Table of Contents
Tyson Yunkaporta spends this conversation with Aubrey Marcus on Aboriginal law as a way of living with country, not as a lost origin story. Stories, ceremony, and ordinary talk keep the old law available even when daily life cannot match it. He is wary of the bridge label. He would rather pull the bridge away and make someone swim than stand between sealed camps. Empires, in his account, need towers, ranked work, an outside group for the worst jobs, and tight control of women. Land is a web of signals. A burn timed to insects can also be the smoke a seed needs. Calling out before you enter is a knock. He refuses the purge of newcomers such as cane toads and pasture grass, looking for a new fit instead of a nativist cleanup. A made throwing stick ruins the slogan that old and natural are good. The law, he says, is still here, and no special kind of person is required to come under it.
Key points
- Story, ceremony, and ordinary speech are how he says the old law is kept when daily life cannot match it fully.
- He resists being only a bridge between groups and prefers a trickster who makes the listener swim.
- Empire, as he describes it, builds towers and ranks, invents an outside group, and tightens control over women.
- Country is a web of signals among humans, animals, plants, and stone, and one fire can serve more than one need.
- He rejects wiping out newcomers such as cane toads in the name of a pure native landscape.
- A manufactured throwing stick is his example that natural and old are slippery words.
- The law, he says, is still held by people who did not forget themselves, and it can be met where you are.
Short quotes
Empire they're always building Towers they're always building pyramids they're always trying to create this hierarchy
Tyson Yunkaporta, Tyson Yunkaporta on Aboriginal law and country
He reads pyramids and towers as the building habit empires use to rank people. Watch at 30:02
systems stagnate you can't have a system that is just exactly the same forever
Tyson Yunkaporta, Tyson Yunkaporta on Aboriginal law and country
A living pattern, he says, has to break or it is already on the way to dying. Watch at 1:20:37
with all creation what exactly is unnatural so the boomerangs they gave you today are like are they unnatural
Tyson Yunkaporta, Tyson Yunkaporta on Aboriginal law and country
The throwing woods just handed to his host are enough, for him, to unsettle what counts as natural. Watch at 1:38:57
first values and principles that exist and there's many different facets and ways to approach it but that it's real
Tyson Yunkaporta, Tyson Yunkaporta on Aboriginal law and country
He closes on principles that are real and open to approach, without a chosen insider. Watch at 2:15:02
Video by Aubrey Marcus. Watch on YouTube.