Read an extract from The First Inventors
- Allen & Unwin
- Jun 19
- 7 min read
This is what a history of Australia looks like when it has Indigenous perspectives at its heart. Start reading The First Inventors.
Based on the stunning SBS and Channel 10 TV series, The First Inventors takes readers on a journey through 65,000 years of innovation, diplomacy and design. It challenges everything you thought you knew about the deep history of Australia. This is what a history of Australia looks like when it has Indigenous perspectives at its heart.
Start reading now!
Country is a web of relationships
The community of Yarralin lies on the ephemeral Wickham River in the Victoria River District of the Northern Territory. Most of the time the Wickham is a string of spring-fed waterholes reaching out from its headwaters in the surrounding hills and sandstone plateau. During the wet, it flows, and Country thrums with the sounds of life: the buzzing of insects, the gasps of turtles, the rustle of leaves, the chirp of zebra finches, the crackling fires of people. To those who attend to this presence, such as the late Karangpurru Elder and teacher Jessie Wirrpa, it is as if Country is calling out to them.
‘The world was always talking about itself, and Jessie was a skilled listener and observer,’ her long-time student, anthropologist and writer Deborah Bird Rose, reflected. Jessie saw Country as a web of relationships. When the jangarla tree (Sesbania formosa) bloomed, she knew the barramundi would be biting. When the green flies pestered and bit, she understood that the crocodiles would be laying their eggs. When she saw pronged tracks in the sand, she could tell when and why they were made, and where the goanna was likely to be now. ‘She took notice, and I never knew her to hear silence,’ Debbie wrote. ‘Her attending presence was, to her knowledge, always reciprocated.’ Jessie took care of her Country, and her Country took care of her.
Within the past two generations, Western scholars, scientists and philosophers have belatedly come to realise something profound about our world: the planet is alive. The earth is not a stage for human actors; it is a living force, possibly even a single, self-regulating organism. Ecosystems are deeply interconnected. Forests think and communicate. Rivers live and die. Plants learn and remember. Fungi cooperate and cultivate. Mammals feel and play. Birds socialise and problem-solve. Even fish are self-aware and dream. There is no need for interstellar space travel to find other intelligent life forms. We are surrounded by sentience.
German philosopher Alexander von Humboldt is celebrated for his understanding of the natural world as an interconnected web of life, a ‘great chain of causes and effects’, in which ‘no single fact can be considered in isolation’. And yet his revelation—that everything is entangled with everything else— is something that First Peoples have always known. It is at the heart of Jessie Wirrpa’s teachings about kin and Country.
‘Country is not simply a geographical space,’ Palyku writer and lawyer Ambelin Kwaymullina explains. ‘It is the whole of reality, a living story that forms and informs all existence. Country is alive, and more than alive— it is life itself.’ This is not a romanticised view of the world; it is a recognition that no single organism can exist without the web of life that surrounds and supports it. As Kwaymullina continues, ‘Rock, tree, river, hill, animal, human— all were formed of the same substance by the Ancestors who continue to live in land, water, sky. Country is filled with relations speaking language and following Law, no matter whether the shape of that relation is human, rock, crow, wattle. Country is loved, needed, and cared for, and country loves, needs, and cares for her peoples in turn. Country is family, culture, identity. Country is self.’
English nature writer Robert Macfarlane is one of many Western writers who have taken the insights of modern, systems-orientated sciences to heart and are now seeking another way of thinking about the world. ‘To say a river is alive is not an anthropomorphic claim,’ he reflects. ‘A river is not a human person, nor vice versa. Each withholds from the other in different ways. To call a river alive is not to personify a river, but instead to further deepen and widen the category of ‘life’, and, in so doing— how had George Eliot put it?— “enlarge the imagined range for self to move in”.’
Here we see Macfarlane marshalling his own intellectual traditions to describe something akin to Country. He is reaching across an intellectual divide, yearning for an understanding of the natural world anchored in intimacy and respect, searching for language and laws to value and ultimately protect increasingly fragile ecosystems. There is an urgency to his quest.
We are in the midst of a mass extinction event, an unparalleled period of global biodiversity collapse. In the past half-century alone, people have wiped out about two-thirds of the world’s wildlife. Two-thirds. In 50 years. One million species currently face extinction. According to the most recent Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, without drastic action ‘there will be a further acceleration in the global rate of species extinction, which is already at least tens to hundreds of times higher than it has averaged over the past 10 million years’.
Australia leads the world in mammal extinctions. At least 38 native mammal species have been driven to extinction since European invasion, including Walilya (desert bandicoot), Kuluwarri (central hare-wallaby), Yoontoo (short-tailed hopping-mouse), Yallara (lesser bilby) and the thylacine (Tasmanian tiger). This is likely to be a significant underestimate, given the number of species that remain unknown to science, even today. ‘Such loss,’ argues conservation biologist John Woinarski, ‘stains our society; it demonstrates that we are not living sustainably; it degrades our legacy.’ It is an even greater tragedy to those with a deep understanding of, and connection to, Country. These are totemic beings that have been displaced from their ancestral homes. They are relatives, family, kin, and their losses are mourned as such.
What if these animals and their habitats were also protected as if they were kin? What if the natural world was afforded a legal voice? This is what some jurisdictions have begun to do to protect threatened rivers, forests and ecosystems, and to counter the idea of nature as a ‘property’ or ‘resource’ to be owned, used and extracted. These independent initiatives, from Ecuador to India, Spain to Aotearoa New Zealand, are part of a global movement to restore the rights of nature— to create and implement legal systems that acknowledge natural places as living entities with inherent rights to exist and flourish.
There are now over 500 rights-of-nature legal provisions in over 40 countries and international bodies. In less than two decades, political scientists Craig M. Kauffman and Pamela L. Martin reflect, the rights of nature have ‘gone from being a radical idea espoused only by a handful of marginalized actors to a legal strategy seriously considered in a wide variety of domestic and international policy arenas’. It is a movement that draws from, and resonates with, the teachings of First Peoples, who follow older Laws and practices of care. As legal scholar and advocate César Rodríguez-Garavito explains, the rights of nature are not the Western legal application of Indigenous thought but rather ‘the Western legal translation of the more fundamental notion that everything is alive, that all beings speak in their own ways’.
Jessie Wirrpa would often lament the destruction wrought on her Country since invasion: the massive erosion caused by the hooves of introduced cattle, the rapid spread of noxious weeds like rubber bush and devil’s claw, and the absence of animals who were previously abundant. And as Debbie observed, ‘Just as living things are connected through benefit, so losses ramify destructively.’ The loss of a river red gum or timalan whose root systems are exposed by erosion leads to the loss of food for flying foxes and native bees, the loss of habitat for birds and possums, and the diminishment of food, firewood and medicine for people.
The genius of Indigenous kinship systems is their capacity to respond to, and prevent, such losses. It is an invention that encodes sustainable behaviours, imposes limits and is sensitive to the complex repercussions of change. It is a way of being that establishes a custodial ethic—what Pairrebenne Trawlwoolway scholar Lauren Tynan describes as ‘an ethic of responsibility’. And ‘as an ethic of responsibility’, she continues, ‘relationality is something that is practised’.
It is also a system that acknowledges life in all its forms.
‘If we value the relationships between things,’ say astrophysicists Gamilaraay woman Karlie Noon and Gomeroi woman Krystal De Napoli, ‘then everything is vital to everything else, with no human, animal, plant or object being more important than another . . . When these beliefs are applied to a way of life, we see a culture of “treading lightly”, of cohesive communities and sustainable practices based on a web of intimate, relational knowledge.’
The intimacy of kinship, the shared bonds across species and with Country, creates a basis for accountability and reciprocity. One is accountable to dolphins, dugongs or owlet nightjars in the same way as one is accountable to a sister or brother. This partnership then becomes the foundation for long-term, mutually beneficial relationships with Country.
People sustain Country, and Country, in turn, sustains people. This is a relationship that has been continuing for millennia—with far-reaching implications for the Australian biota. It is no exaggeration to say that the distribution and diversity of Australian flora, fauna and funga are a result of relational thinking. Through attentive and regular practices of care, people have become critical agents within these webs of biodiversity. In their absence, these interdependent systems break down. This is what has happened in many places in the wake of invasion. The removal of people from Country, often forcibly and violently, has had devastating ecological and biological consequences.
It is only recently through Indigenous Ranger Programs and initiatives like Country Needs People that Indigenous management practices are being restored— with immediate and wide-ranging benefits to the health of Country and communities. Through these community-based programs, a new generation of Indigenous land managers is tackling one of the greatest threats to the environment today, which is ‘empty Country’. Country that has become orphaned by the process of colonisation. Country that is without people. Country that is lonely.
Edited extract from The First Inventors by Billy Griffiths, Larissa Behrendt and Sean Ulm.
Available now at your bookstore of choice.
The First Inventors
by Billy Griffiths, Larissa Behrendt and Sean Ulm
This is the story of how Indigenous knowledge shaped the Australian continent.
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