The practice of historical archaeology is often interdisciplinary, but the relationships between archaeology and other disciplines are not often explicitly analysed. A characteristic national strand of archaeology, which crosses the boundaries between historical and Aboriginal archaeology, is developing in Australia. So it is timely to consider specific ideas for relating Indigenous oral history and historical archaeology. In our research partnership with Yarrawarra Aboriginal Corporation, which was aimed at understanding Aboriginal place knowledges, we develop the concept of conversation for analysing the research process between archaeology and oral history. We define co-opting conversations as the most usual conversations engaged in between disciplines, research paradigms and between scientific and Indigenous knowledges. We then identify several more productive kinds of conversation that occurred between oral history and archaeology in our research: intersecting, parallel, complementary and contradictory. We found contradictory conversations, usually regarded as failures by other researchers, yielded the most productive analytic understandings. As a result of these different types of conversations we were able to produce a richer understanding of "placeness" ('sensu' Mayne and Lawrence 1998). The richest understandings of place at Yarrawarra develop only through such interdisciplinary conversations.

Gumbaingirr Aboriginal people at Corindi Beach, a small town in coastal northern New South Wales (NSW), have lived a self-sufficient lifestyle for over a hundred years, outside the systems of government reserves and missions which existed elsewhere in Australia in the twentieth century. Adapting to a land tenure which included formal 'permissive occupancy leases' in the early twentieth century, the Corindi Beach living places are now on Aboriginal land, having been granted legally under a successful land claim in 1985 (Murphy et al. 2000). The Corindi Beach people have therefore resisted domination from white control, and kept traditional history, culture and language alive, alongside new ways of living. Tony Perkins (a Garby Elder) says 'A long time ago we'd keep it all in out heads and we'd pass on something that way ... Now we [are] better off researching everything, recording everything, getting it all down' (Beck et al. 2002:40). This chapter documents how the Corindi Beach people have continued in their efforts to resist domination, and Tony explains how in 1987 the Yarrawarra Aboriginal Corporation was set up to carry out this work, and how it became a partner in the Yarrawarra Place Stories Project.