This podcast has been forming for over two years. It was a mountain of a project. It has also been one of the most rewarding collaborations I’ve worked on.

This is the summary:

Throughout Australia’s colonial history, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples have struggled for recognition of their land rights and human rights. Self-determination for Australia’s First Nations people has been at the mercy of government policy, industry and the politics of the time. In the Kimberley region, in far north Western Australia, these influences have played no small part in determining the welfare of Aboriginal people and how their communities interact with mainstream Australia today.

The series is an outcome of research by Patrick Sullivan, a Professor at the Nulungu Research Institute, who lived and worked across the Kimberley for over 40 years in Aboriginal Community Development. It covers a lot of ground; it’s a political and social history of this region that considers the influence of international and national social movements since WWII, it digs deep into the motives and people behind political strategies, protests, mass population displacement, racism and resistance.

It’s significant research that may not have moved far beyond academic circles in its written form. However, Kate Golson, a Researcher at Nulungu, initiated the process of adapting it for a creative medium so it could reach more people.

This podcast brings the energy and context of something bigger than words on a page—it’s presented as a series of conversations with Steve Kinnane, a Miriwoong man, and a writer and researcher. He opens the story up with his deep knowledge of the era and his connection to the people and the Country. His authentic curiosity and passion teased out all the questions I wanted to ask and motivated much of my own research.

As well as the big policy picture, the series highlights Patrick’s personal experience of working for Aboriginal Community Organisations in the Kimberley. I thought this experience was an important part of the story because it not only gives his words and research context but takes us to that Country and those times—we hear stories about what it was like working in the wild west for the Kimberley Land Council, losing cars in rivers and how the political machinations of successive governments played out for people on the ground.

We recorded over five hours of conversations in the middle of COVID from across the world. I sat in my home office in Cairns and plugged everyone into a remote recording and mixing desk on my laptop; from Paris, Freemantle, Goulburn, Canberra and Broome. We needed good internet to get the best quality audio. Sometimes we had it, sometimes we didn’t. We were interrupted by illness and life events. In one episode you can still hear the church bells ringing in the town of Thonon-les-Bains. Then followed months of writing, cutting, mixing and fixing to bring all these conversations back to a chronological and coherent 5 episodes, and make it sound like everyone was in the same room.

It’s a package now and lives on Spotify so it can travel to people who may otherwise have never heard about the ongoing fight for land rights and human rights in the Kimberley. And that’s important because it’s not just a story about things that happened in the Kimberley. It’s about the enduring adverse effects that government policy and industry have on the welfare of First Nations people across this country, and how we can fix that, if we choose to.

Always a timely story.