AN ABORIGINAL AUSTRALIAN who is a Nyikina woman, and a man and a woman from European backgrounds – all writers and cultural theorists – ponder the meaning and power of a River that has flowed for thousands of years, in northern Western Australia’s Kimberley. We ponder and share understandings about Australia as a colonised nation, the permeable boundaries between non-­fiction and fiction and the interconnected contemporaneous qualities of culture, people, history and the environment. Still thinking, worrying and talking about Martuwarra, regularly known and mapped as the Fitzroy River, Anne Wagaba Poelina tells how well she knows the River from Nyikina stories, experience, cultural life and knowledge handed down to her from family and past generations. Each of us conversationally and experientially understands that stories will always be transferred to those learning about Martuwarra from Wagaba and other Aboriginal people in the Kimberley’s Fitzroy Valley with deep-­time connections to the River. Each of us also knows from individual learning and collaborative research that the realism of the River’s creation and its life-­giving qualities are meant to be for all human and interrelated life. 

Wagaba remembers the day she got a message from senior Ngarinyin Elder and a man of high degree, Paddy Nyawarra, to come to the Mowanjum Community near the port town of Derby, to meet with him, and from this time she speaks to the true story he relayed.