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In my language we say Yindyamarra Winhanganha — Wiradjuri Elders have translated this central ethos into English as, “the wisdom of knowing how to live well in a world worth living in,” and it acts as a tether for our relationships to each other and to the world. As a trans/non-binary Aboriginal person in their late 50s, that ethos requires me to do anti-colonial work, to challenge the colonial project of gender (and everything else), and to resist the reductive containment of colonial rule. As with Yindyamarra Winhanganha, the answer to how we do this work is why we do this work. 

There has been no cession with the colonizer. No treaty, no agreement. We assert our sovereignty in spite of that, by making our world a place worth living in and inhabiting it through our complexities.  

My sibling, writer and Indigenous researcher Dr. David Hardy, died this year at the age of 62. In 2015, he wrote Bold: Stories from Older Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Intersex People, a book that gathered the complex and varied stories of over 50 older queer people. As a queer Wiradjuri person, David’s life’s work was to highlight stories rarely told, stories to prepare the community for a more informed future. In the days before his death, he worked with the Centre for Global Indigenous Futures to set up a fund to support advocacy for older queer Indigenous people, someone David knew he would never be. 

Yindyamarra Winhanganha, even when you cannot be in the world. 

Through Indigenous survivance — an active continuance, the ongoing generation of our stories and communities — Indigenous theorists remind us that we are always connected to both the future and our past, and that if Aboriginal people are queer now then there have always been queer Aboriginal people. Because of course there have. Trans people everywhere did not just appear when we had access to greater rights, but those rights made our visibility greater. And for colonized people, it afforded us a strategy of engaging with the colony on our own terms.  

Yindyamarra Winhanganha, the world for us, not the colonizer.

And there are those in the queer settler community who seek to understand their queerness by borrowing ours or their imagined version of ours, seeing us as a primitive, spiritual link to their own past. As a professor of Indigenous Studies my work intersects with Queer Studies, and I am frequently asked by fellow Queer Studies scholars to provide an ancient history of trans and gender-diverse Aboriginal people. That is: Proof. I am asked to provide proof that we always were, pre-invasion, pre-colonial, pre, pre, pre. Frequently the request comes as they attempt to connect their histories with Indigenous histories, a fantasy gotcha of how we provide a “missing link” for them. I explain that the future is the past is the present. If we existed now, we existed then, and we exist in the future. And this is, usually, wholly unacceptable for them. They want their own version of proof. 

Yindyamarra Winhanganha, what is now has always been.  

Proof is a slippery slope, in part because history presents a messy and unreliable record, but also because historical proof in relation to gender is often unavailable. Sex characteristics, perhaps, but gender as an expression of who we are requires some means of transmission from subject to interpreter. Since 2009, I have worked on multiple projects focused on the representation of Indigenous peoples in museums, including one exploring the ways in which the archive is binary-gendered despite a total lack of proof. 

In European Ice Age art we see figures like Venus of Willendorf or Lion Man, figures made over 25,000 years ago, and there is no record to suggest who made them or why. We rely solely on modern interpretation. Imagine for a moment that you are entering a museum as a young non-binary person, eager to see representation of people like you. You look at the Venus of Willendorf, a figure that perhaps looks like you, curvy with a rounded belly.  You read the wall text and it tells you she, her. It describes a figure of a woman. 

But you know you aren’t a woman, and this figure looks like you. 

Did they get it wrong? 
What does it tell you about the person who wrote that description? 
Or do you think that perhaps there have never been people like you? 
That people outside of the binary have just arrived?

The “proof” these curators are providing is their own gendered perspective. The art may represent sex characteristics, though decisions on that basis are often suspect for figurative portrayals. But museum visitors are provided no proof for these gendering decisions, and for many objects it could not possibly be provided. They provide no proof, but will people demand it in the future? 

Yindyamarra Winhanganha, a world for our future, a world for our present.

When my brother David wrote Bold, he started with his story but then wrote and asked others to write their own, across an age range often excluded in discussions of queerness. Not the low-hanging fruit of imagining queerness as shiny and new, but the brilliance of queer continuity. 

Of what it is to be in an aged-care setting, 
of what it is to have lived through the HIV/AIDS Crisis of the 1980s and come out scathed but still here, 
of the arrests, 
of the exclusions, 
of the love, 
of the celebrations.
Of the complexity. 

Yindyamarra Winhanganha, survivance, continuity.

Yindyamarra Winhanganha, there is no cession.