Podcast: Download (Duration: 54:22 — 50.2MB)
Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Android | RSS | More
The Sustainable Hour no. 597 | Transcript | Podcast notes
Our guest in The Sustainable Hour no. 597 on 1 July 2026 is professor Mark Rose AM who speaks about Aboriginal education, sovereignty, masculinity, community, and the need for Australia to define itself by who it is – not by who it is not.
As Australia prepares for NAIDOC Week, we begin the episode by acknowledging that we broadcast from Wadawurrung Country – on land that was never ceded.
Mark Rose AM is Deputy Vice-Chancellor Indigenous at Deakin University, a Distinguished Professor, an educator, and an advocate and bridge-builder who has spent four decades working to move education from an instrument of oppression into a force of liberation.
Mark’s story begins with the Stolen Generations. His father was taken from his mother as a child. Mark himself grew up between hardship, loss, out-of-home care and convent life in Ballarat, where boredom and books became his unexpected doorway into education. Later, Uncle Banjo Clarke called him back into community work with a simple instruction: become a bridge between Western education and Indigenous education – and take no shortcuts.
Throughout the conversation, Mark returns to one central idea: Aboriginal knowledge is not a museum piece. It is not simply dot paintings or boomerangs sold at markets. It is a living way of seeing, learning, relating and belonging. It asks us to step out of the industrial mindset, move beyond command-and-control systems, and enter a more relational way of education where teacher and learner exchange roles with respect.
He also challenges Australia to grow up.
Reconciliation, Mark says, should not be built on guilt. It should be built on national maturity – the ability to face what happened, name it honestly, learn from it, and then craft a better future together.
. . .
• Mik Aidt opens the Hour with Sydney’s cycling boom and a challenge to Geelong: build safe bike paths first, and the riders will come.
• Colin Mockett OAM reports on Europe’s severe heatwave, the Qatar LNG explosion, the City of Sydney’s call for a fossil fuel export levy, and China’s changing role in global fuel supply.
• Tony Gleeson reflects on the dangers of expanding LNG infrastructure in Geelong while the world is trying to move away from fossil fuels.
• The programme includes two musical reflections: ‘Learn to Listen’, featuring Yaraan’s words about slowing down to the pace of Country, and ‘This Is the Time’, inspired by Marama Grace Brownsdon’s call to pick up the shovels, rakes, mulch and seeds, and get started.
. . .
NAIDOC Week 2026 carries the theme ’50 Years of Deadly’. In that spirit, Mark’s final message to listeners is beautifully simple: be curious. Be courageous. Park your assumptions. Go to a new place.
Because in a world rushing towards AI, climate disruption, conflict and exhaustion, perhaps one of the most radical things we can still do is this:
Take off our shoes. Feel the earth beneath us. Be curious, and learn to listen.
→ Find out more about NAIDOC on: www.naidoc.org.au
“So when you talk about men’s… – that’s been number one attack. If you want to eradicate a people, attack families, attack economic, attack culture, attack language. So… Dismantle, destroy, diminish, all those D-words happened to us. So I’m not making excuses. I’m just proud of being Aboriginal and proud how far we’ve come.”
~ Professor Mark Rose, Deputy Vice-Chancellor Indigenous Studies, Deakin University
→ Subscribe to The Sustainable Hour podcast via Apple Podcasts or Spotify
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
We at The Sustainable Hour would like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land on which we are broadcasting, the Wadawurrung People. We pay our respects to their elders – past, present, and emerging, and extend that respect to all First Nations people.
The traditional custodians lived in harmony with the land for millennia, nurturing it and thriving in often harsh conditions. Their connection to the land was deeply spiritual and sustainable. This land was invaded and stolen from them. It was never ceded. Today, it is increasingly clear that if we are to survive the climate emergency we face, we must learn from their land management practices and cultural wisdom.
True climate justice cannot be achieved until Australia’s First Nations people receive the justice they deserve. When we speak about the future, we must include respect for those yet to be born, the generations to come. As the old saying reminds us: “We do not inherit the Earth from our ancestors; we borrow it from our children.” It is deeply unfair that decisions to ignore the climate emergency are being made by those who won’t live to face the worst impacts, leaving future generations to bear the burden of their inaction.
“The Indigenous worldview has been marginalised for generations because it was seen as antiquated and unscientific and its ethics of respect for Mother Earth were in conflict with the industrial worldview. But now, in this time of climate change and massive loss of biodiversity, we understand that the Indigenous worldview is neither unscientific nor antiquated, but is, in fact, a source of wisdom that we urgently need.”
~ Robin Wall Kimmerer, weallcanada.org
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Education, sustainability and social transformation
Blending theory with real-world case studies, this open book explores how knowledge can inspire dignity, responsibility, and solidarity in a shared vision of global citizenship.
By Western Open Books
The book creates a space for diverse voices to engage in dialogue about how learning can drive social transformation. Relevant to scholars and students in education, development, Indigenous studies, sustainability, and critical theory, it also offers insight for practitioners and policymakers seeking inclusive, ethical alternatives to dominant global paradigms.
Aligned with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, the book supports equitable and affordable access to high-quality learning resources worldwide.
Edited by Loshini Naidoo; Susanne Gannon; Christine Woodrow; Claudio Díaz Larenas; Verónica López; and Juan Salazar
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
TRANSCRIPT
of The Sustainable Hour no. 597
António Guterres, United Nations Secretary-General: (00:00)
Cooperation over chaos. We are all in this together.
Jingle: (00:06)
The Sustainable Hour. For a green, clean, sustainable Geelong: The Sustainable Hour.
Tony Gleeson: (00:24)
Welcome to The Sustainable Hour in the lead up to NAIDOC Week. For those who need reminding, NAIDOC stands for National Aborigines and Islanders Day Observance Committee. So we like to acknowledge we’re on the land of the Wadawurrung people. We pay tribute to their elders – past, present, and those that earn that great honour in the future. We’re on stolen land, land that was never ceded, always was and always will be First Nations land. Now in the lead up to NAIDOC Week, it’s extremely important that we remind our listeners about the incredible store of ancient wisdom that they’ve accumulated by nurturing both their land and their communities for millennia before it was stolen. And in that store of ancient wisdom lies so many of the solutions as we face up to the climate crisis.
Mik Aidt (01:38)
I didn’t think I would even live to hear this kind of news in Australia: record numbers of bicycle riders in a major Australian city. Record numbers of people moving around on their two wheels! And that’s in Sydney. Sydney’s Lord Mayor, Clover Moore, is happy and proud as you can hear here, because she has had a direct stake in this development – she’s been pushing for it to happen for more than 20 years:
Clover Moore, Sydney’s Lord Mayor (02:05) – Facebook video
When I first came mayor in 2004, there were no bikepath here. Now there are 29 kilometres of separate bike lanes. This bike lane has the first one I opened in Bourke Street. And you know, it could have been an opening nuclear reactor – the response to the lightning media and emergency-producing was extraordinary. We now have an average of 2,500 bike riders a day. That’s children, it’s parents with children, it’s people on their way to work. It is quite fantastic. This is a remarkable 28 per cent increase in 12 months. One of our first to one of our newest, the Oxford Street Cycleway, is clocking up more than 4,500 bike trips on peak days, making it our most popular cycling connection. So join the thousands of others who are taking up cycling today.
Mik: (03:00)
That’s Sydney’s Lord Mayor, Clover Moore, in a Facebook video she’s put out where she’s bragging about that there’s now more than 7,000 people who ride to work on their bicycles in the city centre of Sydney. And that is – honestly, that’s the lesson that I’ve been trying to talk about here in Geelong for more than a decade… Something that we learned in Denmark in history and that we have seen Amsterdam and Paris learned more recently, which is that you have to build the safe infrastructure for the bicycles first and then the cyclist will come.
So, councillors here in Geelong who are looking out their car windows and saying ‘We can’t see anyone using their bikes here in Geelong, so why should we even build a bike path for them?’ You know, it’s the other way around! You have to create a safe bike path network and then the cyclist will come. That’s the story that we have now learned from a major Australian city. And that’s what we need to understand here in Geelong as well.
Because we live in a time now where everyone’s talking about energy security and rising fuel prices. And the bicycle is such a good solution to all that tension and pollution which we’re feeling – it’s in our lungs when we’re so dependent on petrol and oil in order to move around. But what we’re seeing is governments repeatedly spending billions of taxpayer dollars on trying to shield the car.
Driving consumers from these fossil fuel shocks from the fact that the Strait of Hormuz has been closed for quite a while now. Government around the world are paying out billions of dollars to support fuel subsidies. In Japan, 20 billion dollars. In Thailand, tens of millions of dollars a day to support fuel subsidies. Around the world, more than sixty countries have introduced what they call emergency measures to prevent fuel price spikes that would trigger economic and social unrest. And that’s exactly what dependence looks like. And to make it worse now we have a figure from the last year that the banks have been paying out nine hundred billion dollars in financing to fossil fuel companies so that they can build more fossil fuel projects. Nine hundred billion dollars in one year. And this at a time when we’re seeing climate chaos all around us.
I don’t get it how these bankers in their suit and ties can go around and justify themselves and come home to their families and talk proudly about what they have done at work today. Financing more climate chaos to the tune of 900 billion dollars. At a time when renewable energy now is the cheapest way to create electricity.
No one can blockade the sun. If the banks can find one trillion dollars a year to support fossil fuel projects, imagine what we could achieve on this planet if our bankers and the government were firmly directed towards a transition to clean energy and creating the kind of infrastructure in our communities so that we become more resilient and for instance begin to use our bicycles again. It’s not impossible and at least now we have Sydney proving that very simple point.
It’s time for some global news, the global outlook. We have Colin Mockett OAM ready with the news. And Colin, I hope you have something that’s maybe not as grumpy as what I have been coming up with here?
COLIN MOCKETT’S GLOBAL OUTLOOK: (06:38)
Ha ha. Hello, Mik. Well, not really, because I’ve got news, basically, it’s filled with news. Our roundup this week begins in Europe, where it’s been well recorded that a severe heat wave which covered much of the continent for most of last week, is slowly now moving easterly. Last week it saw temperatures hovering around forty degrees in France, Spain and the UK.
Now it’s affecting Germany and Poland and presumably moving on to Russia. The phenomena was and is being driven by a mass of hot air that’s moving north from the Sahara. Meteorologists say that the system is creating a so called ‘heat dome’, which traps hot air over Europe in which well Europe was already rated the world’s fastest warming continent.
In a slice of irony last week, King Charles was affected by the heat when he appeared at a conference at St. James’s Palace on London’s Climate Change Action Week. In the event the king described the oppressive temperatures as the “new normal”.
Another speaker at that event, Professor Haley Fowler of the Centre for Climate and Environmental Resilience at Newcastle University, said that heat waves were becoming more frequent, longer and hotter with climate change, as a direct result of the fossil fuels we are releasing as a society. We can expect to have to cope with more and more of these types of events in the years to come, she said. In England more than a thousand schools closed due to the heat and many train services were cancelled. At least 18 people died in France, including two children that were left in a hot car. An April report by the World Meteorological Organization found Europe is warming at more than double the global rate.
Now elsewhere in Doha, Qatar, an explosion at a factory injured fifty four people and left 18 missing. That’s according to the Gulf States Interior Ministry. A technical incident caused the blast in Qatar’s Ras Laffan Industrial Zone, it said in a press release. Authorities were searching for the missing workers. An AFP journalist 20 kilometres away said he saw flames in the night sky and a plume of smoke rising from the area which is home to the world’s largest liquefied natural gas hub.
Ras Laffan had already been badly damaged in the US Iran war, with Iranian strikes targeting the Gulf’s energy infrastructure and forcing Qatar to halt its gas production. Qatar Energy said the blast occurred during the start up of operations at the industrial site.
Now it’s worth remembering that in Geelong, Viva Energy, which was the former Shell oil refinery, suffered a fire last April which is still having repercussions. And that’s the company that’s trying to get permission to store liquefied natural gas in a floating hub at its facility, which is approximately eight kilometres from the centre, the central business district of Geelong.
Now continuing the subject of LNG, the City of Sydney proposed a gas export tax at the National Assembly of Mayors and Local Councillors last week in Canberra. The motion asked the federal government to impose an export national levy on coal, oil and gas companies, with the money raised given to local councils to use for greenhouse gas reduction measures. It was passed unanimously.
Now, Greater Geelong’s representatives were there, but nothing has been reported locally. Incidentally, also at the meeting, Sydney Council said that the city was banning gas supplies to all new house building projects. As I said before, Geelong Council was represented there, so the example has been set.
We’ll see if they were noted in Geelong Council’s meetings that are coming in the future. Now to China, which finds itself in a very different position from much of the rest of the world, which is emerging from the war in Iran with depleted oil supplies. The stockpiles held by China’s state owned energy companies remain nearly full.
Beijing appears not to have tacked its vast strategic reserves and storage tanks at Chinese refineries. They’re brimming with petrol, diesel, and other refined products. China has cut its daily oil imports by roughly a third during the course of the war. The pullback, which driven largely by higher prices, helped ease some of the upward pressure on global oil markets and that were caused by the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. China was able to reduce imports sharply because of a broader push to strengthen national self reliance and improve its ability to withstand supply disruptions.
“I would expect China’s oil companies to continue to be price sensitive and to increase their purchases gradually,” said Philip Andrews Speed, who is a longtime China oil specialist at the Oxford Institute of Energy Studies. Chinese companies kept their refineries running throughout the war, he said, by drawing on their extensive stockpiles of crude. But demand in China for petrol diesel, jet fuel and other refined products appears to have weakened as prices rose and sales of petrol cars have fallen, plunged during April and May.
At the same time the Chinese government halted most exports of refined products since the start of the war to ensure adequate domestic supplies. China actually overtook the U.S. in 2024 to become the world’s largest oil refiner, and it’s typically a major supplier of refined fuels to neighbouring countries such as Australia. So nowadays we don’t draw our fuel supplies from the Middle East or from America. It’s China that is supplying our refineries. And that piece of mixed news ends our roundup for this week.
. . .
Jingle: (14:11)
Listen to our Sustainable Hour – for the future.
Tony: (14:19)
Thanks for that, Colin. Always the mix there’s some good news. The interesting one for me is the LNG and the reference to what Viva has planned for for Geelong for the bay.
Colin:
Yep, when the Qatar storage system exploded, you could see it 20k’s away. In that case if the Corio refinery were to come up with a mishap, because it wasn’t hit by an explosive. It was simply going through the normal start-up procedure at the beginning of a shift. And the workers who were there are are all missing. It’s a re that’s the sort of facility that they want to build eight kilometres from the centre of Geelong.
Tony:
Yeah, hard to understand. And also – or plus the fact that the emissions that will go out from that facility into the atmosphere.
Colin:
Exactly. At a time when we’re all buying electric vehicles and reducing the need for oil and gas.
Tony:
Yep, all of that. It it just very difficult to understand why that’s happening at the same time, why it’s allowed to happen.
Colin:
I guess – as Mik pointed out earlier – the banks are quite happy to fund the oil companies and the fossil fuel industries. Mainly because… well, look, like our politicians, the banks have only got short term memories. Our politicians don’t see beyond a three year term. They only see that they need to be re-elected in three years, so they don’t take long term views. Or rarely do.
I mean, I think possibly Bob Hawke and Keating took a couple of long term views when they thought that they’d got a a big enough majority to get through the next election. Certainly Gough Whitlam took long term views. But I don’t recall any other government that’s said, ‘Hey, we’re looking forward to this to do for our grandchildren’, or for at least the next ten years. They just don’t plan that amount. They only plan for three years or four years time.
Tony:
We tend not to learn from history, the mistakes of history. Yep, that’s a good message to put out at NAIDOC Week.
Colin:
Exactly.
Tony:
Okay, seeing as we’re leading up to NAIDOC Week, which starts next Sunday – it’s from July 5 to July 12th – we thought it only fitting to have an accomplished First Nations speaker on as our guest, and that is going to be Professor Mark Rose. Mark is the Deputy Vice Chancellor of Indigenous Studies at Deakin University. And many other things which we’ll get to know during the interview. So, welcome to The Sustainable Hour!
Mark Rose: (17:42)
Thank you for the invitation. It’s great being here. Thank you.
Tony: (17:46)
Tell us about your story, your journey.
Mark: (17:49)
So, it’s a bit of a complex story. My dad was a stolen kid who after the orphanage went to the navy, and a shipmate invited him home to who was dating my auntie… invited him home for Christmas, had nowhere to go. He met my mum and the butterflies appeared, the dubs and all that, and married and it was a marriage between a white person and an Aboriginal person and that was kinda like reconciliation in the very early days.
I was the firstborn son, and dad and mum wanted to have a conventional marriage. However, they were tracked – my dad was tracked by demons of his upbringing himself. He was as a stolen kid growing taken from his mum at six. He expressed those demons in domestic violence, and I came under the intention of the authorities and about to be put into a to an orphanage or out-of-home care.
So my white grandparents struck a deal with the Catholic bishop of Ballarat, which is strange because they were a Presbyterian, that if I change religion at eight years of age, where you make those really important ecclesiastical and philosophical decisions, I could go and live in a convent in Ballarat where I did and I got raised by eight nuns.
So my education came by stealth. It’s… and I got to be honest, it was so boring, the only way to get your head outside the walls of the convent was to read and write, and so I opened up the encyclopedia and read every page I could and wrote everything I could. And so I got an education by stealth rather than by the standard way.
I was asked recently about if I… what I knew about equity and I said, ‘I’m a black kid from Broadmeadows. What else do you need to know?’
So I went through life at the start hard way, you know, out of home. but eventually I ended up living with my grandmother. My mother died very early and I then moved into getting a qualification. My mum actually died in the pursuit of me getting an education to keep me in that home. She tried to get a job in a factory in Broadmeadows and took a fit and hit her head and died tragically. So I was determined to get an educator.
So, after I got expelled from a couple of schools and had a bit of a rough ex I ended up at St Bernard’s in Essendon, where the brothers there in their demeanor sorted me out in 15 minutes at Toby and then I went on and got Year 12, moved into teachers college, became a teacher, then since then I’ve got another four bits of paper. So I think I’ve repaid my mum’s debt pretty well.
So I’ve been in education, but on a Framlingham cold day, Uncle Banjo Clarke got me and said that I had come back to the community to be a bridge between Western education and indigenous education – and not to take any shortcuts and be awesome and deadly in both, and to be that bridge.
So I think in the 40 years I’ve had in education, I’ve moved education from being an oppressor for black fellows into being a liberator. And that’s what I work for with the thought that Aboriginal education is about teaching our kids but teaching everyone else about indigenous
Tony: (21:28)
In that time, Mark, like, you’re a pioneer very much in that area, what battles have you had to fight?
Mark: (21:37)
And still do. Look, it’s landing on the right paradigm and being informed by the ancestors. And I’ve got the word of the ancestors by being part of Victorian Aboriginal Education Association where 33 communities come to one table in Northcote and they sit down and we advocate for Aboriginal people across the state. I’m voted by those communities to be one of their voices, and I’ve – as I said, I got five qualifications from a national university, a couple of Victorian universities, a New South Wales and Harvard. And I think I learnt more from the table with the aunties than I have in those universities. So… Except Deakin – ’cause I work at Deakin, I better say Deakin was… Deakin… – so I wanna get the free commercial in, all right? – You learn a lot at Deakin.
But yeah, the oppression is… and I also co-chaired the committee with Aunty Joy Murphy, the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths and Custody. And been in every jail in the state and saw the sharp edge of the criminal justice system. And when you hug a kid who tried to hang themselves with their t-shirt the night before and you try and give the kid something to hope for, that is where education is important.
I wanted… After I had that experience I wanted to go off and work in Justice, be a saviour there. The elders slap me over the head and said, ‘No! Education!’ Because if we’re going to close the gap it is going to be through education. So it is the silver bullet. It is what we need to to make sure it happens.
So to do it, we’ve got to be more than invisible or mute in it. So I’ve worked with the National Curriculum, getting the indigenous stuff in the curriculum. I worked at VCAA and I’ve worked in every chance I can get a microphone, including this one today, to talk about that our culture is is a real asset for this country and that I often put up the side dispossession when I do a keynote. And everyone gets to be the Quantas eye roll to say you know, he’s gonna bang on about Aboriginal dispossession.
But I believe that white fellows have been dispossessed by our education system. ‘Cause if you live, love and learn on this country and you don’t know the history of it, you’ve been robbed. So it’s a two way strategy. It’s teaching our kids, but it’s also teaching about our culture and that will change. And the original Royal Commission had that in it.
Mik: (24:19)
Mark, in The Sustainable Hour I sense in the last months there’s been a growing sense of despair in a way. We hear more and more speeches about ‘the end of the human race as a species’ because of AI or because of climate or because of nuclear war. And there is of course a lot going on in the world. So there’s a new tension in the air. Could the indigenous worldview help us here?
Mark: (24:53)
I… look, absolutely, Mik. I believe so, and when you say ‘AI’, I presume you’re not talking about ‘Aboriginal Intelligence’, okay? Sorry. Let that one go by.
So look, we are challenged but through Aboriginal knowledge I think it is something that can sort of compete with AI because through Aboriginal lens everyone thinks that we’re gonna hand over ancient stories and ancient history and that certainly is part of it. But it’s also about the way you see the world.
I walk in two worlds. I walk down Sydney Road out here and I look on as a person living in a first world country, and I see it from that perspective but I also walk down as someone who’s connected to communities across the nation who are living in third world standards.
So I see it two ways. I see the trendy glitzy coffee shops and that’s all very nice, but I can’t stop but thinking about our people who are still on Struggle Street. I just come back from Harvard doing a black leadership programme, which is was really good. I was the lightest person in the room. And which they said when I opened my mouth they knew I was black. And when I told how my dad lived, they all, they actually thought I was in the wrong room. Made me laugh but they identified himself as being related to the slaves. I said, yeah, my dad was a slave. Part of his stolen journey was he was given to farmers in Gippsland to work and locked in a shed at night. So which I regard as that.
But one of the things I take away from the the black leadership programme at Harvard was they talked about Rosa Parks and the seats on and how she refused to give a seat. But they said, when the mob sat at the back of the bus, at least they were all together. And now that, you know, we’ve got a rising middle class, you know, how one of my challenges is to make sure that we never rest until people on Struggle Street have the opportunity to get on to Main Street, but we never get seduced by Main Street.
We gotta work and… But to go back to your thing, Indigenous bes helps you see things different ways. There’s a a fellow in Adelaide, he’s getting on a bit he was stolen as a kid, taken to Darwin, and when the bombs dropped in Darwin, he got sent back to his family. Now, conventional Australian history says, you know, the Japanese attacked the sovereign people, but taking a kid away from his family and putting him in an orphanage in Darwin was the same. And he says, ‘Thank Christ for the Japanese!’
Now, that has got me in trouble when I’ve told that story. But it it means that that person is not completely right, and conventional Australian history is not completely right. So looking at it from two worlds means that you can go to a a new common ground place. So you can see things more intensely and that’s what knowledge creation is all about.
And that’s why the work I’ve done, I’ve attracted a bit of criticism from Sky TV, which I hold as being as a badge of honour. First of all, the audience isn’t great. It’s not like it had a peak distribution audience, but the other thing that if Andrew Bolt praised me, then I’d be in trouble with my community. My stocks rise every time he has a go at me.
But, you know, they say that the work I do is placating a minority and political correctness. And I go, ‘No. Everyone needs to take their shoes off and feel the cultural heritage of the land they live on! This is your culture!’
They’re parts of the culture I can’t share, and that is our deep culture. But most of it, it’s also your culture, and you know I spoke on that talk that you guys heard me at [at a Melbourne Town Hall event on 9 May 2026] – about the four faces of Australia.
We have a colonial history. I’m not going to deny the richness of that. It is rich and valid and important to know. Geographically, we’re Asia and the Pacific. That’s gotta be part of our identity. Third, we have come from multiple countries around the world – where you guys live is an example of that – and where I live and we have the world’s oldest continuous culture, and we can’t… we need to identify ourselves from all those a mixture of those four faces, and I’m not going to say that we need to be one nation but we need to be one spirit. So Pauline, I’m coming after you.
Tony: (29:51)
Mark, you mentioned earlier on: Banjo Clarke, and he obviously had a big influence on you. What other influences have there been on you?
Mark: (30:04)
Tony, absolutely, many. The women of VAEAI, the old women, many of them have passed been a great influence. I remember the first time Annie Mary took me to a ministerial meeting I thought I was there for my intelligence or good looks or something. “I’m about to speak” she says, “you’re here to listen and learn, so bide your time and wait for your right time. And she taps me on the negative.
It’s very important. But Japanaka Earl West Lionel Bamblett, who has run VAI for the last four years, Geraldine Atkinson. The leaders we have in here in Victoria are immense. You gotta remember Victoria’s first hit colonially, New South Wales of course, and then my country and later up in the north.
So we have resounded and next week when we move into NAIDOC Week – that’s a celebration of how far we’ve come, where that celebration is for everyone. It’s the national day that we stop and I hope we park any notion of guilt and we move to a point of national maturity rather as part of reconciliation. ‘Cause being a growing up in a convert, reconciliation was all about guilt and no, that’s not a great commodity. Reconciliation should be about national maturities. So if bad things that happen, but we are in this country, we deal with those bad things as mature adults and we craft the future.
So, Mik, that goes to your question about how indigenous can be a light ha a light on a hill for the future. And I think it can be. Not the dot paintings or the the Korean made boomerang at the big market, but the true spirit of love. True spirit of humanity. They’re the things that we have we have and of course. They’re the things that helped us survive and that’s the thing that will help us through whatever AI throws at us.
Mik: (32:12)
That’s really great, Mark. And we have Tony every week acknowledging country and giving us a glimpse of that. But I would love if you would dig a little bit deeper into we now we have the opportunity to hear from you when Tony talks about the wisdom, you know, the ancient wisdom. What is actually in concrete terms in a modern world, what is that wisdom what does it look like?
Mark: (32:37)
Well, to me, Mik, that wisdom is pure wisdom. I’ve worked at universities for over 40 years now, but I’m a kid from Broadie. I had to work in factories to put myself through the later years of school and I found the wisest people I ever come across – this is my insult my colleagues from for over 40 years people – but the wisest I’ve come across with are people on factory floors and on missions where the wisdom is just pronounced.
And the wisdom is devoid of any I’m gonna say colonial and I’m not saying the British colonial, anything that tries to industrialise your mind or spirit. You know, I grew up you know, my first school was an industrial classroom. And I see how indigenous perspectives in the curriculum have moved have aided the system to move from an industrial in into a relational form of education.
In our way, the knowledge transfer, which is ancient wisdom, comes from the fact that rather than the power that’s based in Western education, the teacher and the learner in a transaction ask a question, get an answer. In our way, the teacher and the learner are in constant exchange roles. So the learner becomes the teacher, the teacher becomes the learner. You share knowledge with respect and you take that learning to another place where black fellas used to have education and education in the gav triumphs of the nomads talked about life before colonisation. They said the average Aboriginal male only had to work four hours a day to economically sustain themselves. The rest of the time was in celebration and in education.
And I just think about the tax saving if I only worked four hours a day that but… and I’m working a lot more than four hours now so that’s a lot, colonisers. But having said that I mean we’d be less ta I’ll thank that education was was the key and we went to educate and celebrate on the boundaries. You know, in our boundary road were the demarcation lines that blackfellas weren’t allowed across every country town’s got a boundary road and the blackfellas kept the other side of it. And then we traditionally would go to those boundary not boundary road but boundaries between nations to share knowledge.
So moving away from your central paradigm and your sensibility into a common place is so is the so ancient knowledge is part of the ancient pedagogy rather than well I don’t know why I’m using a French term, but the ancient pedagogy is more how knowledge is created and surfaced and shared. Is the thing that I’m really… And it’s done in an egalitarian way where teacher and learner exchange with respect rather than a transactional way.
. . .
SONG (35:50)
‘Learn to Listen’
Yaraan: “Country can speak to anyone. It’s just, yeah, if they know how to listen.”
Verse 1:
I stand on the Earth
I breathe with the land
The rhythm of its heartbeat
weaves in with my own
I give it all the time it needs
Yaraan: “Slow down to the pace of your heartbeat. Tomtumpa, your heartbeat.”
Chorus:
Listen…
The treaty begins when truth is spoken
Listen…
Healing begins when harm is named
Listen…
Water will guide, fire will teach
Listen…
The stars will sing, when we learn… to listen
[Instrumental section]
Bridge:
We sang the rain, and the rain came
We danced the land, and the land moved
Our sacred fire never dies
We’ll wait for you to slow down
Sit down and learn – to listen
Chorus:
Listen…
The treaty begins when truth is spoken
Yaraan: “This modern world is moving very fast.”
Listen…
Healing begins when harm is named
Listen…
Water will guide, fire will teach
Listen…
The stars will sing, when you learn… to listen
Verse 2:
We are the river
We are the land
The eagle watches
The whale sings
We don’t own these stories
They flow through us
Every rock is a page of a living law
Every tide a verse of an ancient truth
Outro:
Songlines have been drowned in pipelines
Kinship traded for control
But in a world that forgets, we remember
We carry the culture with us
And we are still here, walking
Yaraan: “We’re not waiting for the government.”
Still here, protecting
Protecting what protects us
Yaraan: “We are just doing it.”
So our future will be strong and safe
Learning takes time
Learn to listen
Yaraan: “Our country is our identity, it’s part of who we are and it should be at the root of all other decisions made.”
. . .
Mik: (39:35)
There’s so much in the Western culture… If we look at for instance the way men have been the key players for centuries. They have been the ones out there with their ships conquering and colonising, and they’ve been also in the home in charge and actually quite dominating to their women, and so on. How was it in the in the old days in the Aboriginal community? Was that the same? Or was it different with the male female balance, and also the relationship to nature?
Mark: (40:12)
Well, the relationship to nature is really important. And of course, my immediate experience is being born 12 years to the end of the Aborigines Protection Act, where Aboriginal manhood was still under attack, and leading up to the intervention again was still under attack.
So, we’d go back, we hear stories about beyond that. The notion of clan groups and the notion of extended families come to play in a very big way.
So I think the structure would have been good, but some of it is only not – because our knowledge was destroyed and our language was destroyed.
Some of that has been interpreted or re engineered and reinterpreted. So I can’t empirically speak about what… All I know is that, you know, I’ve been a Aboriginal man, and I… There was a woman I know, an academic, who did a great thing when Howard had the intervention, and there was attack on aboriginal manhood then. She wrote to every one of the men in her life that she knew and told how much she appreciated that manhood.
And we had men’s business and women’s business. So in that men’s business, we would get together and we would talk about health issues and, you know, share knowledge. So we did go to gender ways.
I’ve been a leadership program in in another state that I’m involved with when I suggest that we go to men’s and women’s businesses, I got challenged on whether some people don’t identify as men or women, and I go, ‘Yeah.’ And I’m sure there’s leadership programs for them too. But in our way, men’s and women’s businesses accommodate all and everyone.
And the peak thing about Aboriginality is inclusion. So, we do include it. But I got to be blunt. If you go to some communities across the nation, we still bear the scars of, you know, genocide colonisation, and that’s… I won’t paint as all rosy. I’ve been there, and I’ve been in every jail in the state.
When Joy and I handed down a report in Parliament, there was a quote that was attributed to me – I dedicated to the men, women and kids who find the surrealism of the criminal justice system better than the realism of their own life.
So when you talk about men’s… – that’s been number one attack. If you want to eradicate a people, attack families, attack economic, attack culture, attack language. So… Dismantle, destroy, diminish, all those D-words happened to us. So I’m not making excuses. I’m just proud of being Aboriginal and proud how far we’ve come.
I believe that, you know, our sovereignty – and I’m not talking about a political sovereignty – but our importance as a people will reign, will come back to a point. I’m working for sovereignty, you know. But I’m not waiting for the government to give it to me. Sovereignty is something that you are and you believe in and you grasp. It’s something that you don’t have to march in the street for. Something that you believe – that is your ancestral mandate. So that’s what I would say, yeah.
Mik: (43:55)
I find that very interesting. Even, you know, I’m not in any way close to being indigenous, except maybe there’s a bit of Viking in me, but, you know, I have been thinking a lot about what men will do if they were to transform into an ecological future where humanity actually saves themselves and we don’t destroy our planet until we can’t live here any longer? And what would that new type of ‘being masculine’ look like? Maybe that word ‘sovereign’ could be a new place to go. Because what I’m talking about is that men need to sort-of offlearn being dominating, offlearn being these old traits from 10,000 years of male domination. But what do we put in its place?
Mark: (44:46)
Well, I think, someone who… Identity and sovereignty, as you said, is very important. But Mik, as you were talking, it reminded me that when I worked with that leadership group, and I’ve worked with ten of them now over ten years in New South Wales, that I go in and talk about that the moment they walked into a classroom, they were in a leadership programme, an industrial leadership program where hierarchy was reinforced and where control, command and control was reinforced.
So, a sovereign person recognises the colonising encumbrance in their life and works beyond that. So I could bleed about sovereignty and a colonisation, but I’m just going to get on with the job and making sure people emancipate themselves from the neo-colonial encumbrances that we all carry around with.
And it’s in our language, it’s in our media, it’s in our political system. And there’s a decay in the political bodies at the moment, both left and right, and people are looking for a new way, and I’m not going to suggest anarchy because I have done that as a young person, but what I am suggesting is this: Let’s reread the landscape, you know, and let’s take our shoes off and feel Mother Earth and say: what is important to us?
We get drawn in to… And The Voice was a classic… It got hijacked by the binary: You are either yes or no. You know? And I know good people who voted no, and I know good people who voted yes.
So, you know, when we get dragged into that binary mindset, that’s what we need to liberate ourselves from. You know, we’re not Liberal, we’re not Labor. I’ve worked the back-channels of politics for the last 40 years. And some of the best people are…
I mean, at my 60th birthday party I had Liberal and Labor politicians come, so I… If we can’t operate like that, then we’re losing the plot, you know.
This is the country that decided that as our national capital would be halfway between Sydney and Melbourne. Where’s that logic gone now? Quite a common sense logic, you know. We argue every… as, you know, about Invasion Day and Australia Day. We need a national day to celebrate. Let’s land on something, for God’s sake, you know. Where’s that Australian logic that we had, you know?
So this is a time for us to really get into our roots. But as an immature nation, we get very contrarian. We don’t define ourselves by who are, but by who we’re not.
In that orange group that is emerging at the moment, you’re not migrants, and you’re not Aboriginal, and you’re not pregnant mothers. But if you’re… Both sides, both extremes, have really think… But defining ourselves by who we are rather than by who we’re not is important. And that’s what maturity is.
And, you know, I’ve worked across the world with communities, you know, Sami – where you come from, Mik – Malaysia, Native American and the ones that really are sustainable are the ones who define themselves by who they are. And what we need to do. You know, modern day Australian history is exactly about modern. You know, we’re ancient but we’re new. And what we need to say, you know, move away from who we are not to who we are.
. . .
Jingle
Mik: (48:56)
That’s how deep we could get in one Hour, one Sustainable Hour – today – that went into the Aboriginal wisdom. Thank you so much, Mark, for taking us there. And I couldn’t agree more with everything that you have said. There’s a lot to explore still. Because it also asks questions to us, you know who are we as Australians? And I speak now as an Australian because I do have an Australian passport, but I also have my Danish background. So to find that new way where we all come together that is an incredible and an exciting project that we just haven’t even started, have we?
Mark: (49:34)
No, it’s the journey that we’re on, and it’s a very important journey.
Mik: (49:38)
Now we’ve come to the ‘Be-section’, Mark, where we always ask our guests, ‘What will we be?’ Or what do you want us to be or the listeners to be?
Mark: (49:49)
A word in our… in the Aboriginal is ‘deadly’, ‘Be deadly’. But I did say that to a group of medical students and apparently that wasn’t the best thing to say – but seeing that you brought up AI and knowledge, and ancient knowledge, and modern… Be curious! Just be curious and park your tacit assumptions, and be curious and courageous and go to a new place.
. . .
SONG (49:55)
‘This Is the Time’
Verse 1:
This land has held stories
for longer than memory
Hands in the soil
whispers to frogs
songs carried by the riverbanks
Tiddalick drank the water dry
so the women followed springs
not with force
but with patience
planting as they went
reweaving the land
with love as method
listening as law
Chorus:
We’ve never been freer
Never more connected
So let’s not wait for permission or perfect conditions
Let’s move – let’s grow
Let’s get our hands in it
Pick up your shovel
This is the time
Call the Elders
We’re ready to listen
Mims (Marama Grace Brownsdon): “There’s a lot stopping us in a lot of ways, but we have also never been freer, we have never been more connected.”
Verse 2:
It wasn’t policy
It wasn’t profit
It was being – being with
Being for
Belonging to
We don’t need another slogan
We need a place to stand barefoot
We need purpose with dirt under its nails
We need to build what feels like home
We’re not lacking the plan
We’re lacking the will
Chorus:
We’ve never been freer
Never more connected
So let’s not wait for permission or perfect conditions
Let’s move – let’s grow
Let’s get our hands in it
Pick up your shovel
This is the time
Call the Elders
We’re ready to listen
Mims: “This is the time. Pick up shovels and rakes and manure and mulch and seeds. You know, this is the time.”
Don’t tell me you ‘love this country’
as long as you still poison her veins
You don’t get to farm without family
without connection, without conscience, without consequence
We watched the banks erode
and still we wrapped the truth in story
so it wouldn’t be lost
An army — not of soldiers
but of water-carriers, seed-planters
those who look at a damaged field
and see a forest of healing and hope
Chorus:
We’ve never been freer
Never more connected
So let’s not wait for permission or perfect conditions
Let’s move – let’s grow
Let’s get our hands in it
Pick up your shovel
This is the time
Call the Elders
We’re ready to listen – listen and learn
Epilogue:
This is not sacrifice
it’s sacred – participation
Water clean enough to drink
That’s the promise
Pick up a shovel
This is our moment
This is the time
This is the time
Mims: “The time is right, Wadz. Like, now is the time.”
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
CALENDARS
Events we have talked about in The Sustainable Hour
Events in Victoria
The following is a collation of Victorian climate change events, activities, seminars, exhibitions, meetings and protests. Most are free, many ask for RSVP (which lets the organising group know how many to expect), some ask for donations to cover expenses, and a few require registration and fees. This calendar is provided as a free service by volunteers of the Victorian Climate Action Network. Information is as accurate as possible, but changes may occur.
PETITIONS AND OPEN LETTERS
you could add your name to
→ List of running petitions where we encourage you to add your name
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
THE SUSTAINABLE HOUR ON AIR
LIVE STREAMING
on Wednesdays
The Sustainable Hour is streamed live on the Internet and broadcasted on FM airwaves in the Geelong region every Wednesday from 11am to 12pm (Melbourne time): 94.7 FM.
→ To listen to the program on your computer or phone, go to www.947thepulse.com where you then click on ‘Listen’ on the top right of the page.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
ARCHIVE
Over 600 hours of sustainable podcast episodes
Listen to all of The Sustainable Hour radio shows as well as our special Regenerative Hours, Climate Revolution and Force of Life episodes in full length.
→ Archive on climatesafety.info – with additional links
→ Archive on podcasts.apple.com – phone friendly archive
NEWSLETTER
Receive our podcast newsletter in your mailbox
We send a newsletter out approximately four-six times a year. Email address and surname is mandatory – all other fields are optional. You can unsubscribe at any time.
FOLLOW, INTERACT AND SHARE
The Sustainable Hour in social media
• Facebook: www.facebook.com/TheSustainableHour → Front covers
• Instagram: www.instagram.com/TheSustainableHour
• Blue Sky: www.bsky.app/profile/thesustainablehour.bsky.social
• Twitter: www.twitter.com/SustainableHour
(NB: we stopped using X/Twitter after it was hijacked-acquired by climate deniers)
• YouTube: www.youtube.com/c/thesustainablehour
Great if you’ll share the news about this podcast episode on your social media platforms!
