  (classical orchestra music)
 (tribal percussion) 
 that you might not realizeAMg
about Aboriginal Australia.
They have the oldest, longest
running culture on Earth.
Sixty thousand years.
It's a really sad history.
It's a litany of dispossession.
Maybe my job here
as a story teller
wasn't to just document
a disappearing culture,
in this modern world.
Maybe it was to look
at this living, breathing,
thriving part of their culture,
and how important it is
to the future health
of their communities.
( Aboriginals singing )
(applause)
AMY TOENSING: I am going
to talk to you tonight about
my journey through
Aboriginal Australia,
which began in a cave,
in Western Australia.
And I was wedged between rocks,
trying to get the best
angle on a piece of rock art.
I was working on a story
for National Geographic magazine
about a group of animals
that had gone extinct
all at the same time,
50,000 years ago.
And there was a raging debate
as to whether or not humans,
specifically
Aboriginal Australians
had something to do with it.
The critter that you see at
the end of this hunter's spear
was maybe one of those animals.
There is also
a 10-foot kangaroo.
There is an 18-foot
constrictor snake.
And there is an animal that I
don't know how best to describe
except ask you to imagine
a hairless marsupial chipmunk,
and then make it the
size of a rhinoceros.
And then you have a Diprotodon
that walked here
80,000 years ago.
My husband, Matt Moyer,
who is in the audience
and also a photojournalist, came
on this assignment with me, and
here we are on his assignment
in the Sinai Peninsula, Egypt
for National
Geographic magazine.
And we try to do it as much
as possible because otherwise
we wouldn't see
each other very much.
So, our journey to
get to this rock art
began with a chartered
flight to a remote community
and then a good part of a day
on a dirt track in
a four-wheel drive vehicle.
Not really out of the ordinary
if you are trying to get
to anywhere in the world remote.
It's a lot of logistics
and just trying to get
to where you're supposed to go.
And, so in the midst of that,
it's really important
to remember what's important,
what's the big picture.
And, so I had one
of these moments
when I finally
got to my rock art
and I was like, "Ah, okay,
I'm going to make my picture."
And I thought,
"Who is this person
that drew this hunting scene?"
And I assumed it was a man
because of the traditional
hunter roles.
And I thought,
"Who is this guy?"
He is documenting his day.
He is documenting
the world around him.
And I started to feel connected
to this fellow storyteller.
This person that
was communicating to me
from tens of thousands
of years ago,
something into the
future about his people
and his people's relationship
to these animals.
So, something that
you might not realize
about Aboriginal Australia.
They have the oldest, longest
running culture on Earth.
Sixty thousand years,
they've been around.
So, a few days
later I found myself
sitting across from
Jack and Lily Karadada,
in the Aboriginal
community of Kalumburu.
It's the gateway to and from
this rock art.
So, Matt and I decided
to stop for one night
and we were going to see if we
could find some Aboriginal art.
And we were led to Lily,
because she is known
globally for her paintings.
So, when Jack found out that
we are from the United States,
his eyes lit up.
And he told me how
he worked side-by-side
with the Americans
during World War II.
And how with his bare hands,
he helped build
a strategic airstrip
that helped fight the Japanese,
who had invaded Timor,
just a couple of hundred miles
to the north
of where we are sitting.
And then Lily started to
talk to me about their childhood
and how they both grew
up naked and in the bush.
A hunter-gatherer lifestyle.
And then Lily started
to talk about her country.
And when Aboriginal Australians
talk about their country,
what they are talking about
is the land that's theirs
by birthright.
Where they are from,
the land that they are of,
their ancestral lineage.
And so then Lily started
to tell me
how everything in her country,
the rocks, the trees,
the water, the fish, the birds,
even the sandflies
that bite really horribly
and hard, were her family.
That she was connected
to all of them and
they were connected to her.
So, these are
things as Americans
we read a lot about
in New Age magazines
and we're like, "Oh yeah,
let's get connected."
But in Aboriginal Australia,
it really-- it, it is
the structure of their society.
It dictates who you marry,
how you address somebody
and even what you eat.
So, let's go back
to that thing of
how long Aboriginal Australians
have been around.
So, if the indigenous
population of Australia today--
that's Lily and her ancestors--
have been around
for 60,000 years,
the last 250 years
of colonization,
have brought around the
more-- most change than ever.
Albeit kind of
slow in some areas,
because it's this really huge,
vast, remote country.
The last hunter-gatherer group
walked out of the
Gibson desert in 1984,
into the town of Alice Springs.
Still, if you think
about it then,
Aboriginal culture went
along pretty much uninterrupted,
at least nothing like
colonization, for 59,750 years.
Jack and Lily were able
to walk in both of these worlds,
because they remained
in pre-colonized Australia
until World War II
pulled them out.
And I thought back to that
ancient storyteller in the cave
who made that hunting
scene and I thought,
"Wow, Jack's life as a kid
was probably pretty similar
to that ancient storyteller's,
hunting on the same landscape."
Jack and Lily were bridges
between two alien worlds.
And when Lily talked about
her childhood and her
connectedness to her country,
her eyes just lit up,
she had a glimmer in them.
And it made me wonder
where could I find
that connection
in Aboriginal Australia today?
Because it was so contrary
to the prevalent story
that I was hearing
everywhere about
the downtrodden indigenous
group of Australia.
Don't get me wrong,
it's a really sad history.
National Geographic staff
writer, Cathy Newman wrote,
"It's a litany
of dispossession."
Their stolen land.
There are government policies
that controlled their movement,
who they married,
where they worked.
They even took
their children away.
From 1909 to 1969,
government agencies went
into the home of Aboriginal
Australian families
and removed their children
without any proof of neglect.
And today they are known
as the stolen generation.
So after meeting Jack and Lily
and the rock art, I was hooked.
And so I proposed a story to
National Geographic
and they accepted.
And I learned that after
250 years of dispossession,
the Aboriginal Australian
population had
the highest rate
of heart disease,
kidney disease,
cancer, diabetes,
and they die on average
10 years earlier than their
white Australian counterparts.
Sixteen percent unemployment,
as opposed to five percent
for the rest of Australia.
And they make up a third
of the prison population.
Trying to impose a
European style of education
on an indigenous group
does not always work very well.
So only 37 percent
of Aboriginal students
graduate from high school.
I was in a community where
the principal had to go around
every morning, door-to-door,
and round the kids up.
Otherwise she said
no one would attend.
And the teacher cried herself
to sleep almost every night,
because she was
so frustrated about
not getting through to the kids.
So, you see
little Matty down there,
on the left hand corner.
He's four years old, completely
disconnected in this classroom.
And here he is again
completely connected,
learning about his culture
and how to manage
his land with fire,
just as his ancestors have
for tens of thousands of years.
So this moment
from disconnect to connect
really connected something
for me.
And I thought, "Maybe
my job here as a storyteller
wasn't to just document
a disappearing culture,
in this modern world.
Maybe it was to look
at this living, breathing,
thriving part of their
culture and how important it is
to the future health
of their communities."
Most non-indigenous Australians
have never met
an Aboriginal person.
And most Australian news stories
about Aboriginals are negative.
I felt like there was some
piece of the story missing.
And the Aboriginal population
is sort of faceless.
They don't have education,
they don't have jobs,
all the things that we value
in Western hyped up society
is not what they have.
And so I thought
maybe if I could find
that connectedness
that I saw with Matty,
it would-- they would
see something different.
So I started to look
to the remote communities.
And I learned about
the homelands movement
from the 1970's,
when a more liberal Australian
government gave incentives
for people to go
back to their homeland,
and utilize their
land and live there.
"Homeland for the Aboriginal
person is your being.
It's where you have
been for thousands of years.
Dispossess the person from
that and they become nothing.'
Maybe this was where
I could find that glimmer
I saw in Lily's eyes.
The homelands.
Extensive studies
have shown that
Aboriginal families
that are utilizing
their homelands are healthier.
They live longer.
They hold on to their
language and culture.
They pass on their language and
culture to younger generations.
And they utilize their homelands
for food and cultural practices.
They spend more time
with their family.
And Aboriginal youth that spend
more time in their homelands
are less likely to get
involved with drugs and alcohol.
So, my first night on a homeland
went something like this.
It's always a crazy
road to get there.
You're gonna get stuck,
you're gonna get bogged down.
Really deep sand,
so it was a really long day,
and we got there
really late at night and
I had this big truck
and some young Aboriginal boys
were helping me because
they knew the roads they drove.
We got in really late at night.
Set up my tent,
went straight to sleep.
Next morning I woke up,
go to my truck
to go find something,
and I heard this crashing
and banging
and sand flying everywhere.
I couldn't figure out what it
was, I was looking up and down.
And I look in the back and
there was a 400-pound sea turtle
in the back of my truck,
on its back, upside down.
What-- like these
are the moments
that challenge
you on assignment.
They are kind of random.
You wouldn't be able
to predict it,
but it's like, "Yeah,
that would be challenging."
So it turns out
boys will be boys,
and they went out hunting
after I went to sleep
and they found
themselves a sea turtle.
And they figured that because
they had the keys to my truck,
you know, that was where
it should go for the night,
in the back of my truck,
on its back.
And so they were waiting
for to keep it alive
until the rest of the family
came, so they could butcher it.
And I have to admit it
really wasn't easy for me to
watch it get killed
because I swam with these,
but I'm also not
a vegetarian, so--
And then I saw how they utilized
every part of this
animal for food.
And here they are
washing the guts for soup.
It was amazing.
And somehow I got
talked into eating these.
These are-- These are the eggs
straight from the
belly of the turtle.
And there is a number
of other foods that got me,
like pushed me
to my limit on this--
I wasn't brave enough to eat
these witchetty grubs raw,
but cooked they taste
like cheesy eggs.
These are cycad nuts and you--
they get turned into flour,
and then bread,
but if it's not prepared
correctly, you die.
And this is Wallaby, which
is really delicious, actually.
But this is really what my diet
looked like most of the time.
So, by the time I got
to the end of this assignment,
I had cast quite a web
of connections
throughout Australia.
You can see all those
red dots are places
where I actually
spent some time.
But one of these
connections spun me
back up to the top there,
called Arnhem Land,
which is right up there in the
clump of red flags that you see.
And it also spun me
back to National Geographic.
So it turns out,
almost 70 years ago, in 1948,
National Geographic
ran a joint expedition
with the Smithsonian Institute.
And then, Arnhem Land was
really, really remote.
You couldn't even drive there.
You had to go by boat and it was
months and months.
They spent almost a year there.
And they collected
all the things
that they do in
a 1948 expedition.
They took like birds,
and flora and fauna, and
all sorts of data.
But they also took human skulls.
And a couple years ago
as part of a global trend to
return human remains
to the rightful owners,
the Smithsonian decided that
they would return these
human skulls to Australia,
to Arnhem Land and to the
community to which they belong.
This is actually,
this is the photographer,
the National Geographic
photographer on the assignment,
Hal Walker,
photographing some kids
in the same area that I was in.
So you might wonder,
"Okay, how did they figure out
how, where those
skulls belonged?"
Well, it turned out those
skulls had paintings on them.
And those paintings
had the story
of that person's
country on them.
And so when they showed
the skulls
to some elders in the area,
they knew exactly
what land they went to
and to whom they belonged.
So the descendants
of these skulls
decided that they
wanted to honor them
by bringing them
back and burying them
with the traditional
log coffin ceremony.
And a log coffin ceremony
had not been done in this
community for over 40 years.
So anybody here who knew,
who had seen it were just
little kids when it happened.
So this whole community
was coming together,
trying to piece together
how to do this ceremony.
And it goes something like this:
so you bury the deceased and you
leave their body in the ground
until just bones remain.
You exhume the bones;
and then you find a
log hollowed out by termites.
And you paint the story
of that person on the log,
like they are here.
So all these critters that you
see on this log are the story
of that person who died,
and their country.
And then you put the remains
back in the hollowed log,
and you let them go
back to their country.
You just leave it out there.
So finally ceremony
day happened.
( Aboriginals singing )
One of the ceremonies that day,
or a part of the ceremony,
was private.
And it was for men only,
and it was for only
the men of the deceased.
But they asked
me to document it.
And I said, "Sure,
of course I'll document it."
And they said, "No,
this is not for your magazine.
Nobody else can see this.
This is only for us.
We want a visual record
of this ceremony so that
if it doesn't happen
again for 40 years or more,
we-- our future
generations will know
what happened and
they can do it themselves
because they can learn from it."
And so,
I documented the ceremony,
and I can't show
it to you today.
But maybe that visual record
will be a bridge across time
just like that story in the
cave by that ancient storyteller
with the hunting scene.
And it will offer
a pathway
for this community
to speak to their future
generations about their culture.
And maybe somebody's grandson,
or better yet, great-great-
great-great granddaughter,
will watch this visual record,
and she'll learn
something about herself,
and her people,
and her homeland.
Thank you very much.
(applause)
