 Namibukmak, my name is Leila Gurawewe and I'm a proud Yunga woman of the Galpol clan of North-East Arnhem land. I would like to acknowledge that all of Agency's Untold Talk series are filmed on the lands of the Rurantri people of the Kulin nation and we pay our respects to their elders past and present. It gives me great pleasure to welcome you to Agency's Untold Talk series. Agency is an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander non-for-profit that celebrates and promotes Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art, culture and people on a local, national and international scale. Untold brings together leading Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander creative practitioners and thinkers from across Australia and beyond and shines a light on a broad range of topics from caring for country to the unseen work of women in communities and the importance of intergenerational learning. Our host for this series is Gumarui woman Crystal Denapoli who is a astrophysics graduate now undertaking an Honours degree at Monash University. Crystal is a passionate advocate for Indigenous sciences, Indigenous astronomy in particular, which she explores through public presentations, research, writing and by embedding Indigenous knowledges into secondary and tertiary curricula. Her book Astronomy Sky Country co-authored with Kali Noom has recently been published by Tames and Hudson. In this episode, Crystal discusses Aboriginal plant knowledge with Zena Kumpsten. Zena is a researcher, writer and storyteller who also sometimes works as a curator and consultant. She is a bark and jib woman who is passionate about plants, but particularly the knowledge held by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in this area. In 2022, she curated an exhibition at the old Quad of University of Melbourne Parkville campus called Emie Sky and will be releasing her book Plants as part of the First Knowledge Series later this year. Crystal and Zena cover a range of topics from concepts of country, the ongoing impact of colonisation and the importance of empowering communities and moving past the colonial mindset. I'm Crystal Denapoli. I'm a Gomorri astrophysicist and I'm here today with bark and jib woman Zena Kumpsten. Zena is a researcher and curator and can probably give herself better justice in introducing the wonderful things that you do. Thanks, Crystal. Yes, so I'm Zena Kumpsten. I've been working for many years in academia which I recently left, but I do a lot of different work. I guess the main thing I do is that I do research and my main passion is Aboriginal plant use. I also do work in kind of creative fields. So for example, I've just curated a show at the University of Melbourne called Emie Sky which revolves around Aboriginal knowledge of country. So to set the scene, can you tell us a bit about the research that you have done and what has motivated it? So I guess when I finished uni, I had been working while I was at uni on lots of different projects that were in the realm of Aboriginal visual histories. So I guess looking at histories through artworks and photographs and unpacking a lot of the stories that are within those visual representations of Aboriginal people and culture and knowledge. And so that really brought together my love of art which has been a lifelong love for me. I'm very lucky to have artists and creative people in my family who have really ignited that. And I guess the research that I'm doing now in the realm that I'm really interested in came about when I had my children. I was at home a lot and I was spending a lot of time in my garden. And as I got more and more passionate about my own garden and my own backyard, I started to think a lot about the way that my people have managed country over time and also about our plants and our plant use because here I am at home growing tomatoes and basil. And I started to think what have my people been eating for the longest time because I didn't know. It wasn't something that I had learnt from my family or my community because unfortunately a lot of us don't have access to our foods and that's a lot to do with not having access to country which we can talk about more I'm sure. But yeah that was really where it came from, just my own backyard. And so I went and did a course about urban gardening because I wanted to learn more and I felt the abundance at my fingertips that I had in my garden that I could grow things and my family could eat them and it was just a really powerful wonderful feeling and it really fed me in lots of ways like intellectually but also literally. So really that's where it started and then Uncle Bruce Pascoe's book Dark Emie came out when I was kind of just at the beginning of this journey and before that I hadn't really thought that there was a place for me to do research in this area something that I was so passionate about about plants and when I read Dark Emie I realised that there was this whole realm that I had started to to just get a tiny little like bit of illumination on through my own travels and yeah it really helped me a lot to see that there was a place for me and so as things happen an opportunity came at the University of Melbourne on a project that was about plants and that's where I started this journey that I'm still on today. Yeah wonderful so one of the words that you used in your answer was talking about having access to country and essentially caring for country are you happy to tell us a bit about what you mean when you talk about country because I know in like a literal English word sense we sort of think about like maybe the nation we belong to or the literal land that we're on yeah but how do you define country? Yeah I guess you know we're all so diverse as Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and so there's sort of no one way of conceptualising a lot of the things in our our culture and our ways of seeing but I think there are lots of overarching parts of our diverse cultures across Australia and there's some fundamental understandings we have and I think for most of us our understanding of what country is is very multifaceted I I think of it as everything to do with our cultural landscape and there's there's nothing around us even when we're in cities and inside buildings and around concrete and places that seem completely bereft of their cultural sort of belonging there's not country is always alive and it doesn't matter how much concrete you put over or how many plants you take out or how much you modify the landscape country is animate and it's everything around us so I guess it's for me a really big part of country is my ancestors I feel them with me all the time I know that they're helping me in my life with the decisions that I make the challenges I face and I really see country as they are always with me around me and they're a big part of it so it can be living things and also things that are considered not living I know for a lot of mods really important parts of country and the landscape and everything that they conceptualize as country can be things that people would possibly consider to be dead like rocks we have ancestors ancestors who live within these things in the landscape that are sort of considered I guess inanimate and country is also it's not just the land it's the seas as you know it's the skies it's it's everything around us that's part of our living world but also part of things that perhaps some people might consider to be not living yeah that's wonderful I can sort of imagine the like a it's like a it's like a massive system with different things different areas of life that are tying into it so you've mentioned the processors on the land people animals whatever contained within as well as our waterways and our skies and also importantly the urban areas which I find really interesting and so with I guess the the state of country at the moment and we're talking about country and I guess these different sort of formats so in our urban spaces and also in our rural areas what are some things that you've learned about the state of country through your research whether we're engaging with native plants or whether there are any issues that sort of prevalent across this landscape that's a really hard question I'm sorry no I like it though I guess when I when I hear the question that you just asked I really think about something that I've been ruminating a lot on recently and that is that a lot of people talk about and think about colonization as a point in time or something that happened in the past and I see one of the major problems in terms of the way that we conceptualize and care for country here in what we now call Australia is is the deeply colonial practices that are still part of our everyday I see that as one of our biggest challenges is to move past them and re-indigenize everything around us our way of seeing being and doing in the mainstream here because ultimately we're still managing country as though it's something outside of us something that is not connected to us and really I think a lot of the ways that country is conceptualized in Australia across everything knowledge production the way that we manage it's as a resource that's there to be plundered and we know ourselves as Aboriginal people that we we can never think of country like that because country is living and I guess I mean I really think of country as well as my mother and I know that with my relatives and the people who I deeply love around me that always has to be a reciprocal relationship we always have to be giving back as we're taking and a lot of elders say if you look after country country will look after you and there's nothing truer in the world and so I think that's yeah one of the biggest challenges and the thing that I think about a lot at the moment is how do we move past this really deeply colonial mindset where people are really reticent to allow Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people to completely control the management of country we're always being seen as consultants or people who you can just take a little bit of information from and sprinkle it on top and it'll all be fine until we can fundamentally really empower communities who have lived on country for the longest time imaginable and have incredible knowledge that's been built up over time and more skin in the game than anyone could have until we can empower mobs to kind of really really be in the driver's seat not the backseat I don't see how we're going to sort of get past a lot of the problems that we're experiencing in terms of the many many pressures to do with climate change and lots of other environmental factors yeah absolutely so with your response a few things jump to mind in particular you're talking about the knowledges that we do have and our own ability to died country and so I was wondering if you tell us a bit about some of the the things that you learned about native plants and their their utility when it comes to Indigenous knowledges yeah well I guess for me native plants has been a really exciting thing to be able to talk to lots and lots of people about because it's an area that whilst this seems to be a lot of recognition of the the the value of our plants and our plant knowledge it's still playing out in a way that's quite problematic in the mainstream so for example the bush tucker industry so it seems like people are really really celebrating and respecting Aboriginal people and cultural knowledges through this recognition that we have plants here that have you know incredible nutritional medicinal and also I guess sustainable qualities so a lot of our native plants they don't require fertilizer they don't require lots and lots of water and they are the plants that have grown here for the longest time imaginable with the careful custodianship of mobs on country looking after them because that's been a very active process of looking after our plants and also understanding them and their uses but I guess the bush tucker industry is a bit problematic you know not just for me but for a lot of people in that whilst it seems to celebrate I think in some ways it it it takes away from a deeper more understanding of the power that our plants and our knowledges that go with them can have especially in terms of meeting many of the challenges that we face so for example land clearing and agriculture it it makes up a huge percentage of pressures on our Indigenous species in Australia so I think we have between six and seven hundred thousand native species of animals and plants here and it is well sort of known amongst scientific community that that's probably there's probably about 70 percent of plants and animals that we don't yet know about so it's incredible to think yeah wow so we've got all these you know really amazing species here in Australia but we a don't know enough about them and b we really haven't ever really empowered Aboriginal communities and Torres Strait Islander communities to reinvigorate lots of the knowledges that are still very much a part of their cultural lives but also for that to enter into the mainstream so I do tours of my exhibition that's on at Melbourne University at the moment called Amy Sky and I bring students and adults in and there's a part of the exhibition that has many many different plants and it it's a beautiful visual display of the abundance of country and it's called Murram which means overflowing in Gamilaroi language and Jonathan Jones who's a Gamilaroi raduary so it's I think it's in raduary language here's Gamilaroi and I get mixed up and it's about the abundance of country and I talked to students about lots of the things that are on the table so there's kwandong seeds there's kangaroo grass we talk about the ways that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people have been nurturing countries this abundance this overflowing abundance was always available to us because of the way that we had that reciprocal relationship and how us making country strong allowed country to make us strong because we have so many foods here that are so nutritionally beneficial that we've used for so long and also medicinally and also for tools and for all sorts of technologies and then I asked the students to tell me what in our every day in the way that we eat and do things in this country attests all of that really rich knowledge and some of what they've seen on the table what do we have in our every day that that speaks to that and that honours that amazing resource that is our country and our knowledge of of how to use these plants sometimes in 10 15 20 different ways and they I can see their faces sort of thinking thinking and then the penny drops we really don't have anything we might have some macadamia nuts if you've got a really fancy coals you might be able to get some room each yeah you might have some water seed scones and to me this is part of the problem of the whole bush tucker industry in that it's just almost like our deep knowledge of country that allowed us to be so healthy and vital for such a long period of time is now seen as something that you can just sprinkle on the top yeah and so and that's why I wanted to ask can you expand upon what the bush tucker industry is and what they're doing in relation to native plants here yeah so I guess it's an industry that's been booming for around I think the last 20 years and the work that's being done is really I guess to showcase the nutritional value but also how delicious our foods that grow here are because because colonisation is ongoing and that's what I speak to students about as well about what they're seeing on that table and what they see in their everyday life I say to them if you want evidence that colonisation is not in the past and is here today look at silences like this because why would these plants that are so valuable and so just right for country in terms of sustainability not using too much water not using heaps of petrochemicals to produce why would they not be a part of our everyday that's part of the silences of colonisation which you know for the longest time has told people that our knowledges aren't really worth much and they're not worth kind of looking at properly and also empowering so I guess for me the bush tucker industry the most glaring problem with it is that around one percent of the that industry benefits directly Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples that's a really big problem when it's like an industry that's worth multi multi multi multi millions of dollars probably if you included the macadamia industry in that which a lot of the figures don't you'd be getting closer to like the billions at some point pretty soon it's really problematic that something that claims to sort of really celebrate Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and culture is actually not providing any benefit and also that I guess these little sprinklings like some waddle seeds in your scones or you know a tiny bit of jam on something else to me it takes away from how important these plants and understanding them and using them in our everyday is in terms of sustainability for our future for everyone yeah you know I definitely see that and do you feel like there is um I guess like a continuation of that pillaging because obviously at the time of invasion and colonization which has been this ongoing accents then we are very very familiar with a lot of our knowledges being and our resources being taken from country and um getting to acknowledgement and now we're in like a new era where there's like this tiny sort of hint of acknowledgement but it's still it's from what you're describing still somewhat shallow it's still this one percent that's going towards mob with the bulk of any type of profit or any type of gain going to people who essentially haven't cultivated that knowledge and yeah so how does uh sorry I know what you're saying so basically I guess thinking about intellectual and cultural property rights yeah um because that's a massive problem so for the longest time well since invasion um non-indigenous people have been taking the knowledge of indigenous people as their own with no sort of um recognition of where that's come from yeah and that's happened a lot with our foods and our plants and you know when when the invaders came here they came to to look at what economic benefit this country could be for them and so they were really looking a lot at plants and agriculture and and and that sort of realm and so it's been happening since the beginning but unfortunately it actually continues to happen now so even though we've got this championing of of um our ways of eating of you know utilizing the the bounty of country through this bush tucker industry or the native food industry um still that acknowledgement of the intellectual and cultural property of our people and our knowledges is still not protected and there's a lot of really amazing work going on at the moment um to put those protections in place but it's still it's still not quite there and still um pharmaceutical industry especially is taking a lot and there's incredible problems with biopiracy in this country and people doing you know huge multinational companies i'm talking about as well doing some really really um i guess dishonest crafty things to get around some of the small rules that we've already gotten place so they can do things like um they can take out patents on on certain plants um and use the the knowledge that has come from Aboriginal community for those plants but without having to give acknowledgement through a few little loopholes that they're quite good at identifying and this is the problem you've got um Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people up against multinational companies yeah so really our government and all of us need to look at how we protect this um realm because when you think that you know if we've got hundreds of thousands of plants that are in Australia and only occur here um and are amazing in terms of and pharmaceuticals companies know this because they're the ones who've been doing most of the work and that shouldn't be either we should our our communities universities all knowledge makers should be doing this work not not people who are just looking to basically take what they can and make a lot of money from it um it's yeah it's a really big problem biopiracy and there's amazing people working in the field like obviously um Dr Terry janky has done a lot of really amazing um researching reports in this area um in Victoria at the moment we've got the Australian native um botanicals and bush foods um traditional owner um groups are coming together to sort of put together some guidelines for how people can work in this realm respectfully and in reciprocity with Aboriginal communities in Victoria um so there is work being done but it's still a massive problem and there's people like um Margaret Raven who is um a Yamachee scholar um academic and I think she works at UNSW she's written some incredible pieces about biopiracy and what a massive problem it is but it's wonderful it's being recognised that this knowledge belongs to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and communities but we still have a really long way to go in in those protections and I think you know sometimes it's not just pure greed sometimes people are very ignorant yeah so I talk to people a lot about intellectual and cultural property rights which a lot of people call ICIP and people will say to me in one way or another something very similar they'll say how can Aboriginal people own plants and I find it interesting that people question how our knowledge passed down over tens of thousands of years could could not be viable as like something we can copyright but they've got no problem with a multinational company copywriting a plant or you know patenting a plant yeah and which has been happening a lot and you know there's so many articles you can read about this but one that really stands out for me and one of the first ones I came across was quite a few years ago um a non-Aboriginal company was able to successfully patent a really important medicinal plant called Gumby Gumby it's like the common name yeah um and they were even able to patent the name Gumby Gumby and so um how does the patent work as well is it essentially trying to make the claims that they have been able to discern the benefit that this plant gives and so that they can use it in that manner like are they trying to prevent others from doing similar both so this is the terrible thing not only does it take the knowledge and use it without any recognition or benefit yeah they also stop Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people from being able to use it so when that patent came about no Aboriginal person could commercially um use Gumby Gumby in any way or use the name or the name their own language name like I'm not sure what mob that language name comes from but they weren't allowed to use it anymore because it was patented by a non-Aboriginal company so I don't understand the I guess the legal aspects of all of this very deeply but I have you know an understanding enough to kind of see how rotten this is that people would then go oh but how can Aboriginal people own plants well we can because people wouldn't be patenting these plants or know as much or even anything about their veracity and uses if it weren't for the knowledge that they have been given from our people yeah that's absolutely shocking to me especially just as you I like I laughed I know it's so inappropriate to laugh but the fact that you point out that people are sort of questioning how can Aboriginal people own plants but a very sort of not not happy but very passive about companies putting a patent out on the very same topic when from mine in your perspective we we're quite well versed in the very long tens of thousands of years long history of this land being very carefully managed and those plants being very carefully cultivated to be at the point that they are today yes so to me that is incredibly shocking yeah and so when it comes to your sort of your standpoint looking at this field because you said you don't necessarily know the legal sense to it which is fine doesn't matter but coming from a community member who's super intelligent knows a lot about these plants what would you be hoping to see in the next say five or ten years they can help fix the situation like what would be your sort of like ideal setting I think the only way forward is to really empower our communities to lead the conversations in the area of plants and all of the the many many ways that they can help in terms of sustainability and all of the pressures we're facing with climate change and everything else I think that if our communities aren't put in the driver's seat we're just going to see a continuation of these really colonial practices of people coming in sort of taking knowledge thinking that they know better or can do better we're just going to be on the same path so I think a lot of the work that's happening at the moment is really exciting the traditional owner groups in Victoria for example that I mentioned before coming together to actually make you know really nuanced protocols that protect communities but also empower them at the same time to have a much more viable place in these new industries that are popping up in terms of our plants and and agriculture so I think when it's Indigenous led is when it's at it's very best and where that path for where we need to go forward really begins is empowering us to be at the helm yeah and others is there anything that you think that like say for example our education system and our universities might be able to do to better um to I guess like better sort of help us get to a better educated future I use better way too much but you know you know you see the optimism that I'm eating yeah yeah yeah um look Crystal there's so much I think that can be done and I'm definitely not an expert but I've been working in academia for the last 10 years in various different ways and I definitely see that there's still an extractive mindset and what I mean by that is that people come in and think that they can mine and take things and what they really need to be doing is looking at how to work in reciprocity it's something I talk about a lot because I really believe that it's foundational in you know our culture and again I know how diverse we all are as Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people but you can't you can't argue that reciprocity is not at the core of so much of our interactions with country and each other and I think that if people who are creating knowledge like our institutions and our universities are can can switch their mindset from that taking to actually empowering and coming together with people at the start of projects to really talk properly about what could benefit both of us because like I was talking about with those multinationals and and traditional owner groups and communities the power imbalances are huge and they still are and I think that tertiary institutions and all institutions need to think about the colonial practices that they're continuing when they don't fundamentally address those really huge power imbalances that that happen between communities knowledge holders and and researchers especially um and I see people even I go to talks and I hear people talking about the projects that they want to do with mob with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and they don't even realise they're doing it they're using really extractive language and I think I know where you're coming from because I can hear it in the language that you're using we can use this we can take this this will benefit us they don't even realise their language is so problematic because institutions and especially what I've seen in in tertiary institutions like the universities I've worked in um I guess knowledge is commodified and so to be the number one in your field to be the person at the top is what everyone aspires to in those sort of like non-indigenous ways of building knowledge yeah whereas in our communities if someone walked in and said I know everything we'd all kill ourselves laughing at them and it would be the funniest thing ever because it's ridiculous to us we each have our place as knowledge holders and it's a communal situation the way that we hold knowledge and guess what that's why our knowledge has remained strong for tens of thousands of years it doesn't sit with one person it doesn't get written down our strength is our communities and the way that we hold knowledge and that's another thing I find really strange about the universities they love finding one Aboriginal person who can do things and tell them everything and tick all the boxes that they're hoping to tick and a lot of that comes from a really good place they go oh we want to engage want to do things properly but they do it in in what's completely alien to our ways of holding knowledge and maintaining knowledge and building knowledge and it's it's a strange way to approach approach I guess being able to understand that knowledge you can't ever do it through one person and it's just not going to work and it's so culturally really inappropriate yeah yeah so it seems like there is a lot of harm that's easily caused by people who aren't intentionally acting maliciously but uh completely ignorant I guess on proper protocol and the way that they should be even just discussing indigenous cultural um intellectual property or even just us as being as beings as knowledge holders yeah absolutely so and it's what I was talking about before is we're still very much on this one-way train that's just like colonialism at its worst and we need to find ways I sort of see as this wheel that just keeps turning and the young Aboriginal people I've been working with recently I talk to them all the time about sticking things in that wheel just to trip it up just for a second your stick will probably break and it'll keep going but the more we do that the more we're wearing things down we need people to pause we need people to think more deeply about the way that we do everything because our knowledge is is really sought after in universities at the moment and people are trying to incorporate things in curricula and that's really wonderful because there's been such huge silences for such a long time but the problem for me is that the that our ways of doing are not part of that at all our knowledge and and you know so many of the the powerful ways of doing that we have are trying to sort of almost be like a a square peg in a round hole you can't just shove it into a tertiary system and hope it all comes out properly and it's the same with us even as people you know so often I know this has happened to me as like an Aboriginal woman working in academia I'm expected to I guess bring the value of my culture into a completely alien world and for it to just work and it just doesn't because until we can find more ways of opening up to Aboriginal ways and Torres Strait Islander ways of seeing doing and being as well as all of the knowledge that everyone wants we'll never we'll never have the effectiveness of our ways of knowing when they don't play out in a pedagogical way so that's our ways of doing so even at the uni I give lectures sometimes and I refuse to do power points and people completely freak out but it's not my way of doing things I like to storytell I like to take people for a walk I like to be outside with country I think country should always be an active participant if you can get to that situation where people will go for a walk with you yeah because country is always talking to us all the time breezes birds I'm noticing it more and more as I get older I've learned to open myself more to country and to listen and to watch and country is the repository of so much knowledge even the way water flows tells you something really deeply knowledgeable about the country that you're on if you know how to look properly yeah so I think our pedagogical practices our ways of doing things have to also be in the equation and for me the biggest part for me in the latest project that I did the emu sky exhibition was I had to fight really hard to do it yeah and I don't like fighting with people but it looks like I do if you look at the last couple of years of my my work you know I'm sure plenty of people absolutely can't stand me but there's plenty who love me too and that's fine but I have fought a lot with people because I have made them do things in a way that makes sense to me yeah so for for example the exhibition it was completely from a relational standpoint nothing was kind of just in my head it was all sitting down and talking to people and letting them bring what they wanted to the project that's that's not a very usual way of doing things at the uni and I was quite lucky in terms of COVID there's always some tiny silver linings that come with huge challenges and I know it's been a terrible time for you know so many people right across the world yeah but there are some small things that happen because of COVID that I think we can all be grateful for and one thing for me personally on a really small scale was that my project the timelines expanded so you know that that exhibition was meant to open five times before it eventually opened but that was great because it allowed me to do what I wanted to do which was to have more time to talk more time to work out what the people I was engaging wanted as well as what the uni wanted and so I feel like the whole exhibition has become this beautiful reciprocity and it's not often that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities get more benefit from the uni than the uni yeah and I think on this one we've got close to getting the same or more and lots of my projects in the past I'm ashamed to say really benefited the institution and didn't really benefit um our mobs yeah and that's I'm not hard on myself that's not through any fault of my own that's because I went into a system that I didn't know how to fight in yet and now I do I I've seen a new sky your exhibition personally so I can vouch that it is a phenomenal collaboration of different community members coming to bring to life something really immersive and informative for people who unfortunately don't probably get the chance to actually come see it in person did you want to talk us through about what a new sky looks like and what you've created yeah so I guess thinking about the university as we were talking before I really saw all the research that I'd done the last few years I sort of wondered what would happen to it after I left because I knew that I was leaving academia and so I wanted to bring together lots of the ideas that had been opened up to me through my research and understanding more about our plant use but I also think that artists are possibly the most important people in our culture obviously elders are probably you know the most important but I think artists come a close second because they are our storykeepers and they're the people who transmit our stories and they can do it over time and I really wanted to to work with artists to tell stories in a really public way about our knowledge because I see it as something that's still not well understood a lot of people think that indigenous knowledge is in the past or it's out in the bush or it's not viable for today's circumstance even if it isn't dead yeah there's so many ideas about our knowledge being dead which is absolute rubbish yes we have been really terribly catastrophically affected by colonisation but there is nothing that is completely lost I do not believe it same with our languages there have been languages around Australia like Ghana in Adelaide is an excellent example very little was known it was considered to be a dead language and just through the reinvigoration of you know small groups of community who found lots and lots of resources in lots of different places and were able to bring them together Ghana is now a language that people are speaking again in Adelaide all of the place names are in English and in Ghana this is a language that was considered dead and I see that you know really all of our knowledge of country is the same thing people might not be able to see it really easily or understand that it's there but it is there yeah and I just don't I never believe that things that have been here this long can be lost I just won't believe it but still that language is pervasive yeah the idea that things are completely gone because of colonisation yes there's lots of things that are in trouble including lots of language and lots of knowledge but all you have to do is resource the reinvigoration of those things and what you can achieve is incredible and so we really have to look at the language we use and the thought process we have in terms of indigenous knowledge we have to empower it wherever we can yeah and and us leading is really important for that as well because a lot a lot of the time non-indigenous people can't see where the knowledge is they can't see the value in things and it's up to us to say no this is how it works yeah and for us also to have the opportunity to I guess you know rebuild in lots of ways there's so many things that that we need to reinvigorate but they are certainly not dead I see these things as seeds and they're just waiting same as you know some of the catastrophic damage from fires also another small tiny lining in something that was horrific so many plants came up that hadn't been seen sometimes ever on country across Australia and they were literally seeds waiting just just for the right conditions and unfortunately the fires mostly wiped out things and weren't beneficial in any way but there are some places like Uncle Bruce on his property out at Malacuta where he's doing a lot of work around food sovereignty all sorts of grasses and orchids and yeah which are incredible tubers and have really high nutritional value came up that no one had seen before amazing so that's what to me our knowledge is like that it's just a seed waiting for someone to get the light on and there's nothing lost it's it's more a problem in resourcing wow I think that's such an inspiring note to conclude on I do want to say though this has been like a marvellous conversation with you and I feel like you've really brought to light how as long as our voices are central that we're in the driver's seat that we can help drive change and I know that for yourself that you having you in the driver's seat is something that is going to change a lot of the culture here and also I know you're the type of person to nurture others getting their voices heard and being the next ones to sit in their seats and lead us to a better future so thank you for everything you do and thank you for this chat today aww thank you crystal