Welcome to Emergence Magazine's podcast. I'm Emanuel Vaughn Lee, executive editor of Emergence

magazine, located on the unseated ancestral lands of the Coast Mewalk people of present-day

Marin County. Each week, we feature a new interview, narrated essay, or story,

exploring the threads connecting ecology, culture, and spirituality.

Alexis Wright is an acclaimed Australian Aboriginal author,

and a member of the Wan Yi people

from the highlands of the Southern Gulf of Carpentaria.

She is the author of the Swan Book and Carpentaria.

In this essay, as the world falters, threatening native ecosystems and indigenous lifeways,

Alexis turns inward to the dwelling place of ancestral story.

From here, she considers how her ancient culture has responded to ongoing destruction

and how to bear witness to the creation of a post-apocalyptic world.

A Buddhist monk and Zen poet, whose name was Yu Ning, once wrote Agatha, or poem over a thousand years ago,

the poem titled There Was No Tree to the

Budi, was essentially about how the purity of enlightenment would not be corrupted by the dust

particles of life. The foreline poem ends with the line, when then was the dust.

At the turn of the century, I began thinking about how the essential truths of my people,

how within our lands and within the knowledge of country, have endured great storms of dust,

cultural oppression, droughts, fire, and two questions arose. How far would we as Aboriginal people go to survive?

What is the future of the planet?

I ended up writing this one book, a novel that imagines an apocalyptic future

and shows how Aboriginal people are tied through globalisation to the inequalities

...