‘Collaboration’ is a word commonly used within silos of industry, sectors, disciplines and communities. It is a term and approach used so that these silos might work together to create inter – industry, sector, disciplinary and community outcomes. In most cases, it is generally understood that collaboration happens between two or more people or an organisation of people, and that they are working together to achieve the same outcome. Dependent on the collaborators and the outcome desired, agreed to monitoring systems, communication modes, and ways of working are utilised to undertake the act of collaboration (O’Flynn and Wanna, 2008)(Mattessich et al., 2001). However, this way of seeing and using collaboration restrains the concept to a controlled process with a beginning and end and with a clear set of agreed upon players and milestones from the outset. This method of collaboration, on Larrakia Country, too often reinforces hierarchal colonial power structures and has ignored significant parts of the community and furthermore the ecology in which the community lives within.

Within some creative practice, and within some other sectors, collaboration has moved beyond these fixed structures to claim collaboration as a live, evolving process that is in partnership with live, evolving collaborators. This collaborative process provides more space for evolution within the development process but quite often still has a final definitive output. A different approach to area of creative practice - community and cultural development hones in on the process, at times forgoing the output all together, Eleanor Jackson a poet, performer, arts producer and advocate, in community engagement leader Jade Lillie’s resource; The Relationship is the Project: Working with Communities simply puts “We can start by looking at collaboration itself as an artform, a process that is as creative as the work it seeks to produce” (Jackson in Lillie et al., 2020, p. 33). The Karrabing Film Collective from the Belyuen community on Larrakia Country further enlivens collaboration’s potential:

“The sin-gularity of the concept (collaboration) also implies a mode of copres- ence that would otherwise not exist but for the deliber- ate intention of working together, raising the question: is it collaboration when the formation is already a set of relations among people who have lived with, loved, hat- ed, and helped each other forever, relations of timeless duree and meaning? Here, we remember Rex Edmunds’ statement that Karrabing means “as the tide comes in, coming together.” This describes a group of people who, like the tides, come together and move apart as different functions of their lives converge and dissipate, neither as a once-off nor as a constant steady state, but as a continuation of relational practices” (Lea and Povinelli, 2018, p. 41).

This visceral thinking around collaboration presents collaboration as inherently entangled.