I Didn’t Want A Prophecy, But It Found Me Anyway (one more highlight)

Ok, just a couple more bite size highlights from last year. Well, this one was actually from a few years ago, but an excerpt of it was played last year - titled A Laugh, a Cry and a Touchstone Moment, featuring Tyson Yunkaporta. And indeed, this passage in particular might still be the most moving and funny of the entire podcast. Certainly, the opening gambit has continued to come up in conversation ever since.

Tyson belongs to the Apalech Clan from Western Cape York in far north Queensland, with community/cultural ties all over Australia. He is the author multiple books, including Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World. He’s also a poet and artist carving traditional tools and weapons, processes that were central to writing the book.

If you’d like to hear or revisit our conversation in full, head to episode 70 – ‘Sand Talk: Indigenous thinking, saving the world & living creation’ (there are a bunch of links in those show notes too, and a very special photo from this conversation on that episode website).

Title image: Tyson Yunkaporta (supplied)

To access all episodes, including the full 2025 highlights package in ep 289, head to the website (where there’ll often be photos with each episode), or wherever you get your podcasts. 

With thanks to our wonderful guests and the musicians who generously granted permission for their music to be heard here.

And thanks for listening and supporting the podcast!

Chapter markers

Chapters

• 0:00 A Shattering Vision Of Human Potential
• 2:45 Fragmented Culture And Flickers Of Brilliance
• 5:30 The Crisis Of Meaning And Failed Institutions
• 6:56 A Mentor’s Charge And A Dangerous Task
• 8:45 Doubt Meets The Songline Proof
• 10:35 Following Water, Drawing Memory, Accepting Burden

Transcript

Tyson Yunkaporta: 0:00

Yeah man.

AJ: 0:01

Can you describe that?

Tyson Yunkaporta: 0:03

I just thanks man. No one's ever asked me about that. You know? Thank you. Um I just uh in that feedback, physiological feedback again. I'm trying to see the screen now, my my eyes have teared up. It's it's that it's that much of a longing, you know?

AJ: 0:26

Yeah.

Tyson Yunkaporta: 0:28

Um just and I've never been able to find it again. I've I've I've spent so many hundreds of hours looking for that audio, and I can't find it. But um, you know, it was a long time ago I saw it, but it was those two. It was just those it was the dignity and agency and um just unfathomable intelligence that was just I mean their eyes were burning with it, they they just glowed. It was a man and woman side by side, equally muscled, you know, and they were side by side walking to towards the camera, like what do you want? And they looked right into that camera and it just went through me, and yeah, it's every day I think about it, and I've mentioned it to people before, and they've gone, hmm.

AJ: 1:32

I that wasn't lost on me either.

Tyson Yunkaporta: 1:33

But yeah, thank you. But it's it's such a it's just it's the best and worst thing I've ever seen. You know, it ruined my life seeing that because this is that's something that you know, for us to return to that level of super. I mean, they were superheroes. You drop them in a city, they'd be superheroes. The physical things that they would do, yes, superheroes, but their mental, their cognitive powers that was clearly there, but just their relational dynamic, those two together. Oh my god, you know, superhuman. And it just and like I said, it it was like being a labrador seeing two dingos. Yeah, I curl up under the couch just whining with my tail between my legs, you know, and I've been there ever since. My tail still between my legs from that encounter, and that was just a shadow of an echo of something from decades ago, and I don't know, but it's still in us, it's it's there, yeah. See, I and I and and the that's but that's the worst part. I look in myself and find all those shattered fragments of that same pattern. You know, I look in my culture, my language, and and what's there of that. I look at the community and what is so startlingly present there that reflects that the parts of myself, the things I do. But then the way that is so fragmented and out of balance and and just wrong, and there's these frustration signals just zapping across between those fragments, and there's conflicts and there's disagreements, and there's contradictions, and it's not coming together, and there's just these moments, you know. I see my niece like some fella slaps the other niece, so you know, my niece who's the best fighter in town, she goes around to their house and she calls out the six best men fighters there in that house. You know, it's like, well, no, you're not good enough. Call your cousin from over there. He can come in. I want the best fighters. All right, you all here from this family. All right, let's go. And this one girl beats the shit out of all of them. And and I just I have this just surge of um empowerment and and joy, and you know, you you see those flashes of just brilliance, exceptional something, and but then you also just see it in the quiet spaces in between things, and just that the fierce nurturance of of grandmother and granddaughter happening quietly over there in a corner, showing her something, and you have the same response to it because it's it's it's complete, you know, it's complete, but it's it's so disrupted as well. Anyway, I'm not expressing this very well because no one's ever asked me about it before, and I haven't I haven't thought it through. It's just something that I've let's all the better, man.

AJ: 4:34

Yeah, thank you.

Tyson Yunkaporta: 4:35

It's just doing its work on me. But I just I know that that we're more than this, like I just know it, and most people just know it. Yeah, and there's there's probably a you know, there's a thousand scientific studies that would back that, and there's even more that would that would just laugh at it, you know. No, this is we're better now than we've ever been. Um, but I know that's not true, I know it's not true, and I feel just so many people feeling the same thing, just like a grief. You know, we've lost something.

AJ: 5:06

Yes. Yep. I I don't think that's um marginal anymore. I mean, even yeah, it's sort of wherever I go that that it's uh they are questions of meaning and uh and worth everywhere.

Tyson Yunkaporta: 5:24

Yeah. Well, there's a crisis of meaning now that everybody accepts, every side of politics. There's nobody I've seen refute this concept of a crisis of meaning. So basically, in in removing people from the land, yeah, the state and economy had to provide the things that the land provided for people for free before. And so they provided them haphazardly, but the idea was that if you traded a third of your life, if you sold us, you sell us a third of your life and you do this soul-destroying labor, then you will have access to the things that the land used to give to you. When society is not a thing that's separate from land or nature, the other thing provided by the land is meaning. So that's another thing that the state and economic system, you know, business, marketplace, whatever, institutions that were provided to give us meaning. And outside of that, there's still the church. So you have a number of institutions, you know, all these institutions are supposed to provide meaning. And anyway, as the civilization has has commenced its its fall, uh, all of those institutions have been revealed to be corrupt. Nobody can trust them anymore. You can't trust the church with your kids. All of the institutions that were put in place to provide meaning to us, once we're removed from the land, they're all gone. So now there's a crisis of meaning. What are we gonna do? I know I know what I'm gonna do. I'm just gonna go for a piss bros, I'll be back.

AJ: 7:09

Well, mate, give us the little story about the piece of music that's been significant to you.

Tyson Yunkaporta: 7:15

Ah, okay, so that's um that Timeless Land by Yothi Yindi, which is not I it's not a song I particularly like. It's alright, but it's not my jam or anything. Yeah, but that was just after the first time I met O Man Jummon, he decided, all right, it's you, you're the one. Sit down, I'm passing this to you, and your job's to pass that everywhere now. Oh, and by the way, I'm gonna need you to perform an act of domestic terrorism down the track, but that's not for now. Just oh fuck. He wants me to get this this this there's a beacon on a rock beside a US military base, and the beacon on top of the rock is blocking the spirit work that that special rock is doing.

AJ: 7:56

Wow.

Tyson Yunkaporta: 7:57

I've got to go and remove that at some stage in my life, and I'm I'm definitely gonna get shot doing it. And I'm not looking forward to it, and I've just got to raise up these babies first. And it was like I did not appreciate him putting that on me. I didn't appreciate him putting any of this shit on me. Anyway, it's here, I'm doing it now. Um, sorry, old man, I'm getting wild. But nobody was anyway, ain't nobody got time for that. Um, so anyway, this song, he was like first time I met him, and it was my first piece of like doubting him. Not just doubting him, but but dismissing him. You know, I sat there all day, he blew my mind with all of this, these symbols and images. And then he said, All right, so that song there, Yothi Indi, Timeless Land, you gotta listen to that song. There's a song line in there for a place where you're going tomorrow. And I'm like immediately, I got alarm bells because he's like, aha. And I'm thinking, I haven't told him that I'm flying down to Victoria tomorrow. He thinks I'm still gonna be here in the Northern Territory. We're like this Yothi Indy, this this uh Yulmu um singers that their song line, that I'm gonna be around that, and I'll be able to find this song line in the Northern Territory and follow it. Ha ha, he doesn't know I'm gonna be on a plane tonight and I'm gonna be in Victoria tomorrow, and I'm going up to the snowy mountains. I'm going right up the top of the snowy mountains, and there were the snowy river. That's where I'm gonna be tomorrow. And he doesn't know that. So now I know that he's gammon and he's full of shit, you know? And so I completely dismissed him at that stage, and I walked away, and I barely gave it another thought till the next morning. I'm right up there in the snowy mountains, and I'm there with like a senior lawman, and I said, I told him about what I'd gone through with uh Omar Jumma the day before, and he said, Well, I'm sorry, boy, but you um you've gone the wrong way there. And I'm like, Yeah, but it's illogical. He doesn't know where I was gonna be. And he said, Well, they tend to know where you're gonna be, these old people. You need to. Did you listen to the song? Did you do what he said? And I'm like, Well, why should I? I'm like, I'm not even there. What's a Yulma song gonna have to do with me? And he said, Look, just do what you're told, and so I, you know, so I do what I'm told now, ever since this bloody thing. Anyway, so I did it. I listened to the song, and right at the start, there's these lyrics. Um, but this is written by people from northern anyway. From the edge of the mountain, down through the valleys, down where the snowy river flows. Follow the water down to the ocean, bring back the memories. And that was like, oh. So, you know, it turns out that those Yolma people had visited the snowy mountains and they've written that, they've sat down with old people there, got the story for that song line, and they've written that song line into their song. And how did he and then I'm like, how did he know? I didn't tell him I was coming here. There's no way he could know I was coming to here, to this spot. God damn it. All right, it's true. And so I'm like, oh my god, what are the other instructions? So old man had told me that I needed to follow the song line all the way to the sea, and then I had to remember all of the hundreds of symbols he'd shown me the day before, and I had to draw them all on the sand up above the watermark, and then when I was done, a wave would come and take that knowledge out into the ocean and distribute that. That was the instruction, and that's the lyrics of the song like follow the water down to the ocean, bring back the memory. And I'm like, ah no. And anyway, I went and I did it, and you know, and I'm not gonna do it like a big, like, oh, it happened. It's just like, yeah, of course the wave came up, no wave took it out. Like, you know, of course, all that happened. And is this like a transcendent moment for me? No, it's just annoying. It means I'm definitely gonna have to get shot by Americans one day when I'm taking out that beacon, you know, and I don't want to get shot by Americans. I want to get shot by my own people if I'm gonna get shot. Well, speared, preferably. Which you know, I'm it's not impossible. No, that's right.

AJ: 12:16

Be careful what you're useful.

Tyson Yunkaporta: 12:18

Cheek, cheeky as I am. If I don't start showing a little bit more respect for these old people who are sharing truth with me.