tunapri

A Published Event, Fall, now a river…

tunapri is a palawa (Tasmanian Aboriginal) word meaning “knowledge”. It has various uses today. Ningina tunapri is the title of an exhibition about palawa culture at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery. The University of Tasmania offers tunapri rrala scholarships for palawa students.

tunapri reflects the knowledge that is being recovered by palawa today. For non-palawa, it provides a chance to think again about the nature of knowledge as property. Like many common goods, knowledge has become privatised in Western cultures as something to the purchased by students in order to obtain qualifications or to be bought and sold as intellectual property. But one of the discoveries from our mapping of the Indo-Pacific is the value of goods that are produced as “offerings”, whether for a personal sense of gratitude or contribution to a commonwealth. This resonates with emerging forms of post-capitalism in the West such as Wikipedia.

The story behind this issue is the value of creative practice as a knowledge that can be passed on to others in the form of an object.

This story follows an unexpected journey across the Pacific. We find in Latin America many parallel projects for offering knowledge, not only of the beautiful crafts traditions that are passed on but also the painful losses experienced in recent times.

Special thanks to Greg Lehman for offering us “tunapri”. Our gratitude goes also to Michelle Boyde, Kit Wise, John Vella and the kind offerings of our authors who have shared their stories with us.

Quarterly essay