The Blindboy Podcast
Indigenous Australian knowledge systems and Irish Mythology with Tyson Yunkaporta
10 Jun 2026
Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Tend to the veranda, you henpecked brendas. Welcome to the Blind Boy Podcast. If this is your first podcast, consider going back to an earlier episode. And if you're a regular listener, you know the craic. I want to begin by thanking all the podcast listeners down in Australia and New Zealand for getting tickets to my tour in April 27.
I only announced it last week and already the Sydney Opera House is nearly half sold.
Chapter 2: What is the main focus of Tyson Yunkaporta's work?
Which is mad and I should have booked more fucking dates. But these things are very difficult to predict. And again, if you'd have said to me a couple of months ago, you need to book a bigger Australia and New Zealand tour, I'd have said, no, that'd be ridiculous. Why would I do that? But anyway, thank you so much. I really wasn't expecting half the tickets to be gone in a week.
So this week's podcast is... It's going to be a little thank you. I'm going to be releasing an episode that I had sitting in the vaults for more than a year. It's a chat I had with an incredibly fascinating person called Tyson Yunkaporta. And Tyson is an academic and a writer. He's an Indigenous Australian, an Aboriginal person, whose work centres around Indigenous knowledge systems.
The Aboriginal people of Australia have an unbroken oral culture. There are stories that describe geological shifts. Stories that might describe an island that you could once walk to on foot but that was so long ago that the sea levels have risen since and that pathway doesn't exist anymore. And in Ireland we look to
We look to Aboriginal oral storytelling to try and understand how we would have told our Indigenous mythology before writing arrived. So the person who put me in contact with Tyson was Mancon Magan, the dearly departed Mancon Magan, who was a good friend of mine, who died earlier this year. And Mancon did a lot of work with Indigenous Australian people.
sharing stories and spending time out in the bush. And I think Man Con is the reason that I have Indigenous Australian listeners, because he used to tell them. He told me he used to recommend my podcast wherever he went around the world. And one of the people who he spoke about me to was Tyson Yunkaporta.
And Man Con said to me, if you go to fucking Australia, you have to chat with my friend Tyson. You have to have a chat together. Because the two of you would have mad crack. And he was right. And it was Man Con who set up this talk between the two of us. And this chat took place. Or this yarn. As Tyson would call it. This took place in, I think it was fucking 2024.
If not 2024, when the fuck was I in Australia? April 2025. And this was in the Palais Theatre. And Tyson has a book as well called Sand Talk, How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World. And I strongly recommend that you get it because it's fascinating. It explores concepts in Aboriginal culture, such as the Dreamtime and songlines, which
They're hard to, difficult to understand with the limitations of the English language and a culture based around linear time. And I tried to access these ideas through Irish mythology, through the other world. So me and Tyson had this chat. About the similarities between Irish myth and Indigenous Australian myth. And I think you're going to love it.
And this is... It's a special gift to my listeners in Australia and New Zealand. But if you're not from fucking Australia and New Zealand, you're still going to enjoy it. And just a little disclaimer too. Because me and Tyson speak about colonisation, the land that we now call Australia...
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Chapter 3: How does Indigenous Australian oral culture relate to geological history?
Well, that's just, you know, you kind of pick up the language.
So I'm coming at this I'm very curious about Aboriginal, I don't know what to call them, belief systems. I'm very curious, but I know fuck all. And also I just didn't want to go reading. Like I tried reading about the Dreamtime and then it's like some English fellas writing about us. And I just felt, no, I'm not going to read a brace. In the same way that's... Jesus Christ, listen.
I've read British people talking about Irish mythology and it's like, will you sit down and be quiet? No, they don't get it.
That's it. They know more about Irish hair. They tease you about your hair.
They do. They tease us about our hair and the way that we say 33 in a turd.
Yeah.
What is the dream? I know, you can't resist that. It is pretty funny. It's like when I was down at fucking New Zealand and I couldn't bring up the video game Red Dead Redemption in case they said Red Dead Redemption. What is the dream time?
It's the same everywhere. Anybody who's still got that culture of the land and the law, we're all in that same dreaming. Everything is just those flows, those sacred flows in the land, and you follow that law. You know, that's it. And it's just what goes through you.
Everything in what they call dreaming, now it's like everything that's ever been or ever will be in creation exists there and has always existed timeless in the forms, their potentialities, you know, their way to be born through. And sometimes they go back down like dinosaurs and shit.
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Chapter 4: What similarities exist between Irish mythology and Indigenous Australian stories?
Us too as a pronoun. Yeah, yeah, us too.
Is that the English, us too? Well, us too, it's like slowly going to happen here. And that's what happened when the first Irishman stepped off on the beach. And the British were fucking around with their muskets and shit and putting people in chains and abducting people. And like, yeah, you're walking up and going, hey, how's yourself? Like, whatever, you know. And yeah, we recognize each other.
So, you know, we started to come into relation. But yeah, there's protocols and there's ways of coming into relation. You get that. because, you know, you were bringing your own language and place and law, and you understood us, you know, and you had that same extended kin feeling.
And you also understood that diplomatic relations are best achieved and most swiftly through a bit of good old Royden. Mm-hmm. Yeah. So he was Royden, like good and hard right from the start, you know. I understand. So the best way for, like, you know, we're slowly coming in and building, and us too here, but it would be quicker if you just hooked up with my sister.
Then I'm just like, hey, you're my brother. English, different way. They'd be like, oh, don't you fucking look at my... Oh, that's the northern ones. They weren't so bad.
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Chapter 5: How does colonization impact Indigenous narratives?
Yeah, get your filthy heathen eyes away from the ladies.
Yeah.
The other thing as well is the Irish that would have been arriving here in the 1800s, they would not be able to write because those Irish Catholics, the penal laws was happening in Ireland at the time. So those people, they legally, they couldn't practice their religion. They couldn't own property. They couldn't own a horse. They couldn't vote. And they could not write.
Deliberately, they couldn't have access. Those people, they received an education, but in what we called hedge schools. So there were illegal schools that happened in hedges with teachers that were illegal priests. And this would happen around a mass rock, which is a big rock that's often beside what you'd call a pagan holy well, which was a way to enter the other world.
But when the penal laws came in and we couldn't practice Catholicism, we returned back to the indigenous religion. So now this mass rock that has a little well beside it, that's where you're doing illegal mass and it's where you have an illegal school as well. And the Irish language was completely illegal. So the Irish that would have come here, they would have been full oral culture.
They would have been oral culture and... In a strange way, by about the 1800s, the Irish had become a little bit decolonized because they weren't allowed to read and write. And we returned to something that was pre-Christian and created a new thing.
And I don't know, it's hard to understand what it was like in the 1800s, but you'd have to imagine that that's definitely assisted in a kinship between Aboriginal people and Irish people. It's just... Oh yeah, our culture, okay.
You know? Yeah, completely. And even your big worm things you've got there, the big serpent things. The paste, yeah. We've connected a lot. We've got embassy with Ireland going on here and we connected a lot through that serpent law. Same one, you know, protecting the waterways and Um, and always connected to women like really strongly. Yeah.
So it's, you know, this big serpent, you know, when the, they tried to stab the hag and they got her in the thigh and the big snake come out and ripped everything up and, you know, and all those places. And then the wells where they go through, you, you got those, uh, rituals you do seasonally when the eels come through, because it's that form of that snake in that place. Otherworld.
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Chapter 6: What role do neurodivergent individuals play in cultural narratives?
And we were trying to get the land pregnant with the sun on the 21st. And that was the purpose of that. And they also believed that Kings in Ireland, pre-Christian kings, they were married to the land goddess. Right. And the job of that king was to get the land pregnant. And St. Patrick writes in his Confession, so St.
Patrick's Confession from the 5th century, it's the first piece of writing in Ireland ever, and it's Patrick talking about what Ireland was like. And one thing that Patrick mentions is... The handshake in ancient Ireland was one man would suck another man's tit. So the king, a man of higher status, if a man of lower status came along, it's just suck my tit. And Patrick mentions this.
But when we find bog bodies, so bog bodies are bodies that have been ritualistically killed maybe four or 5,000 years ago, they all have their nipples chopped off. So they reckon that these bog bodies, they're all definitely wealthy people because some of them have like hair gel in their hair and it comes from Spain. So if you're getting that 5,000 years ago, you've got a couple of quid.
But the nipples being cut off, what we have to guess is that these kings failed to fuck the land and get it pregnant. So if there was a bit of a famine or a bad crop, it's like, you fucking, you didn't ride the land correctly. You didn't get her pregnant. We need a new one.
It's the other way as well, because if you've got kings, then you've got a patriarchy there. And we've got matrilineal and patrilineal.
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Chapter 7: What is the significance of 'Dreamtime' in Aboriginal culture?
See, we don't know that. We're guessing.
In Australia, this is the clue. This is why we've got a yarn, because this is where we piece things back together. so down south here, it's all matrilineal cultures, you know, and it's the women keep the bloodline, and they speak for things, you know. My mob, other way, yeah, so the patrilineal ones, you know, we're not,
so much into the bloodlines thing we'll just bring anyone in you know um you know so we've got it kind of got that um advantage which i don't know kind of helps with culture and stuff like that um but women preserve things right but but if you are if you're gonna rule i mean in the land is, I mean, it's woman, you know, like women, the sacred feminine, all that kind of stuff.
It's just like, like you have to be female to, to be like, you know, for the bloodline to follow you, you know, or for the, you know, to have a patriarchal culture, you have to you have to become woman ritually. And so we got a lot of trans stuff happening, you know, in the old way rituals. They're the ones that got beaten out of us first. Really? Yeah, yeah.
That was the first thing was like, hang on, these women over here, they're dancing with these big strap-on wooden dildos. That's got to stop. We'd cut those dildos off. And, you know, yeah, and a lot of men, you know, like rites of passage stuff with men like ritually birthing, like the young men. And we also, we got, so in my mob, us men, we've got spirit, we've got wounds.
We've got spirit wounds and we have spirit children because otherwise we wouldn't be able to be a patrilineal culture, you know. So that's what's happening with those men, I reckon, in the story you're telling, is that they are actually spiritually nourishing with milk and doing a nurturing thing. Because I can't make sense of the nipple.
I can't make sense of it. I can't.
If somebody went, like, leaned too heavy into the big Celtic bollocks side of things and got a bit, you know, like, I don't know, a bit rapey with the land or whatever, then probably you're going to cut his tits off and bury him in the mud. Yeah.
We had... We had a kind of a gender fluidity too, which it lasted up until the 1930s. You ever heard of poutine? So poutine is... Is that Japanese?
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Chapter 8: How do Indigenous perspectives view time and space?
And so that's the one who'd done the wrong thing in the first place, and that's the victim, both. It doesn't matter if one's big, one's small. It doesn't matter. Fair fight. Fair fight. You get in there, and you do your best, and you throw your best punches. Ah, Joe Rogan, man, and all them MMA pricks. Every fight ends up on the ground. Every fight, you've got to have good ground.
No, fucking every fight. No, someone falls down, like, leave them. What are you on top of me for? Get off me! We're supposed to be fighting. You're lying on me? Jesus Christ. You knock someone down, that's it. You wait until they get up and then you punch on again. It's pretty basic rules.
Was this something which was like, this is part of Aboriginal culture and now all of a sudden you've got colonizers with their police saying, that's public fighting, that's wrong.
There's a hundred people standing around yelling and, you know, a couple of sets of fighters going to it. Oh, it's a fucking riot. It's a riot, you know. Next day, Cairns Post, riot in Arrokoon. It's not a riot, man. Like, we're just sorting some shit out. Something it reminded me of. It's a riot when we then go to the police station and start throwing rocks at it.
You know, every time, yeah, you want to turn it like proper violent and ugly, like come in, do the siren, flash the lights, see what happens. That's when it kicks off bad. Yeah. So, but that happens everywhere. Police arrive, things get nasty. Absolutely. Yeah.
This is the fascist turn when like the oppressors like start to paint themselves as being oppressed by the minorities that they're killing, you know? That's the fascist turn. That's when you know it's getting bad. And that's why I'm saying punch Nazis.
In Ireland at the moment, we're dealing with what they've done in Ireland, which is so fucking frustrating, right? So we have immigrants in Ireland. These are very poor people from Afghanistan, from Syria. And Irish racists are waving... The thing with Irish nationalism, and this is what I love about Irish nationalism... Our nationalism is never we are better than you so we should take over.
Our nationalism has always been can we just please survive? Can we just be ourselves? Can we have our language, our culture? That's what our nationalism is. For the first time we're seeing people taking our nationalism and they're saying we're being invaded again. They're equating Syrian and Afghani refugees with the fucking Brits.
Yeah. But then using their own history of colonization and oppression as a kind of get-out-of-jail-free card. There's that too, yeah. It should be, as you say, it should be a source of common struggle and a bond between people to come together. Yeah. But it's been twisted the other way.
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