In the passage, Winch confronts the audience with August and Missy’s experience at the Historical Museum Australia to challenge the concept of ownership and the sovereignty of Aboriginal people in the face of Western Law. Missy’s justification for taking the photo follows the idea that “this is a painting of our country and I’m her elder, so I’m giving her permission to take a photo”. Here, Missy underpins her actions with her cultural authority and partnership with the land, which she refers affirmingly to as “our country”, which encapsulates the Aboriginal worldview on ownership that is centred around cultural and spiritual connection to land. Similarly, in Deborah Bird Rose’s ‘Nourishing Terrains’ there is an introduction to the idea that “humans are only one aspect.…show more content… Rose subverts the reader's understanding of ownership from a life-centred perspective, a Westernised worldview that sees land as a resource to mine and yield from, to a more conservationist, Aboriginal perspective, where country is seen as land to yield to, an “ecosystem” that is built upon the interrelationships of all natural entities in the same biospherical location, not just humans. Winch emphasised the importance of Aboriginal ownership of land through the desperation of Missy as she “jabbed her finger at the glass”. ‘Can you see through this?’” she pleads to August. The symbolic imagery of glass is a metaphorical representation of the colonisers’ enforcement of ownership as it physically separates Aboriginal people from the “documents under glass” cases. Large books, the first signatures. [the] painted map of where the rivers were from”, all culturally significant ancestral artefacts. Aunt Missy urges August to look past the glass cases, to discover her culture and history, hidden beneath the glass cases of Western
