something that you might not realize
about Aboriginal Australia they have the
holdest longest-running culture on earth
60,000 years it’s a really sad history
it’s a litany of dispossession maybe my
job here as a storyteller wasn’t to just
document a disappearing culture in this
modern world maybe it was to look at
this living breathing thriving part of
their culture and how important it is to
the future health of their communities I
am gonna talk to you tonight about my
journey through Aboriginal Australia
which began in a cave in Western
Australia and I was wedged between rocks
trying to get the best angle on a piece
of rock art I was working on a story for
National Geographic magazine about a
group of animals that had gone extinct
all at the same time 50,000 years ago
and there was a raging debate as to
whether or not humans specifically
Aboriginal Australians had something to
do with it
the critter that you see in the end of
this hunters spear was maybe one of
those animals
there is also a 10-foot kangaroo
there was an 18-foot constrictor snake
and there was an animal that I don’t
know how best to describe except ask you
to imagine a hairless marsupial chipmunk
and then make it the size of a
rhinoceros
and then you have a Diprotodon that
walked here 80,000 years ago my husband
Matt Moyer who’s in the audience and
also a photojournalist
came on this assignment with me and here
we are in his assignment in the Sinai
Peninsula of Egypt for National
Geographic magazine and we try to do
that as much as possible because
otherwise we wouldn’t see each other
very much so our journey to get to this
rock art began with the chartered flight
to a remote community and then a good
part of a day on a dirt track and a
four-wheel drive vehicle not really out
of the ordinary for trying to get to
anywhere in the world remote it’s a lot
of logistics and just trying to get to
where you’re supposed to go and so in
the midst of that it’s really important
to remember what’s important what’s the
big picture and so I had one of these
moments when I finally got to my rock
heart and I was like okay I’m gonna make
my picture and I thought who is this
person
but drew this hunting scene and I
assumed it was a man because of
traditional hunter roles and and I
thought who is this guy he’s documenting
his day
it’s documenting the world around him
and I started to feel connected to this
fellow storyteller this person that was
communicating to me from tens of
thousands of years ago something into
the future about his people and his
people’s relationship to these animals
so something that you might not realize
about Aboriginal Australia they have the
oldest longest-running culture on earth
60,000 years they’ve been around so a
few days later I found myself sitting
across from Jack and Lily Chordata
in the aboriginal community of Columbia
it’s the gateway to and from this rock
art so
Matt and I decided to stop for one night
we’re gonna see if we could find some
Aboriginal art and we are led to Lily
because she’s known globally for her
paintings so when Jack found out that we
were from the United States his eyes lit
up and he told me how he worked side by
side with the Americans during World War
two and how with his bare hands he
helped build a strategic airstrip that
helped fight the Japanese who had
invaded Timor just a couple hundred
miles to the north of where we are
sitting and then Lily started to talk to
me about their childhood and how they
both grew up naked and in the bush a
hunter-gatherer lifestyle and then Lily
started to talk about her country and
when Aboriginal Australians talk about
their country what they’re talking about
is the land that’s theirs by birthright
where they’re from the land that they’re
of their ancestral lineage and so then
Lily started to tell me how everything
in her country the rocks the trees the
water the fish the birds even the sand
flies that bite really horribly and hard
were her family that she was connected
to all of them and they were connected
to her so these are things as Americans
we read a lot about New Age magazines
and we’re like oh yeah let’s get
connected but in average in Australia it
really it is the structure of their
society it dictates who you marry how
you address somebody and even what you
eat so let’s go back to that thing of
how long Aboriginal Australians have
been around so if the indigenous
population of Australia today that’s
Lily and her ancestors have been around
for 60,000 years the last 250 years of
colonization have brought around the
more most change than ever
albeit kind of slow in some areas
because it’s this really
huge vast remote country the last
hunter-gatherer group walked out of the
Gibson desert desert in 1984 into the
town of Alice Springs still if you think
about it then Aboriginal culture went
along pretty much uninterrupted at least
nothing like colonisation for fifty nine
thousand seven hundred and fifty years
Jack and Lily were able to walk in both
of these worlds because they remained in
pre colonized Australia until World War
two pulled them out and I fought back to
that ancient storyteller in the cave who
made that hunting scene and I thought
wow Jack’s life as a kid was probably
pretty similar to that ancient
storytellers hunting on the same
landscape Jack and Lily were bridges
between two alien worlds and when Lily
talked about her childhood and that
connectedness to her country her eyes
just lit up
she had a glimmer in them and it made me
wonder where could I find that
connection in a bridge in Australia
today because it was so contrary to the
prevalent story that I was hearing
everywhere about the downtrodden
indigenous group of Australia don’t get
me wrong it’s a really sad history
National Geographic staff writer Kathy
Newman wrote it’s a litany of
dispossession their stolen land there’s
government policies that controlled
their movement who they married where
they worked they even took their
children away from 1909 to 1969
government agencies went into the home
of Aboriginal Australian families and
removed their children without any proof
of neglect and today they’re known as
The Stolen Generation so after meeting
Jack and Lily and the rock
art I was hooked and so I proposed a
story to National Geographic and they
accepted and I learned that after 250
years of dispossession the Aboriginal
Australian population had the highest
rate of heart disease kidney disease
cancer diabetes and they died on average
10 years earlier than their white
Australian counterparts 16 percent
unemployment as opposed to 5 percent for
the rest of Australia and they make up
1/3 of the prison population trying to
impose a European style of education and
an indigenous group does not always work
very well so only 37% of Aboriginal
students graduate from high school I was
in a community where the principal had
to go around every morning door to door
and round the kids up otherwise she said
no one would attend and the teacher
cried herself to sleep almost every
night because she was so frustrated
about not getting through to the kids so
you see little Maddy down there in the
left-hand corner it’s 4 years old
completely disconnected in this
classroom and here he is again
completely connected learning about his
culture and how to manage his land with
fire just as his ancestors have for tens
of thousands of years so this moment
from disconnect to connect really
connected something for me and I thought
maybe my job here as a storyteller
wasn’t to just document a disappearing
culture in this modern world maybe it
was to look at this living breathing
thriving part of their culture and how
important it is to the future health of
their communities
most non-indigenous Australians have
never met an Aboriginal person and most
Australian news stories about
aboriginals are negative I felt like
there was some piece of this story
missing and the aboriginal population is
sort of faceless they don’t have
education they don’t have jobs all the
things that we value in Western hyped-up
Society is not what they have and so I
thought maybe if I could find that
connectedness that I saw with Maddie it
would they would see something different
so I started to look to the remote
communities and I learned about the
homelands movement from the 1970s when a
more liberal Australian government gave
incentives for people to go back to
their homeland and utilize their land
and live their homeland for the
aboriginal person is your bean it’s
where you have been for thousands of
years dispossessed the person from that
and they become nothing maybe this was
where I could find that glimmer I saw in
Lily’s eyes the homelands extensive
studies have shown that Aboriginal
families that are utilizing their
homelands are healthier they live longer
they hold on to their language and
culture they pass on their language and
culture to younger generations and they
utilize their homelands for food and
cultural practices they spend more time
with their family
an Aboriginal youth that spend more time
on their homelands are less likely to
get involved with drugs and alcohol so
my first night on a homeland went
something like this it’s always a crazy
road to get there you’re gonna get stuck
you’re gonna get bogged down really deep
sand so it was a really long day and we
got there really late at night and I had
this big truck and some young Aboriginal
boys were helping me because they knew
the roads they drove it we got in really
late at night set up my tent went
straight to sleep next morning I woke up
go to my truck to go find something and
I heard this crashing and banging and
sand flying everywhere I couldn’t figure
out what it was I was looking up and
down and I look in the back and there
was a 400-pound sea turtle in the back
of my truck on its back upside down what
these are the moments that challenge you
on assignment they’re kind of random you
wouldn’t be able to predict it but it’s
like yeah that would be challenging so
it turns out boys will be boys and they
went out hunting after I went to sleep
and they found themselves a sea turtle
and they figured that because they had
the keys to my truck you know that was
where it should go for the night this is
the back of my truck up on its back and
so they were waiting for to keep it
alive until the rest of the family came
so they could butcher it and I have to
admit it really wasn’t easy for me to
watch it get killed because I’ve swam
with these but but I’m also not a
vegetarian so um and then I saw how they
utilized every part of this animal for
food and here they’re washing the guts
for a soup it was it was amazing and
somehow I got talked into eating these
these are these are the eggs straight
from the belly of the turtle and there
was a number of other foods that got me
like pushed me to my limit on this um I
wasn’t brave enough to eat these
witchetty grubs raw but cooked they
taste like cheesy eggs
this these are cycad nuts and you they
get turned into a flower and then a
bread but if it’s not prepared correctly
you die um and and this is wallaby which
is really delicious actually but this is
really what my diet looked like most of
the time so by the time I got to the end
of this assignment I had cast quite a
web of connections throughout Australia
you can see all those red dots or places
where I actually spent some time but one
of these connections spun me back up to
the the top there called Arnhem Land
which is right up there in that clump of
red flags that you see and it also spun
me back to National Geographic so it
turns out almost 70 years ago in 1948
National Geographic ran a joint
expedition with Smithsonian Institute
and then Arnhem Land was really really
remote you couldn’t even drive there you
had to go by boat and it was months and
months they spent almost a year there
and they collected all the things that
they do in a 1948 expedition they took
like birds and flora and fauna and all
sorts of data but they also took human
skulls and a couple years ago as part of
a global trend to return human remains
to the rightful owners the Smithsonian
decided that they would return these
human skulls to Australia to Arnhem Land
and to the community to which they
belong this is actually this is the
photographer the National Geographic
photographer on the assignment Howell
Walker photographing some kids in the
same area that I was in so you might
wonder okay how did they figure out how
where those skulls belonged well it
turned out those skulls had paintings on
them and those paintings had the story
of that person’s country on them and so
when they showed the skulls to some
elders in
the area they knew exactly what land
they went to and to who they belonged
so the descendants of these skulls
decided that they wanted to honor them
by bringing them back and burying them
with a traditional log coffin ceremony
and a log coffin ceremony had not been
done in this community for over 40 years
so anybody here who knew who had seen it
were just little kids when it happened
so this whole community was coming
together trying to piece together how to
do this ceremony and it goes something
like this so you you bury the deceased
and you leave their body in the ground
until just bones remain you exhumed the
bones and then you find a log hollowed
out by termites and you paint the story
of that person on the log like they are
here so all these critters that you see
on this log are the story of that person
who died in their country and then you
put the remains back in the hallowed log
and you let them go back to their
country you just leave it out there
so finally ceremony day happened
one of the ceremonies that day or part
of the ceremony was private and it was
for men only and it was for only the men
of the deceased but they asked me to
document it and I said sure
of course I’ll document and they said no
this is not for your magazine nobody
else can see this this is only for us we
want a visual record of this ceremony so
that if it doesn’t happen again for 40
years or more we our future generations
will know what happened and they can do
it themselves because they can learn
from it and so I documented the ceremony
and I can’t show it to you today but
maybe that visual record will be a
bridge across time just like that story
in the cave by the ancient storyteller
with the hunting scene and it’ll offer a
pathway for this community to speak to
their future generations about their
culture and maybe somebody’s grandson or
better yet great-great great-great
granddaughter will watch this visual
record and she’ll learn something about
herself and her people and her homeland
thank you very much
you
you
about Aboriginal Australia they have the
holdest longest-running culture on earth
60,000 years it’s a really sad history
it’s a litany of dispossession maybe my
job here as a storyteller wasn’t to just
document a disappearing culture in this
modern world maybe it was to look at
this living breathing thriving part of
their culture and how important it is to
the future health of their communities I
am gonna talk to you tonight about my
journey through Aboriginal Australia
which began in a cave in Western
Australia and I was wedged between rocks
trying to get the best angle on a piece
of rock art I was working on a story for
National Geographic magazine about a
group of animals that had gone extinct
all at the same time 50,000 years ago
and there was a raging debate as to
whether or not humans specifically
Aboriginal Australians had something to
do with it
the critter that you see in the end of
this hunters spear was maybe one of
those animals
there is also a 10-foot kangaroo
there was an 18-foot constrictor snake
and there was an animal that I don’t
know how best to describe except ask you
to imagine a hairless marsupial chipmunk
and then make it the size of a
rhinoceros
and then you have a Diprotodon that
walked here 80,000 years ago my husband
Matt Moyer who’s in the audience and
also a photojournalist
came on this assignment with me and here
we are in his assignment in the Sinai
Peninsula of Egypt for National
Geographic magazine and we try to do
that as much as possible because
otherwise we wouldn’t see each other
very much so our journey to get to this
rock art began with the chartered flight
to a remote community and then a good
part of a day on a dirt track and a
four-wheel drive vehicle not really out
of the ordinary for trying to get to
anywhere in the world remote it’s a lot
of logistics and just trying to get to
where you’re supposed to go and so in
the midst of that it’s really important
to remember what’s important what’s the
big picture and so I had one of these
moments when I finally got to my rock
heart and I was like okay I’m gonna make
my picture and I thought who is this
person
but drew this hunting scene and I
assumed it was a man because of
traditional hunter roles and and I
thought who is this guy he’s documenting
his day
it’s documenting the world around him
and I started to feel connected to this
fellow storyteller this person that was
communicating to me from tens of
thousands of years ago something into
the future about his people and his
people’s relationship to these animals
so something that you might not realize
about Aboriginal Australia they have the
oldest longest-running culture on earth
60,000 years they’ve been around so a
few days later I found myself sitting
across from Jack and Lily Chordata
in the aboriginal community of Columbia
it’s the gateway to and from this rock
art so
Matt and I decided to stop for one night
we’re gonna see if we could find some
Aboriginal art and we are led to Lily
because she’s known globally for her
paintings so when Jack found out that we
were from the United States his eyes lit
up and he told me how he worked side by
side with the Americans during World War
two and how with his bare hands he
helped build a strategic airstrip that
helped fight the Japanese who had
invaded Timor just a couple hundred
miles to the north of where we are
sitting and then Lily started to talk to
me about their childhood and how they
both grew up naked and in the bush a
hunter-gatherer lifestyle and then Lily
started to talk about her country and
when Aboriginal Australians talk about
their country what they’re talking about
is the land that’s theirs by birthright
where they’re from the land that they’re
of their ancestral lineage and so then
Lily started to tell me how everything
in her country the rocks the trees the
water the fish the birds even the sand
flies that bite really horribly and hard
were her family that she was connected
to all of them and they were connected
to her so these are things as Americans
we read a lot about New Age magazines
and we’re like oh yeah let’s get
connected but in average in Australia it
really it is the structure of their
society it dictates who you marry how
you address somebody and even what you
eat so let’s go back to that thing of
how long Aboriginal Australians have
been around so if the indigenous
population of Australia today that’s
Lily and her ancestors have been around
for 60,000 years the last 250 years of
colonization have brought around the
more most change than ever
albeit kind of slow in some areas
because it’s this really
huge vast remote country the last
hunter-gatherer group walked out of the
Gibson desert desert in 1984 into the
town of Alice Springs still if you think
about it then Aboriginal culture went
along pretty much uninterrupted at least
nothing like colonisation for fifty nine
thousand seven hundred and fifty years
Jack and Lily were able to walk in both
of these worlds because they remained in
pre colonized Australia until World War
two pulled them out and I fought back to
that ancient storyteller in the cave who
made that hunting scene and I thought
wow Jack’s life as a kid was probably
pretty similar to that ancient
storytellers hunting on the same
landscape Jack and Lily were bridges
between two alien worlds and when Lily
talked about her childhood and that
connectedness to her country her eyes
just lit up
she had a glimmer in them and it made me
wonder where could I find that
connection in a bridge in Australia
today because it was so contrary to the
prevalent story that I was hearing
everywhere about the downtrodden
indigenous group of Australia don’t get
me wrong it’s a really sad history
National Geographic staff writer Kathy
Newman wrote it’s a litany of
dispossession their stolen land there’s
government policies that controlled
their movement who they married where
they worked they even took their
children away from 1909 to 1969
government agencies went into the home
of Aboriginal Australian families and
removed their children without any proof
of neglect and today they’re known as
The Stolen Generation so after meeting
Jack and Lily and the rock
art I was hooked and so I proposed a
story to National Geographic and they
accepted and I learned that after 250
years of dispossession the Aboriginal
Australian population had the highest
rate of heart disease kidney disease
cancer diabetes and they died on average
10 years earlier than their white
Australian counterparts 16 percent
unemployment as opposed to 5 percent for
the rest of Australia and they make up
1/3 of the prison population trying to
impose a European style of education and
an indigenous group does not always work
very well so only 37% of Aboriginal
students graduate from high school I was
in a community where the principal had
to go around every morning door to door
and round the kids up otherwise she said
no one would attend and the teacher
cried herself to sleep almost every
night because she was so frustrated
about not getting through to the kids so
you see little Maddy down there in the
left-hand corner it’s 4 years old
completely disconnected in this
classroom and here he is again
completely connected learning about his
culture and how to manage his land with
fire just as his ancestors have for tens
of thousands of years so this moment
from disconnect to connect really
connected something for me and I thought
maybe my job here as a storyteller
wasn’t to just document a disappearing
culture in this modern world maybe it
was to look at this living breathing
thriving part of their culture and how
important it is to the future health of
their communities
most non-indigenous Australians have
never met an Aboriginal person and most
Australian news stories about
aboriginals are negative I felt like
there was some piece of this story
missing and the aboriginal population is
sort of faceless they don’t have
education they don’t have jobs all the
things that we value in Western hyped-up
Society is not what they have and so I
thought maybe if I could find that
connectedness that I saw with Maddie it
would they would see something different
so I started to look to the remote
communities and I learned about the
homelands movement from the 1970s when a
more liberal Australian government gave
incentives for people to go back to
their homeland and utilize their land
and live their homeland for the
aboriginal person is your bean it’s
where you have been for thousands of
years dispossessed the person from that
and they become nothing maybe this was
where I could find that glimmer I saw in
Lily’s eyes the homelands extensive
studies have shown that Aboriginal
families that are utilizing their
homelands are healthier they live longer
they hold on to their language and
culture they pass on their language and
culture to younger generations and they
utilize their homelands for food and
cultural practices they spend more time
with their family
an Aboriginal youth that spend more time
on their homelands are less likely to
get involved with drugs and alcohol so
my first night on a homeland went
something like this it’s always a crazy
road to get there you’re gonna get stuck
you’re gonna get bogged down really deep
sand so it was a really long day and we
got there really late at night and I had
this big truck and some young Aboriginal
boys were helping me because they knew
the roads they drove it we got in really
late at night set up my tent went
straight to sleep next morning I woke up
go to my truck to go find something and
I heard this crashing and banging and
sand flying everywhere I couldn’t figure
out what it was I was looking up and
down and I look in the back and there
was a 400-pound sea turtle in the back
of my truck on its back upside down what
these are the moments that challenge you
on assignment they’re kind of random you
wouldn’t be able to predict it but it’s
like yeah that would be challenging so
it turns out boys will be boys and they
went out hunting after I went to sleep
and they found themselves a sea turtle
and they figured that because they had
the keys to my truck you know that was
where it should go for the night this is
the back of my truck up on its back and
so they were waiting for to keep it
alive until the rest of the family came
so they could butcher it and I have to
admit it really wasn’t easy for me to
watch it get killed because I’ve swam
with these but but I’m also not a
vegetarian so um and then I saw how they
utilized every part of this animal for
food and here they’re washing the guts
for a soup it was it was amazing and
somehow I got talked into eating these
these are these are the eggs straight
from the belly of the turtle and there
was a number of other foods that got me
like pushed me to my limit on this um I
wasn’t brave enough to eat these
witchetty grubs raw but cooked they
taste like cheesy eggs
this these are cycad nuts and you they
get turned into a flower and then a
bread but if it’s not prepared correctly
you die um and and this is wallaby which
is really delicious actually but this is
really what my diet looked like most of
the time so by the time I got to the end
of this assignment I had cast quite a
web of connections throughout Australia
you can see all those red dots or places
where I actually spent some time but one
of these connections spun me back up to
the the top there called Arnhem Land
which is right up there in that clump of
red flags that you see and it also spun
me back to National Geographic so it
turns out almost 70 years ago in 1948
National Geographic ran a joint
expedition with Smithsonian Institute
and then Arnhem Land was really really
remote you couldn’t even drive there you
had to go by boat and it was months and
months they spent almost a year there
and they collected all the things that
they do in a 1948 expedition they took
like birds and flora and fauna and all
sorts of data but they also took human
skulls and a couple years ago as part of
a global trend to return human remains
to the rightful owners the Smithsonian
decided that they would return these
human skulls to Australia to Arnhem Land
and to the community to which they
belong this is actually this is the
photographer the National Geographic
photographer on the assignment Howell
Walker photographing some kids in the
same area that I was in so you might
wonder okay how did they figure out how
where those skulls belonged well it
turned out those skulls had paintings on
them and those paintings had the story
of that person’s country on them and so
when they showed the skulls to some
elders in
the area they knew exactly what land
they went to and to who they belonged
so the descendants of these skulls
decided that they wanted to honor them
by bringing them back and burying them
with a traditional log coffin ceremony
and a log coffin ceremony had not been
done in this community for over 40 years
so anybody here who knew who had seen it
were just little kids when it happened
so this whole community was coming
together trying to piece together how to
do this ceremony and it goes something
like this so you you bury the deceased
and you leave their body in the ground
until just bones remain you exhumed the
bones and then you find a log hollowed
out by termites and you paint the story
of that person on the log like they are
here so all these critters that you see
on this log are the story of that person
who died in their country and then you
put the remains back in the hallowed log
and you let them go back to their
country you just leave it out there
so finally ceremony day happened
one of the ceremonies that day or part
of the ceremony was private and it was
for men only and it was for only the men
of the deceased but they asked me to
document it and I said sure
of course I’ll document and they said no
this is not for your magazine nobody
else can see this this is only for us we
want a visual record of this ceremony so
that if it doesn’t happen again for 40
years or more we our future generations
will know what happened and they can do
it themselves because they can learn
from it and so I documented the ceremony
and I can’t show it to you today but
maybe that visual record will be a
bridge across time just like that story
in the cave by the ancient storyteller
with the hunting scene and it’ll offer a
pathway for this community to speak to
their future generations about their
culture and maybe somebody’s grandson or
better yet great-great great-great
granddaughter will watch this visual
record and she’ll learn something about
herself and her people and her homeland
thank you very much
you
you
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