*Warami Wellamabami Didjergura Ngara*

This is the acknowledgement that I used when presenting this paper to the conference that inspired this collection of papers. *Welcome wherever you are from. Thank you for listening.* This greeting in the Dharug language, recognized the commonality between myself as a speaker and the listeners in my audience. Unlike the ethical presence of spoken delivery to an audience, however, distillation in print delays or even avoids conversational engagement, where ideas might be contested, responded to, refined and revised. The immediacy of the face-to-face relationship of speaker and audience creates both invitation and challenge. Presenting the paper as text renders our relationship as detached writer-and-reader, rather than as listeners-to-each-other sharing time-and-place. It separates us from each other in time and place—even though we share both time (Anthropocene) and place (Earth).

As a geographer, I have spent several decades grappling with relational concepts of time–space, place and scale. Let me stretch across time, place and scale to open my invitation and challenge to you by acknowledging Dharug Nura and Dharug yura, the Country and Ancestors of the First People of the Wallumattagul clan, the Wullamai black snapper fish people, of the Dharug Nation. I pay respect to their Elders past, present, emerging and future, the wisdom and knowledge passed down through their generations, and the Dharug knowledge being generated in the present. I also acknowledge the Indigenous peoples of the places where many of you are reading this paper, and the Indigenous peoples of Taiwan, where many of these ideas were discussed and debated in the conference that gave rise to this special issue of Sustainability.
