Leadership Legacy

Foreword

Tyson Yunkaporta: Aboriginal man from the Apalech Clan of Far Northern Queensland, Australia, scholar and founder of the Indigenous Knowledge Systems (IKS) Research Centre at Deakin University in Melbourne.

Adah and I have a lot in common. We share a similar profile of age, neurological condition, marginal ethnic status, and our exotic niche in the marketplace of ideas. But reality is not a dating app, so these banal categories for relational compatibility are not what connects us. As trickster spirits in a timeless cloud of potentialities, we are entangled in a field of creation that no code can crack.

As such, we trouble the discrete boundaries of identity, modernity, and nature, populating fences and walls with vines, insects, the excreta of birds, and the furtive encounters of dealers and lovers and graffiti artists. Here, initiates are marked with the scarification of razor wire and the teeth of dogs, limbs enhanced by crystal shards of broken glass, and organs augmented with injections of steel and implants of lead. We dance and dream and make our tools in the spaces that people seek to define as ‘emergent’ and try to map as ‘complexity’. Here, the crowns of trauma, swords of identity, and thrones of lived experience are melted down and recast to make tools of beauty and occluded purpose.

Us-two belong to an elusive tribe of itinerant knowledge-keepers, fools, and tricksters, engaged in kriolising colonisers, rather than decolonising ourselves. We write texts ...