Since I downed pen last night quite a few new sights have passed my eyes. It began with a rude awakening at 11.30 pm by Neil.

“Wake up you guys and see the aurora.”

Sure enough, though through bleary eyes, I saw my first aurora. Initially it was just a light green glow above the horizon cloud, fading into the starry sky above.

It spread to a large ninety-degree span of bright, bright green to the south. I went back to sleep.

Called again at midnight, I saw a wonderful sight outside my porthole without even getting out of bed. A beautiful swathe of bright green light in the cloudless part of the sky, curving and finishing into infinity — maybe space anyway. The black horizon clouds tipped with a bright green reflection were like a stage without scenery.

The patterns of green colour changed and bent, writhed and vanished as we watched, fascinated. Each minute showed us a changed, new design in a most spectacular cinerama.

Gradually, as if proud of its accomplishments, the aurora bowed and faded into the darkness, leaving the stars to command the skies again.

Do you think I could get back to sleep again? Not a bit of it. Almost everyone I spoke to today had the same problem. Some didn’t sleep at all. I managed to lose consciousness after 2.30 sometime.

Keljat (Kal), the giant bearded Danish radio operator, brought a whizzer to our cabin for Howard last night and said on entering, “This is the only cabin on the ship with some order in it. All of the others are disgusting.” He reckons that the French are much more untidy and much dirtier than the Australians. He says that the journey back from Antarctica bringing the old party home is shocking. The men smell terribly, don’t bathe, and use Eau de Cologne.

This morning we woke at 6.30 for a 7.00 breakfast.

We were at anchor offshore from the Macquarie Island station. What a forbidding scene we saw ashore.

Macquarie cliffs rising up to a thousand-foot plateau shrouded in swirling mists.

Jagged rocks and jagged pinnacles spearing out of an ugly swell. A pitiful collection of ill-matched huts and structures clustered about the only human foothold on this forbidding tumble of rocks, cliffs, landslides, tussocks and swamps.

The station is situated on a narrow neck of low-lying ground between the main island and a large rock on its northern end.

After breakfast we worked flat out and had the machines ashore in one hour forty-five minutes. Phew! And more phew!

The helipads and landing area were in an elephant seal wallow. What stinking beasts. What repulsive creatures!

So fat, so obscene, so large — and yet the big ones are at sea having finished mating.

We took a passenger loader and a sling load each five miles down the west coast to Bauer Bay and then returned for three more loads. A forty- to fifty-knot wind was blowing from the west and we crabbed down the coast almost at forty-five degrees to our intended track.

For most of the day the top of the plateau was covered with cloud so we had to fly around and below the cliffs of the island and over the sea, there being few beaches or “flats” between the cliffs and the water. Almost all of the approaching flat ground along the shoreline is teeming with wildlife — all manner of birds, seals and rabbits.

I didn’t count them but I’m sure I saw a hundred billion penguins today. We made two trips to Caroline Cove at the furthest end of the island — twenty miles — and my eyes just popped at the multitude of living creatures. The shoreline is the most ferocious I could ever imagine. The rocks and white water just have to be seen to be believed.

I can quite believe the stories of the twenty or so wrecks along this coast.

Macquarie is noted for its kelp. The whole shoreline for about fifty or a hundred yards out to sea is a mass of living kelp. Not only is it anchored to rocks and alive, but the damn stuff looks alive in the frantic currents of white water. All day I was mesmerised by the swirls and whorls of the twenty- to fifty-yard-long strands of this rubber-like stuff as it drew patterns of unbelievable intricacy in the rising and falling, pushing and sucking monstrous power of the pounding seas.

Many of the sheer-sided cliffs are bare and have landslides of rubble spilling into the sea, and my loader tells me that rabbits are to blame. These latter were brought here by the sealers long ago for food. Now there are billions on the island and are ruining the vegetation.

This chap Bob, from the Agriculture Department, is a vermin control expert and he’ll be sharing our cabin for the voyage to Melbourne. He has guided me around all day and told me many of the old legends and stories of the island.

We had a film tonight and as I had little sleep last night and it’s now 11.15 I’ll down pen and leave space for more later.

Three days later I have pen again and am trying to remember some more experiences.

Part of our job at Macquarie was photography but the thousand-foot cloud and fantastic turbulence prevented that — as it did a magnetometer survey where a chopper tows a “bomb” behind, reading the magnetism of the rocks.

Another of our tasks was resupply to the east coast rest huts. We battled against the west coast wind but any attempt into the turbulence of the east coast would have been disastrous.

We flew around the bottom of the island to test the turbulence in view of a resupply at Hurd Point (five hundred thousand royal penguins breeding) around the bottom tip. I know that my machine was being pitched all over the sky and I could see Howard switching about like a streamer in a breeze, and we both high-tailed it out of there. Bob had never even been in a chopper before and though a very hardy, tough chap he was still very much afraid after that little trip.

The plateau has numerous lakes in its hollows, some as big as Albert Park Lake, and each of these is overflowing with rainwater and spilling down the valleys and cliffs to the sea.

I saw several waterfalls that defied nature.

They flowed up!

As the water cascaded over a cliff edge, the updraughts of this fifty-knot wind swept water and spray up to sixty to a hundred feet skywards and inland to fall in the lakes and be again overflowed. I didn’t get too close for photography lest I suffer the same fate.

Thousands of years of animal refuse, moss, sea spume and tumbled earth from the cliffs have formed a soggy, cushion-like layer of mire inshore from the beaches and below the cliffs in some places. Chaps have sunk up to their armpits in very innocent-looking golf-green-type flats. I landed the chopper on a relatively hard part of this stuff to go “exploring”. Bob advised on the touchdown area as he’d been there before. I wished to see a cave where three people had lived for three years after a shipwreck. A large rock protruded from this mire at Aurora Point and in it was a two-entrance cave. On closer examination I reckon I’d not last three days there, let alone longer.

My pictures should show so much that I cannot describe.

The turbulence ended our flying at about 2.00 pm.

In company with a dozen others I waited in the radio shack until 4.45 to make a phone call to Melbourne. 2.30 was the scheduled time. At last we couldn’t hold up any longer and I flew my machine on board the Thala Dan.

At five Sydney Radio came up — they’d been listening for three hours for Macquarie on the wrong frequency. As Howard remained ashore until my machine was shifted and tied down, he was able to make a phone call in the evening. I was cross at the waste of time, just sitting and waiting when I could have been snooping about.

What a God-forsaken place Macquarie appeared to us!

Bleak. Colourless. Cold, wet and very gusty.

Actually the colours in the vegetation are most startlingly green. However, we didn’t see any as the sun didn’t get through to show us. The locals said that “our” weather was surprisingly good. I’d hate to be there on a bad day!

Both choppers were fastened down on board before dinner and this precaution was taken lest the weather worsen overnight and we couldn’t get the choppers on if they’d been on land overnight.

The LARCs had to resupply one of the east shore coves for us and those who sailed as sightseers came back sodden to the skin. They threw their smelly clothes overboard rather than try to wash out the smell of Macquarie Island.

5th February 1972

What is a Wizzer?

In last week’s letter, Dad says “Received and sent a wizzer the afternoon.”

A wizzer was the nickname for a coded personal message sent between Antarctica and home. Messages were transmitted by Teleprinter over the HF radio communication system, a series of five-letter groups could be used in place of complete sentences.

A message might look like this:

WYNAN YIGUM YIKYR WYSWO, John

WYNAN = Glad to hear you are better

YIGUM = I have grown a beard which is awful

YIKYR = This place gives you a pain at times — but it’s worth it

WYSWO = Love and kisses

So a short string of seemingly meaningless letters, could carry news, reassurance, humour and affection across thousands of kilometres.

For the men in Antarctica and the families waiting at home, the wizzer was a small connection to the other world.

And perhaps appropriately, the code that gave wizzer its name - WYSSA - meant,

All my love darling.

Compiled from John’s letters and ANARE records.

From Memory — the personal reflections and remembered moments — has moved to its own home. It always felt like a different kind of writing, and it made sense to give it its own space.

If that’s the part of this you’ve been reading, you can find it and subscribe at frommemory.substack.com

Everything here continues as it was — conversations, letters from Antarctica, the rest of it.

Thanks for being here.

Anthony

My daughter asked me the other night -

Dad… did you ever get the strap at school?

Yes.

Often, as it turned out.

Usually for talking.

In an all boys school in the seventies, discipline came with a sound everyone recognised.

Not shouting.

Not a note home.

A sharp crack.

They called it the cuts.

The system was simple. You played up, you got caught, you stayed behind. The other kids filed out slowly, curious, relieved it wasn’t them.

The teacher opened a drawer.

Out came the strap.

You held out your hands, palms up. Pull away and you might get another one. So you stood there and took it.

I remember a maths teacher. Mr Chen.

Tall and thin. Quiet. The type of person you’d look at and think — he doesn’t have it in him.

That day he told me to hold out both hands.

Together.

In front of the class.

He swung hard.

Hard enough that he missed.

The strap caught both my wrists instead of my palms.

In an all boys school you don’t cry.

Crying is weakness.

Everyone is watching.

So you hold it together on the outside and do whatever you need to do on the inside.

I don’t remember what I’d done to deserve it.

What I remember is the after sting.

That was the worst part.

Not the crack — the slow burn that came after, running up both arms while you walked back to your seat trying to look like nothing had happened.

My daughter listened to all of this.

Then she said, that’s terrible, Dad.

She’s probably right.

From Memory

thepeopleyouknow.substack.com

They were written in 1972, in Antarctica.

Written by hand.

Written daily.

Written knowing there was no way to send them.

No post.

No call home.

No reply coming back.

Just writing.

They were written during an Australian resupply voyage — helicopters flying, cargo shifting, days shaped by ice, weather, and waiting.

At the end of each day, he sat down and tried to describe where he was.

And he did try.

He tried to describe Antarctica as a place of wonder.

The light.

The colour in the ice.

The scale of it — how it made ordinary words feel small.

At times, you can hear him reaching for language that might be enough, and finding that it isn’t.

He writes around the edges of it.

He compares.

He stops and starts.

Some things, he seems to realise, can only be pointed at.

That effort matters.

Because these letters weren’t written by a writer.

They were written by a working Australian man, trying to make sense of a place few people ever saw, using the only tools he had — observation and honesty.

Wonder sits beside routine.

One sentence will describe the ice stretching beyond the horizon.

The next will mention a job to be done, or a meal eaten, or the weather turning.

There is no separation between awe and work.

They coexist.

Danger appears, but it’s not dramatised.

Conditions are noted.

Then the writing moves on.

The letters progress one day at a time.

They were written inside the experience, not after it.

In 1972, writing was how you held onto time.

One day ended.

Another began.

There is no sense in the letters that they will be read decades later.

They weren’t written to last.

They were written to mark presence.

I was here.

This is what I saw.

This is what today felt like.

When the voyage ended, the letters came home with him.

They weren’t presented as something important.

They weren’t read out loud.

They were simply kept.

Folded.

Stored.

Left alone.

That’s often how the most truthful records survive.

What remains now is not a polished Antarctic account.

It’s a man, in 1972, standing at the edge of the world, trying — sometimes successfully, sometimes not — to put wonder into words.

And in doing so, leaving behind something far more valuable than he could have known.

From Memory

thepeopleyouknow.substack.com

On black-and-white televisions across Australia, a man with wild hair and an open necked shirt would step into frame and say,

“Why… is it so?”

Not as a joke.

Not as a trick.

As a genuine question.

His name was Julius Sumner Miller, and the program was called Why Is It So?.

He didn’t arrive with answers.

He arrived with objects.

A wheel.

A pendulum.

A ball on a string.

A piece of chalk.

A stick to tap things with.

And sometimes, an egg and a bottle.

He would peel the egg, hold it up for the camera, and drop it onto the mouth of the bottle.

It would sit there, stubborn and impossible.

Then he’d light a bit of paper, drop it inside, and place the egg back on top.

For a moment, nothing happened.

And then, slowly, the egg would slip inside the bottle as if pulled by an invisible hand.

He would look at it, tilt his head, and ask:

“Now… why is it so?”

In lounge rooms around the country, kids sat on the floor and stared at the screen.

Parents half-listened from the kitchen.

And for a few minutes, the house became a classroom without desks.

Not a classroom about rules.

A classroom about noticing.

Why did the egg go in?

Why didn’t it break?

Why did it move at all?

He didn’t say, because that’s the law.

He said, look again.

There was something unusual about that.

Most television told you what to think.

He asked you what you saw.

In a time before the internet, before answers were instant, he made a case for patience.

For watching.

For being bothered by small mysteries.

He treated curiosity as something respectable.

Not just for scientists.

For kids.

For ordinary people.

For anyone willing to look twice at the world they were standing in.

Somewhere along the way, a generation learned a quiet habit:

Don’t just accept what happens.

Ask what makes it happen.

Years later, people would forget the experiments.

They wouldn’t remember the pendulums or the wheels.

But they would remember the voice.

That question.

Why is it so?

And maybe, without knowing it, they carried it with them.

Into sheds.

Into homes.

Into kitchens.

Into stories.

Because sometimes the most important thing a teacher can give you

is not an answer…

…but a question you keep asking long after the television is turned off.

Why……is it so?

From Memory

thepeopleyouknow.substack.com

I land the helicopter in a paddock beside the road.

Grass bends flat under the skids.

Dust lifts — then settles.

The roof has already been cut off the car.

A sheet is being held up between the wreck and the onlookers.

Not to hide damage — but to give a little dignity to what’s left.

People stand behind it quietly.

Hands in pockets.

Arms folded.

Waiting.

Inside the car is a girl.

For a moment — just a moment — she looks like one of my daughters.

She isn’t.

But the thought arrives before logic can stop it.

And it stays.

The doctor steps down beside me.

We’ve flown together many times.

We don’t speak.

She moves ahead — quickly, calmly — into the space behind the sheet.

I watch her face before she says anything.

She looks back at me and shakes her head.

Once.

That’s enough.

A police officer walks toward the small crowd.

He isn’t scanning faces — he’s searching for someone.

He finds the girl’s mother, standing a few steps back, holding herself upright by force alone.

He tells her.

Her legs give way.

He catches her — but there’s no stopping the collapse that comes with that kind of knowing.

Someone helps.

They guide her forward, through the opening in the sheet.

The girl is on a stretcher now.

Inside the ambulance.

The mother falls across her —draped over what remains of a life she still expects to answer back.

Her grief is physical.

Loud — and silent — at the same time.

Nobody pulls her away.

No one rushes her.

This part isn’t timed.

Around them, people do their jobs.

Quietly.

Properly.

Without ceremony.

I stand where I’m needed.

Later, the helicopter lifts off again.

The paddock returns to being a paddock.

Cars start moving.

Someone folds the sheet.

Someone else looks at the road and shakes their head.

I fly home.

That night, one of my daughters rings me.

Or maybe she doesn’t.

Maybe I just check that she’s safe.

I can’t remember which.

Scenes like this stay with you.

Not because they’re dramatic — but because they’re ordinary.

And because, for a moment,

the line between their child

and yours disappears.

This is what rescue looks like.

This is what it costs.

And this is why some stories are carried quietly…

long after the noise has gone.

From Memory

The People We Meet

#77 Professor Ian Brighthope – Health, Autonomy, and the WA Secession Debate.

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#77 Professor Ian Brighthope – Health, Autonomy, and the WA Secession Debate.

Anthony Byrnes

Apr 14, 2026

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Professor Ian Brighthope has spent decades working in nutritional and environmental medicine in Australia.

We discuss his approach to health — his own practices, the protocols he uses, and how his thinking has developed over time. He reflects on his experience with a heart attack and his views on prevention, along with his perspective on the current global health landscape.

He also shares his interest in Western Australia seceding from the rest of the country.

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The People We Meet

Everyone you meet has a story.

Here you'll find Australian conversations that are simple, honest, and full of the surprising moments that make people unforgettable.

Everyone you meet has a story. Here you'll find Australian conversations that are simple, honest, and full of the surprising moments that make people unforgettable.

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There was a time in Australia when a young man’s future could depend on a wooden barrel full of birthdays.

Not exams.

Not applications.

Just luck.

If your date came out of the barrel, the letter would arrive soon enough.

And the letter meant one thing.

National Service.

They called it being a Nasho.

The system came in during the 1960s.

Every Australian man turning twenty had to register.

Then, a few times a year, the government held a ballot.

Inside a large barrel were small capsules — each one holding a date of the year.

January 3rd.

July 19th.

October 2nd.

Someone would reach in, pull one out, and read the date aloud.

If that was your birthday…

you were in.

Two years in the army.

And for many, a strong chance of going to Vietnam War.

Families listened to the ballot on the radio.

Sometimes it was shown on television.

You can imagine the moment.

A young bloke sitting at the kitchen table.

His mother pretending not to listen.

His father standing near the wireless.

The dates start being called.

March 12th.

September 4th.

June 28th.

Each one meaning that somewhere in Australia, another young man’s life had just changed direction.

Some men were proud to go.

Some felt it was simply their duty.

Others dreaded it.

And many never forgot the strange feeling of hearing their birthday spoken aloud like that.

A normal day.

Turned into a dividing line.

More than 60,000 Australian men were called up during those years.

About 15,000 served in Vietnam.

Some came home with stories.

Some came home quieter than they left.

And some never came home at all.

By the early 1970s the country had begun arguing with itself about the war, and about national service.

Marches filled the streets.

Families disagreed at dinner tables.

And in 1972, the newly elected government led by Gough Whitlam ended the system.

The birthday barrel was packed away.

The ballots stopped.

And Australia returned to an all-volunteer army.

But if you speak to men of a certain generation today, you’ll sometimes hear them say something simple.

“I was a Nasho.”

Or just as often —

“I missed it by one birthday.”

And that tells you everything about how it worked.

In those years, in Australia,

the difference between an ordinary life

and a soldier’s life

could come down to nothing more than

a hand reaching into a barrel

and pulling out your birthday.

From Memory

The other day my youngest daughter said something that stayed with me.

She said some of her friends envy me.

Not because of anything I’ve done.

But because I lived before the internet.

That made me stop for a moment.

Because if you grew up before the internet, life didn’t just look different.

It worked differently.

If you wanted to ring someone, you picked up the telephone that lived in the hallway or the kitchen. It had a cord attached to it, and the cord only stretched so far.

If someone else in the house was already using the phone, you waited.

If the person you wanted wasn’t home, that was simply the end of the call. You tried again later.

And if you were out somewhere and needed to ring home, you walked to a telephone box, dropped in twenty cents, and hoped the line connected.

If you needed to know something, you didn’t search for it.

You looked it up.

There were encyclopaedias sitting on a shelf at home, or you went to the local library where someone behind the desk helped you find the right book.

Sometimes the answer was there.

Sometimes it wasn’t.

And that was the end of it.

If you got lost while driving, you stopped the car, wound down the window, and asked someone nearby for directions.

They would think for a moment and say something like:

“Go down two streets, turn left at the service station, then right at the big gum tree.”

And you hoped you’d remembered it properly.

If you arranged to meet someone somewhere, you simply agreed on a place and a time.

“Outside the cinema at seven.”

And then you turned up.

There was no message to say you were running late.

No map showing where the other person was.

If they didn’t arrive, you waited.

Sometimes for quite a while.

Children lived in an even looser world.

You rode your bike out of the driveway in the morning and came home when the streetlights came on.

Your parents didn’t know exactly where you were.

And no one thought much about that.

If you wanted music, you turned on the radio.

If you wanted to hear a particular song again, you waited until it came back around.

Photographs were taken on film and disappeared into a little black canister until someone finished the roll and took it to be developed.

A week later you opened the envelope and discovered what the pictures looked like.

Watching a movie was different too.

If you wanted a film, you drove to the video shop.

Usually on a Friday night.

Rows of shelves held large plastic cases with the movie covers facing outward.

But the real system sat behind the covers.

If the film was available, the actual VHS cassette was sitting behind the counter.

If the cassette wasn’t there, it meant someone else had already rented it.

So you stood there staring at the empty space behind the cover thinking:

Someone’s got it.

Sometimes you put your name on a waiting list.

Sometimes you chose something else.

And sometimes you discovered a movie you had never heard of simply because it was the only one left.

Then you took the cassette home.

And before returning it the next day, you had to do one small but important thing.

You had to rewind it.

News travelled more slowly.

Letters took days.

Sometimes weeks.

And if you wrote to someone far away — perhaps working on a ship or a research station in Antarctica — you might wait a very long time for a reply.

Today the world works in a completely different way.

Every question has an immediate answer.

Every road has a digital map.

Every song ever recorded can be played instantly.

Every film ever made sits waiting on a streaming service.

You can talk to someone on the other side of the world at any moment.

You can carry more information in your pocket than entire libraries once held.

It is, in many ways, extraordinary.

But I think what those young people mean when they say they envy the world before the internet is something slightly different.

They’re not wishing the technology away.

They’re imagining what it might have felt like to live in a world where not everything was known immediately.

Where silence existed between questions and answers.

Where people disappeared for a few hours and nobody worried.

Where the day unfolded without constant messages arriving in your pocket.

It wasn’t a better world.

And it wasn’t a worse one.

It was simply a world where life moved a little more slowly…

and where not knowing something for a while was perfectly normal.

From Memory

These aren’t history stories.

They’re memory stories.

They’re not about famous Australians or people long gone — they’re about us. About ordinary rooms, ordinary evenings, ordinary habits that quietly shaped who we became.

Like when mum baked.

The kitchen was warm before it was busy. The radio was on low, or maybe just the sound of a clock ticking. Flour dusted the bench. The bowl was heavier than it looked. Children hovered — not helping, just being there. Fingers dipped into mixture when they thought no one was looking. Spoons were licked. Aprons wiped hands that didn’t need wiping.

Baking wasn’t a performance. It wasn’t shared. It wasn’t optimised.

It was presence.

Parents were there — not in a dramatic, heroic way — but in the steady way that mattered. They weren’t managing attention or documenting moments. They were simply in the same room, doing one thing at a time. Time moved at the pace of the oven, not the clock.

Nothing about it felt special then. That’s the trick.

The things that matter most rarely announce themselves.

These stories remind us that being together didn’t used to require effort or planning. It was built into the day. Built into the house. Built into the way life unfolded.

And maybe that’s why we need more of them now.

Not to shame the present.

Not to romanticise the past.

But to remember what closeness feels like, so we can recognise it when it appears again — in new forms, in new rooms, with new tools.

These are Australian stories because they happened everywhere — in weatherboard kitchens, brick veneers, farmhouses, Housing Trust homes, and suburban streets where the smell of baking drifted through flyscreens in the afternoon.

They belong to all of us.

And telling them isn’t looking backwards.

It’s quietly saying: this still matters.

From Memory.

Not as a hobby — but into inhospitable places where mistakes mattered.

Fuel mattered.

Weather mattered.

Time mattered.

Navigation wasn’t about knowing exactly where you were so much as knowing whether what you were seeing still made sense.

The compass was always on display.

You glanced at it constantly — not to obey it, but to stay oriented.

You checked the clock against the ground speed.

You checked the terrain against the map.

You looked outside.

Nothing was perfect.

But the relationships told the truth.

Then GPS arrived.

Suddenly navigation became easier. Faster. Cleaner. More precise.

And mostly, it was excellent.

But something else happened too.

People practised the old skills less.

Not immediately. Gradually.

The compass was still there — but it was consulted less often.

The clock mattered less.

The map became something you checked after something felt wrong.

Most navigation errors weren’t caused by the machine failing.

They were caused by unquestioned confidence in the output.

The danger was never the GPS.

The danger was when we stopped asking whether it still made sense.

The good pilots kept the old habits.

They used GPS — but they used it inside a larger system:

a glance outside,

a time check,

a constant awareness of where they should roughly be.

The machine made things easier.

The human remained the gross error check.

I think about that often when people talk about modern tools now.

The problem isn’t that machines are powerful.

It’s that they are confident.

And confidence, without context, can be persuasive.

Tools don’t destroy judgment.

Abandoning judgment does.

The safest systems I’ve ever been part of didn’t remove humans —

they made humans more responsible.

They assumed mistakes would happen.

They assumed inputs could be wrong.

They assumed reality would eventually disagree.

So they kept people thinking.

A compass doesn’t compete with a GPS.

It asks a different question.

And the moment you stop asking that question —

that’s when you get lost faster than ever before.

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Welcome to Australian Stories — a place where we retell the moments, people, and histories that shaped this country, one quiet step at a time.

Today’s episode is the story behind Vincent Lingiari, the Wave Hill Walk-Off, and the extraordinary moment when Gough Whitlam poured sand into Vincent’s hand.
It’s a story of patience, dignity, injustice, and a community that refused to disappear.

This story begins the way many Australian stories do…
with a quiet man, standing on his own country…
and a song that helped the rest of us finally understand what happened there.

From Little Things Big Things Grow is the melody —
but behind it is the life of Vincent Lingiari,
and a battle that took almost a decade…
for something as simple, and as powerful,
as belonging.

Vincent was a Gurindji man, born on Wave Hill Station in the Northern Territory —
a massive cattle empire run by one of the richest families in England:
the Vestey family, headed by Lord William Vestey.

It’s important to understand this part,
because this is the world Vincent grew up in.

Wave Hill wasn’t just a cattle station.
It was a place where Aboriginal workers lived under laws and conditions that today we would call oppression.

They were paid little or no wages.
They were restricted in movement.
Families could be separated at the whim of the station.
And the Vestey operation — with its global wealth and political influence —
benefited enormously from this system.

Lord Vestey lived in absolute luxury on the other side of the world,
while Aboriginal stockmen — men who kept his empire running —
worked sunup to sundown for scraps.
Not money.
Rations.

This wasn’t just inequality.
It was a structure designed to keep Aboriginal people powerless on their own land.

Vincent worked these cattle most of his life.
He was quiet… steady… respected.
The kind of man who spoke only when it mattered.

By the 1960s, the world was shifting — civil rights overseas, new conversations here at home —
and Vincent felt something change.

He realised the fight wasn’t just about pay.
It was about country.

The Gurindji wanted the right to live on their own land, their way,
without asking permission from Lord Vestey or anyone else.

In August 1966, Vincent led his people in what became known as the Wave Hill Walk-Off.

Ten kilometres down the track…
to a place called Daguragu.

What the world saw as a strike
was actually the beginning of a land rights movement.
A stand against a global corporation that had grown rich from Aboriginal labour
while Aboriginal people remained poor.

Vincent said, very simply:
“We want to live on our land, our way.”

And so the Gurindji stayed at Daguragu.

Not for weeks.
Not for months.
For nine years.

Nine years of pressure, meetings, media, government inquiries, supporters from across Australia…
and a slow awakening that maybe, just maybe,
Lord Vestey’s empire had been built on something deeply unjust.

Paul Kelly and Kev Carmody say it best:

“Power and privilege cannot move a people
who know where they stand
and stand in the law.”

Then, in 1975, something remarkable happened.

Prime Minister Gough Whitlam flew into the Territory.
He walked across the red dirt toward Vincent.

And with the cameras rolling,
he bent down… picked up a handful of sand…
and poured it into Vincent’s hand.

That moment changed Australia.

Whitlam said:

“Vincent Lingiari, I solemnly hand to you these deeds as proof, in Australian law,
that these lands belong to the Gurindji people.”

Vincent looked at the sand running through his fingers and said quietly:
“We are all mates now.”

This story isn’t just about two men shaking hands.
It’s about a community with the patience of the land itself.
A man who refused to bow to wealth, power, or a system built to keep him down.
And a song that reminds us that justice often begins with one small step…
taken by someone who knows exactly where they stand.

From little things…
big things grow.

Listen to “From Little Things Big Things Grow” (Spotify)

Where will all of this live in 20, 30, or 50 years?

That question led me to the next step in this project:

I’ve now set up a Web3 home for The People We Meet using Paragraph, a decentralised publishing platform built on new internet technology.

Web3 is basically the next evolution of the internet — one where creators own their work outright, and where stories can live online permanently without relying on one company or one website to keep them alive.

Here’s what that actually means in simple terms:

• Decentralised storage (content isn’t on one server)

Instead of storing your work on a single company’s servers, Web3 publishing spreads it across a network of computers around the world.

That means:

no disappearing posts, no “account suspended,” no platform changing the rules and removing half your archive.

• No algorithms deciding who sees your work

Most of today’s platforms run on algorithms — if they like you, you’re shown; if they don’t, you disappear.

Web3 is different. It’s people-driven, community-driven, not algorithm-driven.

• Your stories become portable

In Web2, you publish somewhere and you’re stuck there.

In Web3, your work can move freely between platforms without losing followers or ownership.

• No more platform lock-in

Spotify owns Spotify.

Substack owns Substack.

Facebook owns Facebook.

But on Web3, you own your identity, and your audience isn’t controlled by anyone else’s company.

• Optional collectors — not subscribers

Some listeners in Web3 like to “collect” an episode or a piece of writing, a bit like digital vinyl.

This part is optional, but it opens up a new way for listeners to support creators directly.

• Future-proofing long-form human storytelling

The stories we record today shouldn’t vanish because a platform shuts down in 10 years’ time.

Web3 lets me create a version of The People We Meet that will last — and that’s important to me as I think about the next generation who might one day stumble across these conversations.

⸻

I’ll continue posting everything right here on Substack as always — this is still the main home.

But now there’s also a Web3 Edition, running in parallel, quietly archiving it all in a way that feels built for the long-term.

If you’re curious, you can visit the Web3 edition here:

https://paragraph.com/@thepeoplewemeet