Welcome everyone, to 100 Climate Conversations at the Powerhouse Museum. As always, I’d like to begin by acknowledging the Traditional Custodians of the ancestral homelands upon which the Powerhouse museums are situated. We respect their Elders, ancestors and recognise this sovereignty was never ceded. To the Gadigal people whose land this talk is being recorded on, I acknowledge that the colonisation of this continent started here. I acknowledge your resistance and your resilience and that despite violent attempts, your cultures, peoples, your waters, your animals, your land is still here. Today, as I mentioned, is number 71 of 100 conversations happening every Friday. Thank you to everyone who’s tuning into the podcast every week and to our live audience for your ongoing support. We’re recording live today in the Boiler Hall of the Powerhouse Museum. Before it was home to the museum, it was the Ultimo Power Station, interestingly. Built in 1899, it supplied coal-powered electricity to Sydney’s tram system right into the 1960s. So, in the context of this architectural artefact, we’re shifting our focus forward to the innovations of the net zero revolution. My name’s Rachel Hocking and I’m a Warlpiri woman from the Tanami desert in the Northern Territory. My grandmother is from a place called Lajamanu. It’s about 500 kilometres southwest of Katherine, in Spinifex Country. Lajamanu is actually on Gurindji land and it’s important for me to acknowledge that while mostly Warlpiri people live there, my people are visitors because we were moved off our ancestral homelands about 60 years ago. I’ve lived and worked on Gadigal land for most of the past eight years. So, I’m a visitor here as well. I have deep respect for the people who’ve taught me about this country. The similarities, but most importantly, the differences with my own peoples and Country. I’ve worked as a journalist and editor, curator, mentor, but I prefer to call myself a storyteller. Sitting next to me is Professor Anne Poelina, who is a Nyikina Warrwa woman from the Kimberley region of Western Australia. She is an active community leader, human and Earth rights advocate, filmmaker and respected academic researcher. Anne is the Murray Darling Basin inaugural First Nations appointment to its Independent Advisory Committee on Social, Economic and Environmental Sciences. And she’s a member of the Institute for Water Futures at the Australian National University. She is also the chair of the Martuwarra Fitzroy River Council, fighting to ensure that this river is protected for all generations to come. We’re so thrilled to have her join us today, please put your hands together and welcome Anne. Anne, thank you for joining me.

Thank you very much. Maboo Barra Ngajanoo nilawal Anne Poelina Ngayoo Mandajarra Nyikina Ngayoo Nyikina Nganka on Gadigal Land Ngayoo Maboo Ngoorinyin Nganka Liyan Boorroo. So, in my language I said, ‘G’day. I am a woman from the Fitzroy River, the Martuwarra, the Martuwarra means river of life’. And what I said in my language was the river is everything. It formed our identity, our culture, our humanity. So, it’s really important — one of the things our Elders say is, ‘Stay humble, sit on the ground’. So, all of these pieces of paper, it’s really to bring me to a point where I realised as an Indigenous person from this country that there’s amazing wisdom that Indigenous people from this country hold and this wisdom is coming as a gift to fellow Australians. I feel really positive in what I said in my Ngayoo Liyan Booroo, that in my spirit I feel good to come and talk and share with all of you today because my spirit feels alive and wanting to communicate. I think one of the things not only do we need to stay humble and stay on the ground, but all of these things brings me to a point where I want to see on my tombstone when I go, and my grandson watches this film in many, many years to come, that I was a good and decent human being. Because to be a human being is a gift. It is an honour to be human because we can think, we can reason, we can make judgement, we can think about what we do and how we do it and why we do it. So, from that perspective, all those bits of paper are important, they are capital. They move me through many systems because one of the things I’m saying is that we are dealing with complexity, so we need collective wisdom. So, if we do not have, particularly in terms of climate and climate change and what I call climate chaos, if we do not have the oldest culture in the world that comes from systems thinking and science, which is what we come from as Indigenous people, we come from eugenics, we practice eugenics, who you could marry, how you could marry. Why was that important? Anthropology, archaeology and astronomy. All of these things is– showing you that this nation holds a wisdom that is not available anywhere else on the planet. But because we live on one planet, Mother Earth, we must be part of how do we build the solutions to right-size the planet so we can go from climate chaos to a climate chance? Because really this moment in time is not about us. When you come to my age, we say we are going down, people. Our duty of care is how do we transmit this knowledge across the generations, not just to Indigenous people, but what my people call, ‘wake up the snake’. How do you wake up the consciousness of the people to bring the people with you? I feel as a scientist and a global scientist, because I work right across the planet, is that I feel that we are a little bit testosteroned-out on science and that we need different ways to tell the story. And that’s why film and these podcasts and all of these things are so important to touch the hearts and the minds of people, to bring them on the journey with us. So, that’s why story and telling story and the cultures we come from, you and I, is all about story. And so, this is a really amazing time. I actually say the wisest people I know in the world cannot read and write. So, this is about the fact that we live in a pluriverse, not a universe, that we need this collective thinking because we are coming into a time where climate chaos is such a real thing across the globe, not just in our Country. And so, my story is about realising that this ancient wisdom from the beginning of time — Bookarrakarra, means the past, the present and the future fused into this moment in time in which we as human beings need to act responsibly. So, a long introduction, but thank you for the opportunity to meet with you and to share this conversation and to have people in the audience sitting with us. It’s a precious thing because this is one of the things I’ve learned— all we have in the world is time and energy, and we have to think, how do we use that for the best way forward? So, I just wanted to say thank you for our fellow human beings sitting in the audience to recognise that they have a place to play in the story we’re sharing today.

That’s right Anne. Thank you so much. I think it’s a really important reminder as well. There are universities that exist outside of brick walls. Someone once said to me, ‘The greatest university is under the trees, under the stars’. And so, to move away from these ideas and to share these ideas with other people and to broaden our thinking, to challenge our thinking is so important. I wondered if you could take us back to start for a lot of the audience, to people who are listening to this, who have probably never been to your Country. To paint a picture of what it was like for you growing up. What did it look like? What did it feel like? What did it smell like when you were younger?

Yes, it’s pretty interesting how you go from six to 65 and plus. When I got to 50, I stopped counting my birthdays because most people in my family and community had died by the time they’re 50. So, I got to 50 and I thought, I’m not counting my birthday. Then I got to 60 and I thought, ‘Wow, every year is precious’. So, it is all about this. It’s about story. It’s about for us as Indigenous people, where I come from, a bit like Bruce Pascoe’s story where the settlers came and wrote down in their diaries what they saw. So, for the Kimberley, the invasion and the colonialism, which is still going on, came about around 1837. So, we’ve had 150 years of continuous colonialism. And it’s very, very interesting because as I said, we come from a culture of storytelling, of talking, of having our stories and the meaning of our stories told in song, in dance, in performance. It’s a pretty magic place. And so, when the settler diaries were written, they were talking about how they came to this Fitzroy River and named it the Fitzroy River. But in the settler diaries it says that the echoes and the laughter of Aboriginal people were heard all along the river, that people were sitting in a world of abundance and plenty, roasting duck, eating vegetables and fruit and just full of laughter and storytelling. And it just painted a world that in my lifetime has changed extremely dramatically. One of our Elders has written a very interesting book, and his name was Joe Nangan, and he was a very senior Nyikina man. And he wrote a beautiful book called The Dream Time Stories of Nyikina People. And at that time, he had a vision that it was important for him to write the stories down. We call them first lore stories. But these stories were written down, and I’ll talk a little bit more about them later. But basically, he said that our world changed when the colonialism came and the settlers came, and the way it changed was they cut up the country by building huge fence lines. Like some of the pastoral stations are 600,000, a million acres that sort of size, so, basically, they set up putting these fences in the land, but it became a barrier to animals, but also to people. And even today, with the pastoralism or the ranges that have been set up on our Country is very, very prescriptive rules. You can’t just go there and hunt and fish. You have to go through a process where you’ve got to get permission. So, the world that they came to was a world of plenty, of abundance, of kindness. Even when the boat came and the settlers wanted to travel along the river, the Elders gave them a young boy to navigate them and to walk with them along the Fitzroy River so they could map that river system out. And many, many weeks he returned back. So, this gift of generosity that Indigenous people have in this country is profound. It is, as I said from the beginning of time, it’s all about story. So, it was a world, as I said, of plenty of abundance, and what I see now is what we have is that this is an amazing place. The Fitzroy River or the Martuwarra is National Heritage listed, which means it belongs to every Australian. It’s globally unique. There is not another river system like it anywhere else on the planet. Prior to COVID I, as I said, work globally but was doing a lot of work in Montpellier, in France with water science. And we had one of our scientists come in. He was standing on the river, and he was holding his hands and he said to the other Elders, he said, ‘Do you realise?’ And I was thinking, what’s coming up now? ‘Do you realise La Meuse is the oldest river in the world?’ And I said, I thought about it, and I thought, oh yes, La Meuse in France, it is a very old river. And later on in the afternoon he said to me, ‘Why didn’t the Elders challenge me?’ I said to him the next day when I saw him, I said, ‘Oh, when I went to prepare the meal for the other Elders and they looked at me and they said, “That scientist, he said that La Meuse was the oldest river in the world”. And I said, “Yes, that’s what he said. That’s what science is saying”. They said, “Oh, next week, you’re going back to France”. I said, “Yes, I am”. They said, “Would you take some of the memory of the Martuwarra and will you track and walk through and find the headwaters of La Meuse? And will you kneel and say to La Meuse, if you are the oldest river in the world, you will share with us what the humans have done” — so, when they start to look at development, particularly unjust development, we will be prepared because you will share some of your memory with us and we will learn how to prepare ourselves for the coming, in a way, a new invasion, which is all about water and land today, in 2023. And I did that, and I trekked, and I found it and I had the exchange of the waters and I knelt and I said to La Meuse that my people had sent me and this is what I was doing. And then as I went from that place to a beautiful place called Charleville-Mézières in France, I wanted to go and see the Ardennes Forest and to visit the place where Australian men had died in the war and were in the forest. And I just had a feeling I had to go there. And then I went there and then I realised that what I needed to do was to write a play with a friend of mine, Gwen Knox, and we called it Two Rivers Talking. And so, we performed and wrote this beautiful play. We performed it in Australia, used a lot of young people from the schools and brought them in. And then we travelled to France and we put this on and really actually educated the local community about their history, about a sense of place, because when you spoke a little while ago you were talking and placing yourself in your land because we know as Indigenous people everything is place-based, the land is alive, it communicates with us, we sing with it, we dance with it, we tell stories. And so, over the generations, our DNA is embedded in that landscape. And that’s what we want fellow Australians to understand, is that this is your home now. You have a duty of care and ethics to love and care about this place because your DNA is here, your children’s DNA is born into this land, your grandchildren. And so, they now become memory in the landscape. And so, Country is alive. And that’s what we were doing. We were acknowledging this country here in Sydney, it’s alive. Somebody said, it doesn’t matter about concrete, it’s still Country. And this is what we’re sharing aren’t we.

That’s exactly right.

But this is all about, as I said, time and energy. And we have to think wisely as humans how we use it.

Tread carefully, you know. You are never not walking on Indigenous land. And I think that’s a humbling reminder to know that we’re not the only living, breathing thing, even if we feel like we’re sitting under a tree and there’s no human being around for kilometres. I wanted to take you back to Martuwarra and the community efforts in protecting this very sacred river. Can you tell us about how the River Council was formed, how that came about and a little bit about the governance structure and what is so crucial about the particular governance structure that you have developed?

Yes in about 2016, there was a big conversation that where we live in the Kimberley, things were going to be changing because, you know, as I said, one of the things that people may not be aware of is water is the new gold. As our rivers around the world become more and more like drains and die and be killed and transformed, water is very, very precious. It is the new gold. My work as a scientist on the Murray-Darling Basin has made it very, very clear that one of the things that is quite frightening is the amount of foreign ownership of our water in the Murray-Darling Basin. And even to the point that these big multinational companies do not need to have a land base to own the water. And so, this places disadvantage not just on Indigenous people and the environment, but onto our Australian farmers who have lived with the land, on the land, part of the land and have been trying to grow produce to ensure that they’ve got intergenerational transfer of their wealth, their knowledge, their assets to their children — well, they’re all struggling. So, it’s interesting because I am looking at the Murray-Darling Basin and I go what we have here is almost 100 years of history, science, facts of how we can prevent a disaster. And I’m going, why are we not listening to the lessons that we’re learning from the Murray-Darling Basin? Why are we prepared to make those same mistakes on the Fitzroy River in the Kimberley? And really, it’s all about water. And so, as Indigenous people we do not separate land, water, people — they are intrinsically and extrinsically entwined. We can’t separate them. So, here we have a story now in Western Australia where water, besides a water licence, is free. And so, my role sitting on the Commonwealth Water Group and on the State Aboriginal Water Environment Group is that we are just reforming a 1914 law called the Water Act to look at how they bring in six bundles of legislation to come up with a solution and a legislative framework of how we are going to manage the waters throughout the whole of the state, but in particular ’round the Fitzroy. As I said earlier, the Fitzroy River is the largest. It’s amazing. It’s National Heritage listed, 733 kilometres, it is so diverse because of the way the geology has been structured. The valley tracks are folded and faulted and there’s so much diversity there that I’m still finding places that I didn’t think existed. Here I am, 65 years been living in my place and I’m still finding the secrets. So, it’s an amazing place. But it’s also the largest Aboriginal cultural heritage site in Western Australia. And what I’m looking at is I’m looking at not just science, but what were the laws that we had — not so much laws in terms of regulation — but what were those key values, ethics, virtues that we as Indigenous people negotiated to live in a region of such diversity? There are nine nations that occupy that river system — 733 kilometres, 96,000 square kilometres of watershed — and so, we came together because from the beginning of time we have been bonded through a law of the river, which we call Warloongarriy law, where the river has made these ways that we must govern and look after our commons for the greater common good, not just of us as Indigenous people, but for the birds, for the trees, for everything else living. But also, to think now about how do we, in modernity, think about leadership and governance that can also be there to govern for the greater good of all of us? Because, as Elinor Ostrom said, the commons are common-pool resources that should be there for the commoners as well as the multinational corporations. So, how do we find these ways to think about other citizens who are living in our region? What is the duty of care that we have to decide and make decisions around procedural justice, distributive justice, water justice, climate justice? How do we make these decisions for all of us in the region? Because we no longer live on our lands just as isolated individual Indigenous people. We now have opened our nation up. And this is possibly one of the most exciting things, I believe, is that we have now got a nation where it almost appears to be about 60% are non-Anglo, and that’s not to discount the white or the Anglo-Saxon people. It’s to show that our nation is growing, is that it is a pluriverse in itself, that we have people here from diverse worlds, multi-faith, multi-cultures, who are now becoming Australians who think and be in the world a different way to Anglo and Western thinking, and that there will come a time, I believe, when we will all wake up as Australians and go, ‘This Australia is for all of us’. But the point I’m making is that, as I said earlier, we live in a pluriverse. When we look at climate chaos, we are dealing with complexity. We need multiple ways of systems thinking from bottom up, top down. And so, 2016, all of the Indigenous leaders came together at Fitzroy Crossing and we declared what we call the Fitzroy River Declaration. So, from there were five points about how we as Indigenous leaders would stand in solidarity to protect our sacred river for not just now but for generations to come. So, we have had to make a collective decision that we would not look at the river as being weaponised against Indigenous leaders to continue the colonialism of divide and conquer, manipulation, chaos, uncertainty, anxiety. That we wanted to find a way that we could stand in solidarity with everyone that lives around the Fitzroy River, who uses it, who builds new dreams, who builds new memory. How do we bring collective voices together so that we could do this? And so, there’s a bit of a solution of how we do that. But basically, we’ve come together to stand in solidarity, to say that we believe that this sacred river, there’s not another system like it anywhere else on the planet. It is so diverse. We have plants there for humanity. In a time when we’re talking about bioprospecting, biodiversity, law, biodiversity credits — those plants that we have, they are good for humanity. But how do we get justice? How do we get equity? How do we share the benefits so that everybody benefits? It’s not, oh, well, we give you this and we get nothing. How do we work together to look at the new economies? So, the Fitzroy River Declaration and a very few couple of years later we came together and said we need a leadership governance model. And so, the Elders said, ‘Let’s form the Martuwarra Fitzroy River Council’. So, we came together, we formed that it had representation from all the different native title groups. But as we started to develop, what we found was that those groups needed to have a brokerage model that would advocate for them and bring in resources. So, in 2022, we made a decision that we would form the council, but it would be a council of Elders and also a council of young people — because our job is to make a transition plan so that young people, particularly Indigenous young people, have got a future that they can dream now, with our leadership, with our guidance, with our knowledge — but raises the voices of young people so they have a voice, and they can use modern technology such as film, such as podcasts, such as all these different ways to tell the story, to show that this place is very sacred, its very precious, and that we need a total reset in terms of how we do development. Because some of the things that are touted for the Fitzroy River, is quite scary. And so, we need to be able to influence a whole range of systems political, policy, research, science. But I think this is really a story for culture, for how can we take art and use it as a way to tell a powerful narrative. And that’s why I said film and podcasts. And what’s happening here at the Powerhouse Museum is so, so powerful that when we are all gone, young people in the future and young people now can look at this wisdom of the 71 people that will soon be 100 and say, ‘Yes, there’s wisdom here’. There’s much that we can learn, you know, human to human between our races, between our cultures, because we do live in a pluriverse and we are dealing with chaos, uncertainty. And so, yes, how do we come together and do that? So, the Martuwarra Fitzroy River Council is there. We are working at many, many different levels. We have an amazing website. We have got amazing young filmmakers, digital storytellers who are creating stories, showing what’s happening on Country because Country is changing.

That’s right.

The Kimberley is changing and I’m sure your Country is changing too.

It’s changing dramatically, and I remember speaking to you before just about flooding is not new to our Country, but the type of flooding and the way we’re seeing floods happen, seems to be different. Seems to be more intense. Uncharacteristic is, I think, a word I heard you use to describe flooding on Martuwarra. In terms of this collective wisdom that you speak to, that the collective wisdom that comes from these Indigenous ways of being, doing and knowing these governance systems. How are you seeing that shape the community responses in the face of climate disaster?

Yes, it is a different type of flooding. As I said, I live on my remote community and, with the flood, we went 1.5 metres underwater. And what’s really unusual about the flooding is, I mean, it occurred in the whole of the catchment, but it’s very interesting now in terms of time for reflection to listen to the different systems like the Department of Fire and Emergency Services — all of the monitoring stations were taken out in the force of this flood. But one of the things that, you know, like I heard the minister make an announcement the other day about how we’re going to invest heavily in terms of flood monitoring by investing in a whole range of satellites to be able to monitor and track these sorts of events on Country. And what I’m saying is that what we should be doing is investing in Indigenous people. We are on Country, we are with Country, we read Country. And so, what I was saying is that at the top of the catchment, when the floods started happening, those communities, if they had the resources and the capacity, could have notified the communities downstream that this flood is coming, it would give them two or three days of warning. And so, that would have changed a lot of the flood response. So, when people talk to me about technology, I think the technology is important, but you cannot get the best technology, which is the ancient wisdom of Indigenous people living on their land, communicating with Country, reading the signs, understanding that big systems are changing, that we’re going to get more intense rain. We don’t need a radio that says this flood is coming. We read the Country. We can see what are the ants doing, what are the insects doing, what is the wind telling us? So, you know, I think technology’s great. It’s there. But I think we need to invest more in building the capacity of Indigenous people, with these knowledge systems on Country, who could be part of not just the recovery, but part of using our system science to say something is coming. Because it’s quite an interesting phenomena, because I speak to climate scientists all around the world — and it’s amazing how many of the top scientists are actually Australian scientists — and they’ve been doing this global modelling. And the other day, a couple of weeks ago when I was in Canberra at the Murray-Darling Basin, one of the top global scientists on climate said to me, ‘Oh, do you realise what’s happening in the north?’ And I go, ‘When I hear the north I go Broome to Cairns, what’s happening right across the top of northern Australia?’ He said, ‘No, there’s a particular phenomenon that is happening particularly over the Kimberley and we don’t really understand why that’s so’. And I thought about it and I thought, well as a child, you know, one of the things that we are taught very, very early in our life, like when we are born, we actually given what we call a totem, a creature. It could be an animal, it could be a bird, it could be something, but we are bonded to that creature for life. And it might sound strange, but people may not be aware that an animal can teach us how to be a good and decent human being. To create that level of empathy where you’re bonded in a relationship of respect and reciprocity, human to non-human. And how do you bring that together to think about the world from multiple perspectives? So, it was very, very interesting that, you know, we have all these things — we read the country, we know what’s going on. What was really interesting from my perspective was two years ago we heard that in Africa, all the huge, big baobab trees are all imploding and they will be lost to humanity, possibly within 50 years. And I thought about it, and I thought, well, we have got the only ever boab population in the world in the Kimberley. So, we started to study the water table, what we would call it from a science perspective, a boab tree, what this bio indicator was telling us about how is Country changing? And so, what was really interesting is that we’ve been doing this boab science before the flood came and we know this country is changing, and particularly for a keystone species such as the boab tree, it has got immense value, one that many of them are thousands of years old. And why I say that they are thousands of years old is that they are in the songs of how we move through Country, where we have to travel to find the special tree that tells us if we sing the song, we know where to dig for the implements. Because when people travel with songlines, they didn’t carry all their things — it was buried in special places so that, as we travel through this cultural landscape and we know the song, we know where to go to find, okay, there’s the digging stick, there’s this, there’s the axes, there’s all these things. So, you know, this is all there. But it’s been really interesting. I think people call it two-way science. How do we be with Western science in with Indigenous science and knowledges to better understand place. And so, these magnificent boab trees that are there, like people may not realise that the flower, when it is boiled down to create the oil, is worth more per ounce than gold, and that when that tree drops to the ground and the seeds disperse it creates like alpha seeds, the shoots, and then it grows into a tuber, and we can use that. Or when the boab is actually green, we can crack it and put it in the coals and roast it. And then when it’s dry, we eat it a different way. But also, in the old days when people were travelling, they would pierce the bark of the tree, because it’s hollow, to a right depth and it would produce a serous, like a water. And so, people who were, you know, dehydrating and nearly at death would be able to drink that water. And the young leaves we eat them in a salad, and we cook with them. And so, what we’ve found over the last two years was that the boab — you know, in particular last year the boab tree produced prolific flowers and we thought, ‘Oh great, we’re going to get a big harvest’ because we eat that, the Aboriginal people also carve it, so it becomes an artefact, and it has a different value — and we were standing around the tree, and we were wondering halfway through the year why the tree did not go to fruit when it had all the flowers. And we were thinking about it and we’re trying to work it out, and one of the Elders said, ‘Oh, we didn’t get the knock ’em down rain’. And I thought, oh, sometimes I’m in so close I missed the obvious. And I said, oh, and then I let the Elder explain to the Western scientist. And he said that in a certain period of the year, ’round about May, the Kimberley would experience a rain that would occur in May, which we would call the ‘knock ’em down rain’. And what it would do is that that rain would trigger the bush bees to come out and pollinate the boab trees so they would flower. And last year we didn’t have that rain. And so, the little bio indicators are all out of whack. So, over the last two years, we’ve seen Country changing. In terms of water scarcity, food insecurity, most Aboriginal people — the majority of Aboriginal people in the Kimberley live on $14,000 a year — and they need what we call the hybrid economy to sustain us. Food, medicine, all of that is in this river of life. And so, that’s why we need to proceed with caution, because once we destroy that river, we destroy so many other things. We call water, living water because water has a spirit, it communicates, it holds memory. It’s a very interesting thing because with the land, when we talk about our Country native title, who belongs where, one of the things I say, particularly to the men and the men leaders, is that we can– we have a rule where we don’t speak for someone else’s Country, and one of the things we’re looking at is unjust development. And so, one of the things that we can say is, oh, you can’t– ‘Don’t come here and interfere with what I’m doing because this is my land and I have a right to do what I want to do on my land’. But what I say is water has its own law, it has its own spirit, it finds its own way, whether it’s under stream or whether it’s in a deep aquifer. My Elders that I’ve grown up with — and now I’m in that situation — when I talk about aquifers, they go, I mean, there’s nothing new that I can say to an Elder, and as I said, particularly someone who cannot read and write English but holds volumes of wisdom, there’s nothing more I can say to them. And I said, ‘Oh, do you understand aquifer? You know, deep down there underground there’s like a ball that water come down’ and they go, ‘Oh yes, you mean, old water’, because some of these systems take thousands and thousands of years to recharge. And once we start fracking them and putting down these poles, we are interfering with things that are an unknown. As I said, the Kimberley– we sit on the Canning Basin, which is 550,000 square kilometres onshore and 100,000 square kilometres offshore, and this system is a bowl that travels from the Kimberley all the way down to near Perth. As I said, in totality, 600,000 square kilometres. So, one of the things is I talked about this conversation where we’re seeing big plans for intensive development of mainly cotton, at this stage, because we’re hearing a story that cotton seed is going to be good fodder for cattle. And I say, if I was a cattleman and we do have a cattle station, if I was a cattleman, why would I be feeding prime beef, genetically modified cotton? Why would I not go, okay, organic, certain roam, premium beef, organic. That’s a premium market. Why would I dumb it down that industry by growing this? So, for me, I call it the illusion of probity, because I think, really, the story is a bit of a pretense. We’re coming there to grow cotton, but really what they’re coming for is the water. And so fracking the Canning Basin is very, very– it’s almost too ridiculous to believe that it would be true that somebody would contemplate fracking a basin that is that big. And from the scientists I talk to, as well as my own work, if we frack the Canning Basin, we will create the largest manmade destruction on the planet. Because as I said, we’re talking about going down seven to 10 kilometres underground to fracture the bedrock that is– people don’t know about it, we still don’t know, except for the Elders who can sing the song and tell you how that underground river will travel to somebody else’s Country and all of that. So, I think, you know, basically, as I said earlier, I think we need a total reset. I think we need to look at this from what are we doing in this system that is going to impact not just on Indigenous people but on the environment? So, the thing you talked about was the flood. And as I said, I went out two weeks ago and saw my home and I looked at it and I thought, oh my God. And I felt quite blessed, because our centre that we’ve built is still standing and it’s great, but I looked at that and I thought about it, and I thought, yes, I can come in and fix all this up and it’s going to be okay. But basically, a lot of the attention has been on Fitzroy Crossing and rightfully so, because it’s where the biggest population of Aboriginal people. But as I said, this catchment is almost 100,000 square kilometres and there’s so many diverse people that live within, I’m at the bottom and so I look at this and think, oh my God, you know what’s happened? But one of the things which is very, very interesting is every two years we have a team of guys who paddle down the Fitzroy River, the Martuwarra in full flood, and they did that this year just after the flood and really, really scary. My son went on two years ago and then he went on this year and one of the things he said to me when he came back was there’s an area on the river that the white-water canoe is called the Badlands, and it’s like a canopy of about 500 metres of spiderwebs with spiders bigger than your hand. And as you’re paddling through, you’re like pulling them off and making your way because it’s almost like an eight-to-10 hour a day paddle because it’s so full and intense. And my son was saying to me that two years ago, when he went down and paddled down that system, it was just totally amazing. But since the flood, that system that I talked to you about, the Badlands, has totally been wiped out. So, basically what we’re saying is that nobody is measuring the biodiversity loss of plants, of animals, of multi-species that have been totally wiped out of the system in this flood. So, I guess, you know, as I mentioned that what’s different about the Kimberley? Why is it creating this phenomena that climate scientists around the world are noticing? And then it made me realise because I spend a lot of time on the river, because that’s where my mother came from. But I grew up in Broome and Broome’s a really interesting place. It was the only place in Australia where the White Australia policy did not apply because we needed to indenture the Asian men from the Philippines, from Malaya, from China, from Japan to come to Australia to work the pearling industry. And so, it had a special rule where this didn’t apply. But the point I’m making about that is, I learnt a lot because I was born in Broome, and I learnt a lot about Broome and the environment and spent a lot of time in sea. But in the Kimberleys, particularly in the King Sound, we have the second highest tides in the world, the largest macrotidal delta in the world. And so, these systems create huge whirlpools that move water around in very big volumes and we’re talking like 10.2-metre tides and all of this sort of stuff. But the point I’m making is that all of this is about balance, about the environment. So, if you’ve got water movement, you’ve got clouds happening, you’ve got big buildup of pressure, it’s the real moment in time where I think that one of the big influences is because of the tides and how that’s changing systems.

Anne you’ve shared so much and so generously — and I’m mindful that in these conversations, you know, it’s very easy to sit here and say, well, yes, we know that what you’re speaking about and not isolated rivers or boab trees or tides, they are living, breathing and they’re connected. But I suppose for people who don’t grow up with that knowledge ingrained, what advice do you have for humans to reimagine their relationship with other species, with Country, with water, in a way that harks back to indigenous ways of being doing and knowing that doesn’t centre the self?

It’s really interesting because many people may not be aware, they may be aware, but the greatest Aboriginal population is on the east coast around Sydney and Melbourne and so there’s a vast number, of the majority of Aboriginal people, actually live on the east coast and many, many Australian Bureau of Statistics reports a couple of years ago said that — and we’re not talking a long time, we’re talking at least within the last 10 years — that many Australians still have not met an Aboriginal person. And so, everyone looks to the north when here is a wealth of knowledge and wisdom and there’s so many Indigenous people that are doing fantastic stuff around Sydney, around Melbourne, in South Australia, and all of that is really, really important. So, as I said earlier, and we agreed everything is place-based, so, what I try and encourage fellow Australians to do and visitors who come to our country is how to hear and feel the land. How to create your own relationship with place. And sometimes it might sound a little bit wacky — and two years ago, I led a special journal on giving voice to rivers and we had people write in from all over the world to talk about how they were building their relationship with not just rivers but living water systems and in particular nature. And so, what I know is that it can be done. And what I’m really encouraging fellow Australians is to feel the land, to hear it, because Country is not silent. You go out in the bush and there’s just– it’s filled with an orchestra of insects and birds and things that are happening and energy and movement. And what I want fellow Australians to do wherever they come from, whatever culture, whatever faith, whatever spirituality is, go and just sit quietly somewhere special, whether you’re on the Yarra River or sitting here on Parramatta or doing something or moving through this land, find somewhere special and connect and build a relationship with that place. And it is profound when people take that chance and be brave and sit somewhere and want to connect with the land. This is an old country — there are memories here that have come from thousands and thousands of years of people walking Country, singing Country, dancing Country — and so, this energy system is here. It’s alive. And what I’m trying to encourage fellow Australians is feel this land, connect with it, build a relationship, because as I said earlier, your DNA is now part of this cultural landscape. You are part of this memory. You need to feel connected to have a relationship, to find that this country is now your Country, and you have a duty of care, same as the Indigenous people, to think about what are we doing in this country, Australia, that we should really as a nation be doing differently? And so, there’s lots of things that we could be doing differently. But that’s what I encourage people to do, and that’s one of the things that we’ve started to do, is that if we want people to know about the Martuwarra, we need to create walking trails so we can walk people through Country, to feel the land, to look at sacred sites, to look at special trees, to understand that we have a fish in the Fitzroy River that starts in the Fitzroy River and grows to seven metres at sea, which is the sawfish. And you think, oh my God, a 21-foot fish. Where else in the world could you have that? As I said, we have plants that would be profound for humanity. We are now starting to have a conversation. How do we take these traditional knowledges? How do we take these medicines and turn them into a pharmaceutical property that we can share with humanity? But before we get to that point, we need to understand what we’re talking about is actually a property right that has been due inheritance to us that we now want to share with the world. So, some of these plants are profound. I mean, one of our main plants has 30 times the property of morphine. It’s an antibiotic, it’s an antiseptic, it’s an analgesic. And you kind of go like, this plant is for humanity. Particularly in times where we’re building our resistance to golden staph, here is a natural antibiotic. When we’re looking at anaesthetics, antiseptics, analgesics, all of these things, and you kind of go, right, we’re in a moment in time in Australia where we have started to move around bioprospecting, around biodiversity credits, around how do we create these laws. And as I said earlier, one of the things that these medicines, these resources that we have on Country are common-pool resources. We know how to use them, we know when to use them, we know why to use them. And we’re at a point where we say this belongs to humanity, but how do we get equity in this process so that our people, who have had these resources from the beginning of time, who continue to live in abject poverty, who still are impacted on what I call lawful awful laws — laws that are no longer fit for purpose, they cannot protect the environment — how are we allowing these laws to continue to have such inequity and injustice? And what brings to my mind is the story of the Sharma case, where young Australians, non-Indigenous young Australians decided that they wanted to challenge the Minister for the Environment, because they believed that the Minister for the Environment had a duty of care, has a duty of care, a fiduciary duty to ensure that young people now and in the future will have the opportunity to inherit this country in a fit and proper state so that they can continue to have dreams.

Yes.

And they took that case to the courts. And these young people actually lost the case where the court found that the Minister for the Environment does not have a fiduciary duty to ensure intergenerational equity for our young Australians now or in the future. And I’m very proud to say I’ve started to develop a very interesting relationship with Minister Plibersek. She holds many of the portfolios that I’m very interested in: water, environment, all these sorts of things. So, I believe that she is a person who really needs and wants to really hear what Indigenous people have to say and how do we start to influence these laws that are broken and as I said, lawful awful laws, not fit for purpose, not fit for the environment, not fit for our young people. How do we start to see these laws in a different way? And I mentioned to somebody coming here today that Wales has created a law which is called the [Well-being of] Future Generation Act. So, every law and every policy in Wales must consider the wellbeing of young people before it comes into practice. So, you know, they are models around the world and that’s why I said we’re living on one planet and so, how do we find ways to go, we can have a climate chance. Because many people that I speak to, they go, oh, you know, Extinction Rebellion and all these highly radical people, and that’s why I say I don’t describe myself as an activist. I describe myself as an actionist because I want to be involved in transformational change. And so, it’s not just activism for activism’s sake, which is very, very important. It’s how do we work together to come up with planetary solutions so that we can have a climate chance? So, people say to me, oh, you know, if human beings are stupid, they’d be for their own demise. Mother Earth will right-size herself because she has the capacity to go. Yes, she will. But she will be lonely without the vibration of humans–

That’s right–

–walking across her girth. So, you know, it’s all of us having these ideas, thinking about, you know, how can we influence policy, how can we bring science into the equation so that we can look at multiple ways to inform, you know, ways that we solve these problems together?

Yes.

But as I said earlier, I think this is why this is such a great opportunity, because we can tell the story a different way. We can use art to really show how science has meaning because we have to, as I said earlier, wake up the snake, wake up the consciousness of the people to bring the people with us because we all are here together on one planet. I even sometimes get in trouble because I say we are all Indigenous to Mother Earth. We have to grow these values, these ethics, and think differently about the place we occupy because we want in 100 years for young people to be looking at our stories, sharing these stories and saying, ‘Yes, those Elders in the past I want to leave knowing I have been a good ancestor’.

Yes.

Yes. So, that’s my– you know, as I said, besides being a good and decent human being, I want to be able to say that as a human being, I looked at all of these things and was held by our first law — which teaches us about respect, responsibility, reciprocity — and how do we come together and hold those values so that young Australians, future young people of the world, can dream and have a future and dream together collectively — Indigenous and not, multi-faith and not, multicultural and not, you know what I mean, and really celebrate that this is an amazing country. As I said, I’ve travelled the world. I come here and there’s not one place in Australia that I would say, ‘I’m not going back there’.

Thank you, Anne. I think as I listen to you speak, I’m taken by this reminder of how much knowledge we have today, collectively, about what can be done and what you call a climate chance — which is probably one of the most beautiful phrasings of that — you know, as we think about this climate crisis, we are in that there is power in our collective imaginings, in our collective knowledge. And so just to finish, as we come to the end of this yarn, I wanted to know if you could reflect just briefly on what the possibilities are of embedding legal pluralism, this first law, embedding it properly in future responses to the climate crisis, and how, in turn, that might create– what future you hope this creates for your child, for your grandchild, and for their children?

Yes, it’s interesting, you know, because we’re so connected, Indigenous leaders connected so much, we get to, you know, soundboard each other. And, you know, I was listening to a podcast that had Tyson Yunkaporta and David Suzuki, and they were both talking, and David Suzuki said he went to bend down to pick his grandson up and he just wept profusely to think, what is the world he is bringing his grandson into? And one of the things that gives me great hope is that we are building a coalition of hope. You know, on the Fitzroy River in the Kimberleys, I am networking out and meeting so many amazing people: filmmakers, storytellers, singers, songwriters, scientists from every field. And we are building this coalition of hope because, as Indigenous people, we don’t see time in a linear way. We see time in a circle. And so, we have a duty of care to ensure that we are brave, and we speak these things out. And I publish profoundly and even to the point that the River Martuwarra, a river of life, is now a first author, and we are writing collectively around the world. We’re watching what’s happening in New Zealand and going, okay, personhood. When I speak to the Elders, they say to me, the river he not a human being. So, I’m pushing the boundaries in terms of ancestral personhood, pushing these things out. And one of the things that I’m very clear about is that we don’t see Indigenous wisdom, Indigenous law, Indigenous science as above. We see it as parallel together. And this collective wisdom is what we’re saying is that, I am hoping, I am dreaming that the young [millennials] — who are so more techno savvy — can, like my daughter is doing now. When I first made a film, it went for three hours. My daughter said to me, Mum, people haven’t got 3 hours. Now she’s saying to me, as a filmmaker herself, Mum, people only got five minutes. So, I’m hoping that these young millennials can use the technology in a really powerful way, Indigenous and not tell the story, use art as science, bring that story together and wake people up. I have hopes and I have dreams that people like me are speaking these things out. We are brave. We’re putting the story out there. It’s now up to the younger generations coming after me and with me to create a new dream, because that’s what we want. We want people to dream a new reality and walk in it together hand in hand, multi-faith, multi-culture, one Australians, one planet, planetary citizens saying we cannot allow the world to continue the way it is continuing. We need a total reset. We need to change the way we value the world, be in the world, feel the world if we are to have that kind of chance. Thank you.

Thank you very much, Anne, an absolute honour. I’ve learnt so much from you today and I just want to express my extreme gratitude on behalf of hopefully the thousands of people who listen to this yarn for this archive of oral storytelling that’s going to be shared with generations to come. Thank you so much.

Thank you.

To follow the program online you can subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And visit the 100 Climate Conversations exhibition or join us for a live recording, go to 100climateconversations.com.

This is a significant new project for the museum and the records of these conversations will form a new climate change archive preserved for future generations in the Powerhouse collection of over 500,000 objects that tell the stories of our time. It is particularly important to First Nations peoples to preserve conversations like this, building on the oral histories and traditions of passing down our knowledges, sciences and innovations which we know allowed our Countries to thrive for tens of thousands of years.