Tyson Yunkaporta: A laugh, a cry & a touchstone

This still feels like the funniest story told on the podcast over its eight and some years now. And right up there among the most moving too. I still laugh out loud when I think about the end of my yarn with Tyson Yunkaporta back in episode 70, when I asked him about his music story. And the emotions that surged in a touchstone moment just prior to that have been the subject of many a chat since. Funnily enough, I couldn’t actually remember that one followed the other. So here’s the last 15 minutes or so of my time with Tyson for episode 70 back in 2020.

Welcome to the 9th instalment of Vignettes from the Source, the new short form series featuring some of the unforgettable, transformative and often inexplicable moments my guests have shared over the years. Indeed, this one hits all three of those marks, and was front of mind when deciding to create this series.

Tyson belongs to the Apalech Clan from Western Cape York in far north Queensland, with community/cultural ties all over Australia. He is the author multiple books, including Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World. He’s also a poet and artist carving traditional tools and weapons, processes that were central to writing the book.

If you’d like to hear or revisit this conversation in full, head to episode 70 – ‘Sand Talk: Indigenous thinking, saving the world & living creation’ (there are a bunch of links in those show notes too, and a very special photo from this conversation on that episode website).

Right now, we’re in the thick of the unprecedented series of international events that have gravitated together between Perth, the wheatbelt and Bridgetown here in WA. I’ll look forward to sharing some of what happens with you all afterwards, especially for those who can’t get here. For now, I hope you enjoy revisiting this one with Tyson.

Chapter markers & transcript.

Originally recorded 13 August 2020, and released 14 September 2025.

Title image supplied.

For more behind the scenes, become a supporting listener via the links below.

Music:

Stones & Bones, by Owls of the Swamp.

The RegenNarration playlist, music chosen by guests.

Chapters

• 0:00 The Andaman Islander footage
• 3:43 Fragments of Ancient Wisdom
• 6:51 Crisis of Meaning
• 7:35 The music story
• 13:40 Not Special, But Part of Something Special

Transcript

AJ: 0:00

You know, in a way, I feel like there's a touchstone for this yarn and perhaps unsurprisingly, because it wasn't lost on me that you said in the book you think about this at least once a day and it was the footage you once saw of the Andaman Islanders. Yeah, man, Can you describe?

Tyson: 0:18

that. Thanks, man. No one's ever asked me about that, you know.

AJ: 0:25

Thank you, you know, thank you.

Tyson: 0:26

You bet I just you know that feedback, physiological feedback again, oh yeah.

Tyson: 0:34

I'm feeling it. I can't even see the screen now. My eyes have teared up. It's that much of a longing, you know. Yeah, it's that much of a longing, you know. Yeah, just, and I've never been able to find it again. I've spent so many hundreds of hours looking for that. I can't find it. But you know, it was a long time ago.

Tyson: 0:59

I saw it, but it was those two, it was those. It was their dignity and agency and just unfathomable intelligence. I mean, their eyes were burning with it, they just glowed. It was man and woman, side by side, equally muscled, you know, and they were side by side, walking towards the camera like what, what do you want? And they looked right into that camera and it just went through me. And, yeah, it's every day I think about it and I've mentioned it to people before and they've gone.

Tyson: 1:52

Hmm, that wasn't lost on me either. But, yeah, thank you, but it's, it's such a, it's just, it's the best and worst thing I've ever seen. You know, it ruined my life seeing that, because this is that's something that you know for us to return to that level of super I mean, they were super here, but you drop them in a city. They'd be superheroes, the physical things that they would do yes, superheroes, but their mental, their cognitive powers that was clearly there. But just their relational dynamic, those two together, oh my god, you know superhuman and it just. And, like I said it, it was like being a labrador seeing two dingoes. Yeah, I curl up under the couch just whining with the tail between my legs. You know, and I've been there ever since, my tail's still between my legs from that encounter and that was just a shadow of an echo of something from decades ago and I don't know, but it's still in us, it's there.

Tyson: 2:59

But that's the worst part. I look in myself and find all those shattered fragments of that same pattern. You know, I look in my culture, my language and what's there of that. I look at the community and what is so startlingly present there that reflects that, the parts of myself, the things I do. But then the way that is so fragmented and out of balance and just wrong, and there's these frustration signals just zapping across between those fragments. The way that is so fragmented and out of balance and and just wrong, and there's these frustration signals just zapping across between those fragments and there's conflicts and there's disagreements and there's contradictions and it's not coming together and there's just these moments.

Tyson: 3:37

You know, I see my niece like some fellow slaps the other niece. So you know my niece, who's the best fighter? She goes around at their house and she calls out the six best men fighters there in that house. You know it's like, well, you're not good enough. Call your cousin from over there, he can come in. I want the best fighters. All right, you all here from this family. All right, let's go. And this one girl beats the shit out of all of them and I have this just surge of empowerment and joy. And you know, you see those flashes of just brilliance, exceptional something. But then you also just see it in the quiet spaces in between things, and just that fierce nurturance of grandmother and granddaughter happening quietly over there in a corner showing her something. And you have the same response to it because it's complete. It's complete, but it's so disrupted as well. Anyway, I'm not expressing this very well because no one's ever asked me about it before and I haven't.

AJ: 4:48

I haven't thought it through it's just something that I've met. Yeah, thank you, it's just doing its work on me.

Tyson: 4:54

but I just I know that we're more than this. Like I just know it and most people just know, yeah, and there's, there's probably a you know, there's a thousand scientific studies that would back that and there's even more that would just laugh at it. You know, no, this is, we're better now than we've ever been. But I know that's not true. I know it's not true and I feel just so many people feeling the same thing, just like a grief. You know we've lost something.

AJ: 5:22

Yes, I don't think that's marginal anymore. I mean even, yeah, it's sort of wherever I go that they are questions of meaning and worth everywhere.

Tyson: 5:41

Yeah Well, there's a crisis of meaning. Now that everybody accepts every side of politics, there's nobody I've seen refute this concept of a crisis of meaning. So, basically, in removing people from the land, the state and economy had to provide the things that the land provided for people for free before, and so they provided them haphazardly. But the idea was that if you traded a third of your life, if you sell us a third of your life, if you sold us, you sell us a third of your life and you do this soul destroying labor, then you will have access to the things that the land used to give to you. When society is not a thing that's separate from land or nature, the other thing provided by the land is meaning. So that's another thing that the state and economic system, you know, business, marketplace, whatever institutions that were provided to give us meaning, and outside of that there's still the church. So you have a number of institutions. You know.

Tyson: 6:46

All these institutions are supposed to provide meaning and anyway, as the civilization has commenced its fall, all of those institutions have been revealed to be corrupt. Nobody can trust them anymore. You can't trust the church with your kids, all of the institutions that were put in place to provide meaning to us. Once we're removed from the land, they're all gone. So now there's a crisis of meaning. What are we going to do? I know, I know what I'm going to do.

AJ: 7:17

I'm just going to go for a piss, bro, so I'll be back well, mate, give us the little story about the piece of music that's been significant to you ah, okay.

Tyson: 7:33

So that's, um, that timeless land by yothi indy, which is not. It's not a song I particularly like. It's all right, but it's not my jam or anything. Yeah, but that was just after the first time I met. Oh man, juma, and he decided all right, it's you, you're the one sit down. I'm passing this to you and your job's to pass that everywhere. Now, oh, by the way, I'm gonna need you to perform an act of domestic terrorism down the track, but that's not for now.

Tyson: 7:59

Just, oh, he wants me to get this, this there's a beacon on a rock beside a us military base and the beacon on top of the rock is blocking the spirit work that that special rock is doing. I've got to go and remove that at some stage in my life and I'm definitely going to get shot doing it. I'm not looking forward to it and I've just got to raise up these babies first. And it was like I did not appreciate him putting that on me. I didn't appreciate him putting any of this shit on me. Anyway, it's here, I'm doing it now. Sorry, old man, I'm getting wild, but nobody wants anyway, ain't, nobody got time for that. So, anyway, this song. It was like first time I met him and it was my first piece of like, doubting him. Not just doubting him, but dismissing him. I sat there all day. He blew my mind with all of these symbols and images and then he said all right, so that song there off the Indy Timeless Land, you got to listen to that song. There's a song line in there for a place where you're going tomorrow. And I'm like, immediately I got alarm bells because he's like aha, and I'm thinking I haven't told him that I'm flying down to Victoria tomorrow. He thinks I'm still going to be here in the Northern Territory. We're like this Yothi Indi, this Yolngu singers, that their song line, that I'm going to be around that and I'll be able to find this song line in the Northern Territory and follow it. Haha, he doesn't know. I'm going to be on a plane tonight and I'm going to be in Victoria tomorrow and I'm going up to the Snowy Mountains. I'm going right up the top of the Snowy Mountains and there were the Snowy River. That's where I'm going to be tomorrow and he doesn't know that. So now I know that he's gammon and he's full of shit, you know. And so I completely dismissed him at that stage and I walked away and I barely gave it another thought till next morning.

Tyson: 9:52

I'm right up there in the snowy mountains and I'm there with, like, a senior lawman and I said I told him about what I've gone through with my gentleman the day before and he said well, I'm sorry, boy, but you, um, you've gone the wrong way there. And I'm like, yeah, but it's logical, he doesn't know where I was gonna be. And he said well, they tend to know where're going to be these old people you need to. Did you listen to the song? Did you do what he said? And I'm like, well, why should I? I'm like I'm not even there. What's a Yulma song? I'm going to have to do with me. And he said look, just do what you're told. And so I, you know, so I do what I'm told now, ever since this bloody thing anyway. So I did it.

Tyson: 10:29

I listened to the song and right at the start there's these lyrics um, this is written by people from northern to, anyway, from the edge of the mountain down through the valleys, down where the snowy river flows, follow the water down to the ocean. Bring back the memories. And that was like oh, so you know, it turns out that those Yolngu people had visited the snowy mountains and they've written that's. They've sat down with the old people there, got the story for that song line and they've written that song line into their song. And how did he? And then I'm like how did he know? I didn't tell him I was coming here. There's no way he could know I was coming to here, to this spot. God damn it. All right, it's true.

Tyson: 11:16

And so I'm like oh my God, what are the other instructions? So old man had told me that I needed to follow the song line all the way to the sea and then I had to remember all of the hundreds of symbols he'd shown me the day before and I had to draw them all on the sand up above the water mark and then, when I was done, a wave would come and take that knowledge out into the ocean and distribute that. That was the instruction and that's the lyrics of the song like follow the water down to the ocean, bring back the memory. And I'm like, oh, no, anyway, I went and I did it.

Tyson: 11:50

And you know, and I'm not going to do it like a big like, oh, it happened, it's just like yeah, of course the wave came up. No wave took it out like you know, of course, all that happened. And is this like a transcendent moment for me? No, it's just annoying. It means I'm definitely gonna have to get get shot by Americans one day when I've taken out that beacon, you know, and I don't want to get shot by Americans, I want to get shot by my own people. If I'm going to get shot, well speared preferably, which I'm it's not impossible no, that's right cheeky as I am.

Tyson: 12:36

If I don't start showing a little bit more respect for these old people who are sharing truth with me, if I don't start trusting in this dream time rapture that's apparently going to happen, if I don't start, I don't know man, I'm gonna start embracing this mobile phone and this zoom meeting like it's part of creation and I don't follow those instructions, then maybe I will end up getting speared. But I'm not even close yet, bros. You know it's. It's what I keep warning people. No stop, don't come to me for wisdom. I've got no answers.

Tyson: 13:11

You know I'm a cheeky boy with a bunch of questions and some interesting ways of looking at things, and none of them are my own. You know I'm a bower bird collecting a bunch of shiny shit and putting it around a nest for a dory. That's it, it's. Oh, you know, don't be putting me up there Like. I'm not a thinker, like people go. Oh, indigenous thinker, tosin. No, yes, oh, indigenous scholar.

Tyson: 13:34

Okay, technically I'm a scholar. Yes, you ask any scholar. Like you know what's Tyson's reputation? I'm not a reputable scholar. I don't do quality work. You know I do weird stuff that I'm just doing as a culture jam and you know so I'm not really. I'm a very low status person, you know, in in this, this society, this, this industrial society, and I'm a low status person in my own community and, um, so yeah, just just that, like caution for people, just have fun with this stuff, don't get, don't be like you know, thinking I've got any answers for you. I don't, I don't have any answers. I'm not even doing it myself. I haven't got my shit together.

AJ: 14:19

I'm a mess you've brought to mind. Well, firstly, I want to say all the same, you've made me happier than ever that I asked the question about the music. That's a hell of a story. It's gonna stay with me. And on the self-deprecation, you have brought to mind the line in your book that I have actually mentioned already a bunch of times to people around not being terribly special and that actually none of us are terribly special. Yeah, and that's liberating because we can be part of something special. That's it. It's a beautiful thing yeah, like.

Tyson: 15:01

so you know, like I, I say these things about myself and people like, oh hey, don't put yourself down, yeah, yeah, you know, don't have self-esteem. I'm like, it's not my self-esteem, I'm happy with myself. You know, I'm intensely aware of all my defects, but I'm quite accepting of those, you know, and I'm accepting of the fact that this is where I am and I refuse to let my thinking overtake my feeling and tell me I should be, I should be less skeptical.

AJ: 15:33

I come back to our touchstone as we end. Tyson, the story that you think about every day, the footage that you saw, yeah, I come back to that as a touchstone, yeah, and how that, how that felt to think about that, even having seen it.

Tyson: 15:53

Yeah Well, thanks, that's good advice.

AJ: 15:55

Yeah.

Tyson: 15:56

Yeah.

AJ: 16:01

Mate. I thank you too for your hybridized insights and lenses that you brought, mate. It's been of value to me and I know others. So good on you for seeing seeing it through to so far. Anyway, and good luck with the next one the mongrel insights bring it yeah, I'm actually really happy that on zoom we managed to connect pretty reasonably and, you know, with substance so thanks a lot and hopefully next time it is by fire somewhere that'd be awesome, and maybe even out of the city yeah, yeah, yeah.

Tyson: 16:32

Well, this was a practical, uh, exploration of that hypothesis that this is a new campfire, right? I felt like me, you know, geez man had a bit of laugh, had a bit of cry yeah went for a piss. It's all good, thank you.