Note: Text has been lightly edited for clarity and does not match video exactly.
Emma Rusher: I'm Emma Rusher and this is Audible Editors Select. Today we are recording on the lands of the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation. I would like to pay respect to elders past, present, and emerging, and acknowledge Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people listening today. You're about to hear from Victor Steffensen, author of The Knowledge: Learning from Indigenous Wisdom to Save Our Global Changing Environment.
In this powerful follow-up to Fire Country, Victor shares how traditional knowledge and practices from his work in Canada to Australia are making big impacts on our planet, wildlife, people, and economies. Thank you so much, Victor, for coming in to Audible today. We are so excited that you’re here.
Victor Steffensen: Thank you.
I wanted to ask about your first book, called Fire Country. It helped a lot of Australians really deeply understand and rethink fire, land, cultural burning. How does The Knowledge build on that first book?
Writing Fire Country was really important for me because that was like showing where the knowledge came from and acknowledging my mentors and also the adventures that we had along the way. At that time, it was all about awareness, and it was about getting people aware of what Aboriginal fire practices were, and not just the fire practices but how that extended further in its benefits, socially and environmentally. Writing The Knowledge was something to carry on, but it really is a different chapter as well. One part of it is to write about fire on parts I didn't get to write in Fire Country and finish in time, because the publishers are rushing at that stage to try and get things out there. But the other part of it is also to show the journey that's extended from there, since I'm travelling on my own now and my mentors have passed, and that next chapter of working in different communities and working overseas. I wanted to really pull together also what traditional knowledge can do as well in so many other aspects other than just fire.
What's your favourite topic aside from fire that lured you in?
Oh, that's so hard to talk about, my favourite topic, because everything's connected and everything's so beautiful. But I really love food. I really love talking about that. I really love talking about the animals, but I guess also people, too, and the state our world is in. Although some things are dire and some things are an emergency, but it really is nice to bring a light to that in terms of hope. Having that hope is something that I think our next generations need, especially the young ones, and also everyone, just to have that enlightenment in the sense of, “Hey, there's something that we all can do, and there's a way that we can find ourselves.”
Writing this book is really about trying to show people that we need to look at ourselves first if we're going to heal the planet. And we need to connect with each other. We need to understand who we are and restore our identity in so many ways and shapes and forms so that we're healing ourselves as a society. That's really an important ingredient in going forward into the future.
How did you find recording the audiobook?
I'm a musician, I love singing and all that sort of stuff, and creativity. So, doing the audiobook, it's all storytelling, and it's just like sitting around a fire and talking to different people and telling yarns and things like that. But it's also putting that beautiful storytelling in place where you're given the character's voice as well. When you're audiobooking your own story—I really wanted to do that because I really wanted to tell my own story. I don't think anyone could really express those experiences that I've had over the many years, working with so many beautiful people in so many beautiful places.
You've spoken previously about growing up feeling like there was a gap, a hole inside. That the cultural learnings, there was a gap. You then had a lot of personal agency, Victor, and you did something quite extraordinary to fix that. Can you tell us about that journey you took to country and how it changed you?
Well, growing up, because my mother, she’s Tagalaka, or you know, Dagalag, the proper way to say it, and that's from the far North Queensland and Golf Country, and for her family and many other families, for Tagalaka, they were all taken off country because there was a gold mine there in the early 1900s. And that really devastated the Tagalaka people. Now, we have no language. People were sent away. My grandfathers were sent to different places in islands and settlements and doing work in stations and getting paid very little and all that sort of stuff. Everyone knows those stories.
That was a disadvantage, because when I was young, I always asked Mum to tell this stuff about our Aboriginal side of our family. Because I'm proud of all my sides, of who I am and as a mixed-race person, but living in Australia, I really wanted to learn about Aboriginal culture because I was a part of it. Mum couldn't say anything. And when I looked up Tagalaka on the internet, or if I looked in the encyclopedia for Indigenous clan groups of Australia, there's only a paragraph or two about our people, and that's really sad. For me, as a young person about 13 and not growing up on Tagalaka country but instead growing up on Djabugay country in Kuranda with all my hometown friends and families there, I had to search. I would talk to any elders I could find, and I had really good friends that we would learn together and we would go down the river and be connected to the land, eat fish off the culls and all sorts of things.
Finally, when I left school, I ran into two beautiful elders, Kuku-Thaypan elders, in Laura in North Queensland and Cape York. They were the Awu-Laya people and they were the last two speakers of their language. They're sort of a language group neighbouring within the regions. I wanted to learn from them. And when I met them old people, they said, “Oh, yeah, I've been to your country when I was 21,” which would have been around 1940s. And they said, “Yeah, we met an old man who was from there who was Tagalaka, and he could talk Awu-Laya.” And I went, “Wow, really?” So, that was like related language groups and how people connected across the whole regions.
So, I stuck with them old fellows, and they put me under their wing, and they didn't let me go either, because we really created a really beautiful relationship with each other. We became family and started the task of restoring knowledge and restoring culture. That's what they wanted to do. And that's what I wanted to do as well. But that was in their agenda, to get out on country and to get things going again. That's how they put it.
From there, I started to work with many ranger groups and really dear friends from Aurukun and other communities around the Cape and also in other regions of Australia. Because my first job was working as a community ranger, Aboriginal ranger, within Ang-Gnarra in Laura, and from there I was able to connect with so many people and do the work and restore rock art in the region. It was just such a beautiful time, and it was a time that I'll never get back. As always, things change. But it was such a beautiful time of my life. And here we are today.
Here we are today. And now you're reaching audiences all over the world through your books and your audiobooks.
I had no idea that would happen. Because to be an author, to do writing, that was something that I didn't think I'd ever do in my life, because I failed school. I just didn't like school, and then next minute, I'm writing a book, and I'm working with schools and things like that. But really it was something that really pushed me into it was the fact that the old people would teach me all this stuff, and I would record all the stuff with cameras and video cameras, and we would teach it to the kids down at the local school. But then I started to look around as a young man and started to see that the world wasn't picking the stuff up. I started to see the problems in the landscape. I started to see the problems socially.
What sort of problems were you seeing?
I saw all sorts of problems in country, weeds taking over native plants, and animals declining, rivers dirty. What used to be sandy riverbanks is now all mud and silt. Really sad cases for our country, and that's the case across Australia and even across the globe. In many countries, we see a huge decline in landscapes, and in Australia we're sort of up there with the top five in landscapes that are declining. It really is alarming.
You're right about “we are nature.” And for people listening today in cities, busy lives, headphones on, juggling, how do we bring that into our everyday life?
No matter where you are, live in the city or whether you live out in the country, you can always connect and always start learning, to realise what's actually real in a sense of our connection to this planet and who we are as human beings. If you're in a city, it's as easy as going out and visiting a tree in a nice park or heading out of town for a little bit and going to see some reserves or go and visit the local community not far from here somewhere. It's also about reading literature like we've written and just being aware and trying to nourish yourself. It boils right down then to your own personal practices on a city level, too. What you eat, not wasteful, and all these things that all contribute to looking after the country. And also that cultural memory that us as humans should have steadfast. That's why I find it interesting, because they even have rock art sites in Italy.
It's startling to hear about rock art similarities around the world that you've seen.
Last rock art that I saw was in Canada, just a month or so, two months ago, and that rock art site there, it's no different to ours. Same place in terms of the caves and also the pigment being the ochre and also the animals and the people, figures. The same thing in Finland when I saw the rock art in Finland. The only difference is they got a moose and we got a kangaroo. It's so, so amazing because I've worked with rock art for a long time in my earlier years. So, like for 15 years, looking after rock art and doing tours and getting graffiti off and taking care of them, and to see that overseas and to really see that is a part of that puzzle, too.
When you go overseas for the first time to visit a country to do this work, it really is about reviving knowledge from landscapes. That is such a different thing for people to hear, is reviving knowledge from landscapes. And there's a whole method around that, and the rock art is a part of it. For me to learn about all the trees that they have and all their plants and their cultural affiliations to their country is all part of the ingredients, their language and their stories. And then once I can understand and get a grasp of that, then there's an ability to share principles and share knowledge and then, most importantly, be practical. Light a fire and see if it should go out over there. And if it does, well, look, the land's telling us it's the right thing. And if the animals come back and the grasses come back, then the country is then responding. That response is the final evidence, where the land says, “Yes, you're right.” And that links to better improving our livelihoods, improving culture, our health.
When you look at the Western way of fire, no one's allowed on a fireground. It's just the people who are doing the fire and dressed up in all their PPE and stuff, which is fine. But at the end of the day, when we're doing burns and stuff, the community is there and the mums with their bubs and kids playing and the hands in the ash and rubbing it on their face and lighting the fire, too. Teaching them how to do that and in a way that is safe, but in a way where they can understand it, understand that obviously not for them to go lighting fires everywhere, but for them to know what it does and why it's important and how it connects to our future.
For listeners who may not be aware about the Australian landscape and the importance of fire, can you share a little bit about why it's so important?
It's not just all about fire, and that's why this book is important for me, because it wants to show further out where this connects and how that can really bring so many benefits to us. The land management is so important. To put it in a holistic way, it's our land management and it's humans’ occupation, which is what land management is all about, what's caused all these problems. The climate change and all those things are all part of it, too. That's all been accelerated from our footprint. But also our land management, and we create those wildfires, as a society, because we're not out there managing the land.
When you look at Indigenous peoples globally, they walk through the entire landscape. They walked around the land and they used the land and they used the resources. The land was tailored and gardened and hunted and all sorts of things. It's preparing. That's what Indigenous culture was always about, proactiveness, which is practical doing in order to get the benefits and to prepare things and make it good for next time, and it's why I'm trying to drum up the support to do that. Region by region, going around helping to try and get these jobs going and these case studies moving so that we can grow the seed to get proactiveness happening in this world. Because if we can do that, that's what's going to make us far more intelligent as humans. It's also going to connect us more closer to nature.
Sustain us.
Yeah, it's going to sustain us. It's going to help us improve our livelihoods, our industries. It's going to help with new innovation.
You've done a lot of work right across Australia, but you've also worked in Canada and Scandinavia and soon Italy. Could you share your experience in Canada? Because I understand you've been there working with the same community for about eight years. What problems were you solving when you were first invited onto that country? And what have you seen happen over those eight years?
Well, it's an adventure. There’s been a lot of years, and the reason why staying in one place is so important, because it's not just going community to community. You need to stay in a place. Thanks to some really wonderful people over there, with Gathering Voices Society within the university in BC, and also with the Tsilhqot’in communities there, the Yunesit’in and Xeni. To work with those communities was beautiful. But I mainly worked with Yunesit’in for most of the time and restoring that fire knowledge again.
When I first arrived, it was like being in a time machine. It was like 15 years going backwards from Australia in a way, of where we were in the sense of working with communities in restoring cultural fire. In this type of work, it was just getting happening. People probably weren't that aware of it at that time. But for me, going to Yunesit’in, it was like they were facing the same problems that we had already dealt with in Australia prior, with communicating with the farmer next door and the governments and where they were at and supporting the community and all these things. So, the landscape had suffered a wildfire in 2017 that was devastating. It really was devastating fire. Their whole surroundings around their community, just almost wiped out because the forests were gone, the trees everywhere, dead standing. So, working on that landscape was important because it was so damaged that it was really vulnerable.
Working with the community, it was like, “Okay, starting from scratch, teach me all you know. And then let's start sharing knowledge and let's start doing the practice and you'll start getting the land to respond.” From there, one step after the other, things grew and things grew. When I first started, there was like three or four people involved. Now there's over 30 practitioners that are involved. They couldn't see animals in the community. They had to go four hours to hunt a deer for their community. And now there's deer running out their bedroom windows, running past. So many animals have come back, and they even have the elk has come back, and that hasn't been seen for 50 years in that area. The badgers, which is an endangered animal in Canada, and so much more. All these animals.
So rewarding.
So rewarding, but also the people, too. See them laughing and walking through the land and happy, and that's something that they notice in themselves, and I hear it from them, and that's such a beautiful thing. But I really hope it brings opportunities for all that country and other countries and to see that, “Hey, this is really important here.” We can't have Western authorities telling us how to do things and suppressing everything, because we'll never get to understand or never get to uncover all that fine detail. And that fine detail is all the information of the soils, the grasses, the animals, and more importantly, all the different multiple benefits that come from it.
Do you have a case study in Australia that you're really proud of you could walk us through?
Oh yeah, I have so many in Australia and there's so much all over the country here, mainly in Queensland, New South Wales. There's also practitioners in Victoria that I work with and also Tasmania, the crews down there doing the work. I just came from South Australia as well and work in some of the communities in Eyre Peninsula and we see big changes within what they're doing on land. They get to see the indicators of success. They get to see grass improved. They get to see exactly what I was talking about with Canada. We really try to help communities to do case studies that are real in a sense of what the land needs, but also in a way that benefits the broader community, too, so they can see themselves in this and see why this is important for everyone.
Well, I think The Knowledge is going to be a huge contributor to that conversation that we need to have and connecting people and helping people understand why it's so important and give us some hope for the future. Thank you so much for sharing your knowledge today, Victor. We've loved having you in.
Thanks, Emma. Much appreciate it.
We hope you enjoyed hearing from Victor. The Knowledge is out now on Audible. I'm Emma Rusher. Stay tuned for our next Audible Editors select.
