Transcription Audio

Hello and welcome. Come with me to a cold May night in 2025, in a Narooma car park on Yuin Country, when my phone rang and I heard five words that knocked the wind out of me: You can’t screen that here. No hello. No preamble. Just Aunty L’s steady voice, and I knew I’d crossed a line I hadn’t even seen. We were days from a winter festival premiere. We’d built a projection about whale migration: archival humpback recordings, kids’ drawings, an animation of a mother and calf in moonlit surf. I’d convinced myself the film felt right. Which part? I asked. The song, she said. And the pattern on the waves. That pattern’s not ours. And that song isn’t yours to put on a wall. There’s a cold that hits when intention meets reality. I thought I was following best practice. We’d met with the local Aboriginal corporation. Spoken with two Elders who gave a kind nod to proceed, so long as it was respectful. I’d reread the AIATSIS Code of Ethics and Screen Australia’s guidance. Budgeted consultation fees in line with the NAVA Code of Practice. In my head, I was doing it right. But right isn’t a checklist. It’s a relationship. The brief seemed simple: a 12-minute projection about whales. I wanted to centre Yuin knowledge of baleen whales and how those stories shape behaviour on the ocean today. The timeline was tight. Festival deadlines don’t bend. Phones blow up. Editors wait. Little compromises start to feel reasonable. That’s when I took a shortcut. I blended elements I’d heard from different Yuin speakers as if they were a single public story. I pulled a wave motif I loved—turns out it came from a neighbouring Nation. I scripted narration that wasn’t mine to script. I treated cultural elements like open-source code: mix, match, modify. But Indigenous Cultural and Intellectual Property doesn’t work like that. It’s held in trust—tied to lineage, place, and responsibility. We need to sit down, Aunty said. Not over email. So we sat, three days later, at the community centre. You’re not the first, she laughed. But let’s make you the last, at least this month. The first question at that table was the one that should have been our first all along: whose story is this to tell? Not abstractly. Literally—who holds this specific knowledge, for this stretch of sea, at this time of year, and for what audience? That’s the heart of protocol: knowledge belongs to people and places, and it’s carried with responsibilities. We went scene by scene. The song wasn’t just a soundtrack; it’s living cultural knowledge tied to families and ceremony. The wave pattern was from Boon Wurrung Country, not Yuin. Someone pointed to a campfire sequence: check the species. Don’t show people eating their own totems. We pulled out the standards: the AIATSIS Code, the Australia Council’s Protocols, and Terri Janke’s True Tracks principles—respect, self-determination, consent, integrity, and more. We’d fallen short on consent—it wasn’t specific enough—and on interpretation—we collapsed multiple versions into one voice because it was cleaner for the film. True Tracks became our rebuild plan. Self-determination meant shifting from consultation to collaboration: who sets the agenda, who decides, who shares authorship. Interpretation meant holding space for multiple versions instead of pretending there’s one authoritative take. And because whales cross multiple Countries, we couldn’t treat it as a single Yuin story. Cross-jurisdictional complexity isn’t an exception in this work—it’s normal. Then we made the hard choices. We cut seven minutes from a twelve-minute piece. We rewrote the narration with a Yuin cultural lead who became a credited co-author. We commissioned local artwork to replace the wave motif. We reshot the campfire scene with bream and flathead after checking totem protocols. We overhauled permissions. Our original forms were standard perpetual licences—the efficient kind that become extractive. With advice from First Nations Media Australia, we added time-bound consent, review-before-release, and options for community-controlled distribution for sensitive segments. The CARE principles—Collective benefit, Authority to control, Responsibility, Ethics—applied to everything: rushes, voiceover files, cloud folders. I called the funder and said we needed three more weeks. To their credit, they backed us. We moved a thousand dollars from hardware hire into fees for community collaborators. We chose a simpler projection and spent the savings on ethics. I wish that choice had been in the original budget. We didn’t forget the animals. We’d planned a drone shot over a mother-and-calf pair offshore. I reread the permits: strict distances from marine mammals—no drones near whales without authorisation. The whales are protected under the EPBC Act. They aren’t props. We sourced permitted footage and leaned on CGI. The credits stated clearly that no footage was captured at distances that could disturb marine mammals. Alignment matters. After the premiere, 62 percent of surveyed audience members said they learned a new behaviour for whale season—slowing vessels, maintaining the 100-metre distance. Stories shift norms when your production aligns with your message. Premiere night finally landed—cold Friday in August. We projected the moonlit calf onto sandstone. An Elder I didn’t know stood nearby, murmuring along at a line about care for Sea Country. The film ended. I turned to Aunty. She didn’t clap. She nodded. That’s right, she said. Not perfect. But right for that place, that night, those people. Seeing Cultural Lead and Co-Author next to a local name mattered. We put up a QR code and split donations between a Yuin youth program and the local wildlife rescue. Quietly, the council updated its commissioning template to require early cultural consultation for any work touching First Nations knowledge. That’s policy change you can feel. So, what did I learn the hard way—so maybe you don’t have to? Start with whose story this is. Identify knowledge holders by place, season, and species before you write a line. If it’s not yours to tell, don’t tell it—or tell it with the people who hold it. Budget for relationships. Pay properly. Build time for travel, childcare, cups of tea, and multiple review meetings. Good relationships take longer and cost more than a quick permissions email—and they’re worth it. Move from consent to co-authorship. If cultural knowledge shapes your piece, share decision-making and credit. Create a pathway for community veto and the right to revise later. Be specific with permissions. Time-bound, purpose-bound, place-bound. Record what’s okay to use, what’s not, and under what conditions. Include review-before-release. Plan renewals—don’t default to perpetual licences. Treat patterns, songs, designs, and narratives as living law, not clip art. When in doubt, commission local artists and practitioners. Plan for cross-Country storytelling. Whales, rivers, migrations cross boundaries. Liaise with neighbouring Nations. Make that visible. Resist flattening many voices into one. Respect totems and food protocols. Get a species check before depicting hunting, fishing, or eating. Small details carry big meaning. Align animal welfare with production. Know permit conditions. Don’t disturb wildlife for the shot. Use permitted footage or CGI. Ethical storytelling includes animals, not just people. Build real review points. Schedule check-ins where edits can be made without blowing up the timeline. Include community-only screenings. Allow post-premiere updates if concerns arise. Document your ethics in the credits. Name cultural leads. Note protocols followed. State how consent was structured. If there’s revenue share or donations, say where the money goes. Be prepared to delay. When the choice is ethics or deadlines, choose ethics. Most funders will support a well-explained shift. If they don’t, ask whether the project should go ahead yet. Measure impact responsibly. Ask audiences what they learned and will do differently. Share those findings back with community partners. Here’s the mindset shift that changed everything for me: stop chasing a seal of approval and start building a relationship. You won’t be perfect—I wasn’t. But you can be teachable, transparent, and ready to change course. You can move money and power to the people whose knowledge you rely on. You can show your ethics on screen, not just in a pitch deck. If you’re a creator planning a First Nations animal story in 2025, consider this your minimum standard. Begin on Country. Listen first. Ask permission. Pay fairly. Share power. Check the species. Check the patterns. Respect cultural law and environmental law. Put the wellbeing of people and animals at the centre. And when someone says, you can’t screen that here, hear the invitation inside the refusal: not like that, not yet. Do the work, then come back. I’m grateful we did. Because on that cold August night, when an Elder’s quiet murmur lined up with a line we’d laboured over, and Aunty L gave that small nod and said, that’s right, I understood something simple and hard: ethical storytelling isn’t the art of getting away with it. It’s the craft of being in right relationship with place, people, and the beings who carry the story—whales included. Thanks for listening. If this lands, take it into your next brief, your next budget, your next production meeting. Deadlines pass. The relationships you build outlast the credits.