Ngapulara Ngarngarnyi Wirra (Our Family Tree) Tracker Data Project Adam Goodes, Angie Abdilla & Baden Pailthorpe MOD, University of South Australia, Adelaide, February-November 2022 What is the link between ancient Aboriginal knowledge systems, biometric data, the direction of the wind, satellite surveillance, AI and a very old sacred wirra (tree) deep in Adnyamathanha Country?
The link runs through Adam Goodes and his deep ancestral connections. For the past four years, we, Adam Goodes, Angie Abdilla and Baden Pailthorpe, have been slowly and consciously working with Adnyamathana Custodians and Yarta (Country) in an effort to navigate some of the most complex questions of our time.
FEB/MARCH 2022
“Every AFL game Adam Goodes played, his body was tracked 10 times per second via a global network of satellites and a small device on his back.” Whilst this surveillance is standard for all AFL players, the origins of Marngrook, its requirement to have a spatial consciousness spanning 360 degrees and the historical and ongoing surveillance of Aboriginal people in Australia means that the tracking of Aboriginal footballers has a vexed cultural and political significance. During the most intense phase of racism which Adam endured, he escaped the AFL season and the intense scrutiny of the media to return to his Adnyamathana
Yarta. While there, he was called by an ancient ancestral wirra (red river gum tree, pronounced ‘widda’). The entanglement of Adam’s biometric data within the metaphysics of Aboriginal knowledge systems has remained invisible, until now. Adam’s phenomenal spatial awareness and his kinship connections are linked to and rooted in an alternate cultural and scientific paradigm. Multiple traces of these patterns were recorded in his data when he played yet remained invisible due to the Western epistemology of sport science. This is not new or unique to sport—as Bruce Pascoe points out, the ancient Greeks saw the space between stars in the night sky as empty, whereas Aboriginal peoples’ observations of the night skies reveal celestial articulations which are full of life and an alternate philosophy of science born from the dark spaces between stars. The key difference between Western and Aboriginal peoples’ paradigms is that the latter is centred by deep and complex relational interconnections, rooted by Country (earth, waterways and skies combined) and kinship systems. The Tracker Data Project exhibition, at the Museum of Discovery (MOD.), reveals the cultural knowledges within Adam’s AFL data through the Adnyamathanha kinship system—a system based on two moieties with specific characteristics: Ararru (North Wind) and Mathari (South Wind). Adam belongs to the Ararru moiety.
