On Australia’s first inventors - and living sustainably together

IP provocations is produced on the land of the Rurundry-Woi-Murung people of the Kulin nations and the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation. We pay our respects to their elders past and present. We acknowledge all people working to reclaim lost knowledge, language and culture. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island listeners are warned that the following program contains the discussion of deceased persons. Do all people and all Australians benefit from great ideas? That's the promise of Patent Law, but perhaps not always the practice. In this episode we talked to Euala Roy Gamela Roy woman Larissa Burrent, distinguished professor at the University of Technology Sydney, a ward winning author and filmmaker, broadcaster, lawyer, recipient of the Order of Australia and most relevant to today's chat, director of the new documentary series, The First Inventors. Our conversation traverses the extraordinary history of invention of Australia's First Nations peoples, reasons why those inventions haven't always been recognised and supported, but alternatives to Western colonial systems for protecting indigenous knowledge. We also explore some of the ways Australia's First Nations people manage to live sustainably and harmoniously on this land for over 65,000 years and what we can learn from that if we're to survive and thrive into the future. I'm Kimberley Weatherall and I'm Rebecca Giblin. This is IP Provocations, a podcast asking the challenging and sometimes controversial questions on issues around intellectual property and data. It's supported by IP Australia, which understands provocative conversations are important to ensuring our IP system is fit for purpose and reformed when necessary. But they don't get to control what we say, and so of course, the usual here expressed should not be taken as theirs. Larissa we always start by asking people for their origin story, like how they came to be where they are, doing the work that they do, looking at the kinds of questions that they do, and your achievements and a range of things that you've done is just so incredibly broad. I would love to hear the way you explain this, how did you come to be you? I don't often have to explain it because it's pretty hard. I don't know, I guess I would say that I was shaped early on by my father's culture as a lawyer, I was lucky that I grew up knowing that I was an Aboriginal woman and I had parents who made me proud of that, a very staunch mother with strong social justice principles as well. So that helped shape me. I always wanted to be somebody that made a difference with my life and I set out to do law because of that, but I think over time lent its limitations in relation to my people. So moved a little bit from doing just legal practice into things that would help me do more law reform, reform the system that I was getting frustrated working with in and then I guess I discovered within that frame, particularly within the First Nations policy area that evidence-based doesn't convince the idea logs, so I got very interested in the power of storytelling which led me into writing novels and making documentary films. I've always had a very strong love of my culture which has seen me balance a lot of creative aspects into my work, like being on the board of Bangara and now on the board of Sydney Dance Company to balance the legal with the creative. So yeah, I guess for me, I think overall it's been a story of learning how, as an advocate, I've sort of started off speaking for other people and then come to appreciate the great privilege of providing space for them to talk for themselves and the power of that is an instrument for legal reform, so here I am, making films still at the university, still working in the law. You are, that's really beautiful and that leads really nicely to precisely what we want to talk about, which is this documentary, this terrific documentary, the first inventors that, by the way, everyone available for streaming by SPS and 10Play in which every Australian should definitely watch and a lot of other people do, how did that documentary come about? Look, I grew up knowing that there were wonderful things about my culture and that the values were really strong, the respectful women, the respect for elders, the sense of kinship, the ways in which you could go into other communities and find relationships and have responsibilities for each other, the way our stories had laws and morals in them. It always felt shocking to me when I could see the racism of other Australians and they had so little knowledge of my culture and they saw it in such a primitive way. And I think as somebody who's worked in legal issues and on law reform, I have always seen the connection between those prejudice views of my culture and the way that we are treated as First Nations people, in relation to violations of our human rights and of course there was a concerted effort to write out that innovation and that knowledge. I guess for me when the opportunity came along to share something that would show the complexity and the innovation and the creativity within my First Nations cultures, I got really excited about that. And the other co-creative of the series Margie Brown had approached me about this idea and with her and a research partnership with a centre of excellence called Khabar which looks at, which has a group of really highly experienced archaeologists and thropologists, a range of different researchers working in it, gave us a good foundation for stories to look at. And really saw the opportunity there. Ironically we couldn't have foreseen that it would come out at a time when Australia is having a national debate about its identity because things just take their own time and we had delays with COVID and getting the permissions to get into different communities and the long process of editing stories to make sure communities were happy with them. But at the end of the day it was a real passion to share a part of my culture that I knew other First Nations people would embrace and want to see on the screen but would be highly educational for non First Nations people, it's always been a surprise to me that there isn't more curiosity from non-indigenous people about how we became the world's oldest living culture. People say that we are and we are but don't they wonder how that happened? What was it that meant that we could do that and this was an opportunity to start to answer that question? Yeah, I mean because it is such an incredible cognitive dissonance and I think about the education I received on this I put that into air quotes very sarcastically because there was this cognitive dissonance where on the one hand, you know the impression that I was given over sort of multiple years where we that to the extent that we did even mention Australia's First Nations peoples was this idea that they were savages who didn't have any technology, had very little knowledge just sort of occasionally stumbled over a kangaroo and suppose like ate that to like keep alive for 65,000 years or more in this country that can be inhospitable as if you don't know how to work with it as you know the first second and third fleets found as they were like approaching starvation and hold that in our heads at the same time as oh yeah, but by the way they also had this throwing stick that could go at great speeds for with great power for long distances do things like you know scare birds into nets so that they could be caught and harvested and by the way just fly back and land back in the per the throwers hand again the cognitive dissonance of holding those two things I didn't even sort of realize until quite a lot later probably only when I read Bruce Pasco's dark in you and then I was so furious at the extent to which we had been misled but like First Nations people had been misled for generations and told you know that these things didn't exist but fortunately there was enough enough remaining knowledge and culture and the strong oral history so that it wasn't lost entirely despite the very devoted efforts of white Australians to try and make that happen and look you know I think one of the the challenges for non-indigenous people is they they have a certain hierarchy in their head about what civilized and developed means and yet I think one of the real successes of First Nations people in the way they've lived on this country is they've left such a small footprint which is Of course, something that should be highly prized, given the issues that are facing the planet now, you know, with issues around climate change and sustainability. And that very light footprint meant that we weren't as visible and we didn't have the same signs that Europeans would have, but at the same time, you know, it doesn't fit the narrative of taking our land and colonising us if you recognise the real innovation and science that was in so many aspects, I mean, the fire burning technology, the aquaculture that was there, the knowledge of the medicines. And I actually think the other thing that was important for me to show in terms of the innovation is there is, I think, probably more of an understanding that there was, you know, maybe some things to be learned about how we lived with the land. But actually, you don't become the world's oldest living culture, surviving for tens of thousands of years, unless you know how to live with each other. So why isn't there more curiosity about our governance systems and about our kinship system, a system where we never needed any presence, a system where we didn't need any orphanages, where everybody had a place, where everybody was looked after, you know, for me, that was the other thing, like I consider kinship system a part of the innovation. So there are those things that aren't visible when you walk onto somebody's country, you don't see big monuments to people, you don't see lots of infrastructure like you would. But partly because the innovations are so sophisticated, unless you really know how to look for them, you don't see them. It's so right, isn't it? And it's actually something that I love the way it emerges from watching this documentary is, is that way that, you know, everything is connected in indigenous knowledge systems? And I mean, it really highlighted how different that is from the way that we're taught to think in, you know, sort of said, all right, peace systems and said, all right, education systems, which are so much more based around individuals and, you know, what's new. Was it, was it hard to pull that out to convey that in a documentary or did it just emerge? There were challenges. This was the first thing I'd made that was also for commercial television or the other films I'd done had been for either ABC, SBS or the streamers. And it was the first thing that was really in a commercial format as opposed to something that I would make as, as a filmmaker with my style. So one of the biggest challenges was taking a story that I could have made a feature documentary about in my usual style and trying to do that story in seven minutes and do it justice. Like that is the real challenge of the space. It was also a challenge to limit the number of stories that we had because, you know, we, I could have done twice as many and still just kept within the themes. I could keep going with the number of stories that we've got. So that, you know, that was a bit of a challenge as well. But, and, you know, I think there are elements of First Nation storytelling that we kept as really strong principles within the making of the show. So even though we had the commercial television constraints, I did really push back and the producers I worked with, worked with me to push back on some of those things to have the things that would feel like they would have integrity from a First Nation's filmmaking and storytelling perspective. So ensuring that we were capturing the land not just as pretty pictures, but as something that showed its personality and its connection to the story, always leading with First Nation's perspectives and points of view and privileging First Nation's knowledge over Western science. So there were ways in which that would sometimes challenge the format that commercial television would be used to. But I, so what I would hope is that while I was challenged with my storytelling by having to fit into some of the commercial parameters, I like to think the series also challenged the commercial network. content was really generous and sort of took the view that this was something that their audience is needed to see and it was something that was important for them to do. And to that extent, having an ITV as a partner gave them confidence that we would be delivering something that would be quality and entertaining and would hit the mark. So we were able to get a little bit of leeway there, I think. So those stories that the documentary brings out were wonderful, can I just say it? I know I can't ask you for favourites, you probably have lots, they're probably all favourites, I don't know, but maybe, you know, can you maybe just talk about one of these innovation stories that you pulled out and why it's so special. It's true, everyone has different resonance to me. The message stick story was close to my heart because it was a message stick that travelled over my country and I reconnected through people through my own kinship system by doing that story. But I think if I had to pick something that I thought was really perhaps one of the biggest well moments for me and I felt like I had quite a good handle over a lot of the material, is the Lizard Island story and the pottery and the work that's been done there between the traditional owners and the Kabar team, particularly Professor Ian McNeven and a distinguished Professor Sean Oam. And the finding of pottery on Lizard Island was, you know, the first I thought, oh, you know, that would make sense, that would have been a really active trade route. It does speak to knowledge that we have that's new to non-indigenous people about the extent to which there was trade through these parts of the world long before it was so called discovered by Captain Cook. But to find out that that pottery through its makeup was made on Lizard Island and the number of pieces that have been found shows that it was quite a big industry and that the thinness and curvature of the shards that have been found shows that the knowledge and sophistication of the artisans was really high does really challenge perceptions. And I just love what it tells us as a story. It says that Aboriginal people can adopt technologies when they're interested in them. But over time, they also abandoned technologies that they didn't find useful. How useful is pottery on Lizard Island? I searched around that beautiful place for a week and I can tell you, I would not have wanted to be carrying pottery with me as I was going over those, you know, all of the beautiful parts of that country. So you can say to me, I thought it actually showed a lovely evolution of society that might use a technology at one time, but then starts to think of other ways to do the same things that are much more innovative and much more consistent with their lifestyle and will abandon it. So I thought that that was a particularly interesting story. And then the other one was the Marajuga story, the underwater archaeology that showed where the sites were before the sea rise. And what was really extraordinary about that was, you could kind of anticipate that they would be there when the underwater archaeology team led by Jonathan Benjamin. And found the pieces that were, you know, obviously hugely exciting for them. But one of the things I loved about it was they took those pieces up from the bottom of the ocean, been there for thousands of years, handed those pieces over to the traditional owners who looked at them as though they'd seen them just yesterday and could tell exactly what they were and how they were made. And even actually through their own stories, knew where some of those sites underwater were. And you know, for me, that was just those moments where you see the excitement of the researcher, but then the kind of deep knowledge and the reconnection with a cultural artifact that the community has. This is their artifact now, that is something that is truly extraordinary to see. And to capture it on film, we just think, oh, that's just amazing. Yeah, and over and over again, you captured that continuity and the sophistication with which First Nations groups had maintained this knowledge over generation after generation. Like I know so little about my grandparents, much less my great-grandparents, not great record keepers in my family, right? Whoever those people were didn't keep any record, so I can't really hold it against them. But you know, like even knowing where those underwater sites were because the stories had been kept for such a long time, so that people knew where to look and you know, the handing down, it was just so incredibly impressive. And it's got so much to teach us as well about, you know, so much knowledge that has been generated in the course of human history has been lost and we have to kind of keep rediscovering it. And then later on, we realized that we had rediscovered it. And I think it says something really important about, you know, Western settler knowledge systems like patent law, the way that they are about rewarding new knowledge or discoveries that are new. But there's also something really important to be said for stewardship of older knowledges. It's not costless or effortless to do that. It takes so much time and effort to be learning these stories and to be passing them on sort of tirelessly and patiently generation after generation. And, you know, that's not at all rewarded in current systems. No, it's not, and it's, you know, I love that you picked up the point about the storytelling, because, you know, one of the things that we really wanted to explore within the series was the idea that the process of storytelling within First Nations communities is a science. That's why we do the experiment of the telephone game where you whisper something along a line and by the end of it, it's something completely different. The storytelling system within First Nations communities is done in such a way that the stories keep their integrity over time and partly because they are connected to the landmarks of the of the country. And because they contain so much information, there's a real layering of each story. Those stories were always sort of dismissed as, you know, like little parables. You often see them as children's stories with beautiful illustrations. That kind of mocks the fact that they are legal systems. They're a part of a legal system that knowledge is actually like a title deed. And within those stories, we use the sea rise story because it is extraordinary how often you have stories around First Nations communities that are near the ocean now and actually even further inland that have stories that are so old they talk about the sea rise and the end of the last ice age. So these are systems with a great deal of integrity. And I think that idea of law being something that is a series of stories is something that's really hard for the Western legal framework to get its head around because it's so used to privileging what's written down, what's in the statute, what's, you know, how do you interpret something that's upon high? Who is the judge of that? It's such a different way of approaching, approaching knowledge. And yet here is a system that keeps this integrity and has a very sophisticated range of rights within it. And it doesn't, yeah, you know, and I'm just listening to that and thinking and that doesn't fit at all with the way RIP system works either, right? Because we draw these lines, we put this line between, you know, this culture and there's copyright and there's music and there's stories and that's completely separate in our, you know, settler systems from patents and science and technology. I mean, no, no wonder there's just such a mismatch. It's so true. It's absolutely true and you capture it so well. We have a whole system that exists outside of Western knowledge, right, of the Western system. Within our own cultural knowledge as an understandings within these stories, within the technology. And it's, you know, it's not a free for all. There is respect about who are the knowledge holders of particular stories. You only get to know particular stories when you are entitled to know them. It's another actually another really big cultural difference. Western, Western knowledge is this idea that you've got a library. People learn something and then you all can benefit from that knowledge and sure some people might own bits of it, but you, you know, knowledge is, is democratic. Within, within First Nations knowledge systems, we don't have that attitude. It's, you know, there are some things that are men's business and women's business. You know there are some things that's for those traditional owners and if you're not part of that group, you don't get to know it. So the idea that there can be knowledge that you don't know is not in a front. It is actually part of a sophisticated system because there are other things that you need to know. There are other things that are your responsibility. There are other things that are, you know, where you need to be concentrating on your responsibilities and your obligations. So just to pick up your point and how important it is, it's not just that these ideas are so different. The knowledge systems are held differently. You know, there are ways in which the communally held knowledge, think of paintings that are done communally and stories that are held communally, where it would be very hard to identify who is the owner of that, who does, who owns that. And, and then you, you know, you, you have these ways in which it would be absolutely culturally inappropriate for anyone to own. Think of our cultural stories by Western copyright law. They're owned by the first person who wrote them down, who was almost always an anthropologist. So what we find in the, in this, in the interaction between these two systems is what we find in relation to intellectual property is what we find in relation to it in, in almost any other space we're looking at, in relation to native title, for example, where we have to look at how the Western system identifies ownership. And then we have to try and fit our notions of ownership into a Western law. And, and it's only where Western law has the ability to perhaps recognise something that that because they can see it as similar. And again, native titles are really good example of that. Mar, the Marbo case was a great case to run because the Torres Strait land system is like plots of land in the Western system. So it was easy to show who, who, who owned what. And it's, then it becomes something where the white system goes, oh, the dominant cultural system goes, oh, okay, I can see how you can fit that into my system so I can recognise that. But it's not a two way system. We, we are constantly having to, um, to push to find ways to, um, get a legal protection for the things that within our own culture would be protected and respected and the, and the preserve of the people who actually aren't them. One of the things that was so clear in watching this is that there are real costs to white Australia in failing to have, um, the imagination or the capacity or whatever it is to understand the benefits of First Nations technologies and understanding. I think about that, like as I'm one of many Australians who've been deeply impacted by ferocious bushfires, um, and I was so struck when I was, I was hiking the jetball trail in the Northern Territory on Jawa and land, um, a few years ago, um, and, and having the privilege of crossing those, uh, songlines. And, uh, at the time, there was a lot of, uh, this and under the management of the traditional owners and they were doing traditional burning as we went through. And this was really new to me, these really low temperature burns that were just slowly and consistently with plenty of notice to the surrounding wildlife, um, crossing the land and looking after it. And that was explored so beautifully and explained so beautifully in the documentary as well. Um, and then, um, combining those, what, one of the things that I thought was really powerful was the combination of, um, demonstrating the, and contextualizing those First Nations innovations, but then combining it with Western science, um, because maybe that's the kind of thing that, that white Australians are more likely to listen to. And then showing over and over again the benefits of those technologies. And I think, do I remember right that, um, that that kind of land management, um, not only, um, saves all of that devastation, but reduces the amount of carbon by an estimated half. Yes, it's extraordinary what it does. Um, and, and so that community had used its carbon, uh, the, the, the, um, the income from the carbon credits that was selling to build infrastructure on its outstation. And it was really interesting because we had a crew of Indigenous and non-Indigenous people. And then our non-Indigenous crew were blown away by the 50%. They're like, wow, that's amazing. We were like, yeah, yeah, that's pretty good. But wow, look at the infrastructure. Like, he has had two totally different reactions to what was amazing about that story. Um, but, you know, and I guess one of the challenges in telling these stories is, is, is as you say, um, we had to be really careful to, to, to, in the way that we showed, um, the, the proof of, um, the first nations knowledges when it used Western science to prove the, the benefits to not be saying, this is really great because it's like Western science. Like, we were really mindful of, of, of that. But I, you know, um, the, the point she made was one that we held really close to our hearts was that these are really deep knowledges that help you live on this country and the fire burning is such a really great example of that. Um, and, and actually it's so much even more sophisticated than we were able to show on just in the brief amount that we have in the documentary, because it's not just about the caring for country and what it does with how it regenerates. There's a whole process that brings the community together. This is where the community, the elders are teaching the younger generation how to physically care for that country and this is a space where younger people start to learn responsibility for their community and the pride you get in doing something communally, like there are a whole range of things that go to the social fabric of the community that are a part of the communal process of engaging in those activities as well. These are really holistic knowledge systems and everything is so connected. So I feel like in some ways we captured just a small amount of it, but I guess the other thing which maybe relates very much to some of the things that we're talking about today. The other danger is we reveal these things within our system and because of the way Western knowledge, Western law protects knowledge or values it, there are high risks of revealing some of this information with the risk of it being exploited in other places. So one of the two stories we did with Arnie Fran Bodkin, we were really mindful when we were doing the stories with her that she has this enormous amount of information that is highly, highly prized and could be very easily exploited. She's taken the view that she wants to share that and make it public and but still there are very complex things to navigate in terms of how that knowledge can be simply taken from her and commercialised with no recourse back to her for the generosity of sharing what she knows because she doesn't want it to be lost. It was interesting actually, I was thinking about that as I was watching all of these stories unfold. Firstly, we haven't so much to learn, but you do show all of these examples of First Nations people working with researchers of various kinds, maybe from the centre of excellence, and I'm presuming that those examples that you're using are all cases of collaboration and learning and sharing done well. Is there something that we can learn from that or that you've learned from that about how it is done well? Yeah, look, I think it was part of what Tom was one of, I often feel like I'm behind the eight ball coming into filmmaking as a second career and all of my peers at film school about half my age, but I do think the upside is it's given me some other insights that help with the work that I do. And I think one of those that was really helpful in relation to approaching this was because of my work in academia. I knew I've got networks of other researchers whose research I've followed, who I know have looked to develop best practice within the academy, and the group of researchers in the centre of excellence in Khabar that is led by Sean Alm were a really good example of that. I'd known Lynette Russell who's one of our leading First Nations researchers for a very long time, Ian McNiven is part of that. So they were a group of researchers who I knew had not only had decades of working with the communities that they researched with, but had been at the forefront of thinking about how Indigenous cultural intellectual property ICIP gets protected in the research process. And it's something that I've been involved with as well. I was very proud that within my work at UTS we did the first clause that that protected ICIP in a ARC grant and that became standard with other universities after that. We've had ICIP protections in people's PhDs. We've actually used it in employment contracts within the university now. So there's a range of ways in which this had been an issue that was on my radar and I wanted to work with stories where we could show people who had respected those knowledge systems. So I knew with that group we'd kind of been looking at these issues together over time, but you're really right that that was actually a deliberate choice to try and show what the best practice is for non-Indigenous people. Particularly researchers and scientists to work with First Nations knowledge that everything is Indigenous led and you'll see you know there's some great examples where where people say and McNeven says this of the Gondachmara they asked me in to do this work. So their whole work schedule, their whole research agenda is driven by what the community needs them to do. Community asked me in because they wanted to make this a World Heritage site and they needed me to date this. They said the places to look for were here and here the community actually was their knowledge that told Ian where he should dig down in those vast systems that have been completely overrun with you know with forest. They still knew where the places were for him to dig down. So that intersection. And the outcome is something that enriches the community but at the same time gives so much reward to everyone who works with them you get the sense that this is work that's really valuable. The academy is only now starting to ask itself how do we how do we measure impact in our research for people working in First Nations collaborations in this Indigenous led way? We've been getting impact from the start because we asked the right questions going in so they were some of the really important things that we wanted to highlight in relation to what we were showing on the screen in the way that First Nations people and their allies can work together in a really meaningful way. Yeah it shone through so clearly and a shout out as well if people are really excited by this and they wanted to do outside the academy you know more First Nations collaborations the protocols that Terry Janky and her team came up with for the Australia Council are a really good resource. Please do not try and just jump into something without educating yourself around things like that. Can I follow that up because one of the things oh yeah absolutely but one of the things that the Albanese government committed to when it's revived cultural policy was actually writing a new law right which they say we'll need to be co-designed with First Nations people to protect and promote Indigenous knowledge and culture and I'm just I'm wondering if you have thoughts about the principles that needs to be based on what it should look like what the process even should look like. Look I think this is a wonderful initiative and I'm glad you've picked it up obviously it's been on your radar because of the area you've worked in but I you know I think there's some very good things around the national cultural policy that are quite significant. I chair the Indigenous panel within the Australia Council which probably by the time people are listening to this will be called Creative Australia and part of the role of my committee is to kind of reinvent ourselves by the middle of next year to be an entity within Creative Australia that will have a lot more say on Indigenous policy and Indigenous arts and culture so there is a large commitment around Indigenous culture in this national cultural policy but this aspect of looking at stronger protections for Indigenous cultural property and intellectual properties is really important it absolutely has to be Indigenous led I know it's a co-design process but I think in those processes you have to structure them so that they are really taking the opportunity to look at what the Indigenous space looks like and then craft from that rather than trying to continue to put Indigenous interests and and and how we would understand our rights and ownership for once of better words there's such English words but those concepts into these into these frameworks and we've got some extraordinary expertise in this area and I think over time it's not just been obviously Terry Janky has done the most amazing groundwork in this and what I think has been really exciting is that the work that she's done around cultural heritage and cultural protection and art we now see really being embraced within the academy we see it being used in a whole range of other ways that are really sort of starting to stretch the way that people and expand the imagination around how you how you protect them and what's important about that I think as an aside is that when we when it's protected by the dominant legal system then it's actually valued more like we can protect it more but it gets valued more and that's really important as well. So I think this is going to be a very exciting opportunity and I think there are already lots of examples that we could point to where we would say this is such a unique interest and it needs to be protected in a way that only Indigenous people can benefit from the use of this knowledge. It can't be commercialised and it can't be exploited from outside of those knowledge holders and that's a complex thing but you know we've had to find sophisticated solutions to other things and I'm sure within this space we'll find some really interesting options. What I love about the documentary is that it pushes us to see this beyond the sort of the cultural of the art because that has dominated so much of sort of you know at least settler IP systems thinking about IP but you know that all of those connections that you talk about it's the science the technology you know even using those words feels a bit wrong but these knowledge knowledge knowledge systems you know it's it's not just about culture as such it's this whole knowledge system. Can I jump in we've been talking a lot about these these First Nations technologies that are outside the patent system but I would love to talk a little bit about like Australia's Leonardo probably the most one of our most one of our patent holders in Australia that should be the best known but is not in fact the best known which of course is David Unipon. His invention of the the new mechanical sheepsharing technology you know generated a huge amount of wealth for white Australians and changed the economy and he had a bunch of ideas for other technologies as well. One of the real highlights of the documentary for me was that testing of his idea that idea that he had was it back in 1914 something like that about using Boomerang technology to achieve flight without requiring a runway could you tell us a little bit about that one Larissa please. Yeah so this was what as you said there were he was an amazing innovator thinking about what he understood were the dynamics within First Nations knowledges and particularly thinking about the say something like what he understood about the aerodynamics of the Boomerang to use those innovations to think about how they could be used in other ways. He was extraordinarily inventive in how he thought and he did a whole range of other things as well including you know it's credited for writing the first the first book published from a First Nations person. There's quite an extraordinary person and and for those who hearing this name for the first time look on your $50 note and and there he is. So had got some some recognition much later in more recent times for for being such an innovator but at the time of course was not taken seriously not given the opportunities and his ideas were were taken and and his knowledge was exploited. One of the things we were keen to do in the series was to do something about about you know his and I guess the point of wanting to really look at whether we could make one of his inventions work was almost to say to a non-indigenous audience look what you missed out on because you don't take First Nations people seriously because you don't appreciate what wisdom they're you know if you hear people say oh so the boomerang is just a returning stick big deal right that sort of mentality is why you miss what is the deep knowledge within these systems and David Unipen was such a good example of that so of course well known for the invention that transformed Australia's sheep industry. That was you say not really credited for it in a way that was meaningful in in terms of the of benefiting from it in in another way but we had the opportunity to to try and see if we could get his drawings that were his musings about how the aerodynamics of the boomerang would work if they were used to try and create a vehicle that would fly and we had somebody from the community that David Unipen was from makes and boomerangs which were used by a team at UNSW to try and see if it would work and well have a look at the documentary to see if it was successful or not but it just goes to show me this was kind of a fun experiment but at its heart it showed how much of that deep knowledge of the understanding of the technology that sits within Aboriginal weaponry and tools could be used in other ways if and and the creativity and innovation of our First Nations thinkers. Yeah and this was such a powerful story as well about the importance of not just having patents but also having the avenues to actually get investment in that and people didn't invest in David Unipen they weren't convinced despite you know all of the evidence and you imagine if a white man had been producing this kind of innovation with this kind of demonstrable benefit how different that would have been and again like I just think it's such an important important story to be told and and you know we can't be asking patents to do too much right there they've got a certain role to play but we need to make sure that we've also got the mechanisms in place to ensure that you know all inventors including First Nations inventors have got the economic opportunities for investment to actually develop their ideas and bring them like commercialize them and bring them to to markets in order to benefit from them. Laura so this has been just a terrific conversation I love these stories and I love getting a little bit below you know even what we saw in the documentary has just been fantastic. I was wondering if you could maybe you know to come back to some part of the documentary like what's the what what is the core message maybe that you want people to take away from this whole thing. I'm always mindful I've got two audiences really and I guess for my First Nations audience I wanted them to kind of feel as proud as I do and I know many of them do but we look I grew up in a time where I didn't see myself on the screen and I didn't see my culture on the screen and and it's an even more exciting time because there's so much of our culture being regenerated. I'm you are or I our language is being regenerated partly from the work of my my father in doing oral histories and collecting material you know there's a range of ways in which we see cultural regeneration that we celebrate this coming the kind of rebuilding of our cultural practices so for me I wanted it to be a real celebration of the the beauty and the power of our culture for my First Nations audience and I guess for a non-indigenous audience I wanted to them to see that too I wanted them to be able to look at my culture the way that we see it and to see the beauty and to be surprised by it but I guess I also hoped that you know and I tried to focus on this in the last episode that we we are now as as a planet as a country facing some really difficult issues going forward and climate change is one of them but the fragility of democracy and this is the fabric of society that we are used to and some of the things that we've taken for granted feel very fragile and you know as I said earlier for me the wisdom within Indigenous cultures isn't just about our relationship with country it's what it tells us about how we live with each other and you know I I hope that what the series shows is that by looking at the wisdoms within First Nations culture there are a whole range of other tools and ideas innovations and creativity that can help us think about some of these large challenges that face us in the future and particularly around how vulnerable we feel as a society and the the reactions some people have to that to be smaller and more selfish First Nations people didn't survive for 65,000 plus years by being selfish we had to be sharing and inclusive because otherwise he didn't survive so I feel like that there are things in that and I guess for me my final takeaway in something that I reflect on a lot is it is extraordinary that we that we are from and that other Australians live on the country that has the world's oldest living culture but when you look at how it has survived. To me, it's not the fact it survived all of that time. It's the fact that it survived the last 200 plus years and yet we still see it regenerating, that we still see it surviving, that with the most virulent parts of colonisation, the most aggressive, we are still here, speaking our languages, understanding our cultural knowledge, being able to still hold the things that we know that our elders still so generously share, that to me is the real celebration and if we can survive that, we can survive anything and surely that's got to be something that says that we have what it takes to meet the challenges that we are about to face. And Seller Australia has not been listening, it hasn't listened for hundreds of years, but we're about to run out of time to have an opportunity to start listening and if we start listening to anything, I'm always banging on about the fact that the reason why so many of us feel empty inside is because that is a feature of neoliberal capitalism, not a bug. The system wants us to feel empty inside so that we feel it with ever more production and ever more consumption and that is a really fast road to the end. If we want to live differently, we do have to learn how to have this connection and community to fill that up instead for a more satisfying life and thank you so, so much for portraying that so clearly in a way that has just resonated really strongly with us and a lot of other people. Oh, thank you. Larissa, it's a privilege. It's been a privilege to learn from you today, thank you. That's it for this episode of IP Provocations. We'd love to hear from you. If you listen on Spotify, you can use the Q&A function to let us know what you thought or you can leave us a comment on Apple podcasts. IP Provocations is made with the support of IP Australia. We're grateful to have had the opportunity to ask such broad-ranging questions about the patent system to such interesting people and get so many surprising answers. The IP Provocations team had full academic freedom in designing these conversations and the views expressed are those of the individual speakers. This podcast was a project of I Priya, the intellectual property research institute of Australia, and had additional support from Melbourne Law School and Sydney Law School. The music was composed and recorded by Nina Buchanan. The host, a professor's Rebecca Giblin and Kimberley Weverell and research support was provided by Barrister Amy Circus. The producer is Greta Robbins' tone. I'm Anders Firths and I filled in all the remaining gaps. This podcast was produced on stolen land. Sovereignty was never seeded. Always was, always will be, Aboriginal land.