Colonial memories in landscapes and waterways: the vital materialism of troubling childhood histories

This article shares a postqualitative, new materialist approach to memory work and storytelling, foregrounding the entangled colonial histories embedded in water and landscape. With its life-giving properties, water is a vital matter through which we can rethink histories to connect with the more-than-human and decolonise ourselves. Using new materialism, we create a watery assemblage (images and text) to challenge our thinking around the colonial histories embedded in the waterscapes. We consider situated epistemologies that emerge through thinking with water, waterways, landscapes, humans, and the more-than-human. Vital materialism enables engagement with the shame, violence, and humiliation of colonisation and invasion. We trouble the histories of our childhoods to rewrite memories of the landscape. This post-qualitative convergence, read through childhood memory, enables us to consider the tensions of First Nations, colonial and postcolonial imprints on place and how we, as researchers, are transformed by this encounter. The initial recall of memory often carries a perspective of childhood innocence. Engagement with childhood memories, evoked through visual imagery, memory drawings, objects, and photographs, opens up tangible spaces to critically amplify ethical encounters with human and beyond human connections.