‘People come and go, but this place doesn’t’: Narrating the creation of the Krowathunkooloong Keeping Place as cultural resurgence

Koori Elders on Gunai Kurnai Country planned and fought for the creation of the Krowathunkooloong Keeping Place alongside their fight for self-determined medical and social services and land rights.We, the cultural manager of the Keeping Place, Kurnai Monero Ngarigo man Rob Hudson, and white colonist historian Shannon Woodcock, narrate in this paper how the community fought to create the Keeping Place through using the methodology that Elders gave to us in the Keeping Place itself.Rob's telling of history from the time of European invasion until the opening of the Keeping Place in 1994 manifests the Keeping Place's purpose, welcoming all Koori and non-Indigenous people into relationship with unceded Country and how we share it, in our scholarship as well as in everyday life.The Koori community on Gunai Kurnai Country opened the Krowathunkooloong Keeping Place in Bairnsdale in 1994.We write this article to you from this place -300 kilometres east of Wurundjeri Country, where the city of Melbourne is located.This paper shares how the founders of the Krowathunkooloong Keeping Place understood the history of European invasion and then narrates their work to create the Keeping Place within this colonial history.This article is grounded in the fact that Gunai Kurnai people are of this Country, and that this Country relies on Gunai Kurnai care for all relationships.Gunai Kurnai people constitute an 'ecology 1 Quote by Uncle Russell Mullett, interview with the authors, 6 July 2020.2 Simpson, As We Have Always Done, 8.