Deep Timetable

This book is a Nyungar history of Western Australia's rail network, providing an overview of the myriad Aboriginal contributions both regionally and inter-generationally to the rail network's construction, extension and operation. But the book's focus is broader, showing how post-1905 government policies of racial segregation, family break-up, and child removal, depended critically on the existence of convenient transportation, while contributing Elders refused any victimhood narrative, instead emphasising the role rail played in employment, housing - and limited escape from Native Welfare surveillance. The phrase 'deep timetable' refers to a precolonial communications network of bidi (tracks) and kaleeps (camping places, water sources) that formed the basis of infrastructural colonisation. It expresses the profound cultural difference between two understandings of how places are connected and people related.

Information for the project came through interviews, work records from the Western Australian Gauge Railway's archives, and 'Nyungar-on-Nyungar' yarning sessions, representing a decisive break with conventional ethnographic research. As a narrative method, yarning re-enacts memory as a journey in the present. Destinations and distances are irrelevant, what counts is relating, in both senses of the word. In this context, Deep Timetable is also an ambitious oral history project, weaving continuities of consciousness between one generation and the next.