of working grounded in ongoing dialogue, relational consent and place-based obligations (Murphy-May et al., Reference Murphy-May, Smith, Marshall, Daley, Wright and Hodge2026; Yandaarra including Smith et al., Reference Yandaarra including Smith, Smith, Murphy-May, Daley, Wright and Hodge2026).
These methodological commitments guided decisions about what to document, when to document, what to withhold and how to honour the relational life of the works and recordings generated in this study. They shaped the circulation of images, audio and written notes, informed how presentational works were interpreted and supported an ethic of care for people, Country and more-than-human co-participants. These commitments show how relational and embodied practices unfolded and the conditions they created for culturally regenerative work.
Ethical approval was granted by the university’s human research ethics process, with additional protocols implemented to support relational accountability, including negotiated permissions regarding the circulation and storage of images and creative works. In line with Indigenous research ethics (AIATSIS, 2020), participants could withhold materials, request restricted circulation or withdraw contributions from further sharing beyond the group. This methodological approach enabled us to explore how relational, place-responsive ways of working take shape within a university context and how we experienced openings, tensions and responsibilities as we engaged with Country-informed ways of noticing, documenting and reflecting. The following section traces how six Noongar-led experiences shaped the unfolding of the inquiry.
Six Noongar-led experiences
Cycle 1: Walking with plant kin (balga, kwel, bibool) and rain (Figure 2)
This cycle established kinship and responsibility as conditions of inquiry. In a slow walk led by Rohan, balga (grass tree), kwel (sheoak) and bibool (paperbark) were introduced as plant kin embedded in Noongar systems of law/lore, use and obligation. Rohan explained that responsibilities for plant use are not generalised; they are shaped through boorungur (totems) and relations of permission, consultation and restraint. He shared that kwel is one of his boorungur, and that guidance should be sought for its use; balga sits within his brother’s responsibilities, including cultural burning for regeneration, and this requires consultation rather than assumption of access. Through these accounts, kinship was enacted as governance grounded in care and restraint, aligning with Noongar understandings of plants, water and landforms as living relations requiring ongoing care (Wooltorton et al., Reference Wooltorton, Collard and Horwitz2018). Rain was an active presence, retiming pace and attention and sharpening awareness of regeneration as a process involving Country, plants, people and weather.
Walking with plant kin and rain.
Following the walk, we responded through drawing, painting, movement, writing and making. These responses reoriented our understandings about kinship and responsibility, repositioning plants not as species to be observed or resources to be managed, but as teachers within systems of obligation that shaped subsequent cycles, including decisions about permission, restraint and refusal.
Cycle 2: Song as listening (Djinaning-Bo) (Figure 3)
This cycle foregrounded language and song as practices of connection with Country. Rohan sang the ancient Noongar song Djinaning-Bo (“looking afar”), explaining that he sings it when he is off Country to connect back to Noongar Country. Singing here was not a performance for others but an enacted relationship with a living place, orienting the singer toward responsibilities that arise through that relationship. This aligns with Noongar song scholarship that describes song as a mode of relating with Country through which law/lore, memory and responsibility are sustained rather than represented (Bracknell, Reference Bracknell2017, Reference Bracknell2020). The rest of us were not invited to sing the song but to listen. Listening was shaped by respect for Rohan’s relationship with the song and for the responsibilities carried with it, including care around translation, reproduction and circulation. Following the singing, we responded through writing, watercolour, pastel, movement and quiet reflection. Across the group, we noticed our habitual academic impulses toward explanation and analysis being displaced by restraint, attentiveness and a heightened sense of accountability for how knowledge is received and held. Methodologically, this cycle positioned listening as an ethical stance that shaped later decisions about documentation, circulation and refusal.
Looking afar on Boodjar.
Cycle 3: Smoking ceremony as protocol (Figure 4)
This cycle foregrounded protocol as an enacted ethical condition of inquiry. Rohan welcomed the group at the Ngangk Yira yarning circle through a smoking ceremony, using wonnil (peppermint), balga leaves, djiridji (zamia fluff) and dried fungus. Rohan explained the ceremony as a practice of welcome, protection and preparation, clearing harmful energies (warra wirrin) and inviting good spirit (kwop wirrin) before engaging in work on Country. In this framing, the smoking ceremony operated as law/lore rather than ritual, establishing the conditions under which people could come together safely and respectfully. It oriented the group toward humility, attentiveness and care through embodied engagement. Moving through smoke retimed breath and posture, drawing attention away from academic urgency and toward relational presence. Protocol was not ancillary to inquiry but constitutive of it, shaping how responsibility, consent and participation were enacted (Poelina, Perdrisat, et al., Reference Poelina, Perdrisat, Wooltorton and Mulligan2023; Wooltorton et al., Reference Wooltorton, Collard, Horwitz, Poelina and Palmer2020).
Smoking ceremony.
Decisions about documentation were shaped by this protocol. We chose not to film or photograph the ceremony, recognising that not all moments are appropriate for capture or circulation, consistent with ethics of ongoing consent, negotiated refusal and respect for cultural authority (Murphy-May et al., Reference Murphy-May, Smith, Marshall, Daley, Wright and Hodge2026; Yandaarra including Smith et al., Reference Yandaarra including Smith, Smith, Murphy-May, Daley, Wright and Hodge2026).
After the smoking ceremony, we responded through drawing, writing and quiet reflection, recording bodily and attentional changes associated with being welcomed and protected on Country. Through this experience, we came to understand protocol as ethical work: not something secured once through procedural consent, but continually enacted through reciprocity, responsiveness to Country, and discernment about when not to document, circulate or explain.
Cycle 4: Deep time and the rope timeline (Figure 5)
This cycle foregrounded temporality as an ethical and methodological condition of inquiry. Rohan laid out a long rope marked with tags representing tens of thousands of years of Noongar presence, extending through deep time and culminating in the brief period of colonial settlement. Rather than walking the rope, we gathered around it in a circle and read the tags aloud one by one, holding the timeline collectively rather than moving through it individually. Rohan explained the rope as a way of situating the university and the inquiry itself, within continuous Noongar presence, rather than within colonial or institutional chronologies, positioning the inquiry as taking place within living histories that precede and exceed the university (Collard et al., Reference Collard, Harben and van den Berg2004; Wooltorton et al., Reference Wooltorton, Guenther, Poelina, Blaise, Collard and White2022).
Rope timeline.
Standing together around the rope retimed our attention and disrupted our habitual academic orientations toward immediacy and progress. This collective orientation resonates with work in higher education that frames learning with Place as requiring slowness, attentiveness and response-ability, particularly within Cooperative Inquiry approaches that emphasise shared reflection and relational accountability (Sutton et al., Reference Sutton, Bellingham and White2023; Wooltorton et al., Reference Wooltorton, Stephenson, Ardzejewska and Collard2025).
Cycle 5: Embodied attention and djena (Figure 6)
This cycle focused on embodiment as a way of attending to Country. Rohan introduced the practice of marking djena (feet) with white ochre and showed symbols representing beings of Noongar Country, including Yonga (kangaroo), Weitj (emu), Koomool (possum), Djiti Djiti (willie wagtail) and Noongar (humans). He invited us to mark our feet with a symbol and to consider how animals move with Country. Moving attention to our feet disrupted habitual upright, forward-driven walking and drew focus to contact, weight, balance and restraint. Through this embodied attentiveness, we came to think differently about movement as something guided by Country rather than imposed upon it and about care as enacted through responsiveness rather than speed or efficiency (Poelina et al., Reference Poelina, Wooltorton, Harben, Collard, Horwitz and Palmer2020; Wooltorton et al., Reference Wooltorton, Collard, Horwitz, Poelina and Palmer2020).
Djena and ochre.
Methodologically, this cycle clarified embodiment as a disciplined practice of attention: learning how to be present with Country through careful conduct, carrying this attentiveness into later discussion of regeneration and response-ability.
Cycle 6: Greeting Waugal and custodial responsibility (Figure 7)
This final cycle foregrounded custodianship and accountability as relational practices rather than institutional arrangements. Rohan invited us to Bibra Lake and led a ritual to greet Waugal, the Rainbow Serpent and creator and protector of waterways. He showed us how to take sand from the lake’s edge, rub it under our arms to carry our scent and return it to the water while announcing our presence and asking for protection. This practice positioned Waugal as a living, sentient being with whom relation must be established through protocol, permission and respectful conduct.
Booka and Bibra Lake.
The ritual made explicit that engagement with Country is relational, not symbolic. Where we stood, how we moved, what we said and what we did not do, were all part of a law/lore-governed exchange. Responsibility was enacted through asking rather than assuming access, reinforcing themes of restraint, refusal and accountability to more-than-human presences (Poelina et al., Reference Poelina, Wooltorton, Harben, Collard, Horwitz and Palmer2020; Wooltorton et al., Reference Wooltorton, Collard, Horwitz, Poelina and Palmer2020).
Rohan also presented a booka (kangaroo-skin cloak) that he had pyrographically marked over the course of the inquiry with birds, plants and seven connected shapes representing the research group. He explained the booka as a living archive of shared responsibility; decisions about visibility, handling and circulation were shaped by his custodial authority.
We noticed more-than-human presences (Kulbardi (magpies), Wardong (crows), Karrak (red-tailed black cockatoos) and wind moving through Kwel (sheoak)) as co-present rather than incidental, aligning with Indigenous accounts of Country as evidentiary and responsive (Poelina, Perdrisat, et al., Reference Poelina, Perdrisat, Wooltorton and Mulligan2023). This cycle consolidated key orientations of the inquiry: recognising custodial authority, respecting limits on access and circulation and attending to how responsibility is distributed across human and more-than-human relations.
Discussion
Cultural provocation as method and ethics
Across the inquiry, cultural provocations functioned as both method and ethics, rather than as illustrative activities appended to an existing research design. As we walked with plant kin, listened with song, participated in ceremony, traced deep time, moved with ochre-marked feet and greeted Waugal, we reorganised relations between us, Country and knowledge. These experiences foregrounded protocol, permission and attentiveness as conditions of inquiry, aligning with Indigenous-led methodologies that position Country as teacher and participant (Poelina, Perdrisat, et al., Reference Poelina, Perdrisat, Wooltorton and Mulligan2023; Wooltorton et al., Reference Wooltorton, Collard, Horwitz, Poelina and Palmer2020). Within Cooperative Inquiry’s extended epistemology, experiential and presentational knowing were not treated as precursors to propositional insight but as rigorous forms of knowing (Heron & Reason, Reference Heron, Reason, Reason and Bradbury2001, Reference Heron, Reason, Reason and Bradbury2008). At the same time, these modes demanded our ethical discernment: when to document, when to withhold and when refusal itself constituted an ethical and epistemic act (Poelina, Perdrisat, et al., Reference Poelina, Perdrisat, Wooltorton and Mulligan2023). This ethical discernment can be understood through the notion of response-ability, which frames responsibility not as an individual attribute but as an ongoing capacity to respond within specific relations, histories and material conditions (Barad, Reference Barad2007; Haraway, Reference Haraway2016). This unsettled extractive research habits oriented toward capture and representation and instead positioned knowledge as emerging through participation in relational conditions shaped by Country and cultural authority. Framing cultural provocation as method moves beyond inclusion to relational accountability, echoing Indigenous critiques of tokenistic engagement within higher education (Bishop & Tynan, Reference Bishop and Tynan2024; Tynan, Reference Tynan2021). For culturally regenerative universities, this suggests that transformation begins not with inclusion alone but with creating conditions for ethical relations with Country.
Reconfiguring time, attention and academic rhythm
A second cross-cutting reconfiguration concerned temporality. Several provocations, particularly the rope timeline and slow walking in rain, disrupted academic rhythms oriented toward speed, productivity and linear progression. These experiences brought us into relation with deep time, seasonal cycles and continuous Noongar presence, rendering the brevity of colonial and institutional histories palpable (Collard et al., Reference Collard, Harben and van den Berg2004; Wooltorton et al., Reference Wooltorton, Guenther, Poelina, Blaise, Collard and White2022). This re-temporalisation aligns with regenerative scholarship that frames regeneration not as a programme to be implemented but as a way of attending that draws institutions into accountable relation with living places (Wahl, Reference Wahl2016; Wooltorton et al., Reference Wooltorton, Stephenson, Ardzejewska and Collard2025) and with feminist critiques of neoliberal academic tempo that call for slow, collective, care-oriented modes of scholarship (Mountz et al., Reference Mountz, Bonds, Mansfield, Loyd, Hyndman, Walton-Roberts, Basu, Whitson, Hawkins, Hamilton and Curran2015). These temporal reconfigurations raise questions about what kinds of time universities permit and value. Culturally regenerative work requires time to walk, listen, repeat, hesitate and return, conditions that depend on structural support at pedagogical and governance levels (Wooltorton et al., Reference Wooltorton, Stephenson, Ardzejewska and Collard2025). Such temporal reconfigurations invite universities to support slower, place-responsive forms of learning, inquiry and institutional life.
Language, protocol and relational accountability
Protocol operated as lived ethics, for example, the smoking ceremony, greetings to Waugal and decisions not to record or circulate particular moments foregrounded consent and refusal as ongoing, relational processes rather than procedural checkpoints (AIATSIS, 2020; Poelina, Perdrisat, et al., Reference Poelina, Perdrisat, Wooltorton and Mulligan2023). Language was part of this same ethical register. Rohan sang in Noongar and taught us names for birds, plants, greetings and places, situating language as a living relation rather than a set of translations. Our engagement took the form of listening, learning, careful pronunciation and respectful use, rather than performance. Language functioned not as a resource to be acquired but as a relation carrying responsibilities (Kimmerer, Reference Kimmerer2013; Williams, Reference Williams2023). Together, language and protocol oriented us toward relational accountability, an accountability to people, Country and the conditions under which knowledge could ethically emerge (Bawaka Country et al., Reference Burarrwanga, Ganambarr, Ganambarr-Stubbs, Ganambarr, Maymuru, Lloyd, Daley, Suchet-Pearson and Wright2023; Wooltorton et al., Reference Wooltorton, Collard, Horwitz, Poelina and Palmer2020). These enactments exposed the limitations of dominant university ethics frameworks, which are poorly equipped to account for relational consent, more-than-human presence and the ethical status of non-textual forms of knowing (Smith et al., Reference Smith, Marshall, Smith, Wright, Daley and Hodge2022). These practices illustrate how culturally regenerative university work depends upon accountability to Country rather than representation alone.
From relational practice to institutional conditions
The relational practices described above have institutional consequences, not as recommendations to be implemented, but as conditions that must be made possible. Pedagogically, culturally regenerative work requires space for embodied, place-responsive, ceremonial and arts-based engagements that exceed conventional classroom formats (Arts et al., Reference Arts, Roncken, Buijs and Wals2025; van Tol & Wals, Reference van Tol and Wals2025). This includes time, flexibility and recognition of Indigenous knowledge holders as co-authors and co-custodians of learning processes (Wooltorton et al., Reference Wooltorton, Stephenson, Ardzejewska and Collard2025). Governance structures are similarly implicated. Recognising Indigenous authority within inquiry demands more than representation; it requires institutional arrangements that support co-custodianship, acknowledge refusal and honour cultural protocol as legitimate academic work (Knight et al., Reference Knight, Poelina and Wooltorton2025; Wooltorton et al., Reference Wooltorton, Guenther, Poelina, Blaise, Collard and White2022). Documentation and archiving practices also require reconsideration. In our study, stories, language, images, audio and creative responses were treated as relational traces, not inert records. Ethical care centred on conditions of creation, circulation and withholding, consistent with Indigenous research ethics and Country-led approaches to accountability (AIATSIS, 2020; Murphy-May et al., Reference Murphy-May, Smith, Marshall, Daley, Wright and Hodge2026; Yandaarra including Smith et al., Reference Yandaarra including Smith, Smith, Murphy-May, Daley, Wright and Hodge2026). These practices clarified how creative and embodied ways of working unfolded in this inquiry and how they opened both possibilities and frictions for culturally regenerative university work.
These considerations point toward a broader reframing of the university not as a neutral knowledge producer but as an institution situated on Country and accountable to the lands and waters that sustain it (Wooltorton et al., Reference Wooltorton, Guenther, Poelina, Blaise, Collard and White2022). Culturally regenerative practice, as this inquiry demonstrates, does not emerge through policy statements or curricular add-ons. It emerges through lived, relational engagements that reconfigure how knowledge is made, how authority is recognised and how institutions understand their responsibilities to place.
Conclusion: cultural provocation as regenerative practice
This article has shown how Indigenous-led, place-based provocations might reconfigure research, learning and institutional practices toward culturally regenerative university practice. Drawing on a Cooperative Inquiry on Whadjuk Noongar Boodjar, our study demonstrates that such reconfiguration does not emerge through policy or curriculum alone, but through lived, relational engagements that unsettle habitual academic orientations and re-pattern how inquiry is conducted. Rather than treating cultural knowledge as content to be included, the inquiry shows how cultural provocation operates as method and ethics, activating responsibilities to Country, to time and to relations that precede representation.
It is also important to note that this inquiry did not arise in isolation. It emerged within institutional conditions that made collaboration, relationship-building and engagement with Country possible. This suggests that culturally regenerative university practice depends not only on individual commitments but also on universities creating the time, relationships, partnerships, and structures through which learning with Country can occur.
Across the study, we experienced reconfigurations of protocol, language, temporality and more-than-human participation that illuminated the conditions through which culturally regenerative work can emerge. More broadly, this work requires universities to reimagine themselves not as neutral knowledge producers, but as institutions situated on Country, learning with the lands and waters that sustain them. Such reimagining does not offer a template for action but calls for attentiveness, humility and response-ability to the places and relations through which universities come to matter.
Noongar language glossary
Some Noongar terms introduced by Rohan throughout our inquiry:
- Balga
-
Xanthorrhoea sp.; grass tree.
- Ballardong
-
One of the 14 Noongar groups; Ballardong Country lies east of Whadjuk.
- Bibool
-
Paperbark (Melaleuca sp.).
- Bidi
-
Track, path or route; also a learning journey with Country.
- Boodjar
-
Country, land, place.
- Booka
-
Kangaroo-skin cloak
- Djen / djena
-
Foot / feet.
- Djinaning-bo
-
“Looking afar”; a Noongar song inviting relational attention and responsibility.
- Djer djer
-
Blue wren.
- Djiridji
-
Zamia palm – its “fluff” is used as tinder.
- Karrak
-
Red-tailed black cockatoo.
- Katitjin
-
Knowledge; relational knowing.
- Kwel
-
Sheoak (Casuarina sp.).
- Kulbardi
-
Magpie.
- Moort
-
Family, kin.
- Ngangk
-
Sun; also carries the meaning of “mother.”
- Waugal
-
Rainbow Serpent; creator and protector of waterways on Noongar Boodjar.
- Wonnil
-
Peppermint tree.
- Wirrin
-
Spirit, essence, breath. Kwop wirrin: good spirit. Warra wirrin: harmful spirit.
Acknowledgements
We acknowledge Whadjuk Boodjar as teacher, method and participant in this inquiry. We thank Rohan Collard for his cultural leadership, generosity and guidance throughout the six cycles and acknowledge the Ngangk Yira Institute for Change as an important place of gathering, learning and relation for this work. We are also grateful to the anonymous reviewers and editors for their generous and thoughtful engagement with the manuscript.
Financial support
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.
Competing interests
The author(s) would like to disclose that Jane Merewether is an Associate Editor of The Australian Journal of Environmental Education (AJEE). In accordance with AJEE protocols, Dr Merewether was not involved in the editorial process or decision-making regarding this manuscript.
Ethical standard
This research is approved by Murdoch University Human Research Ethics Committee (Project Number: 2025/101).
Author Biographies
Whadjuk Boodjar is the living Country of the Whadjuk Noongar people in south-western Australia. Whadjuk Boodjar encompasses lands, waters, skies, human and more-than-human beings, stories, knowledges, and ongoing relations of care and responsibility. In this inquiry, Whadjuk Boodjar is recognised as teacher, method, participant, and first author.
Jane Merewether I am an Australian woman with Anglo-Celtic ancestry who has always lived and worked on Noongar Boodjar. As a former early childhood educator and now academic, I am committed to feminist, anticolonial and relational approaches to education and research, and I walk alongside Aboriginal colleagues and knowledge holders in ongoing efforts toward truth-telling, decolonisation and ecological justice.
Rohan Collard I am a Balladong Wadjuk Nyungar from the southwest region of WA. Everything I do is because of those who came before me, my ancestors. The information and stories I have shared throughout this project are not mine alone; they are shared knowledge that has been passed down over millennia.
Peter Robert Wright I am Australian (Awabakal) born son of first-generation immigrants spending the early part of my life living overseas and then working on both sides of the country. My life is committed to Education, working across sectors and life stages towards cultural and social justice, social imagination and the ways they are mediated in and through the Arts.
Allison Bell I am a multigenerational Australian woman born on Nipaluna, Lutruwita (Hobart, Tasmania). Having lived across Australia, Noongar Boodjar is the Country I have come to know most deeply and where I am proud to live, work and create. I am committed to authenticity, inclusivity and Arts-based education. I seek to engage with place through relational, responsible and culturally respectful practices.
Sian Chapman I am Australian born on Noongar Boodjar of a first-generation Anglo-Celtic immigrant father and multi-generation Australian mother. Growing up on Bindjareb land in ‘the country’ has now developed into learning more deeply ‘about Country’ and how collaborative place-based projects can provide opportunities for growth and development.
Janene Sproul I was born on Menang Noongar Country, a third-generation Australian woman. I pay respect to this ancient land and ancient culture shared by many thousands of knowledge holders, coming to my ears through this project. My vocation is education, to facilitate and reimagine nature connections for children and adults facing circumstantial barriers.
Kimberley Beasley I am a multigenerational Australian woman of Anglo-Celtic ancestry. I was born on Gayamagal Country and grew up on Wiradjuri Country, both in New South Wales. I now live, work and raise my children on Noongar Boodjar in Western Australia. I hold a deep love for and connection with Country, particularly through plants. I am especially committed to supporting young children to develop love and care for/with/of Country through place-based pedagogies and relational research methods.
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