Tyson Yunkaporta - Sand Talk

We are thrilled to celebrate the release of Tyson Yunkaporta's astonishing and profound new book, Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World. It's so incredible we made it our September Book of the Month!

Tyson will be in conversation with Evelyn Araluen.

About the Book

This remarkable book is about everything from echidnas to evolution, cosmology to cooking, sex and science and spirits to Schrödinger’s cat.

Tyson Yunkaporta looks at global systems from an Indigenous perspective. He asks how contemporary life diverges from the pattern of creation. How does this affect us? How can we do things differently?

Sand Talk provides a template for living. It’s about how lines and symbols and shapes can help us make sense of the world. It’s about how we learn and how we remember. It’s about talking to everybody and listening carefully. It’s about finding different ways to look at things.

Most of all it’s about Indigenous thinking, and how it can save the world.

Praise

‘It was certainty that drove a bulldozer through the oldest and deepest philosophic statement on earth at Burrup Peninsula. Sand Talk offers no certainties and Tyson Yunkaporta is not a bulldozer driver. This is a book of cultural and philosophic intrigue. Read it.’ - Bruce Pascoe, author of Dark Emu

‘Radical ideas, bursting with reason.’ - Tara June Winch

‘An exhilarating meditation on different ways of knowing and being. Sand Talk is playful, profound and fiercely original.’ - Billy Griffiths.

About the Author

Tyson Yunkaporta is an academic, an arts critic, and a researcher who belongs to the Apalech Clan in far north Queensland. He carves traditional tools and weapons and also works as a senior lecturer in Indigenous Knowledges at Deakin University in Melbourne.

About Evelyn Araluen

Evelyn Araluen is a poet, researcher and educator working with Indigenous literatures at the University of Sydney. Her writing has been awarded the Nakata Brophy Prize for Young Indigenous Writers, the Judith Wright Poetry Prize, and an inaugural Next Chapter Fellowship through the Wheeler Centre to develop her first poetry collection, to be released next year. Born, raised and writing on Dharug land, she is a descendant of the Bundjalung nation.