Deep Timetable is a Nyungar history of Western Australia’s rail network. 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 alludes to two profoundly different understandings of how places are connected and people related. 

Information for the project came from documentary sources, notably employment records kept in the Western Australian Government Railways’ archives, but most importantly from over fifty ‘Nyungar-on-Nyungar’ yarning sessions. In a departure from conventional ethnographic method, participating Elders determined which memory tracks and railway places were visited.

Deep Timetable captures the profoundly ambiguous impact of the spreading rail network on Aboriginal life. Contributing Elders emphasised the positive role rail played in empoyment, housing – and limited escape from Native Welfare surveillance. At the same time, post-1905 government policies of racial segregation, family break-up and child removal, depended critically on the existence of convenient transportation: better connections often meant easier separation. 

As a narrative method, yarning re-enacts memory as a journey in the present.Destinations and distances are secondary, what counts is relating, in both senses. Talking about the rail network like this turns it into a network of family survival. Weaving continuities of consciousness between one generation and the next, it shows how a beleaguered community repeatedly found ways to make the system work for them.

Paul Carter is a writer, artist and cultural theorist, Professor of Design (Urbanism) at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia.