Really we’re talking about right to culture, right to clean, healthy water, right to sanitation, right to housing, right to practice religious and spiritual beliefs, right to stay on our ancestral homelands and really just the right to survive as a population.

Today is the second of a hundred conversations happening every Friday. The series presents 100 visionary Australians that are taking positive action to respond to the most critical issue of our time. Climate change.

We are broadcasting today in the Boiler Hall of the Powerhouse Museum, before it was home to the museum, it was the Ultimo Power Station built in 1899. It supplied coal powered electricity to Sydney’s tram system into the 1960s. Unique industrial features remain, including the imposing chimneys you entered between and coal cart rail tracks that run underneath this stage.

On behalf of the Powerhouse, I’d like to acknowledge the Traditional Owners of the land upon which the museum is situated, the Gadigal People of the Eora Nation. We pay respect to their Elders past, present, and future, and recognise their continuous connection to Country. I’d also like to acknowledge any Torres Strait Islander or Aboriginal peoples listening in or joining us today and extend my respect to their Elders past and present.

My name is Yaara Bou Melham. Sitting here next to me is Sasha Purcell, a Torres Strait Islander woman, human rights and climate change lawyer and PhD doctoral researcher. You’ve said in the past that Torres Strait Islanders contribute least to climate change, but are among the worst affected in the world by this and is something that we usually associate with Pacific Island nations, not here in Australia. Tell us how real the threat of rising sea levels is there and is there a possibility that Torres Strait Islanders could become Australia’s first, internally displaced peoples?

Climate change is very real in the Torres Strait. Sea levels are rising. The salt within the ocean is changing, which means it’s changing what kind of natural organisms are created in the ocean that we can actually consume, like fish and crab and things like that. So the houses are already getting flooded, some of the low-lying islands are disappearing. This has been happening for about – well since the 1970s, Australian Government was put on notice that this was starting to happen which I discovered among my research, but the research dates back to the early 1900s.

What else have you been hearing on the ground from the Torres Strait Islander community about the effects of climate change today?

In relation to the effects of climate change, it’s all kind of connected together. So for example, it affects your fresh water, so if you have salt-water go into it, you can no longer drink that water. It causes flooding which disrupts education because you can’t get to school because it’s flooding. You lose housing, you lose infrastructure, you lose boats that float out to sea. You lose the ability to travel, to get medical services, to get educational services. There are diseases that come within the storms and within the environment because of climate change and the Torres Strait has limited resources in relation to protecting themselves from that. So this all culminates in pressure for the Torres Strait.

I wanted to pick up on something you were saying about how the impacts of climate change are being felt right now. And islands are already disappearing. A lot of the narrative we’re hearing about climate change is that it’s something that’s going to happen in the future. How do we change that?

That narrative is incorrect. It’s incorrect in Australia in relation to the mainland, incorrect in relation to the Torres Strait and incorrect in relation to the rest of the world. So for example, the Torres Strait 8, when they presented their lawsuit to the United Nations, the Australian Federal Government responded saying, ‘Oh, climate change is a future concern’. It’s a present concern, it’s a past concern. This has been a concern for about 30, 40 years. Seriously. And before that it was just something that’s coming, but mainland Australia is already feeling the effects of climate change.

We’ve got bushfires, we’ve got increased flooding and dams bursting. You can see it, but they don’t really equate those things to climate change, they think they’re just natural occurrences. Climate change sits under weather. So really, they just think it’s the weather that’s impacting Australia, but it’s not, you’ve got weather and then you’ve got climate change. And so that’s where the issues are, but they don’t seem to understand that it’s already affecting the country and they really need to take some action before Australia gets too hot to live in or infrastructure and communities are destroyed.

So it’s a bit of a wake-up call in a way. But you’re not one to sit on your hands. You decided to take action. And do, what many of us would associate with an older generation – you wrote a letter.

Yes.

Tell us about who you wrote that letter to and what happened?

So I was speaking to family and community about what was going on in climate change, and I wanted to do something. And at the time I was actually, a different kind of lawyer, I was a police prosecutor in domestic violence and child protection litigation. And so I did a bunch of research and then I realised that it’s really not a lot data out there in relation to the Torres Strait specifically because people don’t research that location or they group us in the Aboriginal population. So the data is skewed.

So, I ended up writing to the, I emailed the president of the United Nations Association, Queensland. And I said, ‘This is who I am, I’m a Torres Strait human rights lawyer. This is my background. I want to go to the United Nations. I want to speak at the expert mechanism on the rise of Indigenous people, on this issue, independently. Can you please meet up with me if possible and we can chat.’

And then I took a week to book flights and accommodation to Geneva. And then I flew to Geneva and I spoke at this expert mechanism, it’s called an intervention. And I spoke about what is happening in the Torres Strait and an outcome from that is that the Human Rights Council stated that considering the impact it is having in Indigenous populations and including the Torres Strait, that there should be a separate bunch to the UNFCCC, which is the United Nations Climate Change program. So that was a really great achievement to get, very fast.

And how much did being able to go to Geneva and represent you in your community at the UN change things for you on a professional level, as well as on a personal level? Like, was it a catalyst for you to get into climate change justice?

I’ve always worked in the area of justice but going to the United Nations and seeing people who were from different Indigenous populations throughout the world, mainly Central South America and parts of Africa and like the Sami people in Europe. So we all kind of had the same concerns, everyone had the same issues and some countries were doing better than others in helping Indigenous people. But we all came together, I think it was about 150 of us, and it went over seven days and we talked to each other inside and outside of the the United Nations headquarters. And we caught up for dinners and lunches and we shared ideas about this is what we’re doing in this community, could you apply it to your community?

So professionally, I am still connected to many of those people and we do research together. We get each other to speak at different events because we like those different perspectives. Personally, it did kind of change my life because I had decided that I wanted to dedicate my legal career to working in this space because it touches on so many different human rights issues.

But you noticed that there was a lack of data coming out of the Torres Strait, particularly. So you started a PhD.

I did. I just finished my Masters in New York as a Fulbright and I’m in the middle of my PhD, which is based on the Torres Strait. So it’s looking at two things, it’s recording, basically an oral history from the Elders and other community members about how the climate change has impacted their lives.

Looking at incremental climate change, as opposed to an open scope of climate change. And then the other part of my PhD is I am researching domestic and international legal mechanisms as a way to find justice for Torres Strait Islanders. So the Torres Strait aid lawsuit is an example of looking externally from Australia to try and get the human rights that we deserve.

We’ve touched a little bit on your backstory and your legal work, and I think it’ll be interesting to kind of get a sense of your motivations as well. And it was obvious that hearing and seeing the effects of climate change in the Torres Strait was a big motivator for you to combat that. But is there a broader theme that connects your work as a former police prosecutor, as someone who worked in child protection litigation and now with climate change?

I think my hook or my motivation is injustice. So for example, when I was in high school, people tried to bully me, it didn’t succeed, but they tried. And from there, I guess I just kind of had this hatred for any kind of injustice. And from there, I just kind of continued working in spaces where there was injustice. So domestic violence, for example, and the abuse of children.

So that is a common theme throughout my life that came from just a core belief that I could do something to make right an injustice. And if I can’t make right that injustice, then I’ll do everything I can to get the support around me to work on that solution.

That individual experience has now seen you working for a collective for the public interest, I suppose.

Yes.

In the area of climate change, at least. Can you tell us what are some of the fundamental, basic human rights that you are calling for, especially when you come to First Nations climate justice?

There are a lot of human rights that come from the declaration. We also have Indigenous human rights within the United Nations. But really, we’re talking about right to culture, right to clean, healthy water, right to sanitation, right to housing, right to practice religious and spiritual beliefs, right to stay on our ancestral homelands and really just the right to survive as a population. So all of those rights are being breached at the moment by the Australian Federal Government in the Torres Strait. And they are being breached all over the world.

And I was in New York last year working on a project around Ecuador and what’s happening for their Indigenous population. So it’s the same kind of things. And they have fundamental rights that anyone in Australia would want to have.

If we’re on the mainland, we’re in Sydney, you have a right to want a home and to stay in that home, you want a right to medical services and health services and education. You want a right to clean water and fresh nutritional food. You want a right to feel safe in your environment. You want a right to live where you want to live. Those are the exact same rights the Indigenous people want, the Torres Strait Islanders want but for some reason it doesn’t translate from those human rights into a Western paradigm and a Western legal system.

I’d like to go to some of your legal work as well. Another really compelling legal area that you are engaged in is in rights of nature. Can you walk us through what that means?

So rights of nature is a very new legal concept where you apply human rights to the environment. So whether it be tree, rainforest, lake, river, and you know, animals already have their own rights. So we’re stretching the jurisprudence, I guess, in relation to how we can have legal standing and have the environment have a legal entity.

So there’s been success with the Whanganui River in New Zealand now has, is recognised as having legal entity. The Ganges River is considered as being protected because it has human rights and Ecuador in 2008, I believe was the first country to put it in the constitution that their nature does have legal standing. What that means, broadly, is that instead of suing a company as an individual or as an Indigenous population, we can have lawyers represent environmental institutes, like rainforests and trees and rivers, et cetera against the company.

So if a coal and gas company destroys a rainforest and it has legal standing, a legal entity, that means its rights have been breached. If your rights are breached, you’ve got a case. So you can imagine how much trouble that would be for a lot of these companies right now who are destroying Indigenous environments because of looking for oil and gas and the destruction of sacred archaeological sites.

So it’s a very, very new kind of concept, but I think it’s the next step that we need in that legal jurisprudence, because just having individuals, having human rights isn’t enough anymore because that court can go on for about three or four years. If you decide to represent an entire Amazon rainforest, that rainforest gets protected, which equals the entire Indigenous population being protected. So there’s a lot you can do in the space, but it’s very, very new, only a couple of lawyers work in this area. So we’re still trying to get it off the ground and, and into kind of the mainstream.

Many of these examples are led by First Nations communities and based in the foundation of traditional ecological knowledge. In this postcolonial Australia, we only have a memory here that dates back 200 years in the Western canon, but the knowledge of First Nations peoples here, about what our environment was compared to what it is now stretches back thousands of years, tens of thousands of years. How do you use that knowledge, that history, that memory to then fight for climate justice?

The recognition of scientific knowledge is still a bit of a struggle. Within my PhD, I do use some of that as part of my social scientist background. But the reason why Indigenous people have survived for 60,000 years within the Australian location is because of their scientific knowledge on how to survive and how to work with the environment.

So it is not recognised in some Western institutions like universities, but it is starting to become recognised because when you talk about bushfires, you learn about bush burning and where that came from, that’s an Indigenous idea, that’s something we’ve been doing for generations. So scientific knowledge, Indigenous scientific knowledge has been around for so long and the push now is for it to be recognised.

And you will find that there are scientific applications and methodology that are used that are essentially exactly the same as Indigenous scientific knowledge, but because the word Indigenous is there, people discard it and see no merit. However, I am very active in that space and push for it to be recognised because without it, we are not going to survive.

You stated in the past that Australia needs to take the lead from First Nations voices. Why is that? And why do you think that, and what do you think would allow that change or would make that change?

It connects to what I said earlier, you need to listen to Indigenous voices because not only is there a whole knowledge system and base that they’re missing out on, Indigenous people are survivors by nature, so you’re going to learn tips in relation to resilience and adaptation that potentially you wouldn’t think about because it’s a cultural norm for Indigenous people to have that.

And so if you bring in Indigenous people into your organisation or your company or your law firm or within politics, they’re going to bring a different way of thinking. They’re going to bring their different beliefs and values, but those values and beliefs are all centred around community, helping community, preserving community, helping the environment, preserving the environment.

And that’s why we talk about our ancestors so much, I’m here today because my ancestors were strong enough to survive everything they went through, including blackbirding and slavery. So whatever they’ve put down to me and whatever I do for the next generation is what will continue the survival of Indigenous people. So there is that strength within the Indigenous population and within individuals that I think should be valued and should be brought into the mainstream.

Thank you very much again Sasha for the conversation today. To follow the program online, you can subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and to 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 records of the 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.