Before I go and start borrowing books on it, I wanted to check online resources, as they’re sometimes a better place to find a culmination of information that’s otherwise been ignored by standard places of education and knowledge—that information being Indigenous Australian Knowledge. As acknowledgement grows and reconciliation becomes a bigger part of non-Indigenous Australia (and therefore the part of Australia that manages all of the social systems), there has been a great increase in access to learning about local Indigenous knowledge. And that’s not to say that it’s never been there, but that it’s importance has been overlooked by general non-Indigenous Australians and so it wasn’t regarded as centrally important. When I was doing research on the Noongar Country of Australia, I was surprised that I spent hours scouring the library and databases and only found about six books, with only three being written by Indigenous Australians and one of them being a picture book. I found it a lot easier to find information online by searching for First Nations led pages where they collected history and culture. And so that’s why I started with a Google search.

“history of Meanjin” is what I typed in, and what I got were links to the literary journal “Meanjin”. There was one question under “People also ask” and one video link at the bottom that was actually related to Meanjin as Indigenous Australian country. And that’s a quick representation of part of the problem.

One article was from NITV about the journal having crossed out the “anjin” and replaced it with “Too” as part of the #MeToo movement, and how it sparked backlash. Why? Click on over and read about it: Meanjin debacle: erasing Aboriginal words in order to highlight white women’s appropriation.

And so that is my starting point. I type in the name of Country and what comes up is a bunch of articles about a magazine that don’t even acknowledge the origin of the name. The magazine itself might acknowledge First Nations People, but that isn’t the whole problem.

If I type in “history of Meanjin country”, I get much of the same links, but with some more mentions as to where the word came from. Granted, I think Meanjin is technically the land and upon it are Turrbal and Jagera Country, but I was still hoping it would have a lot less about a quarterly journal and a lot more about the history of the very land that journal operates on. And so, I start digitally digging.