Dr. John A. King, a Wurundjeri man, is raising money to record and preserve Warumungu songlines, stories, and languages before Elders pass away. He's bought recording gear and plans to train young people and make a documentary. He's asking for donations starting at $5,000.
Hello. So I'll try and make this— no, I can't make it brief. Listen, I need your help. I'm going to ask you for help. I'm going to ask you to consider contributing financially. I just want to be upfront. Here's the project. I'm a Wurundjeri man, Australian Aboriginal, and I'm going home to Country. Country is really important to our people. We're Indigenous to Australia. Country's everything. There's only Country. You have Country and you have Country There. When they ask where John is, John is either there on Country or Country There. He's not on Country. There's only 2 places. Country is denoted, like in whitefella terms, it would be by GPS coordinate. In blackfella terms, there's songlines, and those songlines go, for example, the dog and the bush turkey walk side by side. The bush turkey goes over this way and the And the dog goes on, and that songline actually goes all the way up to Russia in our particular country. Why those songlines are important is those songlines, you can actually go from one side of Australia to the other, and those songlines will take you to places where there's food and water. That's why Imbrani, which is the term we prefer instead of Aboriginal, Imbrani, that's why they never understood why the Europeans were dying in Australia. The Europeans thought it was desert. The Imbrani knew that wasn't the case. There was water everywhere. There was food everywhere. So European law now in Australia recognizes these songlines. As long as those songlines are alive, we have right to our land. What happens when our old people die is that we lose those songs, and if those songs aren't preserved or recorded somewhere, then we lose the land. It just becomes land owned by the European government. Our generations, our children, the have that. And our old people are dying at a horrible and a historic rate. The average age there is 52, 55 years of age. At 62, I'm a bit of an anomaly. I'm outside of the curve and also educated, which is incredible because you can't have self-determination without education. So we want to preserve some of these things. And Melissa and I have been blessed by people who have supported us. They've allowed us to buy a little DJI Mic 2, which is, you You know, the most incredible bit of kit. It's a little sound studio, and every one of these little things got 17 hours of audio, so we can record songs and stories all night long because it's a ceremony season and those things will go on. And this little Osmo 3 Pocket, it's a 4K, it's, it's, it's a cinema quality camera that we can record things and capture it for all time. We've also stepped out and brought a DJI drones so we can capture our songlines and we actually physically track by video these songlines so people can see where they are and where they are and the songs and the stories that go with these, these songlines. So we've managed to get all this together and we're going to go there and we're going to capture things and we're going to train young people on how to use this equipment. We're going to work with the Science Language Centre to preserve languages and songs. And we want to, when we come home, we want to be able to hand that over to someone better than us. And that's someone that can edit the stories and not only document the songs and the stories and the dances that go together with each of these songlines, these storylines, but also put together a brief documentary of this, documenting these processes and these stories and how it was done. So we're going to ask for your help financially. There's links in the bio above or in the description below, whatever platform you're on. Like and subscribe to this. Follow us on one of the channels. If a friend has sent this to you and you don't know us, have a look at our website. Reach out to us and talk to us about it. We can probably bootstrap it for five grand. Ten grand would really help us get there and get someone else involved. Twenty would mean there'd be marketing. So look, we're going to get this done one way or the other, and we'll do it in the best way possible. Excellence is doing the best you can with what you have. Your contribution to this could really make a difference in terms of how quickly we can get it done, how quickly we can preserve some of our stories, and how quickly we can make a difference on Country. So thank you for all those people who have connected with us over the last 10 years or so. Thank you for following the ups and downs of our stories. And if you're in the US, this gift is tax deductible. Again, link in the bio or the description. Appreciate you. And look, stay tuned because we'll be posting a bunch of stuff about what it's like out there. And if you haven't checked out my YouTube channel on Home to Texas, Dr. John A. King, one word, John A. King, then there's 60 videos, 70 videos of what it was like living in the bush and in our Blackfella camp out there. Melissa and I were there for 6, 7 months last year. Thank you. Appreciate it. Thank you.
