Threshold · Auricle Productions

Hark | 16 | Country is Speaking

November 4, 2025·1 hr 3 min·5 clips

Chris Letray explains how rocks tell ancient stories and why ignoring them breaks our connection to the world.

1. Threshold host Amy Martin presents the season finale from multiple locations — Missoula Montana, Shark Bay and Perth in Western Australia, northern Kenya, and the Murrajuga rock art site in Western Australia — weaving together voices about listening to the more-than-human world. 2. The episode features Chris Letray (Métis, Little Shell Tribe, Montana State Poet Laureate 2023-2025), Bianca McNear (Malgana woman, Shark Bay), Dr. Cass Lynch (Korang Wajari Noongar Yorke, Curtin University), Tilos Likongo (Samburu, northern Kenya), and Clinton Walker (Ngarloman Injibandi, Murrajuga). 3. The episode's central argument is that paying attention to the full spectrum of communication in the world — not just human language — is both a survival practice and the foundation for reciprocal relationship with place, something many Indigenous cultures have sustained for tens of thousands of years. 4. Chris Letray introduces the theme by describing rocks as 'the first storytellers,' arguing that the world is in constant effort to tell stories and that humans 'overestimate our genius' by assuming narrative belongs to us. 5. Letray describes his practice of writing one sentence a day, which began as a way to feel he was practicing his craft but became a discipline of noticing — leading eventually to his published books One Sentence Journal (2018), a poetry collection (2021), and a memoir Becoming Little Shell (2024). 6. He shares a Métis creation story in which the first person Nanabuzhu's first task from the creator Kichimanitu is to go out onto the Earth and listen — because listening is the only way to learn the common language everything speaks, a language humans have largely forgotten. 7. Bianca McNear describes Malgana culture in Shark Bay, Western Australia, where language and kinship are organized around saltwater, and where her grandmother Nana Ada told stories that Bianca later learned were memories of events 6,000 years ago — sites now submerged under the sea as it rose after the last glacial maximum. 8. McNear explains that Malgana people have collaborated with scientists studying underwater cultural heritage of Australia, and that Nana Ada's stories about where people used to live 'out there' in the sea were oral transmissions of knowledge from 6,000 years of continuous habitation. 9. She describes the Dreaming not as 'Dreamtime' — which she says is too isolating — but as past, present, and future all at once: 'it's basically everything all at once, it's the whole cycle of our culture or even just life, universe, everything.' 10. Bianca describes the legacy of colonial violence against Malgana people: whaling, guano extraction, forced pearl-diving, land removals, boarding schools, and laws that imprisoned people for speaking their language or resulted in children being taken. 11. She says colonization can be understood as 'a massive failure to listen — a decision not to listen — to impose a story rather than try to hear one,' and that Malgana people survived specifically because being a spoken culture meant they never fully lost the dreaming even when muted. 12. Dr. Cass Lynch, a postdoctoral research fellow at Curtin University working on Noongar language revitalization, describes how learning her own Noongar heritage — initially intellectual, then embodied — changed her understanding of identity as responsibility to country rather than appearance or recognition. 13. Cass describes bonding with a species of short-range endemic spider in the Purungarup Range that only lives within one square kilometer of the world, saying watching those spiders 'stay close to grandma' is 'country showing me how to slow down.' 14. She describes Carnaby's black cockatoos as living carriers of Noongar history: 'our blood in their feathers, our spirit on the wind, they are us talking to each other' — and says the loss of their call would sever temporal roots and leave people in 'an anxious present, a soup of shallow time.' 15. Tilos Likongo, born in Samburu, northern Kenya, describes how Samburu children learn survival listening from an early age — tending herds alone or with siblings and learning every animal sound, including human distress calls, as non-negotiable survival knowledge. 16. He tells the story of being around nine years old, walking home from boarding school, finding his entire village had moved away, and spending the night in a tree above three converging hyenas before being guided to safety by a donkey's call at 3am. 17. After surviving the night alone, Tilos was cleansed by community members using a gray goat — a ritual that signified 'you died and you resurrected again' — before being allowed to return to his village. 18. Clinton Walker guides Amy Martin through Murrajuga in Western Australia, where over one million petroglyphs — among the highest concentration of rock art in the world — record tens of thousands of years of Ngarloman Injibandi culture, sitting directly adjacent to the Karratha gas plant, one of Australia's largest industrial facilities. 19. Amy Martin narrates with a consistent voice of emotional response and reflection throughout — sharing her surprise, her whiplash at contradictions, and her own evolving understanding of listening as both a personal and ecological act. 20. The episode is the last episode of a season, with a fundraiser update noting that listeners donated over $84,000, reaching $103,130 with NewsMatch matching funds, and a preview of more work to come in 2026.

As heard by us

A reflective Threshold finale treats listening to place, spiders, and threatened black cockatoos as ecological memory.

Threshold ends its season by widening the act of listening beyond speech, toward rivers, clouds, burrows, birds, and the obligations carried by place.

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

You want a season finale about listening to a whole place and everything in it, not just human speech.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

Listen to the show on

Apple Podcasts Spotify

Play clips from this episode More from Threshold