How will you become a good ancestor? Kunggalu and Birri Gubba poet, actress, storyteller and great-great-grandmother, the late Maureen Watson, used to say we must all ask ourselves this question. In uncertain times, as Aboriginal people are bunkering down in their communities to protect the vulnerable from coronavirus, especially elders who are the keepers of important cultural knowledge, some are finding solace in being out on country that is closed to tourists. In South Australia, the Ngarrindjerri elder Major “Moogy” Sumner is spending time with his extended family, and learning how to deliver cultural lessons on “the Zoom”. “This virus has interrupted ceremony, everything that we do, our right to travel across the country,” Sumner says. “But you can learn things from this.” Sumner is 72, a Ngarrindjerri cultural ambassador whose country is along the Murray river in the Coorong. He’s an actor, on the London stage last year in Andrew Bovell’s adaptation of Kate Grenville’s The Secret River, and he has travelled Europe repatriating the remains of his ancestors, most recently from Leipzig, Edinburgh and London in 2019. Sumner’s wings are clipped for now, though, as we talk about survival and resilience on the phone from his home in Adelaide, while he holds his sleepy two-year-old grandson on his lap. “We’ve lived in this country for thousands and thousands of years and we’ve come up against all sorts of things within our existence in this land. Even though this is a bad virus, we’ll get through it because Aboriginal people don’t realise how strong we are,” Sumner says. “A lot of people don’t realise, just because we’re not up to number one on the western society’s measuring stick. But we know how to survive in this land, we’ve been here for a long time and the laws have been there with us, how we respected each other, how we did all sorts of ceremonies. We should really get back to that, because at the moment we’re living in a way that is really alien to us.” Sumner points out that Europeans may have been in Australia for 250 years on the east coast, but contact history is very recent elsewhere. Songlines are unbroken. “It’s only a 100 years here, and further north it may be only 90 years. It’s not that long. Even here in South Australia, we are still practising our ceremonies, we’re still practising men and women ceremonies. “We are dancing about the land, about healing the land and healing the rivers. But most of all, we are dancing about healing ourselves, because we’ve been damaged, our culture has been damaged. We have, as nations of people across this country been damaged, but by using ceremony, we can bring ourselves back to the land,” he says. Sumner was among hundreds who gathered at a healing ceremony along the Baaka (Darling river) late last year, worried for the health of the Murray-Darling system, from Queensland to the Coorong. “Some of the Murray cod [who died] were over a hundred years old. They died in their own environment. And I thought, when is it our turn? Because Ngarrindjerri, we consider some of the fish as ngarritji, which means ‘my best friend’. They are ngarritji and people would translate that to mean “totems”. When our totems die, when is it our turn? Is it happening now, when we’re dying in our own environment? “We need to take notice about the world, about the environment, about diseases. “When did the first really bad disease come to this country? With Captain Cook.” “Ngarrindjerri have a word for spirit that lives inside of us. And that spirit lives in our stomach area. And we call that spirit the miwi. It’s the spirit that tells us right from wrong. Everyone’s got it. You know when you feel there’s something wrong, you don’t feel it in your mind or in your heart. You feel it in your stomach. And in some of us, that spirit is gone. That fire has gone out. We need to rekindle and relight that fire in a way that people will have that feeling back. “As elders around the world, we need to teach, so that later on down the track all these children, they’ll be respected elders. “When we look to the future, we have to take our culture with us. We don’t leave it back there, we bring it with us so that every day we practise it. It’s not a religion, it’s not a church or anything. It’s just things we do. Lockdown is an opportunity to think differently about ways to transmit culture, Sumner says, including embracing technology. “I’ve got a lot of the schools where I do storytelling, now they ask me the other day if I’d like to do it by using that Zoom. “I’m going to take a small – what’s it called? – laptop outside and set it up there and I’m going to sit down, line the camera up on me doing carving. “I’m doing a thing with the education department now looking at the science around the returning boomerang. We’re gonna put little led lights on the top of the boomerang and throw them at nighttime so you can watch the angles as it goes, and we’re gonna have drones and we’re going to videotape it for the kids to learn the science of the boomerang. “So there’s a lot of stuff we can do with our culture. You know, we can take it everywhere.” Sumner pauses, thinking aloud about all the millions of people trying to deal with the virus and the fear and anxiety it generates. “What I’d say is learn your culture, learn who you are. Because what we’re doing today, everyone forgets where we come from. “We all had a traditional way that we lived. We all had songs. We all had dance. We all had our own laws designed for that country. They were designed so that we would live and respect the country, but also respect ourselves. “While we’re in isolation, learn and practise. Start practising stuff that you never practised before or didn’t know about your own culture, your own ceremonies. Start practising them with your family that you live with. “Keep learning, keep teaching,” he says.