Great Southern voices with big ideas on world stage after inaugural TEDxKinjarling event

Albany Town Hall was abuzz with big ideas on Saturday when nine speakers from across the Great Southern took to the stage for the inaugural TEDxKinjarling event.

Based on globally successful TED Talks, the TEDxKinjarling event broadcast the voices of the Great Southern to the world, with the talks to be included in TED’s global online network.

Menang Gnudju elder Carol Pettersen and artist Ben Beeton opened the day, taking the crowd deep into the cultural and scientific inspirations behind their ambitious Genestream project to connect the first steps and song lines of Australia’s First Nations people in a national art trail.

Great Southern Grammar teacher Kieran Bailey opened up about his experience connecting with students with autism spectrum disorder using game-based learning.

Kendenup farmer Penny Goodwin shared her path to sustainability. Denmark writer Martha Barnard-Rae and Pivot Support Services chief executive Ian Neil also took to the stage.

The Albany Shantymen founder Gary Greenwald explored the mental health benefits for men of shanty singing through his experience as a specialised mental health nurse.

He spoke of its ability to connect history with local stories and to get men to open up, before ending his speech by getting the crowd on their feet and singing.

“Shanty songs enable people to express emotion. Men feel all the same emotions as women but conditioning from early childhood is a barrier to expression that many never overcome,” he said.

“It is a powerful tool to pull people out of social isolation. Shanty singing resonates with us because it speaks to the hero and the adventurer in all of us.”

UWA Conservation biologist Dr Alison Lullfitz and Mirninger artist and consultant Shandell Cummings shared their work in connecting First Nations knowledge and western science to protect the south coast’s ancient and vulnerable native species.

Dr Lullfitz said in the South West of WA there were an extraordinary number of plants that exist nowhere else in the world.

“It is like a Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory in the plant world, full of botanical marvels,” she said.

But the downside of being a biodiversity hotspot meant many species were under threat, she said.

Ms Cummings shared how sharing her cultural knowledge of the land was paramount to the sustainability of the land.

“We have a knowledge system that has been built over thousands of years and we genuinely want to teach that to others,” she said.

“For us this is a lifelong learning process and it continues until this very day and will beyond.

“Western Science usually refers to it as intergenerational knowledge transfers.

“For us it is an orally communicated system that has been built over 70,000 years of my family living as part of this country.

“Everything for us is interconnected, so Boodja, our culture and our complex kinship systems — these are critical to the way we look after our country.”