Special Report: Stealing Indigenous Voices in Australia (w/Tyson Yunkaporta)
On October 14, Australians will vote in a referendum on a simple question: should Indigenous peoples be invited to form an advisory council—a Voice—to Parliament?
It seemed like a shoe-in “Yes”—before the issue was FUBARed by a coalition of antivax, anti lockdown, Q-adjacent white sovereign citizens who believe that they are the true victims of colonization.
Professor Tyson Yunkaporta of Apalech clan joins Matthew to discuss the complexities of this history—including how some vulnerable Indigenous folks have been lured into supporting the “No” vote and providing cover for libertarian and white supremacist agendas.
Yunkaporta is the founder of the Indigenous Knowledge Systems Lab at Deakin University in Melbourne AUS, author of Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World (2019) and released just this past week: Right Story, Wrong Story: Adventures in Indigenous Thinking. He’s also the host of the excellent free range podcast The Other Others.
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Show Notes
Indigenous Knowledge Systems Lab at Deakin University
Referendum 202
Conspiracy theories are derailing the Yes vote w/ Tyson Yunkaporta
Voice pamphlets: false claims and conspiracy theories distributed across Australia | Indigenous voice to parliament
How a soap opera star pushed a conspiracy theory linking the Voice to Parliament to a UN takeover
Key voice battleground South Australia is ‘leaning to no’, campaign volunteers say | Indigenous voice to parliament
View The Statement - Uluru Statement from the Heart
Aboriginal Tent Embassy — 'the guys who woke up Australia' — marks its 50th anniversary
So-Called Sovereign Settlers: Settler Conspirituality and Nativism in the Australian Anti-Vax Movement
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Hello everyone, welcome to Conspiratuality, where we investigate the intersection of conspiracy
theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism
And today, I should add to that tagline, White sovereign citizen Australians who believe that they are the true victims of colonization.
I'm Matthew Remsky.
I'm welcoming my guest, Professor Tyson Junkaporta of Opelich clan, that's West Cape.
Founder of the Indigenous Knowledge Systems Lab at Deakin University in Melbourne, Australia.
He's the author of Sand Talk, How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World, that's in 2019.
And then released just this past week, Right Story, Wrong Story, Adventures in Indigenous Thinking.
Also the host of an excellent free range podcast called The Other Others.
Welcome professor, it's a real honor to speak with you.
Thanks so much for taking the time.
Yo, Matthew.
Yeah, no titles.
We don't do titles in our lab.
So I'm not a professor.
No one's a professor in there.
We all go on the same level.
Some people insist on it, but you know they're people who Don't get it.
So our discussion today is going to drop about a week out from a referendum to be held in Australia on October 14th.
And this was the fire behind my first email to you.
This pending vote sits on top of a deep and tangled history that I know you can help many people understand.
Including how some indigenous folks have found themselves aligned with white libertarians who love to use their language, their politics even.
But before we get to that, I'll just take a few moments to cover the immediate news in a little bit of detail.
So the referendum itself is on a question that has been burbling for decades.
And that one might think, in this day and age of moderate and grudging concessions from Commonwealth governments towards their colonized peoples, would have a simple answer.
So, the question is, should the Constitution of Australia be amended to create a body called the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice, charged with speaking for Indigenous issues directly to the Parliament?
Yes or no?
So, is that basically it?
Yeah, yeah.
It's just speaking.
Just speaking, not policymaking or changing anything or anything like that.
It's just every now and then they speak.
And people, people can listen or not listen in Parliament.
It's like, that's what Parliament, the parliamentary system is.
It's all people talking, no one listening.
So it's not much, you know, but it's like, I don't know, we haven't learnt yet what civil rights on Turtle Island, you know, what you've all learnt over there, which is you've got to ask for, you know, it's the art of the deal.
Brothers, you've got to be crazy, and you've got to ask for ten times more.
You've got to ask for the impossible, and then they'll give you the basic thing that you're really after.
Right.
So, when we're after, like, hey, can we have a voice?
I mean, it's pretty simple.
It's like, hey, can we come and talk in Parliament every day?
You know, so immediately, no.
Right.
No, you can't.
And then it's a hill for people to die on in a culture war.
It was the same as the national apology to Indigenous Australia.
That took years.
And we just asked for it once, and there was such a backlash against it that we all had to die on that culture war hill for ages.
And then, you know, it's the same thing here.
It's a very basic thing.
And some of us are voting no just because it's, hey, you know, we should be asking for our land back.
Not just, hey, can we talk to you in your system?
Can we come into your system and legitimize it for you and talk to you?
And they're like, no, you can't.
Unbelievable!
Anyway, yeah, it's a very minor thing.
But we shouldn't have done it.
We should have gone with, hey, you should all go back to England.
Every single last one of you.
And then they would have said, okay, look, you can come into Parliament and talk to us.
It's a bit like defund the police.
It's like, defund the police.
No, no, we won't defund them, but I tell you what, we'll try and stop shooting you.
How does that sound?
Yeah, it's kind of like that.
Now, as you say, the voice wouldn't be any kind of legislative body, let alone some, you know, cabal of autocrats gunning for the Constitution.
We've got QAnon adjacent influencers that have been hard at work trying to make this very basic human rights land back reconciliation discussion or a beginning of a discussion all about them.
So they're saying that, you know, the UN is behind it and that they're aiming to establish apartheid in the country.
The voice will have veto power over the Prime Minister.
There have been pamphlets circulating from unnamed groups that link back to sovereign citizen or white supremacist websites.
There's one group that created a zombie clip of PM Anthony Albanese appearing to affirm that once the voice seized control of everything, the UN would be seizing all private lands.
And then there's this D-list soap opera actor named Nicola Charles who calls herself the White Rabbit.
And she made her name as a COVID contrarian, of course.
And she's going on about the voice ushering in communism and shutting off your power.
Now, your new book is called Right Story and Wrong Story.
And I'm wondering if it's, you know, just safe to say from your point of view that these are all versions of a wrong story.
Yeah.
Wrong Story is unilateral.
Wrong Story always has a hidden meaning and a hidden agenda.
It's never what it seems to be on the surface.
And it's unilateral, so it's coming out of one group or one person.
You know, and so culturally for us, where we have right story, right story is, you know, collectively produced knowledge production that happens collectively and over time and is tested, tested, tested, you know, like peer-reviewed, peer-reviewed, peer-reviewed kind of thing, but where non-humans are also your peers and the land, sentient land is your, is peer as well.
It has to sit within that landscape.
It has to sit right, you know, within everything.
Because that's our methodology, you know, right?
It's a method of inquiry.
So that's right story, but wrong story is is unilateral and I guess traditionally like so in all of our Dreaming stories that hold a lot of our law you see this wrong story coming through and identified as Yeah, unilateral and usually it's about gossip that's there to undermine somebody or a false witness to distract people or to get someone out of the way so that you can do something nefarious that they're in the way of or something like this.
So it's always bad faith.
And I don't know, for us traditionally that's always been really easy to identify and very clear.
But it's actually really difficult in the information landscapes we currently inhabit
especially information landscapes that are co-opting, you know decades of
decolonial and anti-colonial thought and scholarship and activism
that are co-opting all these in the same way that they The right ruined the word woke right for black people on
Turtle Island. They're ruining all They're ruining everything from land rights to land acknowledgement to everything.
You know, everything that we've fought for and built up, they're claiming as kind of nativists and, I don't know, kind of wrecking it.
That history of co-optation is what I want to get to, actually, because, I mean, for now, we don't know how the vote is going to go.
Polls currently are not looking good at the moment for the yes vote.
Some reports are saying that support has dipped below winnable levels.
But that's really the tip of the iceberg.
It feels like the referendum is, you know, on the top of something else.
And I wanted to go back to see if we can look at some of the roots of this twistedness because It's not as simple as blaming QAnon carpetbaggers, because there's a long history of reasonable and misguided, at the same time, institutional distrust in these spaces.
And you've pointed out that Indigenous people in Australia are themselves not immune from very toxic misinformation.
I was listening to a recent episode of your podcast, The Others, and you said something really haunting.
You said, You have to make sure that you're plugged into the right story of activism, the right story of resistance, to know that you're not going the wrong way, because there's lots of crazy ways you can go when you begin to resist, and there are a lot of charismatic bastards with different agendas.
Well, having been a charismatic bastard myself, yeah, it takes one to know one.
You know, set a bullshit guru to catch a bullshit guru, I guess.
I have occupied that space and I have been, you know, a peddler of disinformation unwittingly.
You know.
And I've occupied the position of being an ancient wisdom guru, you know, this is natural guru, you know, sharing my knowledge of land and all that sort of thing.
Yeah, and this stuff sort of gets co-opted as well.
You get that audience capture going on and you find that your knowledge ends up in some strange spaces with some strange bedfellows.
When we're looking at the immediate roots of how this co-optation emerges into an event like the referendum, I think it's really informative to discuss the legacy of the Aboriginal Tent Embassy.
Yeah, for sure.
Which dates back to this amazing protest action outside of the old parliament in Canberra in 1972.
And it's now the longest continuous protest for Aboriginal rights in the world.
So, that's going to lead to a particular...
event in 2022, 2021, but can you just give some background on that?
Well, I've spent a lot of time at the 10 Embassy and sitting down there.
There's a fire that's been burning right from the start.
So, 50 years?
Yes, there's a fire that people, yeah, who are responsible for keeping the fire burning.
So, for a start, it's a very sacred sort of thing, that fire, and it has a real meaning, you know?
It's hard to keep a fire burning in the middle of a city for that long, you know.
Yeah, I've spoken to one of the fellows who was, you know, one of the original three fellows who set it up.
And it was kind of a cheeky, a cheeky idea of a loophole of, you know, well an embassy is, so the American embassy in Australia, that's American soil.
You know, it becomes, it becomes the soil.
So the idea of on our own land, setting up an Aboriginal embassy, which is a kind of a loophole for land rights, because like, well, that's Aboriginal land now.
Right.
You know, where we've, where we've enclosed this place, you know, and, you know, 50 years, it's like, well, how does that work with like, you know, possession and all this kind of stuff.
And that's in front of old Parliament House.
Because I think because of the 10 Embassy, I reckon it was because of the 10 Embassy, they had to make a new Parliament House elsewhere.
Right.
Because they were like, we're going to have to move.
We're going to have to move.
The value of our real estate's really gone down since those blackfellas moved in next door.
It's really symbolic.
It's really meaningful to us.
But if you think about it, It's a very, very short leap from there to sovereign citizen thinking.
Right.
Because basically we're finding some kind of Bush lawyer, hedge lawyer, half-assed legalese, all-caps manifesto kind of version of law to subvert that law and to try and gain sovereignty.
To try and gain some kind of self-determination.
That's why you emphasized the loophole.
They did something sneaky there.
They did.
They did something sneaky.
They did something sneaky, but it's, you know, and I always thought it was genius, and I've always loved it, and I feel it sets me on fire when I think about it, you know?
And when we talk about it, you know?
And then the Sovereign Citizen movement happened.
And I've got Aboriginal friends coming up and talking to me about the difference between public and private.
And, you know, and then that starts to come in along this idea of the difference between law and law.
So law, L-A-W, and law, L-O-R-E.
You know, which has always kind of been, it's another linguistic trick that we talk about, you know, because we talk about, well, you have, you know, the law, L A W of the capital, of the settlers, you know, but we have this L O R E, you know, it's just the traditional law.
you know, of the first nations who live here.
It's a saying of the elders, right?
That's it. But then, what's the difference between that and someone suddenly making a
distinction between, you know, between Commonwealth law and Admiralty law? You know what I mean?
Right.
They're talking up this bullshit admiralty law or citing the Magna Carta or et cetera, et cetera.
And you find it's different where it lands everywhere, but it has some common threads, this sovereign citizen movement stuff.
But in Australia, they use the LORE thing all the time.
They use it when they're pulled over by police.
They say, no, sorry, I don't live under Australian Commonwealth law.
I live under the LORE.
Of the land.
I am a free man on the land and I live there.
There's some jackrabbit bloody dodgy jump around thinking that's involved in that.
I can probably unpack with you a couple of different ways as we go along.
If we go back to 1972, we'll have elders saying, I am not bound by the law, I live by the lore.
And it means something different from how it becomes sort of twisted and corrupted in this mirror world blender.
That's it.
I guess you have to be tracking this transition from like a real statement to a very strange and twisted statement.
Or maybe that's the difference between the right story and the wrong story.
Something that's responding to something real versus something that is It's about importation, and it's about, you know, this has come across from Turtle Island, from the US, you know, to Australia.
And I guess as comms have become more widespread between Australia and the US, and there's tighter and tighter cycles of feedback loops between us and you, that's when it's changed.
And so that's about, I don't know, a decade and a half ago.
And for the last couple of decades, there's been a fellow, an Aboriginal fellow, by the name of Merck Murtry, and he's been running around doing sovereign citizen stuff for a long time.
It was kind of mixed in with a lot of anarchist philosophy as well, as well as being mixed in with, you know, A lot of our sort of legal precedence for native title, et cetera.
So Mabo, the Mabo decision, the WIC decision.
And these are big wins for us, but it basically just acknowledges that we existed and had our own law before people arrived.
And I guess this makes people uncomfortable.
I can see why a lot of settlers would want to co-opt that law for themselves, to kind of reinstate their own nativism.
Which they feel alienated from.
Yeah, and it's a long tradition.
It's as long as, you know, there's been settlers, as soon as, you know, anybody born, the first people born in Australia, you know, from Europe, as soon as they grew up, they were making nativist societies.
And you know what I mean by society, not the biggest society, but the club, you know, a local hall with, yeah, a nativist club or movement.
You know, so Australian nativists were people who were born here and therefore, you know, have this claim to this soil and they're of this soil.
They still have loyalty to Britain, but at the same time they, you know, have rights here.
And I guess people were doing that when, you know, it was becoming clear that, you know, even under the doctrine of discovery, this was a...
This was on legally shaky ground internationally, this colony, like right from the start.
So that's why the settlers here, they cultivate relationships with the UK and with the US particularly.
They cultivate relationships so they can have that support.
Because essentially it's a whitefellas colony on blackfellas land in the middle of Asia and they feel...
They feel a little beset, you know.
The Great Replacement has been a concern here for about 150 years, rather than 150 months.
Back to the Tent Embassy, there was something really specific that happens over December and January of 2021-22, so it's the height of the pandemic.
And the embassy is infiltrated by sovereign citizen protesters and anti-vax folks and they set up their own tent and their own fire?
Is that what they did?
Here's where it gets tricky because one in six of those people were Aboriginal.
So they had that legitimacy and they do.
These people are very careful to cultivate relationships with vulnerable Aboriginal individuals.
You know, and call it, you know, like a solidarity with community when it's really not.
They just have...
A scattered selection of individuals that they've managed to brainwash and co-opt their agenda.
And these are individuals who are vulnerable because they have lost family ties or they have fallen on hard times.
Well, we're all vulnerable.
And as somebody who's been quite readily and easily radicalized over a decade ago, myself, This is because it's all true.
Right.
You know, we've lived through like actual conspiracies.
Right.
You know, they did and they do take our children.
You know, we're still scared every day.
Like, I don't know, if we're having an argument, we're really worried about raising our voices too much because we know someone might call the police and we might never see our kids again.
Right.
You know, we're nervous when we go to a hospital because we don't know if our kids are going to be taken away.
Right.
You know, we watch Handmaid's Tale.
That was my grandmother's life.
That was her life, you know, she lived that.
And, you know, and this was something, it's not something that's in the past, it's something that's still happening now, because there are more Aboriginal children being removed from their families than at the height of any other time in Australia's history right now.
At the height of what they call the stolen generations, you know?
So they are like, you know, hashtag buddy taking the children, you know?
Hashtag save the children for us as a whole.
You know, we see that and we're like, oh, these people have affinity with us.
You know what I mean?
They know what's happening.
There were people in rooms on the other side of the planet.
Who were making decisions about our country and who were making, you know, conspiracies around dispossessing us of our land and genociding us, who were actually trying to, they had specific policies until A few decades ago of deliberately breeding us out, which is why more than half of us look like me now.
We can't scrape together enough melanin to scare off a taxi, you know?
We've been like genocided like that, you know?
So we've been through a great replacement.
We've been through all these things.
So when, you know, others are there and they're talking to us and they're trying to make embassy with us and they're reaching out a hand, And they're sharing all these same conspiracy theories.
And it's narrative, Matthew.
You know?
It's not like the communication we get from this government.
Which is always, you know, it's not narrative.
It's fact-based.
It's evidence-based.
And it's boring.
And there's no spirit.
And there's no spirit!
And for us, everything is spirit.
So these settlers come to us and they seem to be thinking like us.
They're coming with story.
And they're coming with spirit.
They have a story that has spirit in it.
They must have story and spirit because they don't have anything else.
I mean, that's the paradox of the sovereign citizen jargon, actually, is that the person speaking it is only really going to get anywhere to the extent that he sounds credible because it's gibberish.
For most of us, it's not long before we see that as wrong story.
Because, you know, we all know what right story is, and right story is collective.
Collectively produced, processed, you know, and judged.
You know, and so for us, it's very quickly it shows up as wrong story.
For most of us.
But for at least one in six, you know, we, um, there are those of us who, uh, many of us become disconnected, you know, because of our experience of being in the settlement, in the colony, of having to move away from home if we want to find work.
Of being forcefully dispossessed and removed.
Of not being able to find community because our parents were removed, or their parents were removed.
So a lot of us are lost in that way, and we're not processing information collectively.
And so we can grab onto anything as individuals, if we're living as an individual, and we're offered this individualized, bespoke bloody narrative where we can just bake Right.
And people are going to agree with it, and it's going to fit in, and it's going to feel like a tribe, it's going to feel like a collective.
There's some of us who get sucked into that, and we get co-opted into there.
And then, so your sovereign citizens are then able to say, hey, look, we've got this.
And you know what?
They're not all primarily sovereign citizens either.
That's often just one string to the bow, because there's several, and there's more at it all the time.
So these are anti-trans activists, these are COVID denialists, these are anti-5G protesters, you name your poison, but they all weave together.
Are there some of those poisons that don't have purchase within First Nations communities?
Is there something that comes along where everybody says, actually no, that doesn't sound like we'd like to sign on to that?
It becomes clear that this is disinformation, that this is wrong story when we're collectively processing and discussing this and going through it.
It's people who are somehow in bad relation.
So we talk about all knowledge is coming from being in good relation.
Yeah.
You're sourcing your knowledge and you're fact-checking your knowledge, but from several different angles at once.
You're polyangulating your verification process all the time, you know, and that's coming from You know, it's coming from multiple sources in vast collectives that must cohere with your traditional lore as well.
And, you know, your sentient landscape and, you know, humans and non-humans and how we work in partnership and think and feel together.
And we feel our way through this all together.
And it's not long before we realize what's wrong story and what's not.
But if one of us happens to fall into bad relation, then we're vulnerable.
You know, and I know several elders, a lot of elders actually, who have become lost, you know, and then they're vulnerable to these things.
And so just for the example with the trans thing, you know, I know one senior lawman who has just sort of made up stuff about the old law that will cohere with anti-trans, you know, law, L-O-R-E law.
You know, like, okay, gay babies were strangled at birth, traditionally.
Oh.
Like saying things like that.
Oh.
And so straight away the rest of us are, uncle, you've gone wrong.
Oh my gosh.
Think it through first before you make an assertion like that.
At least think it through.
How are you identifying these gay babies that you're strangling or drowning at birth?
Are you just looking at it and going, no, no, that baby's gay.
Look at his wrist.
Look at his wrist.
I mean, what is it that you're looking at for a gay baby uncle?
Think it through.
I guess that's how things are supposed to happen.
But that uncle's not just talking to community.
That uncle's talking to a lot of weird settlers.
Who have scooped him up and given him a microphone on a podcast somewhere, right?
Oh, I know.
And his opinion is valued.
You know, in the colony, people, he can see his capacity to change things in the colony.
You know, these people are hanging on every word.
And as long as he says what they're expecting him to say, they'll keep listening.
And he will be valued.
And on it goes.
And it is usually a he, by the way.
Not always, but mostly.
Mostly he.
When you're playing out the uncle think it through, I'm imagining, is this on somebody's front porch?
Or is it, like, where does that discussion happen?
And is it in real life?
And what's the response generally?
And is there a process for that?
Like, is that formalized?
Yeah, well, it should be if that person is coming into the Sometimes we call it Mimburi, so in Southeast Queensland.
Anyway, the mob I'm working with on collective sense-making processes, Waka Waka, etc., people from Bunya Mountains, I refer to it as Mimburi.
I'm only including that language word because we're doing research around this and it's on the public record.
Right.
But we all have words for these things, which means collective sense-making.
And we're supposed to do that together in this process of yarning.
And there's some ritual and ceremonial kind of yarning which is really rigorous and nothing can get through that's bullshit.
It has to be real or it won't make it through.
Is that the definition of the yarn?
There's provision for bullshit though and here's where it gets tricky in the colony because a lot of our old people have a protocol For when it looks like sacred knowledge is going to be stolen or co-opted and so, you know, and where they're being backed into a corner or forced or bullied into sharing, they'll make something up.
Wow.
Okay.
Yeah.
So I think that's where a lot of this is coming from with our elders and these people.
They're very pushy, these sovereign citizens.
They're very aggressive, very pushy.
So I think a lot of elders would share things with them that are made up.
And this is a protocol.
Is that you are under no obligation to share truth with a bossy person or a rude person.
That you are, yeah, you may lie to them.
It's a protocol we have to protect knowledge and, you know, keep sacred knowledge safe.
And also to misdirect invaders.
Exactly.
You get things made up.
But these, unfortunately, there's such a loop back into our culture in these positive feedback loops that keep You know, growing, baking, baking, baking into the circle.
And there's no regulatory feedback loops traditionally that we have for that kind of, you know, hyper-bullshitization process.
We don't have anything for that.
At that kind of speed.
And if it's oral, it would be assumed to only exist in the moment of its iteration.
It's not going to stay around in a meme format or it's not going to replicate itself in podcast form or in social media posts.
We have permanent ways of storing knowledge, data, etc.
Different thinking, ideas, innovations, etc.
We have processes for this of right story.
But like science, it can take like a decade or four decades to actually determine whether it's true or not.
Whether a vaccine is effective or whether vaccines cause autism.
Right.
I can remember seeing Obama say that there are indications that vaccines might cause autism.
I can remember him saying that and McCain saying that in the same week.
That was forever ago.
And it took a decade to be able to assert definitively, no, they do not.
Science takes a decade, in the same way in our culture.
It's a rigorous process, so it takes at least a decade.
Right story.
Wrong story takes 10 minutes.
10 minutes to breed like a little white rabbit and bang out 10 copies of itself, all slightly different, and then go off into the world exponentially.
There's something about that speed that comes up in an episode of yours that I was listening to where you are speaking about weeping in a bookstore while you're gazing at the books of a late indigenous elder who had been captured by this movement during the pandemic and who had died of COVID.
Yeah.
And this is somebody who you described as Producing a lifetime of work in preserving and restoring the stories and the art forms and the relationships.
And so when you say the person who becomes vulnerable is the one who falls out of right relationship, that's happening to leaders as well.
And so I'm wondering, you know, I know you may not want to name him, but in that particular situation, was the sovereign citizen discourse or were the conspiracy theories or were his, you know, settler, I don't know, seducers, were they just too wily for him to parse out?
Did he not have that 10 years of testing the story to see whether or not it was true?
Or did he get overwhelmed by the internet?
Should he have not had a phone?
What do you think went on there?
I'm still investigating this.
I only don't want to say his name because it hasn't been that long.
I haven't heard whether or not the family's happy for his name to be spoken again yet.
That's a custom that we have.
You don't speak the name of someone who's passed away for up to a year afterwards.
Right.
Because that shadow spirit has to not be attracted back to anything familiar so that it can just dissipate.
Shadow spirit being almost like your ego.
Right.
This ego that just keeps lingering like a crappy shadow and we want it to go away.
Part of the investigation is I've He was part of a religion, and that religion also, it emphasizes democratic processes at every stage of every decision.
So, I don't know, it didn't look to me like that was what was causing, you know, the weirdness.
So he ended up as an anti-masker, COVID denialist, all the rest of it, over COVID.
Amazing elder with very Very strong law, you know, someone who is a keeper of so much, so much sacred law.
Someone who still was carrying out initiations, you know, which is, you know, it's a rare thing, you know, to have somebody doing that authentically, you know, on the continent now.
You know, most of that, most of that, that Bora process is gone now.
So it's very rare to see someone doing it.
So he's very special, very treasured elder.
And yeah, died of COVID while denying that COVID existed.
And you know, swearing black and blue that the vaccines were here and part of the New World Order, etc.
While appealing to lore.
Yeah.
Right.
Exactly.
While also carrying sacred lore, that's right story.
Also carrying this wrong story around.
That killed him.
I mean, so it killed him.
So I'm standing in this bookstore.
I already had tears coming out of my eyes before I started crying because my autistic six-year-old was on my shoulders.
We're in the bookstore because he was screaming and he needs the Hungry Caterpillar storybook,
so I raced into a bookstore to buy it to try and stop his meltdown in the middle of the
street.
And so I'm looking across the shelves while he's ripping the hair out of my head and screaming
and everybody in the bookstore is looking at me.
So I already had tears streaming down my cheeks just from the hair getting ripped out.
And then I see this one and Uncle's there and I'm like, oh.
I didn't even know that he'd written this book.
And it just all hit me at once and I'm like sobbing in the shop.
And I'm like, oh my God.
Oh my God.
You know, there's a body count.
There's a body count for this stuff.
And these bastards, they co-opted his law and they took it for themselves.
And now it means nothing.
You know, it means less anyway.
It's like the...
It's really hard.
It's hard to describe why it's wrong.
You have land acknowledgements there, eh?
Yeah, we do.
I can talk through this land acknowledgement.
Yeah, please.
This brand uses a lot of sovereign citizen stuff, but it's the full raft of pretty much whatever comes out of InfoWars that week, comes out in the email chains that they send out.
And this is a good friend.
I don't know.
I don't know if they're a good friend.
I think women would be used to this feeling that I'm about to tell you about.
I don't know if you've ever experienced it.
But there's this wolfish way that people will look at you.
And they're being friendly, but they're thinking something else that's a bit disturbing and it makes you feel nervous in your gut.
I think women would know what that feels like.
Yeah.
If they've got someone who's being friendly at work, but there's this kind of wolfish way that they look at that woman because they're thinking something else that's quite aggressive.
They're going to take something.
Yeah, I use the word seduction to describe how is this elder drawn in.
It's not really seduction, it's more pickup artistry.
It's like those incels and stuff that do the pickup artist stuff.
It's wolfish.
It's predatory.
I think that's a paper you've got to write is settler pickup artistry.
I don't know.
Well look, I could write a paper just analyzing this.
I'm going to read this out to you.
Okay.
So this is a land acknowledgement, what you would call over there.
We call it acknowledgement of country.
So this is from a settler who is, I don't know if you've ever come across these neo-peasants.
I haven't seen any analysis or inquiry into this, but it's quite a big movement.
Anyway, so this is Neo-Peasants from Marja, and they live on Dja Dja Wurrung country.
Anyway, so here's their acknowledgement.
We live in Djaara mother country.
So that's really weird, because they've taken a language word, Djaara, from Dja Dja Wurrung language, and they've renamed that country Djaara mother country.
With all caps, anyway.
The first language spoken here is Dja Dja Wurrung, which translates as yes, yes speech.
Dja Dja and First People communities in this bio-region continue to come together and perform rites that are both ancient and contemporary.
These rites acknowledge the land and culture as sacred, giving and renewing.
That sounds nice, doesn't it?
It sounds great.
But you look at it, they're not actually acknowledging Dja Dja Wurrung people.
They're acknowledging that some people speak Dja Dja Wurrung language there.
But they, as a settler, they're not a settler anymore.
They live on Djara mother country.
And then they name themselves as a Djara person.
Because they say Djara and First People Communities.
Oh.
So they've separated themselves and named themselves with a language word from that country, and then separated the First Peoples are another group, and we are this group, which is named with that language!
Anyway, so we both live in this, and they call it a bioregion.
It's not a territory, you know?
We live in this bioregion.
And, you know, we perform rites, ancient and contemporary.
So it's not the indigenous people who were there before, but somehow the language precedes everything.
Yeah.
Right.
Yeah, this idea that, you know, we're native to this place.
Not even necessarily having to be born here, but in actually living on the land and trying
to improve it with all this permaculture, etc.
And there's another thing, permaculturalists are, you know, I mean, you scratch a permaculturalist
half the time and you've got a Nazi right there.
A lot of the founders of permaculture were very much white ethno-state sort of crypto-fascists.
And that came out over COVID too.
You see them in a lot of these You know, grandfathers, godfathers of permaculture, you see them marching alongside white supremacists and spouting the same kind of nonsense.
Yeah, so anyway, yeah, so these are people who are sort of claiming the word through permaculture, the land through permaculture and their relation with that and they're sort of coming into relation that way and now they're all for this mother country.
Yeah, I don't know if they're still attached to the fatherland from before, but here they are in the mother country.
There is something very weird and metaphysical and spiritual bypassing going on with the… There really is.
A political bypass.
Yeah, well, those things are merging.
It's like the phrase that's coming to me is, in the beginning was the word.
That somehow if we can identify the resonance or the vibration of the bioregion, that that's what's original.
And if we can take that on, then we don't really have to bother with the people who are actually here.
Because if they are here and they have a connection with the bioregion, it's because they're vibing as well.
Right?
Not that they've preserved it, not that they've learned it, not that they have told stories about it or figured out its various gifts, but that everybody who lives there and can identify with that is there because they can share in the vibration of the sound and the word.
It just occurred to me, I read that to you out of an email signature, but the content of the email itself.
Was all about accusing me of being a farmer colonist.
And, you know, yeah.
Because that's flipped.
Yeah, completely.
I finally responded with questioning this person's thinking, going, look, every email you send me is like 24 hours after I hear the same thing on Alex Jones on InfoWars.
And this anti-trans paper that you've just sent me, that's You know, you really need to look into that and where all this messaging is coming from.
And they've responded, I don't know, you know, very nice people, but then responded quite aggressively.
And well, they would say that I'm being aggressive by questioning them and also by colonizing them, by not agreeing with the anti-vax and anti-trans and all the rest.
RFK propaganda getting sent to me.
Right.
Yeah, from a permaculture guy living down the road in Australia.
So as a public intellectual, they're expecting you to side with them, you know, openly.
And then, because otherwise, you're part of the problem.
But it is all about ad hominem attacks.
You know, I'm going to assume that this will be the first time that we speak together because you have so much to say about so many things that our podcast should be better on.
You know, like the real Essence and place of indigenous epistemology and these questions of like how we know the world and trust or don't trust institutions and science and governments.
Anyway, you're definitely, I hope that we can meet again.
But to come back to the referendum for a moment, I wanted to ask you about whether You feel that conspiracy theory culture of fascination with, let's say, trafficked children is actually a way of stealing fire from the real history of
You know, the way in which indigenous children have been treated, or whether the Great Replacement Theory is a way of stealing the story of genocide.
It's like the dynamic at play in Australia seems to be that as soon as Some part of settler culture gets close to a moment of self-recognition.
A portion must revolt and sabotage the project.
It's like we get right to the edge of voting on simply allowing there to be a committee to speak to Parliament, and that is a step too far because somehow it will force us to reevaluate our entire history.
And so there must be a sabotage.
Is that what you feel In some way is happening.
Well, you had me at stealing fire.
You know, because straight away, I have to acknowledge that I'm on Boon Wrong country.
And that part of the big story traditional law here is a kind of black Prometheus story.
Wow.
Fire belongs to women.
And most of Australia fire is a woman's.
A woman's thing.
And there are stories in the law here and elsewhere all over Australia of men stealing fire from women.
Wow.
In dreaming.
And it's a cautionary tale.
It's a cautionary tale of lustful people who have no right to something.
People who have not earned or do not have the law to be able to possess something, trying to possess it, and what happens to them as a result, the punishments that happen, and then the processes and protocols that are in place afterwards to make sure that doesn't happen again.
Yeah.
So, you know, upshot is today fire is available to everybody, but there are respectful protocols and ways that you deal with it.
And any decision making around that and any ownership questions of that, it comes back to women and women's law.
Same thing.
When you think about all of these mostly men, in terms of leaders of disinformation cults, yeah, you think about these mostly men and they co-opt women to vigorously support these things, as most religions do as well.
And they co-opt the very minorities that they oppose.
Individuals from those minorities.
You know, you can see the same cautionary tales emerging.
And I can see from all this wrong story, right story emerging down the track, potentially too late.
This Indian fellow said to me the other day that this is all right, because this creates evolutionary pressure.
That forces us all to have more rigor and to develop systems that have more rigor and that are more sustainable.
And that this is all evolutionary pressure towards this.
Extremely optimistic.
I like that view.
I would like to speak to that fellow.
Yeah.
Except that I had to mention that he was Indian.
It shouldn't have mattered where he'd come from!
But straight away I'm like, oh yeah, he's coming from this ancient Vedic tradition, so it must be true!
But you and I both know that's where half of the Steve Bannon stuff comes from.
The same place.
Oh my god.
Let's flood the zone with shit.
My last question is, you know, October 15th is going to roll around, regardless of what happens.
What will Indigenous people have to keep on doing?
We just have to stay alive.
I mean, most of us are in survival mode.
We have a middle class now.
You know, grew up as children in survival mode, but now have been able to scrape together a bit of capital.
And this is the first generation that we have, where some people have managed to have capital.
I don't.
But I hope, I don't know, I hope to...
Be able to go some way towards that so my kids can have some capital down the track.
And I guess we just have to keep doing that.
You know, you must join the system and be destroyed by it in a few decades, or you can fight the system and be destroyed by it now.
So, you know, we genuinely have a problem with the institutions that run our lives.
And, you know, and we genuinely have frustration with it.
But, you know, even we're not stupid enough to say burn it all down right now because, you know, the collateral damage from that would be huge and it would include most of us going down with it.
Anyway, a lot of people identifying themselves as our allies seek the destruction of their own system and I think they see themselves as arising from the ashes as the new masters of this land and of having some kind of claim to it that is, you know, Correct.
But yeah, what do we have to do?
We just have to keep surviving.
We have to keep the old law going.
We have to make sure we hold on to right story and keep propagating that.
Tyson, thank you so much for your time.
No worries.
And I really look forward to speaking with you again.
Yeah, it takes time.
I hope that you can cobble together something that makes sense at all.
Absolutely, I will.
Thank you everyone for listening to another episode of Conspiratuality Podcast.
