Dr Jodi Edwards awarded $300k grant to rebuild the underwater library

While on the Far South Coast, Dr Edwards - a Walbunja woman of Yuin Nation, with kinship connections to Dharawal Country - met with other local elders, who decided that something needed to be done to heal the burnt and traumatised country.

"Everyone was going to dance separately, but I feel like country spoke that day," she said.

That night, the sky opened up and unleashed a downpour, as Dr Edwards joined with other elders to dance and sing to land and sea country.

The next morning the orca returned, having not been seen in those waters for decades.

"The orca hadn't been seen for a very long time, possibly since the Davidson whaling station owner had shot it," Dr Edwards said.

For millennia, Dr Edwards's ancestors have sung and danced to the orca, whales and other migrating mammals off the coast of Yuin country.

Early European arrivals to the area, now known as the Sapphire Coast, were astounded at the connection between local Indigenous groups and the ocean species.

They employed Indigenous people to call in the killer whales, which - like sheep dogs - would surround and herd the whales into Twofold Bay in Eden, where they could be hunted for meat and oil.

But in recent years, those songs have gone quiet, after European settlers hunted the whales to near extinction and drove Indigenous people from their lands along the coast.

But Dr Edwards and others quietly passed down the songs sung by their ancestors, not just as a method of communication between humans and whales, but also as a form of shared knowledge passed up and down the coast between different language groups from lunawanna-allonah (Bruny Island) to K'gari (Fraser Island).

"When people want to know things, generally, in the non-Aboriginal community, they go to a library, they get a book out, and they read it, but in our community, our library is our stories, songs and dances that the elders pass on and teach us," Dr Edwards said.

After European colonisation, much of this knowledge, like in the fire of the Library of Alexandria, was lost, with murmurs shared between survivors and glimpses of stories painted on rock formations.

Now, Dr Edwards has been awarded $300,000 from the Department of the Environment to rebuild this library, and will embark on a multi-year project named Unbroken Whispers to resurrect these stories, connecting land, sea and sky along the east coast of Australia.

Prior to the start of the project, Dr Edwards, a Dharawal language expert and a post-doctoral research fellow at the Australian Centre for Ocean Resources and Security based at the University of Wollongong, knew each community along the coast had their own connection to the mighty creatures that journey up and down the coast each year.

For the Dharawal people, who live in what is now known as the Illawarra, the whale dreaming is one of the central stories of how Dharawal people came to be. Burri Burri - the whale - was part of the creation of Windang Island, and how ancestors came to be in the Illawarra.

Whales are seen as the embodiment of elders, who once walked the land and then went to sea, and are the lawholders of the sea.

Similar stories could be found across different language groups, all along the coast, Dr Edwards found.

"I realised that whales were the connection point," she said.

"Through observation, going out on country, I started to realise that those practices were very few and far between, and country felt like it was suffering because of that."

While some whale populations have rebounded dramatically since the end of whaling, more recently, whales have been washing up ashore seemingly unwell.

Some of this is attributed to warming oceans, the depletion of krill stocks, and vessel strikes in an increasingly congested ocean.

As non-Aboriginal society looks towards the sea to solve some of the country's most pressing challenges, Dr Edwards said nothing was known how Indigenous people viewed the sea and the iconic creatures that populate it.

During early consultation on the Illawarra offshore wind zone, Dr Edwards came under extreme pressure to come to a position on the proposed wind farms.

During the consultation period, Dr Edwards was heckled and pressured, but remained steadfast in her position.

"My position has always been that I want to know and understand sea country, and I've always maintained there was no research [from an Indigenous perspective]."

While the project Dr Edwards is currently embarking on is not specifically tied to any wind farm zone or proposal, she said the increased attention on our oceans necessitated an Indigenous perspective.

"Climate change is affecting sea country, and we need to map it with an Indigenous lens.

"It's getting mapped with a non-Indigenous lens, and that's not a bad thing, but what this will do, is our knowledge and our systems will complement non-Indigenous scientists are doing."

While our sandy shores and cliff faces that face the ocean may seem like they have existed since time immemorial, it was not that long - in the terms of Indigenous history - that sea levels were much lower than they are now, and Indigenous people walked across a land bridge that connected lutruwita (Tasmania) and the mainland.

Indigenous artefacts have been found underwater off north-west Australia, with underwater sites known as the "last real frontier of Australian archaeology".

There as well, energy projects have the potential disrupt ancient underwater sites, however there are calls that underwater heritage be involved in any offshore projects to provide a better picture of Australia's underwater heritage.

Back on land, Dr Edwards and her co-researcher Dr Chelsea Marshall from the University of Tasmania are preparing to depart for Tasmania, where they will start their journey following the whales' migration from Antarctica to the warm waters off the coast of Queensland, speaking with local Indigenous groups along the way.

The research team is preparing to speak with 20 different groups and conduct five in-depth case studies.

Once the findings have been synthesised, Dr Edwards said the team will share this cultural knowledge, where appropriate, with the wider community.

But in the meantime, Dr Edwards, who has been involved in the revival of the Dharawal language, including publishing a dictionary, said there are small changes that could be made to acknowledge the longstanding connection that Indigenous people have with the oceans and creatures off the coast.

The Southern Right Whale is named as such because it was the "right" whale for hunting, due to high meat and oil content. But the Gunditjmara people of southwest Victoria have called the whale Koontapool for millenia, a name perhaps more appropriate, since the whale is a protected species.

"That's some of the things that we want to bring back into the vocabulary," she said.

"There's all these connections and we're working out different ways of keeping that information in the community and pass it on to the next generation."