AustLit

'Turrbal, Yagera, thank you for caring for this land we meet on today. It is a big responsibility and what I consider a very human thing to do. When last here, for the AIATSIS research conference, I witnessed an impassioned local performance to welcome attendees. In the old days, we visitors might have been expected to perform in response. Although a number of Aboriginal people were there, many of us may not have had a song to share—at least not yet.

'I am Noongar, with a Noongar mother and white Australian father. I have a Noongar wife and son. My ancestral Country is far from here, along the southern coast of Western Australia. Here in Brisbane, our endangered Noongar language is strange and foreign. I speak about it in the hope that the things we are doing in the southwest might be useful to people here and elsewhere.

'It is an honour to be invited to present as part of the Academy’s auspicious 50th Symposium. This year’s theme ‘Humanising the Future’ resonates with my interest in the intersection between tradition and digital technology. This lecture is held in honour of Sir Keith Hancock, who contributed to the foundations of environmental history studies in Australia. Although his biographer Jim Davidson notes that Hancock ‘shared the general ignorance of the extent of Aboriginal resistance’, he rightly critiqued characterisations of Australia as untouched wilderness.1 This continent is an inherently peopled landscape, Country with a capital C—‘nourishing terrain’ as Deborah Bird Rose would put it—alive and intertwined with Aboriginal people and knowledge systems.2 Our longstanding and very current environmental crisis can be understood as not just the fault of flawed science and economics, but also a disconnection between culture and nature, between humans and landscapes.3 Although frequently overlooked in scientific research, factors supporting human connection to the environment such as story, language and song are key to people’s everyday wellbeing.4 Our future is dependent on Country. Things that most connect us humans to Country—like language, story and song—are crucial to our future.' (Introduction)