JOURNEYING WITH YOUTH
By Daniel Ronchetti
Director of Faith and Justice, St Aloysius’ College, Sydney.
In Yolngu tradition, a fire, or gurtha, is never really extinguished. Long after the flames die down, small embers, called nil nil in Yolngu, break free and drift on the wind.
Carried far enough, they can leap valleys and rivers to kindle new fires in places the original flame could never have reached.
It is a beautiful image of how hope, once lit, keeps travelling. And it is the image that best captures what happened this July, when 31 Aloysians travelled with our provider, Culture College, to Arnhem Land for seven days of immersion in Yolngu culture, language and law.
All photos courtesy of Daniel Ronchetti.
The heart of the trip was four days spent in Nyinyikay, one of the over 150 remote homelands in Arnhem Land. Under the guidance of Yolngu leader, Marcus Lacey, our boys hunted, gathered and sat with the stories that carry the origins of Country. In good Ignatian fashion, none of it arrived as tidy instruction. The boys were given room to notice, to sit with, to make their own meaning and ask questions.
What Marcus offered them, more than any single lesson, was a way of seeing. The same stretch of forest could be a pharmacy, a supermarket, a source of fire, even a fertile country for yidaki (Yolngu for digeridoo). Its uses are only limited by the knowledge you brought to it.
For boys used to a world of fixed categories, it was a glimpse of endless possibility hiding in plain sight, available to anyone willing to look with the right eyes. Marcus took the boys deeper into that idea with a lesson in finding a yidaki.
Termites are rampant in the forest near his homeland, and a good yidaki begins with a termite mound built on or near the right kind of tree. From there it is a careful process: cut a small hole, flick the trunk and listen for the hollow sound that tells you the termites have done their work. Only then do you cut the tree down and peel back the bark to reveal, if you have read the signs correctly, a perfect instrument underneath.
When one of the boys asked Marcus how he knew what he was looking for, his answer was disarmingly simple: he was checking three things: the size, the thickness and whether the tree spoke to him. It is a striking thought for a group of boys more used to measuring things than listening to them: that if you can be still and attentive enough, the forest itself can speak.
On the final day, some of the boys noticed tracks in the sand and started digging just as Marcus had taught them the day before. What emerged was a nest of fifty-seven turtle eggs: fragile, easily missed and a genuine delicacy for the traditional owners of that Country. A small find, but a large lesson: abundance is often already around us, waiting for someone who has been taught how to see it.
That someone who has been taught is really the point. Yuval Noah Harari argues in his book, Sapiens, that what set our species apart was never raw intelligence alone, but our capacity to share stories, values and knowledge across generations. To pass down, person to person, what mattered and how to survive.
It’s a fragile art, and one our world increasingly outsources: to search engines, to feeds, to AI, to anything that promises instant answers without the slower work of one generation teaching the next. In Arnhem Land, our boys watched that older kind of knowledge-transfer still alive and unhurried. Knowledge handed down, not information downloaded.
The other thing that stayed with the boys was discovering that these communities were held together by something other than status or wealth. From the moment they arrived, they were welcomed in as family. A hospitality that has the ability to change your perception of what you think actually matters.
Ignatian educators have a phrase for what happens in moments like these: life-generating dreams and longings. Ignatius discovered, while recovering from injury, that not every dream nourishes in the same way. Some leave us dry and listless, others leave our spirit fed and buoyed long after the daydream ends. The dreams that sustain us, he found, are almost always bound up with others rather than with ourselves alone.
Arnhem Land gave our boys precisely that kind of dream: not a fixation on achievement or image, but a genuine longing to build bridges. To help the nil nil spread, ember by ember, until reconciliation takes hold more widely than any one trip ever could.
All photos courtesy of Daniel Ronchetti and St Aloysius’ College Milsons Point.