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ANGE:

From Schwartz Media, I’m Ange McCormack, this is 7am.

Australia is home to some of the hottest towns in the whole world.

In the Northern Territory, remote communities with large Indigenous populations know how to live in extreme heat.

But, even they say they’re seeing the climate change before their eyes, making their homes less and less liveable.

So, what lessons can First Nations people impart about surviving the heat? And, could the secret to adapting to climate change be simpler than we thought?

Today, contributor to The Saturday Paper, Dechlan Brennan, on how Indigenous resilience and cultural knowledge can help us cope in a climate crisis.

It’s Thursday, August 24.

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ANGE:

Dechlan, you've been speaking to people who are living in some of the hottest places in Australia. Can you give me an idea of how extreme conditions have changed and how extreme they've become in the Northern Territory?

Dechlan:

So I talked to a gentleman, a Warumungu elder called Norman Frank Jupurrurla, and he gave a really vivid description of the heat that sometimes you would be walking and you would feel sticks at your feet.

Archival tape -- Norman Frank Jupurrurla:

“I walked up the street one day and the sole was coming out of my boot. I just couldn't walk anymore. My boots were all melted...”

Dechlan:

And one of the stories that really impacted me was, driving into Tennant Creek, the traditional smell was cooking kangaroos, and that's not there anymore.

Archival tape -- Norman Frank Jupurrurla:

“Now we go out bush, we don't see a kangaroo, not even one hopping around now, because the climate has been killing all our kangaroos and they’re all going somewhere. I don't know where they're going, but there's not even a track up there…”

Dechlan:

And from my discussions with First Nations people and people who are familiar with Tennant Creek, there was a belief that kangaroos could never die of thirst because there was always watering holes available for them, and they're dying and there's trees that are burning and dying that have provided shade for people during the hottest part of the day, and they're not there anymore.

Tennant Creek has a very small population. It's less than 4,000 people, about 50% First Nations people. It suffers quite large levels of poverty. Power costs are very, very high and a lot of the houses are not built for the climate. They're built with concrete walls or brick walls. They’re hot boxes. One of the people who lives there told me that in winter it's freezing because there's no insulation, and in summer it's a hot box. You have to sit outside.

ANGE:

And from a scientific standpoint, how hot can the days get and how many hot days a year are we seeing out there?

Dechlan:

So if we look at north of Tennant Creek, look at a place called Katherine, which is about 320 kilometres south of Darwin, that averages about six days over 40 degrees a year. In 2019, they got 54. Which is, you know, a ridiculous number.

ANGE:

Yeah, that's huge. So what kind of impact does that extreme weather have on a community?

Dechlan:

From October, for example, in Katherine, they have a thing called the build up, which perhaps Westerners may know as ‘going troppo’ or ‘mango madness’. And the heat is just so oppressive that we see rates of domestic violence going up. We see rates of sexual violence going up and we see appearances at hospital from heat related diseases going up considerably. And this season now is getting longer and it's getting more intense. And the off season, which would be where some businesses or some things like construction want to work longer or do a lot of their work, that's now minimising because the ‘mango madness’ season is getting longer.

ANGE:

And Dechlan, with more extreme weather on the rise, we know that these conditions are going to get worse, not better. How are these issues being addressed on a day to day level and how are they being studied?

Dechlan:

The study that I've been looking at is a study in The Lancet, which was authored by Dr. Simon Quilty from the Australian National University, and he has spent a considerable amount of time in the Northern Territory as a GP, worked in Alice Springs.

He worked in Katherine for quite an extensive period of time in some other smaller areas.

Archival tape -- Simon Quilty:

“Well, I guess I grew up in Sydney and moved to the Northern Territory as a junior doctor. And what's been really clear over the last 20 years is it's definitely getting hotter. We're now at the point of experiencing threshold temperatures that kill biological entities and that includes human beings. And there was a complete deficit in the Northern Territory of anybody taking any notice of it.”

Dechlan:

And he's been looking at the heat mortality rates of comparison between Indigenous people and non-Indigenous people. And Dr Quilty and his team looked at 32,0000 deaths between 1980 and 2019.

Archival tape -- Simon Quilty:

“And so the first finding was that the whole population is becoming more vulnerable to heat over time and not less. And that is despite this overarching increasing access to more air conditioned spaces.”

ANGE:

And can you talk to me a bit about air conditioning and what Dr. Quilty's research found about that? Because it's often, you know, it's seen as I guess, a solution you know, the temperatures and the climate is getting hotter, put in some air conditioning to help cool us. Can you explain what Dr. Quilty found about the benefits and drawbacks of cooling via air conditioning?

Dechlan:

So the study doesn't bag out air conditioning in any way. But what it does is it says that I think there's a massive reliance in Western society for technology to be the saviour for us all.

And Dr. Quilty was chatting to me and he was saying that, you know, even the the setting that we put on air conditioning at 21, 22 degrees is based on a really outdated model and we should be sitting at 26, 27 degrees and making us more, not adept but sort of being able to sort of be used to that outside and inside environment.

Archival tape -- Simon Quilty:

“And so we hypothesise that air conditioned spaces is actually preventing people's bodies from acclimatising to the heat. We know that a body takes about 15 days to acclimatise to the heat. If you spend all of your life inside an air conditioned space, your body simply doesn't acclimatise. And more than that…”

Dechlan:

But then at a macro level, when we look at medical issues, people are not being able to adapt to the heat when they're spending so much time in colder climates or colder insides. And it becomes very, very difficult, especially for people who are slightly older, I think.

Archival tape -- Simon:

“So the second finding that we had was that Aboriginal people were less vulnerable to heat than non-Aboriginal people, which was really startling when you consider that all of the health conditions that affect Aboriginal people are really because of housing.”

Dechlan:

Which shows that there is an ability of people like First Nations people to survive the heat at a better rate than people who've maybe been inundated with air conditioning.

Archival tape -- Simon Quilty:

“..and so our hypothesis is that culture is what's protecting Aboriginal people and it is extraordinarily rich.”

Dechlan:

I think the research finds just the incredible resilience of First Nations people in some of the harshest climates in the world. And non-Indigenous communities have so much to learn from that.

ANGE:

Coming up after the break, how a simple daily activity could be the answer to adapting to extreme heat.

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ANGE:

Dechlan, we've been talking about this new research into heat related mortality in remote areas of Australia. And there's this finding that technology, you know, air conditioning and cooling might not be the answer. What are Indigenous communities doing that protects them from the heat?

Dechlan:

When I spoke to Norman Frank, he explained to me this idea of Gwarda, which is listening, or in his language, he said it's a direct correlation to ears. And it's about listening and seeing and watching. And understanding how people deal with the environment that they are in. And I think that's just something that I don't think a lot of us really do.

Archival tape -- Norman Frank Jupurrurla:

“And Gwarda is something like, people don't listen. In my way, we say, you got no ears. It's like we’re trying to tell you something, you go through one ear, you come out the other ear. He's like, He's mad. He's not listening.

Dechlan:

In Indigenous communities in general, there's just an understanding that climate and the weather is the main, is the boss.

Archival tape -- Norman Frank Jupurrurla:

“Do you want to destroy your brain in that heat or you stay in the shade? That's Gwarda. You know, it’s just saying you want to listen to yourself or you want to destroy yourself?”

Dechlan:

And you've got to listen to that and you've got to adapt to that because you can't dominate it.

One of the most notorious in a way is having a nap in the middle of the day. And that doesn't necessarily mean sleeping per se, but staying out of the heat in the middle of the day. And it makes perfect sense if you think about the hottest part of the day is between 11 and two or 11 and three. Why would you go out in the sun and deal with that?

Archival tape -- Norman Frank Jupurrurla:

“If we need to go hunting, we'll go hunting, you know, the late afternoon or early hours in the morning or we’ll wait for winter if we want to go way out in the desert. We wait for winter. We'll walk out there wintertime so it'll be nice and cool and, summer it'll be too hot and dry. You can’t walk out there, no way.”

ANGE:

And this idea of Gwarda, which is obviously at front of mind for indigenous communities, is that something that researchers agree with as an effective solution for managing extreme heat?

Dechlan:

I think that from my reading and the people I've talked to, one of the biggest issues around climate change management in Australia or building or anything like that is a lack of consultation with First Nations people throughout the country and also overseas with other indigenous cultures. People look at these incredible cultures that have survived thousands and thousands of years. And there's a reason that has happened. Of course you can't disregard technology, but there needs to be a conscious effort to discuss and utilise indigenous knowledge, which is vastly more informed than anything we can offer. Like anything, if you've been somewhere for a much longer period of time. Of course, that's the opinion that you should utilise. And I don't think people do that enough.

ANGE:

And Dechlan, with the world heating up and places like the Northern Territory becoming more inhospitable, what are some other suggestions of what we can do about it?

Dechlan:

Yeah, I definitely think housing that's much more adept to the heat. Much more we need to do about insulation. I know Norman Frank has talked about solar panels in a previous discussion. That's a really important thing. But building and adapting to the heat by utilising local knowledge and trying to combine those two things to best survive because at the moment it almost feels that despite all the recognition of climate change being the apocalypse we are going to face, we are acknowledging and then ignoring so much advice on how to survive it. We acknowledge that it exists and we acknowledge we've got to change with things like greenhouse gases and cutting back on fuels. But then we're building things that are sort of…Norman Frank said houses that are built for Yorkshire as opposed to Tennant Creek, you know.

And I'm not a builder and I'm not an engineer, but I've talked to plenty of experts, and they say that if you do not embrace indigenous knowledge for these areas, more people will die because, as Dr. Quilty said, this is, the heat at the moment is an ecological disaster. And that's not going to get better by ignoring people who've been experiencing it the most.

ANGE:

Dechlan, thanks so much for your time today.

Dechlan:

Thank you very much.

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ANGE:

Also in the news today…

Emergency Authorities say almost the entire country can expect drier and warmer conditions this spring, with an increased risk of bushfires in large parts of Australia.

Residents in large areas of the Northern Territory, Queensland and New South Wales, as well as some parts of Victoria and South Australia, have been put on high alert.

And

There are concerns the Murray-Darling could soon run dry with another drought expected to impact eastern Australia in the near future.

Federal Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek says the Murray-Darling Basin is in trouble, after the timeline to return 450 gigalitres of water to the system was pushed out until the end of 2027.

I’m Ange McCormack, this is 7am. We’ll be back again tomorrow.

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