Elder Noel Nannup loves Wireless Hill. On any given day you can find him there, strolling, looking after the place, in the same way Noongar people have for 80,000 years. A softly spoken, gentle man, Noel has spent his life piecing together his culture and sharing that culture through talks, and fireside chats. A welcome to country is an initiation ceremony for people who have come from overseas, who were not born in Australia. For those of us who were born here, Noel tells me, as we walked through Wireless Hill, we have a spirit child, a responsibility to look after the land. 

“My people have known this land, this place, for 80,000 years,” Noel says. “In the old way you knew exactly why you were here, you knew exactly why you were born; you carried on a role that someone else lived before you. you also carried on the knowledge and totems, and when you start to learn that and understand that, and it sits in your psyche, you’re well and truly on your way to knowing why you’re here.”

We walk. We walk and stop, and Noel points. 

“You see that tree there? It’s a jarrah. Our placenta is buried under jarrah trees, so our DNA is in that tree; the same DNA that’s in me is in that tree, via the placenta; when you tell the same story from the side of science; that’s when people start to understand. We never knew that was science, we knew that the same thing that nurtured us, nurtured us in the womb, when you learn these thing early in life, these teachings become innate.”

We are facing one another, and he looks me in the eyes. Noel is a natural story teller, and he quickly gathers a sense of where you’re at, what he thinks you can understand. 

“The word ‘jarrah’ means to spread out, the canopy is spread out, but also the root system under the ground is spread out; any word that has that sound jar-rah, means spreading out; the Canning River comes out of the hills and runs onto the coastal plain, but it spreads right across; the local name, the aboriginal word is Jarulah, and the last thing you learn about is that the jarrah, you can sit under that tree on a full moon, and you can talk to someone else who is the same kinship as yours, they could be 200k’s away; you can’t mistake a full moon, the tree becomes a transmitter and a receiver, like an antenna, and that’s called mental telepathy in science, that’s the power of the mind spreading out across the land, because you can have multiples of people at different locations all on the same wave length, and this went on for 80,000 years, and when you know that and when you’ve got that down pat, you get some incredible understandings; and we didn’t have a mortgage on that because other cultures had it as well, and they wrote about it, and it says that when you understand those things it produces people who can perform what we call miracles; our people performed those miracles all of the time, because we were so close, and when the tall ships came our people knew what was coming and they sang, and they sang the spirit into the ground, and the spirit is in the land, and we all know the crow, they’re never far away, they’re always watching, wondering what’s going on, or the cockatoo, big billed, strong beaks like vices crunch the nuts and use their tongues to take the seed out; it’s innate; those plant sense you’re here, we eat it, we sleep it, and we drink it, it doesn’t own us, and we don’t own it, and that’s what I’m hoping to get across in a few fleeting moments during a Ted talk.”