New South Wales

It's almost like the ocean is a part of me and I am a part of it. I see it as Mother Earth and the ocean is one of our mother's lungs, and it's something that helps clean the carbon and the bad stuff out of the sky and the air, and the ocean being our totem, it's inherently a responsibility for me to make sure that it's looked after and it's cared for.

The land told them. The land spoke to them. And if you say "How does the land talk? How do you understand the land?" And that's what it comes down to. Land doesn't actually speak the same language we speak, you see, that's what it is, it's the same as an animal communicates with an animal. They can hear each other. They can talk to each other. They don't have to speak English or speak the way we speak, but they communicate so they can listen. We built that same relationship with the land, where we could understand what trees saying. We built that same relationship with our animals, where we knew exactly what they were saying. And when an animal tells you how to care for it, that's all you've got to do. You got to follow what it says. When a tree tells you how to look after it, you listen to it. You don't say "No, I actually know what's better for you I know how to look after you. I'll do it this way." You let them tell you. And that didn't come from 10 years. That didn't come from 100 years. It's come from hundreds of thousands of years of learning. From looking and listening.

There's so many different plants that we call calendar plants, or plants that teach us certain things to do at certain times of the year, and that's what it was about. It was about learning what connected with what, and what done what at what time of the year. And once you learnt that, you had to follow it.

When the Mutton Bird is migrating, it's not a good time to be swimming, because obviously you have the younger ones that can't make the journey dropping off and a lot of them wash up into the nearshore area and that's sort of prime taking for something like a Tiger Shark that's an opportunistic scavenger. So that's an indicator that they'd be very active.

When the dogwood bush flowers and seeds, it's another indicator to be cautious and to be careful because sharks are about. Things like after flood events, not swimming because Bull Sharks tend to be more active during those times. When the Jezebel Butterfly starts to migrate up the east coast we know that then the mullet and the taylor or the trevally are starting to migrate north as well. And what follows them are sharks.

As part of the ocean being our totem it's essentially that consideration and that respect for everything that feeds into the ocean or is connected to the ocean, and that includes the land and landform systems. So the whole catchment, the water that comes out of the catchment, the trees that are in the catchment, those animals that are in that catchment, the things that flow down those creeks and down those streams, and eventually everything flows into the ocean. And then in the ocean, the species that are in the ocean, the functions that the ocean does, how it dictates our weather patterns. It's got such a huge role to play on the planet and I'm constantly thinking about the health and the function of all those things. I think that's why I'm feeling a little bit sick and angry. But that's part of my inherited responsibility.

If we're connected to salt water, for example, we have to live and breathe it. We have to come back to be healed with it. It's just who we are as our identity. So where some people would say we're going fishing and we're going to enjoy catching fish for that particular event or day, for an Aboriginal person that's much more of a cultural and identity experience. Knowing that you're fishing at the spot where your ancestors have fished forever, because we haven't come from any other place than here. So it's really our identity. It's the depth of that deep time that we're experiencing. So we're not just experiencing it in 2021, but we're experiencing all of those generations that have come before us. So that's a very powerful concept that the sea is us.

So as Aboriginal people, we also believe that the connection between the sea and the land is one, and it's as far out as you can see to the horizon. But from a European view, the land is most important because you can actually survey it and you can fence it and you can cut it into small portions and then you can sell it. So as you can see, it's just a totally different notion, understanding, that an Aboriginal person has.