Season 5: Episode 16

Country is Speaking

In some cultures, listening to the more-than-human world is a deeply held value and a part of everyday life. In this episode, we look at what it means to listen to a whole place.

Guests

Bianca McNeair

Bianca McNeair is a Malgana Saltwater woman from Gatharagudu (Shark Bay W.A.) whose work caring for Country has spanned several different community, cultural, conservation and political roles. Underpinning all of Bianca’s work caring for Country is an understanding that Aboriginal women bring a much needed perspective to cultural and environmental issues.

Cass Lynch

Dr. Cass Lynch is a Koreng Wudjari Noongar woman, and writes stories and poetry alongside her work as a researcher on the Noongar language. She is currently a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Curtin University in Perth, and her PhD explored Aboriginal stories that reference climate change.

Chris La Tray

Chris La Tray is a Métis storyteller, a descendent of the Pembina Band of the mighty Red River of the North and a citizen of the Little Shell Tribe of Chippewa Indians. He writes the newsletter "An Irritable Métis" and lives near Frenchtown, Montana. He was the Montana Poet Laureate for 2023–2025 and has written three books, most recently Becoming Little Shell: A Landless Indian's Journey Home (2024, Milkweed Editions).

Clinton Walker

Clinton, the CEO and Founder of Ngurrangga Tours, is a proud Ngarluma/Yindjibarndi man whose Traditional Lands encompass the West Pilbara region, including Karratha, Dampier Archipelago, Murujuga National Park, and Millstream-Chichester National Park.

Laura Palmer

Laura Palmer is a PhD candidate at the University of Bristol. Her research explores natural and anthropogenic (or human-caused) drivers of whistle variation in bottlenose dolphins.

Stephanie King

Dr. Stephanie King is a Professor of Animal Behaviour at the University of Bristol, U.K., and co-director of Shark Bay Dolphin Research, which has gathered research on dolphins for over 40 years in Western Australia. Her research centers on deep observation of animal behavior while applying cutting-edge techniques to understand the evolution of animal communication, cooperation, and cognition in the natural world.

Tilas Lekango

Tilas is a professional Naturalist with over 15 years of experience as a guide and guide trainer in Kenya. He currently serves as the Manager at Reteti House and also works as a consultant for guide training across the country. Tilas is widely recognized as one of Kenya’s top guides, camels trainer an exceptional sky guide, and a dedicated conservationist.

Credits

Transcript

[00:00] INTRODUCTION

CHRIS: Storytelling….we can't necessarily silo it into just a human speaking in whatever language that we can understand.

AMY: I'm in Missoula, Montana, walking next to the Clark Fork River, talking about listening with one of our most celebrated local authors.

CHRIS: I am Chris La Tray. You want me to say more than that?

AMY: Yeah.

CHRIS: I am a Metis storyteller. I am an enrolled member of the Little Shell Tribe of Chippewa Indians, and I am the Montana State Poet laureate for 2023 through 2025.

AMY: And since it's audio, I need to tell people that as poet laureate, you wear a golden crown, which you have on right now. It looks really good on you.

CHRIS: Yeah, it graphs itself to my scalp for two years and then it just falls off like elk antlers.

AMY: (laughs) I wish it were elk antlers, actually.

CHRIS: Wouldn't that be cool?

AMY: Welcome to Threshold, I’m Amy Martin, and this is the last episode of this season of our show. There are so many ways to listen in this world, and for our final episode, I want to bring you some of the voices of people I met as I reported for this season who come from cultures where listening to the more-than-human world is a deeply held value. Something people do regularly just as a matter of course. Instead of focusing on one animal or one type of communication, this episode is more about listening to a whole place, and everything in it.

CHRIS: You know, if we look at the clouds, the clouds are telling a story based on what the weather conditions are like, you know. If we see all of a sudden a bunch of birds erupt from a tree or something like that, that is a story. There's something that is causing them to do that. So the world is in constant effort to tell stories. So, you know, we we kind of overestimate our own genius when we assume we're the only ones who tell stories, you know? Yeah.

MUSIC

AMY: Yeah. You just, ah, you just landed on the heart of what is pulling me to do this season about listening. There are, there are stories everywhere.

CHRIS: All the time. We consider, you know, rocks to be the first storytellers, you know. And you can take a group of kids out to a place and say, well, what are the rocks telling you right now? You know, if if they're big boulders, well, that's, they're telling the story of, you know, glaciers and and things like that. The world is the first storyteller that's told us the story of how to be who we are.

AMY: And that's why that's why it's breaking my heart that there's all these stories, they're beautiful, they're funny, they're sad, they're interesting. And so when we're not listening to anything other than our own voices, we're missing out on something--

CHRIS: We're really, that's it, we're missing out. Our lives and our connection to the world are passing, for our brief little time we get to be part of it and we're missing it. And that's the tragedy.

AMY: One of the questions I posed in our first episode was: how does listening change us? What happens when we tune in a little bit more intentionally, to our own lives, but also to everything in the more than human world. And in some ways, Chris has lived an answer to that question. His first book, One Sentence Journal, began simply as a daily practice of noticing. He knew he wanted to be a writer, but he was working a job he hated, and he'd find himself at the end of the day having done nothing remotely creative. So he started writing just one sentence a day in his journal.

CHRIS: Just to feel like for the five minutes or ten minutes or whatever it was that I was doing it, that I was practicing my craft. And what I learned from that is that, you know, at the end of the day, when I couldn't think of things on some days and I realized, if I can't think of one memorable thing in this only version of this day that I'm going to have, then that just means I'm not living my life because I'm not paying attention to it. And so it became, you know, the writing became secondary to the importance of just trying to reconnect, and paying attention to my life unfolding around me.

AMY: Chris published One Sentence Journal as a book in 2018. That was followed by a book of poetry in 2021, and in 2024, a memoir, Becoming Little Shell. His decision to watch and listen—to spend even just five minutes on the act of noticing—ended up changing the whole course of his life.

I think this is what the world needs us to do. In this time of multiple mounting ecological and social crises. And yes, we need to act, and to stop taking some really destructive actions. But I also think we spend less time thinking about ourselves, and more time thinking about all the life around us. To just listen more. I don’t think it’s the whole answer, but I do think it’s an essential piece. We needed to listen in the past, we need it now, and we’ll keep needing it in the future.

CHRIS: Our creator, Gichi Manidoo, which means the great mystery, dreams the world into existence. And the world exists and humanity thinks, oh, I've done this wonderful thing. It's perfect. And over a long time it is. And, you know, all of the other relatives then kind of start to whisper to Gichi Manidoo that maybe things aren't quite as they seem, you know, maybe it's not quite perfect. We're missing one thing. And of course, that one thing is the human relatives. So Gichi Manidoo takes a handful of soil from Mother Earth, from each of the four directions, and places it in this shell, and then breeze through the shell, and that kind of mingling of this holy breath and this wondrous, best kind of soil you can imagine the kind of gardeners dream of, what emerges from the other side of the shell is the first person, and that first person's name is Nanabozho. And the first task that Gichi Manidoo gives Nanabozho was to go out onto Mother Earth and learn who everybody else already is. And of course, the only way that Nanabozho is capable of doing that is to go out and do everything that we've been talking about all morning is just listen, and pay attention, and hear what the world is telling them. Nanabozho, he only way they can learn that is by listening, and over the course of that listening learns the common language that everybody speaks. So like when we're talking about trees making sounds, when they're when they need water and other animals and birds and things, being able to hear that, that's them still being able to speak this language. And we've lost that over time, we became so proud of our own intellect and our own abilities, and we lost the humility that is necessary to to live in reciprocal relationship with the rest of the world, that we've lost it. So when we talk about now about going out and trying to reconnect, we're just trying to return to what we were from the very beginning.

AMY: I think it's so fascinating that in that story, what the first person was supposed to do was listen.

CHRIS: Yes. Yeah.

THEME MUSIC

[08:15] A SEGMENT

CASS: To go there and to sit there, these charming little spiders. You never see them, but they all decorate their burrows differently, right? So they are a community, say, of, I don't know, forty in a little patch. The big burrows are the size of a ten cent piece, that's the grandmother. And then her babies, when they get out, they only go like twenty or thirty centimeters. So these short range endemics only live in, like one square kilometer of this entire world, right. When I spend time with them and look at them and write poetry about them, that is Country showing me how to slow down. It's showing me look at this short range endemic who stayed close to grandma, close to mother, they're all there, they don't go any further than that. Their generations and generations and generations in one place. Just one of these things on Country that remind me of what it means to be in relationship with place and how that has influenced Noongar culture and our values.

CASS: Country gives you signals and signs, and a really prominent one is the cry of the Carnaby's black cockatoo, Ngoolark It is...there's something extraordinary about black cockatoos flying overhead. They have a really whistling call.

CASS: So the Carnaby's black cockatoo, white tail black cockatoo is a animal under threat. You know, koorlbardi the magpie and waardong the crow, they can live at the fringes of human society, they create their own nests in any tree. The black cockatoo not so much. Deforestation has devastated them. You know, my mother-in-law talks about seeing clouds of black cockatoos in the 70s. I just, I don't know what that's like, you know, I didn't experience it. And so when I see ten fly overhead, it is and this and the sound of their beautiful call. They're beautiful big birds, but gentle and curious. When I hear they call it is a history of what has been done to them. And I want people in the future to have that.

CASS: You know, that's our blood in their feathers, that's our spirit on the wind. They are us talking to each other.

CASS: I don't know what it would be like for people to not hear black cockatoos. I don't know what would be lost. Something…some whistle that you just would never rattle around your brain again, that humans have always had in this part of the world. They are flying around reminding us of who we are.

CASS: You need to have these places and these animals to reconnect back to and focus on. Otherwise, all we've got is the like holograms and ghosts of Western culture that come into our faces, into our ears. And you're just in a soup of shallow time that just rolls over and over and over. It's an anxious present.

CASS: And so it is this perfection that flies around our Country, inspiring us to be the best that we can.

Break

[28:17] B SEGMENT

TILAS: Listening is used a lot in my tribe.

AMY: This is Tilas Lekango.

TILAS: I grew up here in Samburu. Born here. Went to school here. So, yes, I was, born behind that mountain just in front of me here.

AMY: We've hopped continents now. I'm talking with Tilas in northern Kenya, on Samburu land, not far from the Reteti Elephant Sanctuary—the home for rescued baby elephants where we spent Episode 11. And actually, a few wild bull elephants are browsing through the bushes and trees very close to us while we talk. They can be so quiet when they want to be! But Tilas says growing up here, you learn how to listen for them.

TILAS: Walking at night, you must know, if an elephant is around, what kind of sound will you hear. If lions is around, what will you hear. And the only way you knew that is by experience.

AMY: We've talked a lot in this season about how listening is connected to survival—preventing extinction of other species, saving ourselves from a ruinous future. Tilas says in Samburu culture the connection between listening and survival is direct and concrete. It starts with being sent out into the bush as a very young child to tend to herds of goats, cattle, and camels.

TILAS: As you grow up, then you learn to take care of the small goats, then graduate to take care of the goats. Then graduate to take care of maybe the young calves, then go to the cows.

AMY: Samburu kids are out on the land, alone or with siblings, learning the skills they need to protect themselves and their herds from the many wild animals around. And Tilas says often the best form of protection is simply listening and getting out of the way when necessary.

TILAS: So as you grow up, you know, like. Yeah, when you hear, like, a cutting saw hoo hoo hoo that must be a leopard. When you hear a noise wooooo like that must be a hyena. And whenever you hear maybe like a crackling in the bush, cckk ckkk, you know, probably the lions are fighting for a carcass. And then, yeah, you need to avoid them.

MUSIC

TILAS: And even human sounds, whenever you hear anybody shouting, you know, we we are told, this kind of. I told this to a fruit like, safe run away. This one is like calling you to come. This one is like there's a danger ahead of you. So you hear any noise like oooo-eee you can go straight to that person to go and help.

AMY: Can you say that noise again?

TILAS: Ooooo-eee!

AMY: Oooo-eee! It means, like, I'm in trouble.

TILAS: I'm in trouble. Help me.

AMY: Learning to identify all of these different kinds of sounds is non-negotiable here.

TILAS: Everyone must learn all this to survive. Because you don't know, maybe a buffalo's making the noise ffff behind the bush and you don't know that's a buffalo, you walk towards it, what next? You lose your life. By the time you're ten years old, you know exactly what revolves around which animal makes which noise, and why, and at what time and when should they make that noise and all that. They learn all this.

MUSIC

AMY: When Tilas was around six, he was sent to a boarding school. It was about thirty kilometers, or eighteen miles away, and he walked there. Every few months there would be a break, and he would walk home, usually in a group of kids. And on one of those journeys home from school, his survival skills were put to the test—especially his listening abilities.

TILAS: So one of the holidays, we left, I think we were more than ten boys together. I was the youngest of all.

AMY: He thinks he was probably around nine, on this long walk home from school through the wilderness.

TILAS: So we walked all the way until my village was less than five kilometers.

AMY: And at that point, they came to a river. Everyone was pretty close to home, but for those last few kilometers, they all had to head off in different directions. And they weren't ready to split up. Like kids anywhere, they wanted to play.

TILAS: We started playing, throwing rocks and wrestling. It became very late, like probably six.

AMY: The sun sets reliably around 6:30 pm this close to the equator. And there isn't much twilight. It's bright, and then it's dark. And the boys realized…

TILAS: Everybody has to go home. I found myself, yeah, running to our village. When I arrived where the village was, it was too unfortunate that I only found...not even footprint of animals. People left more than two weeks ago. And then I was like, what?

AMY: Tilas' parents and the whole village had left the area. That might sound uncaring, but you have to understand the context: Samburu parents can't keep their kids alive if they don't keep their herds alive. So when the goats and cattle need to move to find food, you just move with them. It's not really a choice. But Tilas' parents didn't really have a way to contact the school, so they just moved on, and trusted him to find them.

AMY: So here's Tilas, around nine years old. He's alone. It's dark. And in that darkness, he knows there are elephants, leopards, hyenas, lions. He needs to find his people—or any people, really. And he knows the best way to find them is to listen. Not for human voices necessarily, but for the voices of their companions.

TILAS: The goats, the donkeys, the cows.

AMY: He knows from experience that these are the sounds he's most likely to be able to hear from a distance.

TILAS: And it was already late, and I had to look around. Run for like five other kilometers towards south. Climb up on the rock, climb up on a tree, listening. No sounds of animals. Run towards east. West. Then listening. I can hear nothing.

AMY: A couple of hours go by. He hasn't eaten since he left school that morning.

TILAS: I was still walking and hoping to find our village or just to hear, some noise of animals so I can run to that village and spend my night. Unfortunately I haven't heard any.

AMY: But he did hear something else. A rustling in the bushes. An animal was following him.

TILAS: And then I was like, oh, there's something making noise behind me. So it's like, okay, I keep on walking. I was a young boy. Then I decided to take a rock and hit.

AMY: He wanted to know what was tracking him. And he figured if he hit it, it might call. And it did. He threw the rock and heard….

TILAS: (hyena call) And then I was like, wow, so this was hyena. So now I knew it's a hyena. And yeah, I was a young boy, and I knew that, yeah, I should be brave enough to scare away the hyena.

AMY: At least it wasn't a leopard, or a lion. Little Tilas took comfort in the fact that he was being hunted by one of the smaller carnivores around.

TILAS: So I kept walking for another maybe another one more kilometer and the hyenas became two. Then I can hear them like making eee, eee. And they kept on making more noise. All of a sudden they are three. Then, when they became three, I can hear more hyenas are coming and shouting like, heeee! Like making some unusual, noises running towards me. And I went to like, so shall I be a meal tonight for the hyenas? So I decided, OK, no. I took some rocks, hit them. Then fortunately, there was a big tree called delonix elata, one of the flame trees around. Then I just climbed up.

TILAS: So I climbed up a tree. I went up a distance where I know the hyenas cannot get me. And then I stayed there for the whole night.

AMY: It was an especially dark night, with no moon.

TILAS: Being up on a tree...you had no, water the whole day. You had no meal. The only meal you had was yesterday in school. Those 12 hours were a long, long time.

TILAS: By almost three o'clock, I heard the donkey making a noise at a long distance: uuuhh, uh, uh. Then that told me like, yes! That's the village. So the next morning if I survive I'll just walk straight towards that the sound of the donkey.

TILAS: I wanted to come down, but my instincts are telling me, no. Wait more, wait for the sun.

TILAS: So the sky kept on changing.

AMY: Until finally the first beams of sunlight swept across the valley.

TILAS: So I just saw the sun rising. Hmm, I survived.

TILAS: So the next morning I just came down, I went straight to where I heard the sound of the donkey. Unfortunately it was not our village again, but fortunately they knew where my village was. So I went in, I was welcomed, I was given milk, I was given water. Then I was shown where my village was like your village is. You see the hill there? Behind the hill is two rivers that you cross when you cross the second river, that's why your village will be.

AMY: So off he went again, into the bush, alone.

TILAS: So I had to run.

TILAS: Before I arrived home I met some guys taking care of the animals, and I told them I spent the night. And then they were like, wow, you spent the night? You should not go home.

AMY: They told him that spending the night alone in the bush as he had done was dangerous—not just physically, but spiritually. He needed to be cleansed before he returned to the village, or he might end up spending the rest of his life alone in the bush.

TILAS: So they had to walk to go and look for a grey goat. They brought it to me. Then they slaughtered it. They took the stomach. They add some water. They have to wash me. Then washing you with a grey goat, it's like saying that you died and you resurrected again. And like, they do that ritual so that you will not again have something like that appearing to you or happening to you. So after that, I found a home and, yeah, here I am to tell the story. So I survived.

AMY: We're heading back to Australia one last time, after this short break.

Break 2

[39:42] C SEGMENT

AMY: I'm about a day's drive up the Western Australian coast from Shark Bay, heading into an enormous art museum. But there are no walls, no canvases protected behind glass in quiet rooms. This art is carved into the stones that cover this landscape.

CLINTON: My name is Clinton Walker. I am a Ngarluma/Yindjibarndi man. We're currently in Murujuga, that's the traditional name of this area that's typically called the Burrup Peninsula and Dampier Archipelago.

AMY: I’m sitting next to Clinton in his truck, driving through a series of hills made of red rocks. And a huge number of those rocks are covered in ancient art.

CLINTON: Murujuga is home to the highest concentration of rock art in the form of petroglyphs or carved images in the stone. And it was made by my people over thousands and thousands of years.

AMY: The sheer amount of rock art here is really hard to fathom. There are likely more than a million individual pieces‚ maybe even twice that. Like Clinton said, it's one of the biggest collections of rock art in the world—a record of human culture here that stretches back for tens of thousands years. But in the last sixty years or so, a very different kind of use has emerged. It's looming just across the water as we get out of Clinton's truck.

AMY: We are talking about a really important cultural site, and right behind us…

CLINTON: Yes.

AMY: My God, it's like the biggest... I think it's the biggest plant I've ever seen. That's the Karratha gas plan, yeah?

CLINTON: Karratha gas plant is the biggest oil and gas plant in Australia. One of the biggest definitely in the southern hemisphere. It's just incredibly large.

AMY: Calling it a plant doesn't paint the right picture. This is not a factory. It's an industrial city. It has its own roads. It's a labyrinth of steel beams, spiky towers, and blinking lights, perched right on the shore, directly across from this cultural heritage site.

AMY: I knew that both these things existed here, the rock art and the industry. But until I got here, I could not grasp how close they are together. It is, like, mind boggling.

CLINTON: Yeah, it's it's it's painful to see all the time, but we've got to numb our senses a bit because there's nothing we can do about it. It's. It's there now, you know?

AMY: The Karratha Gas Plant is actually just one part of an industrial complex here. Offshore, huge deposits of gas are drilled out of the seafloor and transported here to multiple refineries. On land, iron ore is mined and brought here to be loaded onto ships and sent around the world. There are ammonia plants, fertilizer plants—the whole area is abuzz with people driving around in company trucks and trains moving to and fro. Companies from all over the world are making big money here—Yara, Chevron, Rio Tinto, and Australia's own Woodside Energy. All of this industrial activity brings jobs, of course, and in fact Clinton used to work at the Karratha Gas Plant himself. But he left to start a business focused on cultural preservation, taking visitors on tours to see the rock art. He also provides trainings for the workers at the plant.

CLINTON: So one of the things that I do encourage my people is we can't change what's already been built, but what we can do is change the people's perceptions who work there so that they understand more about the local area, the local people, and while this rock art is important and why it needs to be protected, you know?

AMY: We turn away from the plant, and focus our attention back on the rocks.

CLINTON: I'll show you just in a second here, a piece of turtle rock art and a stingray liver. ….you'll see in a second.

AMY: Alright so we're walking up into the rocks. Oh wow! There's the turtle. It's right thre. And then what's that?

CLINTON: That's the stingray liver.

AMY: Clinton says turtles are a very important part of traditional culture here. Historically, people depended on them for food, and the process of learning to hunt them was intertwined with practices that protected the animals for the long haul.

CLINTON: Because it's something that we eat, we have to protect it more than anybody, because we need it to be sustainable for future generations. And all this rock art is teaching you about their lifecycle, their nesting habitats, how long they live, when to hunt them. All this type of stuff is recorded in the rock.

AMY: As we walk through the area, it's almost impossible not to step on the art. It's everywhere.

CLINTON: And this area here behind us and that rocky outcrop just over the top there, it's just covered in turtle rock art, the whole lot. It's everywhere you look around this area. Before they built this plant, there were these amazing beaches. So it was a turtle nesting site, lot of turtles would come here, but this was an education place to learn about turtles.

AMY: There are turtle shapes of all sizes etched into the stone. Some of them only faintly visible in the right sort of light, others are still bold and clear. I notice one that's covered in precise round dots, which Clinton says represent eggs, others include hatch marks and curving lines.

CLINTON: And this is really important too, these markings represent the turtles when they go to lay their eggs on the beach. So that's the track that they make. So that's what they represent, turtle tracks.

AMY: Oh, so cool!

CLINTON: Yeah.

AMY: And it's not just turtles. All kinds of information is recorded here. Like that stingray liver—it looks like a little horseshoe, and there’s a reason someone took the time to make an image of it in stone.

CLINTON: The liver is rich in iron and other things. So that's also a really good food source. Very healthy for you, you know.

AMY: So you can imagine, like, people were out here teaching kids about this.

CLINTON: Yeah.

AMY: Showing them, like, this is what to look for.

CLINTON: And same like how I grew up, you know? But my people been doing it for generation upon generation. Going back, I don't know, 60,000 years or something.

AMY: Amazing.

AMY: Clinton says the art we're looking at right in this spot is probably a few thousands years old. In other areas, pieces have been dated to ten thousand years old, or more. As I'm taking all of this in, my sense of whiplash only increases. I look in one direction and I see a massive industrial complex. In the other, I'm looking at a vast cultural and artistic wonder. It's so disorienting. I mean, imagine standing in the Louvre looking at famous paintings with gas flaring out of giant towers in your peripheral vision. That's what this is like. And of course, the land where the plants are now also used to have rock art on it. Thousands of pieces were destroyed or moved to make way for industry. But as companies aim to expand operations here, traditional owners are pushing back against any plans to relocate more of the art.

CLINTON: In our culture, we don't remove rock art. So let's say we, we cut all this off the rocks and we place it in a museum. What happens then? You lose the story, the significance that it has to the area. And like, we know by having this here, this was a place where turtles come, you know? You take that away. You don't have that same connection to the place of.

AMY: The place is part of the art.

CLINTON: That's right. It was chosen specifically for this type of art because of what is in this area, yeah.

AMY: This art isn't just about this place, it is literally made of this place. It reflects the stories and information that was learned and passed down here. Clinton says his elders gave him this same sort of place-based education all the time while he was growing up.

CLINTON: Yeah, they would tell you to come round, and then they'll say…., which means listen now, and then start telling us stories. And then we would spend that whatever period listening and learning. And then once that was done we could go back to playing and doing other things. But as long as we got the stories in our head and that would happen every day, every school holiday, every weekend, whatever.

AMY: Some of the stories could take hours to tell. Some might just be a few minutes.

CLINTON: You just might just hear a little story about an area while you pulled up somewhere, you know like, “oh, while we're here, kids we'll tell you about this place,” you know. And they would teach us, and then we'd go somewhere else and we might go to a waterhole and have a swim and things. And then after we're done swimming and we're having some lunch, we sit down and they tell us another story about the area.

AMY: Are those good memories for you or were you-

CLINTON: Oh yeah.

AMY: Yeah.

CLINTON: My memories of being with my elders—because a lot of them have passed now, you know—so I really cherish those memories growing up, spending time with them, going out on country, learning different things from them. And what I know now is because of them. So I really appreciate what I learned and how I was brought up. So yeah, they're really special for me, yeah.

AMY: Clinton has kids and grandkids of his own now, and he takes them and other young people out on the land to keep these traditions alive.

AMY: Is it hard to get them to listen with all the distractions today?

CLINTON: Not when you're out on country. So that's why it's really important to be on country. And when you take the kids out, the distractions are gone. They are focused on where they're at. And once we tell them, you know what, I don't want to stop you doing things. Do what you do. Do what you like. All that. But remember, when you carry on and you're spending this time, these are memories that one day you'll be thinking back on, I'm really grateful I learned that, you know, because one day we won't be here.

AMY: There are serious concerns about the long-term survival of the rock art, as well. Recent studies have shown that pollution from all of the plants in the area is wearing down the surfaces of some of the stones, with the damage being greater the closer the rocks are to the plants. In an effort to secure more protection, local people have been working for years to get the Murujuga Cultural Landscape listed as a World Heritage Site through the UN. That finally happened in July 2025. But just a few months before, Woodside Energy received permission from the government to extend its operations in the area until 2070, sparking protests from archaeologists, climate activists, and Traditional Owners. Clinton is taking the long view.

CLINTON: I know that one day, and it might be in my lifetime, we’ll see this all finished.

AMY: He says when your culture is tens of thousands of years old, a few decades is a drop in the bucket. And in the meantime, he’ll do what his people have always done: listen to Country.

CLINTON: Country...country is always talking to to me. Telling me thing is showing me things. And I'll always listen to country. Because when I listen to the country, it tells me what I need to do. And but you can only get that is when you spend time on the country, because when you're sitting outside somewhere else, maybe, you know, in an office or in in town or doing something and you're not spending that time what people call spending time in nature, you know, you you won't learn none of that stuff. When you're here, you see that bird over there and and you're like, you listen to what that bird is doing or or something else. You know, the that stone will tell you something because it might even if it doesn't have rock art, you know, you look at that Sara, that'll be great for making artifacts from, you know, like stone tools. Other one would reveal how to find water, all the sort of stuff like the country tells you. You just got to learn to listen. Yeah.

AMY: The first step, he says, is just quieting down. Calming down. That's where he often starts with people when he's leading tours on Country.

CLINTON: And that's what I tell them, get away from all the distractions and come sit down. And when we sit down, just sit there for a minute and just don't do anything and just take everything in. And you start...the wind talks to you, the trees talk to you, rocks talk to you, water talks to you? Everything talks to you because they want you to know things. They want you to learn to look after it. The moment you stop listening, the moment that's when country gets hurt and then people get hurt.

AMY: Yeah.

CLINTON: Yeah.

WATER

LAURA: Ah, behind us.

STEPHANIE: Ok, let's go.

AMY: We're going to end this season where we began: in a boat on Shark Bay, with a team of dolphin researchers. And dolphins.

AMY: We can see them just below the surface.

AMY: Stephanie King is leading the research team from the University of Bristol in the UK, along with Laura Palmer and Millie Clark. 

STEPHANIE: Ah ha ha! I think it’s a consortship!

LAURA: No way!

(everyone talking at the same time…)

AMY: One of the running jokes of my time with this crew was that they didn't want to emote too much, especially with me around, recording them. But they really couldn't help it, and I'm so grateful for that.

STEPHANIE: Oh, my God, there's more of them, and they're foraging. It's the boys!

LAURA and AMY: laughter

LAURA: Look at the joy on her face.

STEPHANIE: Too much feeling there, too much feeling.

LAURA: Dampen your emotions, Stephanie.

AMY: As much as I wanted to learn some of the fascinating science behind dolphin communication—how we're learning to decode their buzzes and whistles and more—I also just wanted to get inside the experience of being a professional dolphin listener. How does spending so much time tuning into the communication of another animal change a person? How does all this listening to the more-than-human world make you feel? I think it's clear that one answer is that it brings a lot of joy.

LAURA: Yeah!

STEPHANIE: What's he doing? Look at that!

AMY: One of the males was lying on his back wiggling around in a goofy sort of way. On a different day, we saw a female zipping around with a sea sponge on her nose—apparently it protects the dolphin's beak as it pokes around in the rocks searching for fish. But only a very small percentage of Shark Bay dolphins do this. Why? And why was that male shimmying around on his back? There's just so much we don't know about these animals, even though they're actually much more like us than many others. And the mysteries are a big part of the delight. 

STEPHANIE: Oh, I love being on the water, no matter how tired I am, it's the best!

AMY: Yeah, this is cool.

STEPHANIE: It's just you never know what you're going to find. And you know animals that you haven't seen that year. I love it!

AMY: Yeah.

AMY: Stephanie plans to continue her research here for many, many years. And with all the technological changes happening in bioacoustics, I wanted to know what she’s hoping all of her dolphin listening might lead to.

STEPHANIE: I hope that we can really uncover how they communicate amongst themselves, to really understand their communication system. They've been studied for decades, you know, over 50 years. But we're still scratching the surface with what many of the sounds mean. We need to appreciate that they have a complex communication system that we barely understand, and that's what we should be focusing on. And I think to do that, you need to understand the context in which they produce sounds. You need to understand how other dolphins respond when they hear those sounds. You can't get that from AI at the moment. You need to study them in the wild. You need the behavioral observations.

AMY: So one of your hopes is not to someday be able to speak dolphin.

STEPHANIE: No. And I think we're doing the animals a disservice by focusing on that question. I think this comes down to...maybe to our ego and wanting to talk to the animals.

AMY: It seems like we leap so quickly from the role of being a deep listener to wanting to be a talker.

STEPHANIE: Well exactly. Humans love to talk. But what's far more important is we listen.

AMY: I turn my microphone out toward the water, where the dolphins are swimming calmly nearby. Stephanie and I just listen to them breathe for a few minutes.

DOLPHINS BREATHING

STEPHANIE: I love that sound, the pfffwhhu.

AMY: Yeah!

DOLPHINS BREATHING

AMY: It’s a simple sound, and a relatable one, and yet, it holds such a story. The ancestors of dolphins once walked on land. They developed lungs that breathe air, and when they moved into the sea, they kept them. Their voices, just like ours, begin with this.

DOLPHINS BREATHING

AMY: Opening our bodies to the atmosphere, allowing the particular blend of life-giving Earth-air that we all depend on, to enter in, and fill us up. 

DOLPHINS BREATHING

And that air was gifted to us by even older ancestors—microbes and plants and rocks and more than four billion years of planetary change.

DOLPHINS BREATHING

This is what I love about listening. It’s like a magic portal; I focus on the sounds around me and almost instantly I’m in closer connection to my place and other beings. And I can hear how my own little life is a tiny part of this ensemble that’s much older and bigger than I am.

DOLPHINS BREATHING

AMY: And now somehow, we’re all here. Breathing together. Singing together. Listening together.

Credits

This episode of Threshold was written, reported, and produced by me, Amy Martin, with help from Erika Janik and Sam Moore. The composer of our gorgeous music this season was Todd Sickafoose. Alan Douches graciously gifted us his post-production time and skills. Our fact checking throughout the season was by Sam Moore. The Black Cockatoo sounds you heard in this episode came from the website Xeno Canto, and were recorded by Mark Harper, Matthias Feuersenger, Marc Anderson and Drew Davison. The hyena sounds were actual hyenas recorded by me in Samburu. 

Huge thanks to the entire Threshold team and board, who contributed in a million ways — listening to drafts, helping to raise money, making social media posts, and so much more. Thank you to Jay Avery, Halee Bernard, Luca Borghese, Hana Carey, Dan Carreno, Eleanor Cleaverly, Kara Cromwell, Brittany Damico, Katie deFusco, Ray Ekness, Eddie Gonzalez, Caroline Kurtz,  Penelope Jackson, Deneen Wiske, and again, Erika Janik and Sam Moore. 

Threshold is made by Auricle Productions, a non-profit organization powered by listener donations, and what that means is that we couldn’t have told these stories without you—our community of listeners and donors. Threshold exists because you listen, and donate, and recommend the show to other people, and I am so grateful for that. If you believe that these stories have value, and you want to hear more of them, support our work at thresholdpodcast.org.

Thank you so much for listening.

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