Gurung Dharug Ngurrawa (kids on Dharug Country) – centring children’s experiences of Indigenous-led tourism
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Dadd, Lexodious
Norman, Corina
Possum, Venessa
Graham, Marnie
Suchet-Pearson, Sandie
Narwal, Harriet
Scott, Rebecca
Lemire, Jessica
Suchet-Pearson, Rhian
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In this article, we centre the voices and experiences of children engaged over several years in Indigenous tourism initiatives on Dharug Country (Dharug Ngurra) in Western Sydney, Australia. As Dharug and non-Indigenous researchers within the Dharug-led Yanama Budyari Gumada collective (Darug Ngurra et al, 2019, 2020a, 202b, 2021), we dialogue with our gurung, our children, who walked so patiently and with such great curiosity alongside us as we hosted over 25 Darug culture camps involving over 900 participants at Yellomundee Regional Reserve between 2017 and 2022. We dialogue on our experiences of hosting visitors and of learning together for many years on-Dharug Ngurra – learning in myriad ways from each other and from Dharug Ngurra – in a process we call ‘spirals of connection’. This dialogue contributes to addressing the critical gap of children’s voices in tourism literature. Given childhood education is understood as “an important site for the circulation of discourses pertaining to colonisation and reconciliation” (Maddison & Stastny, 2016), we also contribute towards understanding the ways that kids being, loving and learning together on-Country might influence their relationships to Country, culture, and to each other. As we follow how our gurung are learning their respective responsibilities to Dharug Ngurra, we argue governments and corporations alike have much to learn from our gurung. As our gurung tell us, all kids should have the opportunity to learn on-Country. We argue one important way that governments and corporations might step up to their responsibilities to Country is by supporting kids being and learning on Country.
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Tourism Geographies
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© 2024 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent.
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Dharug Ngurra; Dadd, L; Norman, C; Possum, V; Graham, M; Suchet-Pearson, S; Narwal, H; Scott, R; Lemire, J; Suchet-Pearson, R, Gurung Dharug Ngurrawa (kids on Dharug Country) – centring children’s experiences of Indigenous-led tourism, Tourism Geographies, 2024