Right Story, Wrong Story: How to Have Fearless Conversations in Hell – Indigenous Tools for Bridging Social Divides Through Dialogue and Deep Listening

by Tyson Yunkaporta

Continuing the work of the well-received Sand Talk, Tyson Yunkaporta casts an Indigenous lens on contemporary society, challenging us to find our way onto the right track.

Sand Talk, Tyson Yunkaporta’s bestselling debut, cast an Indigenous lens on contemporary society. It was, said Melissa Lucashenko, "an extraordinary invitation into the world of the Dreaming."

Right Story, Wrong Story extends Yunkaporta’s explorations of how we can learn from Indigenous thinking. Along the way, he talks to a range of people including liberal economists, memorization experts, Frisian ecologists, and Elders who are wood carvers, mathematicians and storytellers.

Right Story, Wrong Story describes how our relationship with land is inseparable from how we relate to each other. This book is a sequence of thought experiments, which are, as Yunkaporta writes, "crowd-sourced narratives where everybody’s contribution to the story, no matter how contradictory, is honored and included…the closest thing I can find in the world to the Aboriginal collective process of what we call 'yarning.'"

And, as he argues, story is at the heart of everything. But what is right or wrong story? This exhilarating book is an attempt to answer that question. Right Story, Wrong Story is a formidably book about how we teach and learn, and how we can talk to each other to shape forms of collective thinking that are aligned with land and creation.

Genres: Nonfiction, Indigenous

304 pages, Hardcover

Published February 4, 2025

About the author

Tyson Yunkaporta is an academic, an arts critic, and a researcher who is a member of the Apalech Clan in far north Queensland. He carves traditional tools and weapons and also works as a senior lecturer in Indigenous Knowledges at Deakin University in Melbourne. He lives in Melbourne.

Reviews

[Ben · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stop here and just get this book and read it. Audiobook would be cool because, in his own voice, the humour and self-deprecation comes through loud and clear. But it’s still there in the text - a devastating but somehow still encouraging journey that is a descent into the various circles of a downunder Dante’s Inferno, that is still very much all of our hells whether we may be hell-creators, fellow-travellers or hell-survivors or (more probably) all of the above. It begins with some wonderful “yarning” with kin close and more geographically distant that nuance and complicate the familiar narrative of those eager to treat indigenous knowledge as an extractive resource to inform a kinder, gentler colonial “machine-gun hand”, but then engages more directly with the author’s more personal descent into these difficult journeys, the cost to him and all of his kin. But the long-term cost to us all in attaching so blindly to Wrong Story is always clear and present, as are the enduring if fleeting, often ghost-like manifestations of Right Story if we could pay attention to the land and the Lore (such as remains). Looking forward to Snake Talk, the next in the trilogy.

[Varó Eszter · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book felt like a Hieronymus Bosch painting in a rant format. It's beautifully saturated, intense, angry and gentle at the same time.

Or like an Arthouse movie that doesn't have a plot that you could describe to someone you'd recommend it to, but you definitely would want them to watch it.

Or like bouldering/climbing for the first time, when the next day you notice soreness in muscles, you weren't even aware you had.

It's intinate and (in)formative at the same time. It doesn't demand or expect anything of you, and yet you find yourself wanting to move mountains.

The idea of connecting/describing objects/weapons that he associates with specific societal issue clusters makes it come alive in a 5D animistic way. It tickles more senses, than one is used to when reading.

I fell in love with this guy a bit, and, sure, it's more about what he stands for, not the person per se, so now I'm "braiding" my own traditional whip (in my culture we use wips, not boomerangs) thinking about right stories to tell... I'd thank him for the inspiration, if I could.

[Beef · Rating 4 out of 5]

Enjoyed the listen, a lot of great thoughts that I probably missed. Would like to get the book in my hands next time I visit it

[Chris · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is wrong story. It necessarily must be, as it was produced by an individual through a relatively isolated process; it represents only a single perspective. Even when the book shares the perspectives of others besides Tyson Yunkaporta, the sharing is his, has been filtered through Yunkaporta's understanding and captured in his context. That means it can only be wrong story regardless of its contents.

In [my previous book] Sand Talk I told a story about education, and it was true, but on its own it can only ever be wrong story. To become right story, it needs to coexist with opposite narratives that are also true, weaving a more diverse and robust understanding.

Yet Yunkaporta lives in two worlds at once, is a part of two cultures--his Aboriginal Australian one and the world's dominant one--and he has produced this book as an attempt to bridge between them. He is using wrong story to try to convey the essence of right story, as understood by Indigenous cultures. Information--knowledge, wisdom--can only be right story when it is communal, is the product of many people with diverse experiences and perspectives in relationship with each other. Right story can only exist between people, in the interactions, and can't come from a single source. It is never fixed or static, constantly adapting. It also must include non-human perspectives, those of animals, the land, and nature. It is a collective story, found in the patterns among us, in our processes of relating.

Attachment to a singular narrative is like pinning an insect to a board and measuring it: if you aren't watching it in flight, you're missing the point.

The book's subtitle is How to Have Fearless Conversations in Hell, and Yunkaporta roughly structures it after Dante's narrative journey through hell in the Divine Comedy. He uses "hell" as a metaphor for the Western culture that is currently the controlling narrative for our world and interactions. He uses right story, the knowledge and processes of his Indigenous culture, to consider the various levels of hell and how we might learn to do things differently. He also does his best to demonstrate the workings of right story in how he has written the book. He calls the book a yarn, his term for conversation among a group of people sitting together sharing stories. He considers the book a conversation between himself and readers, regularly referring to "us-two" as a pronoun for him and his reader. Each chapter includes at least one description of his dialogue with another thinker where they have put their ideas in play with each other and considered each others' viewpoints. Yunkaporta's language is a free-flowing weave of conversational, academic, dialogue, folksy, and storytelling. Because collective Indigenous knowledge is oral and relies on memory tools like repetition and mnemonics, including physical items inscribed with metaphorical, meaning-containing symbols, Yunkaporta also crafted a traditional artifact for each chapter and he records each crafting process as it relates to the knowledge.

Remember, we're partners in this heretical act of looking out at the world together through a glitchy Indigenous lens and riffing on what we see there. We're inquiring through Indigenous knowledge, not about it, and this is a deeply unsettling and unpopular process in a world that gobbles up minority narratives and wisdom like chocolate-covered strawberries and macadamias.

I found this book to be both a challenge and a delight. It was a challenge to get my head fully wrapped--at least somewhat wrapped--around Yunkaporta's ideas and concepts because they are such a departure from the ways we have learned to think and understand. Yet yarning with him was a pleasure because he is such a good tour guide and interpreter. Patient readers will find many rewards and will find themselves expanded by it. I particularly appreciate that Yunkaporta is the opposite of backward-looking: he is not yearning for return to a mythically perfect past or bemoaning all the ways we have already messed things up, he's trying to find a way forward by putting our worldviews into dialogue with each other. He's trying to find ways to apply wisdom learned in the past to our future in order to change our current trajectory. He is both a guide and a fellow traveler, inviting readers to join him.

A living culture is one that is in a relationship of exchange with other cultures. When cultures are damaged by separation, they can recover through such exchange. It's not about turning back the clock, but more like what my friend Douglas Rushkoff the media theorist calls 'retrieving forward'.

A few more quoted passages to let Yunkaporta speak for himself:

There is deep-time story in the echinoid, though, in the intelligent pattern its embodied knowledge left on that stone, and it has been working on me for a few decades now, driving me towards inquiries into distributed cognition and the way true narratives are created over time from an aggregate of viewpoints, including the ignorant ones. . . . Every viewpoint is ignorant, really, in one way or another. Combined over time, in right relation within and across generations, these diverse ignorances create right story.

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Us-two, you and I meeting in these pages, we're here to find what is useful and interesting in dialogue. We're not here to score points in a culture war. If I'm talking about failing global institutions and destructive empires, that's not about individuals or communities or cultures--it's about systems and structures that we are all required to live under at this moment in history, and most of us are intensely unhappy and terrified about it all. I'm not sitting down here with you clutching my historical IOUs; I'm here to share some stories, patterns and systems that might be helpful in the next few decades (and even centuries).

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Our ancestors, our gods, our prophets, our country, our spirit, our cosmos--however we want to see the community of entities beyond our waking sight . . . All they can do is nudge us-all towards the pattern of creation to find our symbiotic roles within it, in annoyingly vague and non-linear ways that can only be perceived through constant connection with the land and collective processing of that relation.

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Schrodinger's wombat is like the expansion pack for that psychotic thought experiment. This is how it works. A wombat is in a hollow log, and we have to decide whether it is alive or dead. However, because the log is not an enclosed system, we are aware of the thousands of exchanges of energy, matter and information between the log and the surrounding country. We see what the insects are doing, the fungi on the log and surrounding trees, how the wombat behaves in that particular season. We see its fresh scat on a nearby rock. We feel the wind direction and the recent tracks that tell us about the animal's behavior and condition. We see no sign of recent snake activity (although you're never more than ten metres away from a snake in the bush). We see a thousand things and know that the wombat is alive and inside the log. We see this because we are not only thinking about the log and what might be inside. Rather, we are an integral part of the dynamic system of that country, which is observing itself through our relationship. So we share in the exchange of energy and information in that system and are therefore not intervening in the system from the outside.

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In this sense, there is nothing spiritual or religious about Indigenous knowledge, which is just a peer-driven process of coming to understand all your relations (human and non-human) within creation. But how can we define this process without grounding the description in opposition to spirituality, science or religion? All stories are welcome around our fires, even those that define us as pagan, heathen, other. In the end, our knowledge is human knowledge, accountable to community, ancestors, descendants and the eternal Law of the land. . . .

Authentic science is a genuinely collective commons of knowledge, although it is often defamed by the extractive disciplines as being corrupt and monolithic. I've done this myself, spending half my career depicting science as hostile to Indigenous methods of inquiry in an I am not them, therefore I am kind of way.

But what is science? It is a community with a long lineage, comprising members of almost every culture on the planet, collectively sharing inquiry in rigorous, rule-governed ways, with peers reviewing peers in distributed networks of autonomous institutions that aren't controlled by any single, centralized authority. That also sounds to me like a fairly good description of Indigenous knowledge processes. It has been a mistake for me to divide myself into different parts so I can interact with this infinitely diverse community that I thought was my enemy. Us-two have probably both done a lot of this in our lives and work, dis-integrating ourselves and our relationships for no good reason.

[Jorien · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very thought provoking. New insights and a real testimony to there is not one truth with a writer who is extremely self reflective and open.

[Douglas · Rating 1 out of 5]

My biggest frustration with this book is its lack of clear focus. Yunkaporta attempts to weave together a vast tapestry of ideas – critiquing capitalism, colonialism, and Western thought, while simultaneously exploring indigenous perspectives on sustainability, governance, and interconnectedness. Certainly all of these are vital conversations, but the book often feels like a collection of loosely connected vignettes and philosophical musings rather than a cohesive thesis. What Yunkaporta calls "adventures in Indigenous thinking" comes across more like a disorienting ramble, leaving me struggling to grasp the central thread that ties these disparate discussions together.

Yunkaporta’s style, which often leans into the anecdotal and the abstract, comes across as opaque and self-indulgent. The "right story" he aims to tell is frequently obscured by meandering prose and a reluctance to define key concepts clearly. Invariably, I found it difficult to make sense of what he was talking about. The very premise of "right story" versus "wrong story" feels overly simplistic, potentially reducing complex global challenges to a binary that doesn't fully acknowledge nuance or the multifaceted nature of societal problems.

Yunkaporta claims to engage in critique of "Western" systems, but his writing lacks specificity and depth. Rather it is filled with broad generalizations about "Western thought" or "capitalist narratives," and to me this ammounts to offering strawman arguments; he seems uninterested in engaging with the diversity and complexity within these traditions. Again, he claims to challenge "dominant paradigms," but the execution can feel more like a blanket dismissal than a constructive deconstruction. The indigenous alternatives presented are not always presented with the clarity or practical applicability.

Failing in his attempt to enable the reader to extract actionable insights, Yunkaporta simply left me lost and struggling in the narrative brambles.

[Richard Pulfer · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an excellent read which explores many issues plaguing our society, many of which boil down to misinformation and the narrative. Yson Yunkaporta explores each of issues through a variety of angles, all of which feel personal and authentic. The most interesting thing Yunkaporta brings is an Indigenous perspective to these issues, though he does so with context and nuance which add a much-needed layer of understanding to the issues presented.

If I had one criticism, it's that some of it went over my head, but this isn't a dig against the author at all. I just felt there was far too much wisdom in this book to absorb in one sitting. It remains a book I steadfastly recommend - and one I look to reading again soon.

[Relena_reads · Rating 4 out of 5]

When the conceit of this book works, it's fantastic, but there are definitely points where Yunkaporta is forcing the narrative into the frame which start to feel like unintentional wrong story. The overall framing of right story/wrong story works fairly well, though, and Yunkaporta is--as always--refreshingly vulnerable and honest. If you enjoyed Sand Talk, you'll likely enjoy this too, but it is a very different book.

Audiobook supplied by NetGalley.

[Jenna]

I had a difficult time holding the thread while listening to the audiobook. I would like to read it with my eyes to see if that helps because I think there’s potential a strong thread that could change my perspective.

[Kylie Van-Minnen · Rating 4 out of 5]

So much to digest here 🤯 I feel I need to reread (or listen) to truly take in all the stories and messages. The audio was great to hear things in the authors voice and tone, but I now need a physical copy to regroup (and mark up!) on the wisdom and ideas shared.