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Taking the universal character of child play as both the common ground of meaning-making and a pathway to self-consciousness and, more fundamentally, to being-in-the-world, I interpret in this essay a small number of play stories by a young Anangu girl in natural social settings, that is, in the milieu of her family into which I had been included as a researcher and friend since the early 2000s. At the time, the three-year-old girl, whom I call Lila, was living in a small remote settlement on the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara (APY) Lands in the arid northern part of South Australia. Like most of her female peers, from about two years of age she had begun to use a traditional technique of presenting thoughts in the sand.
There are several, evolving reasons for my focus on the personal and cultural meanings of the play configurations by one child at a particular time in her life. Initially this was conceived