I’m standing at the edge of a lagoon near the small town of Nyngan in central New South Wales, talking to Aboriginal children about their futures. These bright tomorrows go under the rubric of ‘learning and earning’, a program that has been developed elsewhere using a predictive process I am not familiar with. I’m here to sell them that vision: I’m supposed to be a role model, telling them they can achieve anything if they work hard and show up and smile a lot. So I show up for this excursion to Nyngan. I smile and get to work trying to teach black kids in the bush about their bright economic future while grounding them in the proud traditions of their past.

The amazing thing discovered by brain researchers is that humans never actually lose memories—we just lose access to them, but they still somehow guide our actions. We might lose conscious access to the traumatic memory of our hair catching fire, yet still remain afraid of flames, for example. Part of us remembers.

Each of us has indirect access to the memory of every moment of every experience of our lives. It must remain indirect or our brains would explode with the volume of data.

Emu’s problem can be seen in the mathematical greater-than/less-than interpretation of the symbol. Emu is a troublemaker who brings into being the most destructive idea in existence: I am greater than you; you are less than me. This is the source of all human misery. Aboriginal society was designed over thousands of years to deal with this problem. Some people are just idiots—and everybody has a bit of idiot in them from time to time, coming from some deep place inside that whispers, ‘You are special. You are greater than other people and things. You are more important than everything and everyone. All things and all people exist to serve you.’ This behaviour needs massive checks and balances to contain the damage it can do.

The basic protocols of Aboriginal society, like most societies, include respecting and hearing all points of view in a yarn. Narcissists demand this right, then refuse to allow other points of view on the grounds that any other opinion somehow infringes their freedom of speech or is offensive. They destroy the basic social contracts of reciprocity (which allow people to build a reputation of generosity based on sharing to ensure ongoing connectedness and support), shattering these frameworks of harmony with a few words of nasty gossip. They apply double standards and break down systems of give and take until every member of a social group becomes isolated, lost in a Darwinian struggle for power and dwindling resources that destroys everything. Then they move on to another place, another group. Feel free to extrapolate this pattern globally and historically.

We’ve spent a lot of time sparring in a traditional style that was once done with stone knives. The rules of engagement are that you can only cut your opponent on the arms, shoulders or back (extremely difficult to do) and—here’s the kicker—at the end of the fight the winner must get cut up the same as the loser, so that nobody can walk away with a grudge. It’s hard enough to cut somebody on the back with a stone knife when they’re trying to do the same to you, but it’s even harder when you know that every time you cut them you’re really just cutting yourself. In our yarns following these sessions we decided this kind of combat forces you to see your enemy’s point of view, and by the end of it you can no longer be opponents because you’re connected by mutual respect and understanding. More lessons from stone—but how to apply these today? Sounds like a good opportunity for a thought experiment.

I guess if you wanted to take a contemporary economy that is dependent on perpetual war and try to make it sustainable, you could start by applying similar rules of engagement. But in the stone-knife model, enemies are a non-renewable resource and eventually you would run out of them. It would not be sustainable at all for the war machine if everybody ended up respecting all points of view. Perhaps the transferrable wisdom here is simply that most young men need something a little meatier than mindfulness workshops to curtail the terrifying narcissism that overtakes them from the moment their balls drop. Maybe then they won’t grow up to be the men who start wars in the first place.

Max responds

Stone teaches us that we should be strong no matter what tries to crack us or wear us down, keeping an unbreakable core through your culture and your beliefs. The majority of this earth is rock, and while water and plants make up its surface, the body of the earth, the part that keeps it all together, is rock. You can have life and creation but it will all crumble without a solid base, same with society, companies, relationships, identities, knowledge, almost anything both tangible and intangible. Like those forests and trees sitting as a skin over the rocks of the earth—without that strength inside, without that stone, it would crumble.

Packaging, for example, might make more efficient use of space and resources if we considered that you can get a hell of a lot more into a small sphere than a big box. But then what would stop those spheres rolling off the shelves? The flat-earthers resolve this—just squash the spheres down a bit. Thank you, flat-earthers. That innovation could save a bit of landfill, buy us a little time.

Perhaps further work needs to be done on what constitutes consciousness and what constitutes life. If the definitions of these things could include rocks as sentient beings, it would go a long way towards stemming the emu-like behaviours that are running rampant across the earth and cyberspace right now. Either that, or we could start mailing those Uluru rocks out to all the narcissists to give them a lesson in respect for others.

In our Law we know that rocks are sentient and contain spirit. You can’t just pick one up and carry it home, as you will disturb its spirit and it will disturb you in turn. If you sit at any campfire for a yarn with Aboriginal people anywhere on this continent, you will be sure to hear a cautionary tale about a relative who was silly enough to pick up a rock and take it home, who then got sick or was haunted or killed or went crazy. A lot of rocks are benevolent and enjoy being used and traded, but you have to follow the guidance of the old people to know which ones you can use. Rocks are to be respected.

My subjective view of the Rainbow Serpent helps me to perceive problems with the timelines we are all forced to inhabit today (although it also makes me miss appointments and write in logic sequences that can be difficult to follow). The arrow of time proposed by physicists works in lab experiments and is a real, observable phenomenon in closed systems. It is a true law. It’s just the wrong law to apply to beings living in open, interconnected systems. It’s a bit like touting the theory that an economy is thriving when the stock markets are doing well—the actual inhabitants of the economy say, sure, stock prices are spiking, but we’re still hungry!

The selective application of different laws and theories is the reason for the crisis of civilisation that will be experienced on this planet until we reach Aristotle’s telos, the inevitable end.

To understand the crisis of civilisation in this way, we first need to define what civilisation is from the standpoint of First Peoples’ Law. Many would say it is a culture that produces knowledge, technology, law and arts, but this could be said of any community in the world. Indigenous people will often say, ‘We had these things too, so we had a civilisation!’ But a civilisation is something else. A village or pastoral community or mobile community seasonally managing ancestral estates is not a civilisation, because civilisations build cities. Wakanda in Marvel’s Black Panther comics is an African civilisation, because it makes cities. In the real world, the ancient peoples of Zimbabwe who once made cities of stone lived within a civilisation, until it inevitably collapsed. This was not an indigenous culture just because its inhabitants had dark skin. Civilisations are cultures that create cities, communities that consume everything around them and then themselves. They can never be indigenous until they abandon their city-building culture, a lesson the Elders of Zimbabwe have handed down from bitter experience through deep time.

A city is a community on the arrow of time, an upward-trending arrow demanding perpetual growth. Growth is the engine of the city—if the increase stops, the city falls. Because of this, the local resources are used up quickly and the lands around the city die. The biota is stripped, then the topsoil goes, then the water. It is no accident that the ruins of the world’s oldest civilisations are mostly in deserts now. It wasn’t desert before that. A city tells itself it is a closed system that must decay in order for time to run straight, while simultaneously demanding eternal growth. This means it must outsource its decay for as long as possible.

For this reason, a city is dependent on the importation of resources from interconnected systems beyond its borders. The city places itself at the centre of these systems and strips them to feed its growth, disrupting cycles of time and land and weather and water and ecological exchange between the systems. The exchange is now only going one way. Matter and energy are still neither created nor destroyed in this reaction; they are directed into static heaps rather than cycled back through and between systems.

The exponential destruction caused by cities feeds the exponential growth of infrastructure and population. For this they misapply laws like supply and demand: in order for economic growth to occur, there must be more demand than supply. Roughly translated, that means there must be more people needing basic goods and services than there are goods and services to meet their needs. Put another way, there must be a lot of people missing out on what they need to survive in order for the economy to grow, or in order for anything to have value. As the growth continues exponentially, so do the masses of people missing out. There is no equilibrium to be found here.

The exponential destruction caused by cities feeds the exponential growth of infrastructure and population. For this they misapply laws like supply and demand: in order for economic growth to occur, there must be more demand than supply. Roughly translated, that means there must be more people needing basic goods and services than there are goods and services to meet their needs. Put another way, there must be a lot of people missing out on what they need to survive in order for the economy to grow, or in order for anything to have value. As the growth continues exponentially, so do the masses of people missing out. There is no equilibrium to be found here.

So, in quiet moments, I just like to sit on country within the comfortable embrace of that women’s spirit of creation. I can still hear the bulldozers coming and I can no longer hear the frogs. But I can see the flowers.

But that First Law is still there. We need to be brave enough to apply it to our reality of infinitely interconnected, self-organising, self-renewing systems. We are the custodians of this reality, and the arrow of time is not an appropriate model for a custodial species to operate from. If I think about all those grannies and nieces and sisters now, I wonder if I haven’t gone the wrong way charging down all these wormholes of physics and poking every negative particle. Those women just quietly get on with things and keep creation systems in motion through kinship and they don’t worry about much, except what kind of mess I might make next. Maybe they’ve got this. In a lifeworld where your great-grandchildren become your parents, you have a vested interest in making sure you’re co-creating a stable system for them to operate in and also ensuring a bit of intergenerational equity. So, in quiet moments, I just like to sit on country within the comfortable embrace of that women’s spirit of creation. I can still hear the bulldozers coming and I can no longer hear the frogs. But I can see the flowers.

It is difficult to name the ripples and patterns of global power systems when we are limited by nineteenth-century language around race and colonialism. For Australians the hazy old binaries of race have become profoundly unsettling and difficult to pin down on a colour-coded continuum of victims and oppressors. ‘People of colour’ in their struggle for economic equality join the rush to exploit Aboriginal land and resources, and are welcome at the boardroom table as long as they embrace settler values and identities. An Indian company undertakes a project to devastate Aboriginal lands and waters in Queensland with coal mining, and farmers formerly opposed to Native Title now stand beside Traditional Owners to protest the development. African-American visitors are offended when they drop in on Indigenous centres in our universities and hear us using the term ‘black’ to describe ourselves, when so many of us can no longer scrape together enough melanin to scare off a taxi.

I’ve seen Dreaming stories invented with no connection to songlines or real places. I’ve seen complicated indigenised rituals manufactured from new-age fripperies. One person says, ‘Today I’m running a buddubigwan, which is the traditional Aboriginal word for workshop,’ and delivers a PowerPoint presentation mixed in with some trust-falls, face-painting and warm fuzzy affirmations. Another person translates the Oxford Dictionary into an Aboriginal language, inventing new Indigenous words for things like tableau, quixotic and xenophobia. This is a work of genius, but the problem is that it is not how cultures adapt and evolve over time. Like all things that last, it must be a group effort aligned with the patterns of creation discerned from living within a specific landscape.

The innovators creating the above examples argue that our culture is constantly changing and adapting, and they are right. But true cultural change doesn’t happen unilaterally. Cultural innovations occur in deep relationships between land, spirit and groups of people. A person ‘of high degree’ in traditional knowledge may find a song in a dream if they are profoundly connected to land, lore, spirit and community. But that song must then be taken up by the people and modified gradually through many iterations before it becomes part of the culture. Besides, that song can only be found through a ritual process developed over millennia by that community. The song itself is not as important as the communal knowledge process that produces it.

Most lasting cultural innovations occur through the demotic—the practices and forms that evolve through the daily lives and interactions of people and place in an organic sequence of adaptation. When these processes are unimpeded by the arbitrary controls and designs of elevated individuals they emerge in ways that mirror the patterns of creation.

I have seen authentically demotic innovation at work in my culture and observed it carefully over time. I know what it looks like when it is true. I was involved in the emergence of a new funerary ritual over the first decade of this millennium, a headstone opening ceremony that takes place a year or so after a deceased person is buried. It began in a community that had only wooden crosses in the cemetery and was led by a woman who wanted a stone marker erected for her dead son.

The creation of the ceremony to ‘open’ that first headstone was a communal process shaped by multiple Elders and family members, incorporating older elements of the traditional mourning process that had fallen into disuse. When it was repeated and modified by many families and different communities it became an authentic innovation embedded in living culture. It even incorporated family savings plans and budgeting to save money for the headstone and the community feast following the ceremony. This complex, beautiful and healing ritual could not have been designed arbitrarily by any individual or even a ‘working group’.

So I am careful about the Indigenous Knowledge I choose to present in this book, because I know the way ideas can get tangled up and twisted in the marketplace of this civilisation, embraced and repackaged and marketed in forms that are often the opposite of the original concept or intent. I may present elements of Indigenous Knowledge to reveal a true understanding of ‘forever’ in this writing, as a call to align with creation as an infinitely complex, self-sustaining system. I may illuminate ways to follow the patterns of creation in the innovation of truly sustainable solutions; but perhaps the worst possible outcome of this work would be civilisation embracing these ideas.

Let’s say I get paid to consult with mining companies as they lift a raft of phrases and buzzwords from my work to insert in their annual reports and reconciliation action plans. Maybe my consultancy grows into a business proudly called ‘Forever Consulting’. Maybe someone makes me an offer I can’t refuse and I sell it, then they turn it into a company called ‘Forever Ltd’ that then goes global. Maybe my writing then becomes a vehicle for Indigenising and rebranding the face of extractive technologies that are becoming increasingly unpopular as Avatar depression continues to spread among the restless masses.

It gets taken a bit far to a point where the claim is dubious, or at least ignores the massive evolution along the way eg mass emancipation with everyone voting does seem fundamentally different from ancient Rome with an emperor. Plus it ignores the major cultural paradigm shifts that have been happening. And the robustness of modernism socially and politically is I think overblown - this is just how Rome looked in the 4th century. Modernism has only been dominant quite recently and is clearly in decay. (Witness this book etc)

The most remarkable thing about western civilisation is its ability to absorb any object or idea, alter it, sanitise it, rebrand it and market it. Even ideas that are a threat can be co-opted and put to work. The Romans did it with Christianity—an ideology of the poor and enslaved that threatened the foundations of empire. When torture and murder became ineffective as deterrents, they simply embraced the idea and made it the state religion, rewriting the holy texts to suit their needs and rebranding it as a new system of control. In the same way that plants can be tweaked at the genetic level to become the intellectual property of one company and then replace all similar crops in a region, ideas can be re-engineered to serve the interests of the powerful. It’s not a conspiracy; it’s just power doing what power does.

The people may rise up against tyrants in the name of liberty, shattering the halls and towers of the powerful, but then the ruling systems will simply embrace the idea of freedom, tweak it a little and continue with business as usual. Liberty becomes the right of land-owning white males to vote, then changes form again to include males of every class, then again to include females, and so forth. It constantly shape-shifts, eventually enshrining the freedom of corporations to make messes they cannot be held accountable for, to bribe governments to change laws allowing them to damage people and land at will, no matter who the people vote into government.

In this way, liberalism has been frequently rebranded to vanquish competing ideologies. The success of liberalism lies in its ability to wear whatever shape a population projects through disruption or dissent. Thus at the beginning of this millennium it remains the only show in town. It is an illusion that currently dominates the globe.

This illusion has a pattern. Everybody follows the pattern, even if they openly oppose the tenets of liberalism or the system of nationhood in general. The most roguish of nations still must maintain their status as a nation, and to do so they must follow the blueprint. No matter where you go in the world, you will recognise elements from this template—if you chance upon a place that doesn’t have those elements, you’ll find that the people there have lost or are in the process of losing their right to exist.

Everywhere you go, there will be the same institutions, anthems and flags. There will be recognisable schools, banks, hospitals, councils and courts (no matter how poor or rudimentary) and there will be a dreary national anthem. None of these things existed in a universal form a couple of centuries ago, but everyone has them now. The other element you must possess is a flag. It must be rectangular and utilise three colours somehow representing a unifying ideology and national identity

… The flag is interesting, though. It is understood by most of us as a symbol of defiance rather than compliance, as demonstrated by its proliferation in the cheeky graffiti of Aboriginal children. You don’t often see other kids scrawling the Aussie flag on a wall instead of a dick and balls. This is because the Aboriginal flag represents a social system in direct opposition to the global order that requires the existence of flags in the first place.

The Aboriginal flag represents more than just black for the people, red for the land and yellow for the Dreaming. It shows how the relationship between people and land is balanced perfectly by the Laws, stories and values of the Dreaming at the centre of two equal halves, so that the needs of the people are always in a sustainable balance with the needs of the land

I have done a lot of thought experiments using the flag as a kind of symbolic graph, changing the shapes and sizes of the different sections of the flag to represent different economic and political systems.

In most contemporary systems, the red and the black are alarmingly out of balance and the yellow at the centre seldom takes the shape of a circle. The dreaming of our current growth-based economic system takes the form of a pyramid. Progressive approaches may try to flip that pyramid upside down or cut off its top, but there is still only a thin strip of red land left at the bottom of the flag no matter where you sit on the political spectrum—every civilised system demands growth based on destruction of land. The political spectrum itself is an illusion, suggesting that the only possible forms of social organisation are liberalism, fascism or socialism.

This limiting range of governance paradigms denies the existence of a myriad of forms of human society developed over eons of existence. These new paradigms ignore the fact that it really is not possible to maintain massive nations and cities in any sustainable form. Civilisations over the last few millennia have done unspeakable damage to the systems necessary for existence, but this is nothing compared to what has happened in the last century or so with the emergence of a global system of great industrial nations.

I won’t insult you with endless statistics about extinction rates and topsoil loss and climate change and toxicity levels in every breath of air and every drop of water on the planet, statistics that will be out of date a few months after I write them as these disasters continue to multiply. Suffice to say that from my birth up until this point, well over half of the vertebrate species on the planet have become extinct.

…

When it comes to global environmental catastrophe the jury is done deliberating and the case is closed. It requires no more debate. This apocalypse is real. On the upside, apocalypses have proven to be survivable in the past, although on the downside it usually means that your culture and society will never be the same again.

Gross sees potential apocalyptic crises today as opportunities for reconciliation, drawing from his study of historical Indigenous and European holocausts: ‘Since the Europeans went through an apocalypse and suffered the exact same symptoms as Indigenous people, this indicates that we are not as different as we might like to think.’ He said that it takes at least a century after the crisis has passed for a culture to recover from post-apocalyptic stress syndrome, but that the emergent culture can never return to what it was before. It always transitions into something new, adapting to the new social and ecological environment.

Considering that the catastrophes we are experiencing may take decades or even centuries to play out, then another century for us to recover after that, it may be advisable for us to get ahead of the game and begin creating cultures and societies of transition, to lessen the impacts of this calamity on our communities and potentially avoid post-apocalyptic stress altogether. We need to start working with the land, rather than against it. Our communities need to share knowledge with each other while maintaining their own unique systems grounded in the diverse landscapes they care for.

Nyoongars and Yorgas in Perth tell stories about a group of three totemic entities that work together in miraculous ways. Certain butterflies always lay their eggs on a particular bush above the nest of a particular species of ant. The ants collect the eggs and take them down into the nest. When the larvae hatch, the ants carry them up to eat the leaves of the bush at night and then carry them back down again. When they grow too heavy to carry, the ants bring the leaves down to them. The larvae grow a jelly on their sides when they eat those particular leaves, and this is the food that the queen ant eats. The larvae then spin cocoons in the nest for the final stage of the process, after which they fly out of the nest as butterflies and begin the cycle all over again.

This intensely interrelated process within a totemic group of three entities—bush, ant and butterfly—would be impossible for a single human mind to design. How do these symbiotic dances develop, when the cause-and-effect relations are so interdependent and complex that there is no way to reverse-engineer the process by which the system came to be? This is precisely the kind of process we need to understand and engage with to create sustainable responses to the catastrophes we are facing.

For this yarn I made a boomerang etched all over with this symbol. Trends and surprises emerge within the whole design, and what seems like chaos has patterns and shapes that you can only discern with a holistic view. Contemporary science is beginning to understand this way of knowing through chaos theory, complexity theory, network theory and fractal geometry. It is becoming clear that complex systems are adaptive, self-organising and patterned with a logic that can be discerned and used for trend analysis and predictive technologies. Second-wave automation, artificial intelligence and blockchain technologies seek to harness this complexity. But it is a complexity that cannot function through external design and control.

Pre-industrial cultures have worked within self-organising systems for thousands of years to predict weather patterns, seasonal activity and the dynamics of social groups, then manage responses to these complexities in non-intrusive ways that maintain systemic balance. While interventions are possible from within these dynamic systems, they cannot be controlled from the outside. Systems are heterarchical—composed of equal parts interacting together. Imposing a hierarchical model of top-down control can only destroy them. Healthy interventions can only be made by free agents within a complex system—agents referred to in chaos theory as ‘strange attractors’. Could you be a strange attractor within your institution? It is a risky endeavour in a culture that attaches negative meanings to words like chaos and anarchy, equating them with disorder and ruin. But chaos in reality has a structure that produces innovation, and anarchy simply means ‘no boss’. Could it be possible to have structure without bosses?

Sustainability agents have a few simple operating guidelines, or network protocols, or rules if you like—connect, diversify, interact and adapt.

Diversity is not about tolerating difference or treating others equally and without prejudice. The diversification principle compels you to maintain your individual difference, particularly from other agents who are similar to you. This prevents you from clustering into narcissistic flash mobs. You must also seek out and interact with a wide variety of agents who are completely dissimilar to you. Finally, you must interact with other systems beyond your own, keeping your system open and therefore sustainable.

Connectedness balances the excesses of individualism in the diversity principle. The first step in connectedness is forming pairs (like kinship pairs) with multiple other agents who also pair with others. The next step is creating or expanding networks of these connections. The final step is making sure these networks are interacting with the networks of other agents, both within your system and in others.

Interaction is the principle that provides the energy and spirit of communication to power the system. This principle facilitates the flow of living knowledge. For this, you must be transferring knowledge (and energy and resources) rather than trying to store it individually, with as many other agents as possible. If the world ever experiments with an actual free market rather than an oligopoly, this would be the perfect system to facilitate sustainable interactions. Knowledge, value and energy in truly sustainable networks of interaction are prevented from remaining static and unchanging by the final protocol.

Adaptation is the most important protocol of an agent in a sustainable system. You must allow yourself to be transformed through your interactions with other agents and the knowledge that passes through you from them. This knowledge and energy will flow through the entire system in feedback loops and you must be prepared to change so that those feedback loops are not blocked. An agent that is truly adaptive and changing is open to sudden eruptions of transformation, in which the agent may temporarily take on the role of strange attractor and facilitate chain reactions of creative events within the system.

We have looked at Emu story, but it is also worth looking at stories from the northern hemisphere to discern the patterns of narcissism that prevent the functioning of sustainable systems. The word narcissist comes from a Greek story about Narcissus, a man who fell in love with his own reflection in the water. A girl called Echo was in love with him, but she was cursed to hang around and repeat only his words forever. This is what you find with these narcissist flash mobs—one loud person will start shouting silly things and attract followers who repeat those things without thought. Not all strange attractors are benevolent.

Adolescent cultures always ask the same three questions. Why are we here? How should we live? What will happen when we die? The first one I’ve covered already with the role of humans as a custodial species. The second one I’ve covered above, with the four protocols for agents in a complex dynamic system. The third one, us-two will look at next.

A smaller but similar Turnaround event happens at the neurological level when an individual learns something new. There is a spark of creation like lightning when true learning takes place, with a genetic reward of chemical pleasure released in the brain. This is the moment that teachers love—described by educators universally as ‘the light coming on in their eyes’. You can see the same light when you gut a fish—for a few minutes there is a shine like rainbows in its intestines, but as the life and spirit leave those organs the light dies. This living spirit of creation, sparked by opposite fields colliding and separating, is what brings fire and light into the universe. This is the sacred nature of knowledge. A knowledge-keeper must share knowledge because she or he is a custodian of miniature creation events that must continually take place in the minds of people coming into knowledge.

The chemical burst of pleasure we feel when genuine knowledge transmission takes place occurs from the creation of new neural pathways. These are connections between two points that were previously unconnected. Jokes are one of the most pure examples of this neural creation event; most humour is based on two ideas coming together in a new way—puns, rhymes, double meanings, unusual circumstances, accidents, exposed delusions and contextually inappropriate content are examples of this. The chemical rush we get from sudden neural connections in jokes is so intense and pleasurable that we laugh out loud. This kind of humour and joy in learning is a huge part of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures. If people are laughing, they are learning. True learning is a joy because it is an act of creation.

But there are two kinds of joy. One is characterised by light-heartedness and the other is marked by fierce engagement and deep concentration. Both give pleasure by increasing connectedness and complexity in the neural systems of learners. There needs to be an interaction between abstract (spirit) and concrete (physical) worlds of knowledge for this kind of complexity to develop fully. Without closing the loop between abstract knowledge and reality, and without making connections between different ideas and areas of knowledge, true learning cannot occur.

A focus on linear, abstract, declarative knowledge alone not only fails to create complex connectivity but damages the mind. We are biologically punished for this destructive behaviour with a neurochemical rush of lethargy and discomfort that most people call boredom. Extended periods of this affects a person’s mental health, resulting in bouts of rage, depression and worse. In centralised knowledge institutions today, this illness is called misbehaviour or misconduct. Without the spark of creation in your neural system, the mind–body system stagnates and falls apart, affecting not only your ability to learn but your health and relationships as well, leading to increasingly destructive behaviours. If you are an Aboriginal person living in Australia, this will almost certainly lead to incarceration and/or a decreased lifespan.

Our family stories will outlast the stories of this civilisation, but at the moment they are almost invisible in the shadow of monolithic grand narratives like ‘progress’. The narrative of progress is grounded in the myth of primitivism—the widely held assumption that life before the industrial era was brief, brutish, savage and simple. This is contrasted with the myth of development, of advanced societies and people from Europe representing progress and enlightenment. There must be an upward trend to show, to keep the illusion alive. When the masses come down with Avatar depression or begin to chafe at the bleakness of their lives, they are reminded nightly on their screens of how terrible things used to be, how much better and longer and healthier our existences are today.

The stereotypical caveman does not stand up well to this line of questioning, but still he persists in our hearts and minds, internalised by Indigenous and non-Indigenous people alike. It is such a prolific image in contemporary civilisation that if I ask you to stop reading and picture it in your mind for a moment, you will then open your eyes and see that my next sentence describes that image perfectly:

A broad-nosed, thick-browed, hairy savage dressed in animal skins is standing with dull eyes and a wooden club in his hand, possibly over the supine form of a woman he just knocked out to drag back to his cave.

…

The two clubs are carved from beefwood and they are flawed with a number of cracks in the surface of the wood that have been filled with a black sap used as a kind of glue or putty. There are cracks in the stories I’m sharing here too, the grand narratives and the cheeky counter-narratives I am presenting to disrupt them. I yarned with a lot of different people while I carved out the ideas and stories in this chapter, but nobody would engage with my critique of primitivism. Their eyes just glazed over and I felt like I’d hit some kind of firewall installed through Sunday-morning cartoons. They all engaged with my story about Prussia though, which surprised me because it’s probably the most lunatic, incendiary rant that has ever fallen from my lips. But before we get to that, we’ll continue the lonely business of tipping the sacred cows of primitivism and progress.

Yarning is more than just a story or conversation in Aboriginal culture—it is a structured cultural activity that is recognised even in research circles as a valid and rigorous methodology for knowledge production, inquiry and transmission. It is a ritual that incorporates elements such as story, humour, gesture and mimicry for consensus-building, meaning-making and innovation. It references places and relationships and is highly contextualised in the local worldviews of those yarning.

It has protocols of active listening, mutual respect and building on what others have said rather than openly contradicting them or debating their ideas. There is no firm protocol of only one person speaking at a time, although the mutual respect protocol ensures that interjections are in support of what a speaker is saying, enriching what is being said. There is no ‘talking stick’ protocol. (The talking stick idea was appropriated by the West from Native American culture.)

This back-and-forth yarning style neutralises the unpleasant phenomenon that occurs in many conversations, meetings and dialogues of one person grandstanding and waffling on while the rest of the group drowns in polite boredom. (Monologues are rare in Aboriginal culture unless a senior person is telling a long story or an angry person is airing grievances.) There is a lot of overlapping speech that makes yarning vibrant and dynamic and deeply stimulating. It is non-linear, branching off into diverse themes and topics but often returning to revisit ideas in ways that find connections and correlations between diverse sets of data that would otherwise not be found in more analytical modes of dialogue. There may be periods of comfortable and communicative silence that are reflective and not considered to be awkward. The end point of a yarn is a set of understandings, values and directions shared by all members of the group in a loose consensus that is inclusive of diverse points of view.

The primary mode of communication in yarns is narrative—the sharing of anecdotes, stories and experiences from the lived reality of the participants. Sand talk may be incorporated as people sketch images on the ground (or even in the air) to illustrate a point or map out a place. Physical demonstrations are included as people act out events occurring in stories. Sharing drink or food is often part of the ritual—most commonly cups of tea today. Often yarning will occur around a shared material cultural activity like weaving, painting, string-making, Ceremony preparation or even things like crossword puzzles and setting up birthday party decorations.

Yarners will usually sit in a group so that everybody can see everybody else, or in a rough circle—whatever shape the formation takes, it has no stage or audience spaces. This removes hierarchical barriers to consensus and also avoids the shame that often comes with being in the spotlight or having to speak in front of an audience. Some group members may have more authority and respect than others if they are senior people, but that authority is usually used to pull people back into line when they break protocol, rather than to pursue ego-driven agendas. Usually.

There is a reason ideological battles and culture wars filled with rhetoric about patriotism and nation-building are fought around schools and schooling. Schools are sites of political struggle in this civilisation because they are the main vehicles for establishing the grand narratives needed to make progress possible. The entire history of globalisation hinges on the story of modern public education, how it began and why. I often wonder what would change if people were able to see this story retold from the perspective of an Aboriginal person reading back through old federation documents and the earliest syllabuses from Prussia.

The answer is: it would be an outlandish conspiracy theory that has no place in a glass cabinet full of skulls. That’s why I’m going to tell it here.

While most of the facts are verifiable, I have been very selective in which facts I used to build the narrative. I created the story to illuminate the way history can be twisted to suit the interests and narratives of the people who write it. But mostly I wrote it for a laugh—it is fun to imagine what history would look like if it were written not by the winners but by losers like me.

The story of modern public education, then, is a story of transition between an age of imperialism and an age of modern globalisation. It begins, like all stories about civilisations, with the theft of land from indigenous people. The people were the Prūsai, natives of an area between modern day Germany and Russia, who lived there from at least 9000 BCE. They traded amber and hemp across Europe and into Asia, but mostly lived by hunting and fishing. They maintained this society right up until the thirteenth century.

In the south, trouble had been brewing for centuries. Germanic and other Nordic refugees (from previous Roman invasions and rising sea levels, and from starvation as a result of degraded soil caused by recent incursions of agriculture) went viking across Europe. Viking was a verb meaning raiding in those days, and these boat people really were a problem. They had overrun Britain and changed that island forever, although Roman and Celtic invaders had already been there before them, so the poor old British copped a triple dose of colonial abuse. The Prūsai, however, were lucky enough to escape the worst of this colonisation process for many centuries, and continued their traditional lifestyle, along with many other indigenous nations to the north. For a while, at least.

There weren’t single big nations like today, but pluri-national groups of regions—lots of regions all with different laws, languages and customs: very much like Australia was before colonial occupation. Big countries with one law, one language and one people are a very recent invention designed to facilitate more effective control of populations and resources for economic purposes. This is why, after Rome had left the Germanic regions, the rich landowners struggling for dominance there worked hard to restore the Roman system of social control. They fought to reinstate this power system for a thousand years, with many small states battling each other for supremacy, the Roman eagle standard emblazoned on their coats of arms. This obsession with Rome would cause some problems down the track, particularly for the indigenous Prūsai to the north.

In the thirteenth century, an organisation called the Order of Teutonic Knights broke away from the other German regional groups and decided to create their own new state. The site they chose was Prūsailand, so they invaded and exterminated or assimilated the Prūsai people, making the entire population Teutonic. In classical and fantasy art, however, you won’t find any images of knights wiping out indigenous people. What you will find instead are armoured heroes bravely slaughtering beasts, dragons and mythical monsters. These creatures came to represent the tribal cultures of the world: the romantic European image of the knight slaying the dragon is actually a hidden reference to the systematic genocide of what were called pagan peoples. This European tradition of propaganda in which victims of genocide are portrayed as dangerous animals was later used to great effect against the Jews, and even our own ‘mob’ here in Australia, who up until half a century ago were often considered animals rather than human citizens.

By 1281, the Order of Teutonic Knights had all but wiped out the native Prūsai and created the new state of Prussia. The interesting thing is that these ‘white knights’ had been heavily involved with the Crusades, in which the Roman Church had been fighting a Christian war for centuries to take over Jerusalem and other holy places. They failed so badly that instead of bringing Europe to the Middle East, they brought the Middle East back to Europe, in the form of a system of government that they had seen there and liked. This system was in its final stages of decline during the Crusades, with most of the Middle Eastern forests and farming land stripped bare and turned into desert by the ravages of the world’s first civilisations. The survivors had begun returning to more sustainable ways of life—tribalism, subsistence agriculture and pastoralism in the following centuries (a way of life that would later be turned upside down again by twentieth-century Anglo oil interests).

The failed model borrowed by the Teutonic Knights wasn’t invented in the Middle East. It had its origins in an unsuccessful Asian experiment of large states with total government authority and rampant expansion and production. This was completely alien in Europe, which was used to a system of petty warlords and oligarchs struggling chaotically over dwindling natural resources, while local peasants in villages persisted much as they had since the beginning of the iron age, periodically disrupted by the activities of the powerful. The exotic new system introduced by the Teutonic Knights was all about absolute power concentrated into one highly organised central government that would control the daily lives of all.

Remember too that these new Prussians had just spent a thousand years trying to replicate the system of control that they had experienced under the Romans who had originally conquered Germania. (Britain and the US later mastered Rome’s imperial method—a system of establishing indigenous elites to keep conquered peoples in check, promoting lateral violence and competition to make subjugated peoples self-policing vassals.) Prussia even adopted the Roman symbol of the eagle as a logo, which was later picked up by the Nazis and the United States. Rome introduced mesmerising dreams of power and control that have not been easy to shake even in modern history.

By the eighteenth century Prussia, under Frederick the Great, had become one of the greatest powers in Europe, despite its small size and lack of natural resources. This was due to the fact that it had a larger permanent military force than anyone else. No other country could force so many of its citizens into the army on a full-time basis. The Prussian system was one of total control, which successfully managed to coerce the population into complete submission to the will of the government. Creating a massive standing army was not a problem for them. (Over a century later, the US military would adopt their formula for maintaining permanent standing armies on the advice of a Prussian military consultant named von Steuben.)

Prussia didn’t stop there. The more rights it stripped from Prussian citizens, the more powerful it became. Frederick the Great’s nephew continued this process, depriving every adult of all rights and privileges.

Then in 1806 the Prussians suffered a shattering military defeat at the hands of Napoleon. After their beaten soldiers fled from certain death, they decided to turn their attention to the children, realising they had to start young if they wanted to instil the kind of obedience that would override the fear of death itself.

The government decided that if it could force people to remain children for a few extra years, then it could retard social, emotional and intellectual development and control them more easily. This was the point in history that ‘adolescence’ was invented—a method of slowing the transition from childhood to adulthood, so that it would take years rather than, for example, the months it takes in Indigenous rites of passage.

seemed a bit weird, even to the power-hungry ultra-rich of Europe—it was so all-encompassing that women were required to register each month with the police when their menstruation started. Prussia was described jokingly as an ‘army with a country’ or a ‘gigantic penal institution’. Towns and cities were built like prison blocks, grey grids of rigid cubes and plain surfaces. The government worked hard to ‘cleanse’ the society of homeless people, gypsies, Jews and homosexuals as they expanded and enforced their embryonic doctrine of eugenics. (Their motto for education was Arbeit macht frei, work sets you free, a slogan that the Nazis adopted and later placed above the gates of concentration camps, including Auschwitz, used for Jewish slave labour and extermination. There are many schools in Australia today with a similar motto in Latin: Labor Omnia Vincit, work conquers all. Now, as ever, the creation of a workforce to serve the national economy is the openly stated main goal of public education. And, as ever, the inmates of this system are told that their enthusiastic compliance with forced labour will be in their best interests at some future point.)

Germany’s compulsory education system expressed six outcomes in its original syllabus documents:

1. Obedient soldiers to the army.

2. Obedient workers for mines, factories and farms.

3. Well-subordinated civil servants.

4. Well-subordinated clerks for industry.

5. Citizens who thought alike on most issues.

6. National uniformity in thought, word and deed.

And it spread like wildfire: to Hungary in 1868, Austria in 1869, Switzerland in 1874, Italy in 1877, Holland in 1878, Belgium in 1879, Britain in 1880, and France in 1882. From there it quickly expanded further to European colonies, including Australia.

merely rebranded. Later, following long civil-rights struggles and campaigns for social justice, racial inferiority was renamed ‘cultural difference’. Racial integration was called ‘reconciliation’. In the colonies, assimilation was relaunched as ‘Closing the Gap’. The language became more politically correct, but the globalising goals of cultural uniformity, economic compliance and homogenised identities remained the same.

In my crackpot version of this history, public schooling plays a principal role in the story of transition from one age to the next. It is by no means a complete account, but I hope this marginal perspective is far enough ‘out of the box’ to provoke some questions regarding the sustainability of the global systems that shape our minds and lives. Where is our current turbulent period of transition taking us? Do we want to go there? What form will knowledge transmission (aka education) need to take during this transition? Us-two may also tentatively wonder whether our minds are now too domesticated and shrivelled even to contemplate these questions effectively.

He [Oldman Juma] interacts with his phone like it’s a benevolent alien message stick. I get frustrated because I know he’s right and that I need to embrace these things as part of creation or I’ll miss patterns I need to see. But I’m a Luddite and it’s not easy. I used to get wild when my own people would tell me I’m not a proper blackfella if I don’t have a mobile phone. I resisted as long as I could. From 2010 onwards, my employers insisted I carry office phones on the road for emergencies and meetings but I seldom used them. I got my first ever personal mobile phone in 2016 and then watched my brain fall apart like damper in a pisspot over the next few months.

I can’t imagine what a flash phone with all the bells and whistles would do to me. I can only get pre-paid phones because, like most people in my community, my credit rating is not good enough to get a phone plan. My phone is cheap and hasn’t got much memory so I can only fit a handful of apps on there, but those few apps have been enough to completely change the way my mind and body are wired. I feel numb after I’ve been using it, like when your arm falls asleep. No wonder people have become so weird over the last couple of decades. I understand now.

… Most of all, it highlights the massive divide between engagement and compliance. Most of us today are living in a state of compliance with imposed roles and tasks rather than a hightened state of engagement. We are slaves to a work ethic that is unnatural and unnecessary.

The Protestant work ethic developed from the theories of a powerful clergy. Any time not spent at work or prayer was a chance for the Devil to enter a person and whisper evil suggestions, perhaps something like, ‘What the hell am I getting out of this?’ The clergy conjured up all kinds of demons and evil spirits to frighten workers into compliance. My favourite was the Noonday Demon, a wicked entity that would enter a person if they considered having a siesta. Slave-like labour without lunch-breaks would purify the soul in preparation for paradise. You can take a holiday when you die!

Us-two, we still endure longer work hours than our roles require today, for reasons of social control rather than productivity. It’s difficult to find the mental space to question systems of power when we’re working eight hours, then trying to lift heavy weights that don’t need lifting or pedalling bikes that go nowhere for an hour so we don’t die of a heart attack from being stuck for a third of our lives in a physically restrictive workspace. We sleep for another third of our lives (although not if we have small children), then the rest is divided between life maintenance tasks, commuting and using the few remaining minutes to connect with loved ones, if we still have any. Somewhere in there we also need to find time to study and retrain, unless we want to finish up homeless when our industries inevitably collapse or change direction.

The JOB is the unquestioned goal for all free citizens of the world—the ultimate public good. It is the clearly stated exit goal of all education and the only sanctioned reason for acquiring knowledge. But if we think about it for a moment, jobs are not what we want. We want shelter, food, strong relationships, a livable habitat, stimulating learning activity and time to perform valued tasks in which we excel. I don’t know of many jobs that will allow access to more than two or three of those things at a time, unless you have a particularly benevolent owner/employer.

I am often told that I should be grateful for the progress that western civilisation has brought to these shores. I am not. This life of work-or-die is not an improvement on pre-invasion living, which involved only a few hours of work a day for shelter and sustenance, performing tasks that people do now for leisure activities on their yearly holidays—fishing, collecting plants, hunting, camping and so forth. The rest of the day was for fun, strengthening relationships, ritual and ceremony, cultural expression, intellectual pursuits and the expert crafting of exceptional objects. I know this is true because I have lived like this, even in this era when the land is only a pale shadow of the abundance that once was. We have been lied to about the ‘harsh survival’ lifestyles of the past. There was nothing harsh about it. If it was so harsh—such a brutish, menial struggle for existence—then we would not have evolved to become the delicate, intelligent creatures that we are.

Each of us has indirect access to the memory of every moment of every experience of our lives. It must remain indirect or our brains would explode with the volume of data. It’s all there in unconscious zip files. You have to be connected daily to intuitive or extra-cognitive ways of thinking and being if you want to utilise this knowledge. Ancestor-mind is worth considering as a kind of Paleo thought-path to take you where you need to go, help you tap into this unconscious knowledge system. If you think about the times when you have attained this altered state in your life, through a near-death experience or peak-performance moment or meditation or just through doodling thoughtlessly on a page, you may recall that complex decisions and activities in the hours afterwards were effortless and elegant. You were performing feats of rapid calculation that would crash a quantum computer, accessing a lifetime of memory all at once.

You did this without conscious thought, because to attempt it consciously would fry your entire neural system like an egg. This incredible ability is a gift from your Palaeolithic ancestors, who had the time and liberty to live within this heightened state of mind every day.

I’m a guest speaker addressing students and teachers in a school assembly hall, standing in front of an enormous banner with the lyrics of ‘Advance Australia Fair’ painted on it.

Our land abounds in natures gifts of beauty rich and rare.
In historys page let every stage advance Australia fair.

I point to this and say, ‘I find this offensive,’ and the room goes horribly silent. I draw out the discomfort for a few delicious seconds more, before eliciting a collective exhale of relief and ripple of laughter from the audience when I reveal that what actually offends me is the absence of apostrophes in ‘nature’s gifts’ and ‘history’s page’.

I’m a stickler for grammar and punctuation, and misplaced apostrophes drive me nuts. Apostrophes are important because in this language they tell us who things and people belong to. How do you know who you belong to if you can’t get the language protocols for belonging right? I have been known to lose my head in fruit markets over labels that say things like ‘Grape’s’. Ooh, you bastards, I want to see the owner and unless his name is Grape I’m gunna get wild in here!

Back at our motel after a full day of speeches and meetings and workshops about Indigenous literacy, us-two see a professionally printed sign on a brass plate that says, ‘STRICKLY NO RUNNING’. This makes us question whether the official narrative of literacy interventions in Aboriginal communities is correct; perhaps low levels of literacy do not represent the main barrier to our economic participation and advancement.

Strickly no running. Us-two wonder what the prosperous illiterates responsible for that sign have that we don’t. Maybe it has something to do with belonging to a family that didn’t have its wages quarantined by the government and never returned, allowing for some kind of intergenerational inheritance of capital. Maybe it’s about belonging to networks of informal merchant guilds for settler entrepreneurs. If the people responsible for that sign are able to thrive enough in the marketplace to buy motels and sign-writing businesses while having such shocking spelling skills, surely economic success must be dependent on factors other than reading and writing and counting. Whatever it is, that’s the secret we need to be teaching Indigenous students if we really want to start closing the gap.

Improved literacy scores aren’t going to help you if your community’s role in the marketplace is that of commodity rather than vendor. I’m told I’m a decent enough writer, but I’ve never been able to afford a new car let alone a motel off the back of this hard-won skill. I’m starting to wonder if I’ve spent decades working on a discipline that has no market value at all. On top of it all, I’m beginning to suspect that literacy causes brain damage, if Plato’s opinions on the matter are to be taken seriously.

Modern neural science has been able to map the way print literacy rewires the human brain. It is a fairly catastrophic process, rearranging neural networks and connections between different areas of the brain in ways that are inefficient at best and highly abnormal at worst.

Further, you should never commit all of your cultural knowledge to a print or digital repository. Archives are great, but they are only temporary. The Egyptians learned that the hard way.

The only sustainable way to store data long-term is within relationships—deep connections between generations of people in custodial relation to a sentient landscape, all grounded in a vibrant oral tradition. This doesn’t need to replace print, but it can supplement it magnificently—those two systems might back each other up rather than merely coexist.

Kinship-mind is one of five different ways of thinking us-two have examined together so far in our yarns. It might be helpful to summarise these ways and define them.

This is the image for kinship-mind, which is about relationships and connectedness. In Aboriginal worldviews, nothing exists outside of a relationship to something else. There are no isolated variables—every element must be considered in relation to the other elements and the context. Areas of knowledge are integrated, not separated. The relationship between the knower and other knowers, places and senior knowledge-keepers is paramount. It facilitates shared memory and sustainable knowledge systems. An observer does not try to be objective, but is integrated within a sentient system that is observing itself.

This is the image for story-mind, which is about the role of narrative in memory and knowledge transmission. It is the most powerful tool for memorisation, particularly when connected meaningfully to place. This is how songlines have worked in Australia for millennia to store knowledge in stories mapped in the land and reflected in the night sky. It includes yarning as a method of knowledge production and transmission. Today it is also about challenging grand narratives and histories.

This is the image for dreaming-mind, which is all about using metaphors to work with knowledge. The circle on the left represents abstract knowledge, and the circle on the right represents tangible knowledge. The lines above and below represent communication between these physical and non-physical worlds, which occurs through metaphors. These are images, dance, song, language, culture, objects, ritual, gestures and more. Feedback loops between the worlds must be completed with practical action.

This is the image for ancestor-mind, which is all about deep engagement, connecting with a timeless state of mind or ‘alpha wave state’, an optimal neural state for learning. We can reach this state through most Aboriginal cultural activities. It is characterised by complete concentration, engagement and losing track of linear time. Ancestor-mind can involve immersive visualisation and extra-cognitive learning such as revealed knowledge in dreams and inherited knowledge in cellular memory.

This is the image for pattern-mind, which is about seeing entire systems and the trends and patterns within them, using these to make accurate predictions and find solutions to complex problems. There are three lines with three sections. Each section represents the line from the kinship-mind symbol, which is two elements linked by a relationship. You can see at each point a new pair begins, linked by a new relationship. It is about truly holistic, contextual reasoning.

Not that holistic medicine practitioners would have been much more effective in any of the above scenarios. Whether you presented with appendicitis, ruptured ulcers, arthritis or kidney disease, they would probably all say the same thing: ‘No wheat, no dairy, no meat, no sugar. Eat plenty of yoghurt and cous cous [i.e. dairy and wheat]; take St John’s wort. Two hundred dollars please.’ The term holistic has become something of a dirty word for me, as I’ve seen it co-opted by charlatans in both health and education. Like sustainability, the term ‘holism’ has lost its meaning.

Let’s start out by looking at the recent restaurant phenomenon of Indigenous cuisine. It’s marketed as ancient, holistic and exotic but in reality it’s just a shallow collage of token souvenirs, far removed from anything resembling an Indigenous diet. Customers are titillated by wallaby scaloppine with mango coulis when it’s neither wallaby season nor mango season, and sit staring at a dot painting over their partner’s fifty-dollar plate of warrigal greens and magpie goose carpaccio.

This is not Mumma’s stingray recipe or kap marri dugong. It’s not even devon three ways. There may be a tiny amount of factory-farmed native meat on your plate, but the culture of the Indigenous-themed kitchen that prepared this frippery has more to do with Parisian traditions than with the customs of the Aboriginal people who work there. Actually, that’s not true. In Paris they work with foods that are in season. I don’t know what this defrosted kai kai is on my plate.

Emu-fillet medallions with a quandong glaze is not Aboriginal cooking. Aboriginal cooking is not about using native ingredients—it is about using what is available and optimally nutritious at different times of the year and employing cooking techniques that produce the same effect as cooking on hot coals or slowly in the ground. So chicken wings, curry powder and winter sweet potatoes in a pressure cooker could be considered Aboriginal cooking—kangaroo lasagne is definitely not. Sweet potatoes are only good in the cold seasons after the vines die off, and chickens are too busy mating and brooding in warmer periods to produce good meat. And everybody knows winter chicken is good medicine in the flu season. That’s real Indigenous culinary logic—it’s about using a holistic method grounded in regional and seasonal knowledge, not just adding ‘authentic’ ingredients. Native foods are out of our price range anyway these days, so we make do with what is available and leave things like baupal (macadamia nuts) for more prosperous consumers.

As an example, us-two might look at a native tree—the silky oak tree—that has been planted all over Australia in recent times due to its beautiful flowers. But that tree cannot be examined as a specimen on its own for medicinal and other uses, because it is part of a complex system, like every other entity in the universe. That silky oak tree has the same name in Aboriginal languages as the word for eel. Its wood has the same grain as eel meat and it flowers in the peak fat season for eels, signalling to us that it is the right time to eat them. The fat is medicine in that season and can cure a fever. The role of plants in Indigenous medicine is about much more than isolating compounds to be extracted for pharmaceutical use. You can glimpse the true knowledge systems of Indigenous medicine by looking with a less reductive lens at things like silky oak trees. This requires more than taking samples.

Us-two might explore another widespread tree species in a little more depth as an example: the iconic wattle tree. I have carved a fighting boondi out of black wattle for this yarn, etched with a design mapping an Indigenous medicine plant garden in Melbourne where I walked daily as I was putting together the knowledge for this part of the book. Wattle has a powerful spirit and I have a lot of respect for him. He rushes in when land is damaged, like blood clotting in a wound, covering exposed earth and saving the microbiota in the soil. He fixes nitrogen in the ground and the smoke from his leaves is very useful in many ritual practices. His wood is beautiful and makes good weapons. His seeds are highly nutritious and packed with protein.

When the wattle tree flowers the wild honey is ready to harvest as medicine—a native honey I know as may at, that can kill bacteria like streptococcus on contact. It boosts the immune system and gives you boundless energy. River fish are fat at that time, as are the birds who dive for those fish and show us where to find them. The fruit bats are at peak fat in that season too, and that fat is good medicine for respiratory conditions that might be triggered by the wattle flowers. The leaves of the wattle can be burnt for ash to mix with the leaves of the native tobacco that grows nearby, releasing more of the alkaloids and saponins in the tobacco when chewed. Those compounds are more concentrated at that time than in any other season, making for a wonderful non-addictive stimulant that enhances concentration and alertness. You need to be alert if you want to find the tiny black bees, which make brief streaks of light as they fly high in the trees when the sun is at a certain angle in that season.

In these sand-talk yarns we have so far looked at five ways of thinking. let’s blend them now into one symbol and one way of thinking, which we can use to create dialogue between scientific and Indigenous Knowledge systems.

In this symbol you can see the shapes of five other symbols for story-mind, kinship-mind, dreaming-mind, ancestor-mind and pattern-mind. They are not capitalised because I don’t want them to become buzzwords absorbed into the marketplace. There are no trademarks in this knowledge. It is not specific to any single cultural group and belongs to everyone. You should come up with your own words for these ways of thinking if you decide to use them. You should alter them to match your own local environment and culture. This is all open-source knowledge, so use it like linux software to build what you need to build for a sustainable life. If you want to do this you can use the symbol and your hand now to work through a logic sequence that will help you understand holism and enable you to come to Turtle story later on.

Try pressing your little and ring fingers flat into the desk, or ground, or belly, or any surface where you are reading this—maybe on your arm or on the book itself. Imagine those two fingers are making an emu footprint. Now take the next two fingers and do the same again but imagine it as a kangaroo footprint. Imagine each pair of fingers represents a different family group, and that the two groups are connected through marriage.

Imagine your little finger now as a child. The child has a singular purpose when it is young—to relate. It relates completely to people and land. This puts children at the centre of the family and society, the ones who make relationships happen, tying everything together in a kinship system. So this finger represents kinship-mind—a way of thinking and learning that depends upon linking knowledge to relationships with people and with places.

Imagine the ring finger now as a mother. That pair, those two together, mother and child, are the pivotal relationship of any stable society. All other relationships radiate out from, and feed into, this central pair. The first knowledge transmission we experience is through this relationship. So imagine that ring finger now as a mother, telling stories to her small child. This represents story-mind. This way of thinking uses narrative as a device to carry and transmit knowledge and memory in oral cultures.

Imagine the middle finger as a man, belonging to the woman there beside him. He represents dreaming-mind. So the small finger is kinship-mind, using relationships to carry and transmit knowledge, and the ring finger is story-mind, using narrative to do the same. but the middle finger, dreaming-mind, uses metaphors—images, songs, dances, words, objects.

Imagine the pointing finger as the man’s brother’s child. The man is teaching the child using dreaming-mind, by drawing images in the sand. The woman is telling yarns, transmitting knowledge to the other child using story-mind. Her child is taking on knowledge using kinship-mind—through the relationship and country the two share together. but the man’s nephew or niece, the index finger, is working with ancestor-mind. This means tapping into ancestral knowing that is intuitive and inherent, stored in the body and the land and in spirit, accessed through a peak mental state that allows new knowledge to be absorbed at a phenomenal rate. Ancestor-mind can be achieved through cultural activity like carving, painting, weaving, dancing, and any preparations for ritual or ceremony. It makes you completely open to new and old knowledge.

Now look at your thumb. Wriggle it like a serpent and imagine it sliding across the landscape, forming hills, valleys, rivers, ridges. It connects spiritually to the man, woman and children. This represents pattern-mind, which is the skill of seeing the whole and not just the parts, a big picture understanding of how things work. If you can see the whole system and you have a map of it in your head, then you can see the cause-and-effect relationship between every tiny detail. It is the most difficult kind of mind to master.

Touch the tip of your thumb now on the tip of each of your fingers in turn. From the smallest finger—kinship-mind, story-mind, dreaming-mind, ancestor-mind. Pattern-mind, your thumb, connects with each of these in turn. Think about what that means for each—the vast complexities in our kinship systems and country; the way our stories form intricate webs like maps across country; the images, objects and other metaphors we use to communicate across multiple cultural groups; the ancestral practices and phenomenal feats of concentration required to achieve all of this.

Now do combinations. Touch your thumb together with the mother and child fingers simultaneously and think about the big picture meaning of kinship-mind and story-mind together as an intellectual practice. Now touch the man and woman fingers together with the thumb and think about the pattern and purpose of that relationship, of the generative link between dreaming-mind and story-mind, with story as an extended metaphor. Then with the next pair reflect on the link between dreaming-mind and ancestor-mind, the way cultural activities in peak mental states give rise to metaphors that make meaning and transmit that knowledge with integrity and intensity.

On the back of your hand you will find three joints on each finger. These may help you recall the way our kinship systems can go in cycles of three generations, the way time itself runs in these cycles. In each section of each finger, you may use the creases there to help represent and store increasingly deeper layers of knowledge and understanding about each of these five ways of thinking.

Now make a fist, wrapping your thumb across those fingers and squeezing tight as you think about the way all of these kinds of thinking are intertwined. What is it they form when you put them all together? Don’t think too directly about it. Just squeeze your hand in that fist, and feel a corresponding squeeze in your belly, and let the question sit with you.

… There is no obligation for men or women to be limited to one partner for life, but marriage is still sacred.

Selective recording of observations by anthropologists and early settlers popularised the idea that old men used their power and influence to marry underage girls and monopolise the young women of the group. This ignores the fact that old women did the same with young men—a mechanism that makes sense in terms of maintaining stable populations with low birth rates. It also served to curtail the excesses of youth and to mentor young people in how to navigate the complexity of sexual relationships. You may think of this as paedophilia, but bear in mind that this was in an era when adolescence lasted months rather than years—all over the world, children became young adults and married much sooner in those days.

Creation started with a big bang, not a big hug: violence is part of the pattern. The damage of violence is minimised when it is distributed throughout a system rather than centralised into the hands of a few powerful people and their minions. If you live a life without violence you are living an illusion, outsourcing your conflict to unseen powers and detonating it in areas beyond your living space. Most of the southern hemisphere is receiving that outsourced violence to supply what you need for the clean, technological, peaceful spaces of your existence. The poor zoned into the ghettoes of your city are taking those blows for you, as are the economically marginalised who fill your prisons. The invisible privilege of your technocratic, one-sided peacefulness is an act of violence. Your peace-medallion bling is sparkling with blood diamonds. You carry pillaged metals in your phone from devastated African lands and communities. Your notions of peaceful settlement and development are delusions peppered with bullet holes and spears.

Duck hunting results in duck death. Yam digging results in the death of equally sentient plants. Abusing your partner results in a spear through the leg. Hunting stingray can make you into dinner for a tiger shark. Domesticated beings are stripped of this reality and become passive recipients of violence—either its benefits or its cruel impacts. They devolve as a result.

The trouble with this thought experiment is that we’re doing it on our own, and the kind of dialogue that harnesses the power of hybridity doesn’t work that way. There must be a lot of yarners and yarns to make it work properly. It’s also coming from an asymmetrical relationship, with me assuming a position of moral authority over other points of view. That kind of thinking doesn’t produce complex solutions and dynamic innovations. But some interesting things can come from uneven power relationships, too. In the end nobody can stop dialogue, because it is a force of nature. It emerges eventually, in the form of resistance or disruptive innovation, if you don’t allow it expression on an even playing field.

Some members have visions of mining the resources on their land to pay for the Murrawarri Republic. They aim to go off the power grid by installing solar panels. They plan to make solar energy infinite and sustainable by mining the rare earth metals needed to build them on their own land. When I ask them where they plan to store the radioactive waste from refining those rare earth metals I realise too late how cheeky and disrespectful I’m being. I’ve even asked how we will resist accepting loans from corporations to build infrastructure for these mining projects, losing our sovereignty all over again like so many decolonised nations around the world. It’s not my place to ask these things. I’ve overstepped and I feel shame.

I knock a fat pig and bring it back for them to cook up and they are slightly mollified, but I’m not invited back again after that. I remain troubled by the potential risk of creating Indigenous civilisations, Anglo economic systems administered by men with black faces but still following the same unsustainable global blueprint of destruction. It might be advisable to take a moment to listen to the warnings of Ghillar and ground our strategies in our old Laws of sustainability before we go charging off and building a Mumbai on mulga country.

There are people today fighting to transform our Law into a hybrid entity that may be recognised in Australian and international law, and then there are the old fellas who keep the original Law for us, holding it against the day of resurgence that will come.

Those old fellas don’t want to be written about or filmed. They just keep our Law in secret places and sacred objects that are so powerful they take your breath away. They have no need to assert or defend this Law. It is immutable and will outlast anything you can inscribe on paper or store on a server.

If land and people are not even considered as variables in these weather experiments, then it is certain all the interrelated elements of dynamic weather systems and the knock-on effects of geo-engineering are not informing these activities either. The people conducting them are like children doing a rain dance. Future survival of all life on this planet will be dependent on humans being able to perceive and be custodians of the patterns of creation again, which in turn requires a completely different way of living in relation to the land.

In the home language of my family there is no word for culture. There is a phrase that approximates that concept, but the meaning is untranslatable into English. Aak ngamparam yimanang wunan. If you look at the direct translation of each word, the meaning comes out as ‘being like our place’. I think this is a good way to start if you want to begin to discern the patterns of creation and rejoin our custodial species. When you engage with this way of being you will find it changes you in subtle ways. The patterns of your language will change as you find ways to express the places you come into relation with. Your accent will change to reflect the landscapes you inhabit. I have moved around so much in Australia over the years that my own accent is weirdly muddled: there are too many places and Peoples in me. Being in profound relation to place changes everything about you—your voice, your smell, your walk, your morality.

But I can’t explain how to do this, nor can I show you by taking you with me walking on Country and through all the layers of earth and water and sky. So we’ll have to find a non-physical way to do it, a deep visualisation stimulated by speech-sound marks on a page.

We could apply the same technique to remembering some of the other key ideas we have been yarning about in this book. The most important one is the set of protocols for agents in a sustainable complex system. If you are interested in being this kind of agent, we can encode that in your fingers right now. Not in the first row of knuckles near the tips of your fingers, though, because that family lives there with those five different ways of thinking. The complexity agent protocols will go on the middle row of knuckles. When we’re done, you’ll know this like the back of your hand.

First you need to come up with an example of a dynamic, self-organising system that you know well: a solar system or river or family or waterway or ecosystem or football team—anything like that. It has to be something that carries particular meaning, stories and connections for you. See an image of that system in your mind and then stare at your thumb, thinking the image into it.

Now choose four elements from that system to represent the protocols of a complexity agent—connectedness, diversity, interaction and adaptation. You must form an image of each element that connects to what you are trying to memorise. Your thumb will touch the inside of each finger at the second knuckle as you think the image into the finger. It may help to break each concept into three parts and associate those with different parts of each image. For example, the three parts of the connectedness protocol are pairs, networks of pairs and networks of networks.

Connectedness involves forming pairs with multiple other agents who also pair with others. The next step is creating or expanding networks of these connections. The final step is making sure these networks are interacting with the networks of other agents, both within your system and in others.

Recall that the diversity protocol has three parts—similar to you, different from you and systems beyond you. It compels you to maintain your individual difference, particularly from those other agents that are similar to you. You must also seek out and interact with a wide variety of agents that are completely dissimilar to you. Finally, you must interact with other systems beyond your own, keeping your system open and therefore sustainable.

The interaction protocol is about continuously transferring knowledge, energy and resources. This means passing on these three things to as many other agents as possible, rather than trying to store them individually.

The adaptation protocol is about transformation, feedback loops and strange attractors. You must allow yourself to be transformed through your interactions with other agents. Knowledge and energy will flow through the entire system in feedback loops and you must be prepared to change so that those feedback loops are not blocked. If you are truly adaptive and changing you are open to sudden eruptions of transformation, in which you may temporarily take on the role of strange attractor and facilitate chain reactions of creative events within the system.

On your fingers now you have two familiar sets of ideas from this book so far. There are some ways of thinking about the world and some protocols for sustainability, but so far no process for enacting these things. So now I will share with you a cultural process for enacting these ways and protocols if you wish. I will leave it up to you to figure out how you want to store these ideas on your last row of knuckles.

This process for working with Indigenous Knowledge in sustainable ways came from two years of following songlines from north to south and then east coast to west coast with Mumma Doris Shillingsworth. We wanted to find a pattern that was common to all different groups, a process that could be used by anyone to come to Indigenous Knowledge productively and without doing damage. We had hundreds of yarns and Mumma Doris fairly talked my ear off in the car, so much that once I nearly crashed trying to take it all in. She worked with her knowledge of Moondagutta, which is the Murruwarri word for the creation snake, linking up that songline all the way to the Waagal story of the Nyoongar in Perth. Every yarn on the way was first grounded in the protocol of respect, which every Elder insisted on, so that became our touchstone. We had four questions.

1. What can we know?
2. What do we know?
3. How do we know it?
4. How do we work with that?

The answers we found were as follows:

What we can know is determined by our obligations and relationships to people, Ancestors, land, law and creation.

What we know is that the role of custodial species is to sustain creation, which is formed from complexity and connectedness.

The way we know this is through our cultural metaphors.

The way we work with this knowledge is by positioning, sharing and adapting our cultural metaphors.

What we had found was a broad, common description of Indigenous ways of valuing, ways of being, ways of knowing and ways of doing. These things had a widespread order, a sequence in all cultural activities in which people were sharing or producing knowledge on Country. We had our own personal metaphors for describing this process of induction. I referred to it as spirit, heart, head and hands. Mumma Doris knew it as Respect, Connect, Reflect, Direct. She insisted on that order. She also identified that non-Aboriginal people seemed to work through the same steps but in reverse.

She has observed interventions and programs imposed on her community for over half a century, noticing that they always begin with the last step—Direct. Government agents come into the community with a plan for change and they direct activities towards this change immediately. When it all fails, they go backwards to the next step, Reflect. They gather data and measure outcomes and try to figure out what went wrong. Then they realise they didn’t form relationships with community, so belatedly go to the next step, Connect. Through these relationships they discover the final step (which should have been the first), finding a profound respect for members of the community they ruined. They cry as they say farewell and return to the city, calling, ‘Thank you, I have learnt so much from you!’

Invert that process and you’ll have something approximating an appropriate way of coming to Indigenous Knowledge and working towards sustainable solutions. The first step of Respect is aligned with values and protocols of introduction, setting rules and boundaries. This is the work of your spirit, your gut. The second step, Connect, is about establishing strong relationships and routines of exchange that are equal for all involved. Your way of being is your way of relating, because all things only exist in relationship to other things. This is the work of your heart. The third step, Reflect, is about thinking as part of the group and collectively establishing a shared body of knowledge to inform what you will do. This is the work of the head. The final step, Direct, is about acting on that shared knowledge in ways that are negotiated by all. This is the work of the hands.

Respect, Connect, Reflect, Direct—in that order. Everything in creation is sentient and carries knowledge, therefore everything is deserving of our respect. Even narcissists.

My hope is that one day everybody can find a place under the Law of the land where they live, transitioning our living systems into something that is sustainable in the true sense of the word. Oldman Juma calls it the seven families coming home and uniting again. We’d like everybody to look up at the stars and see the same stories there once more. And stop asking the question, ‘Are we alone?’ Of course we’re not! Everything in the universe is alive and full of knowledge.

Now that the small questions of existence have been answered—Why are we here? How should we live? What will happen when we die?—us-two should be able to get back to the business of asking some of the bigger questions. We’ll need living lands and bodies to do that, though. So let’s put these hands of ours to work.