Out of respect for Indigenous Australian bereavement practices, Aboriginal and Torres

Strait Islander listeners are advised that this podcast contains the name of someone who has died.

The podcast includes music from today's guest, Francis Rings, from her work Unaipan.

It's West Wind by David Page and features the First Nations language, Ngadingeri, from South Australia.

Hello, I'm Lali Arakoglu, and this is women who travel.

And if you're at all curious about the world, then this shows for you.

In today's episode, we travel to Australia to talk to dancer, choreographer and storyteller Francis Rings.

The great thing about Sydney is that whether you go, well, you can't go east because that's ocean,

but whether you go north, south or west, it's just completely surrounded by national parks.

As our microphones were getting adjusted in the warm up to our interview,

I couldn't help but start chatting to Francis about my own backpacking trip around the country when I was 19.

And the distinct feeling that I had barely scratched the surface of this rich and complicated country even after I'd spent two months travelling around it.

And really beautiful, diverse, incredible country, rich with history and culture and stories

that are still these living, breathing knowledge systems that surround us.

So, yeah, I mean, you don't have to travel very far to be immersed in this incredible

cultural experience.

But it also means that when we have fires, you know, it's, yeah, yeah, all the smoke comes and settles in the basin and, yeah,

you can get in trouble very quickly.

My first impressions of Australia was that of someone who really hadn't travelled much at that point.

Like I said, I was 19 years old

and I was backpacking on a shoestring of a budget. I couldn't help but think from the moment that

I'd set foot in Western Australia that I was going to be exploring somewhere vast and wild and

...