00:00 In the rich red sands of the central desert, Christine Michaels reads the stories of her country.
00:08 This is the big man, the Bilby Tracker.
00:11 Christine is a Kuyu Pongu, a master tracker.
00:14 Her ancestors have tracked and hunted for millennia, and she wants to keep that legacy alive.
00:20 It makes me proud to pass on knowledge.
00:24 But there's fears many young people today are too busy to learn the Yapa way.
00:28 And if nothing changes, this ancient knowledge could die out.
00:33 If it fades away, if it goes away, we'll lose all our knowledge.
00:37 And if we lose all our old people, everything's gone.
00:41 But a new project, Yatake Mani, or Reading the Country, is working to fast-track learning for the next generation.
00:48 A collaboration between the Central Land Council and master trackers,
00:52 it's distilled generations of knowledge into an intensive teaching program.
00:57 It's everything from, you know, simply what does the track look like,
01:01 all the way through to what kinds of sounds does it make when it moves through grass in the wet season.
01:07 Master tracker Jerry Jungla was born out bush and learnt to live off the land as a boy.
01:13 But times are changing, and he says teaching needs to change too.
01:17 New way now, a little bit different way now.
01:21 The program is already being taken for a test drive,
01:24 with Pintipi elders and rangers gathering at New Haven Wildlife Sanctuary
01:29 to take part in a workshop with Kuyu Pungu.
01:32 Feel happy, feel good, learn more about tracking.
01:36 It's hoped these will be the first of many communities to use this resource,
01:41 ensuring ancient knowledge is kept alive.
01:44 We want to keep our culture strong and keep on going, teaching our young people.
01:50 Knowledge from the past continued into the future.
01:54 [BLANK_AUDIO]
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