Tonight we had the privilege of sitting on the pindan dunes amongst all the cockle shells listening to Bart Pigram, Uncle Peter Peter's and another Elder tell stories of their time as children on Kennedy Hill, Broome, Western Australia.

Here I am sitting bare-chested in the warm glow, faint light at night in a cabin I’ve hand-built from mud pile to shiny tin roof.

At the center of what I have enjoyed for most of my life is as a creative, teacher and the mixed and decadent world of the artist, the aesthete. When I see things, hear things, smell things, touch things….

For those who exist in the lockstep, sleepwalking world of consumerist society the research journey seems only a fast way to another ticket, another accreditation. That reality though is an experiential mission, through moments of critical reflection, the hovering self, the form that is part of the physical body on the ground but the spiritual capacity to see oneself out of body so to speak.

The PhD research provides the reader with an ethnographic account and evidence of how networked technologies connected via the Internet which was purported to bring great freedoms for humanity, yet may in fact be the vehicle facilitating the very opposite, the death of privacy.

If Singularity was a supposed benefit to humanity then why are we all losing our ability to see, hear and feel our way forward as human beings? I suspect that it is far more insidious than the Singularity nirvana we are being told is technology led and determined. 

There are a myriad of issues that come from writing in first person for PhD examiners and supervisors alike. This often poses issues for students who struggle with correlative, summative or extrapolative composition of data from multiple sources

I’ve now compiled a detailed list of the interviewees (confirmed participants) and the general setup, tools, backups and so on. I’ve also struck upon another issue that I’d wished I’d been informed of prior to engaging in a semi-structured interview format.

I have heard it said that during a Ph.D. life just happens. Our families and children still need us. We get physically (and mentally) sick and we need time to heal again. Our work colleagues notice our absences both in mind and spirit.

I am sitting here in Broome, Western Australia next to a young Aboriginal Nyikina man who is wearing a GPS anklet bracelet that confines him to the city limits of this small and isolated city in the far northwest of the Kimberley region of Western Australia.

I am writing this in one of the foulest moods I’ve ever experienced to date whilst trying to complete a Ph.D. after so many interruptions and life’s challenges.

In October 2016 I worked with Filmmaker and Researcher Dr. Magali McDuffie to produce together a visualization of the collaborative process that McDuffie has employed when working with the Nyikina community in the Kimberley region of Western Australia.

“… to consider the anthropocene as Dr. Anne Poelina posits means contemplating the end of the anthropocene, where long after these ‘civilisations’ as we see them appear then they will also disappear and the only role we have as custodians and visitors to country is to leave it in as best condition as we found it, where the technologies of today must be considered in the fuller picture of what impact they have on each other now.”

The researcher engaged with Vance Stevens from Webheads International in an interview which was broadcast via the WebHeadsInAction, Learning2gether 341 in Hangouts on Air via web conference (Hayes and Stevens 2016) on Sunday, August 14, 2016.

On the 11th August 2016 I attended the thesis presentation by Dr. Magali McDuffie by invitation from the Nulungu Institute, Notre Dame University, Broome in Western Australia.