Indigenous knowledge systems and Irish Mythology with Tyson Yunkaporta
episodePreviously titled “Indigenous Australian knowledge systems and Irish Mythology with Tyson Yunkaporta” — renamed by the publisher on Aug 5, 2026
Transcript
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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.
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... was colonized by the British so we have a crack off the Brits quite a bit and if you are a person living on the island known as Britain or identify as British When you hear me saying the Brits, the Brits, the Brits, the Brits, and this is any time I'm talking about the Brits, I'm never speaking about people. I'm never speaking about the people of Britain, especially the working class people of Britain. When I say the Brits, what I'm referring to is British colonisation, the system of power, the violent imperial capitalism that justified its expansion using racism.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–0:32
2
What is the main focus of Tyson Yunkaporta's work?
0:32–7:03
3
How does Indigenous Australian oral culture relate to geological history?
7:03–15:45
4
What similarities exist between Irish mythology and Indigenous Australian stories?
15:45–17:10
5
How does colonization impact Indigenous narratives?
17:10–33:07
6
What role do neurodivergent individuals play in cultural narratives?
33:07–34:50
7
What is the significance of 'Dreamtime' in Aboriginal culture?
34:50–54:09
8
How do Indigenous perspectives view time and space?
54:09–1:25:17
Speakers
4 identifiedMore from The Blindboy Podcast
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