Gulun Story was a bilingual walking, talking, story project aimed at connecting students in years 2 and 3 at Gapwiyak School with traditional ways of knowing and being. I wrote in some detail about how I came up with the idea over the course of two letters, entitled “Speechless” and "The Light Side".

After some planning with the Yolngu educators we decided the best way to start a project like this was with a walk to the lake. There we’d split the boys and girls, the boys would learn to build a traditional shade shelter and the girls would make mud babies our of clay. Afterwards we’d retell the story in English and in Yolngu Matha and create a storybook.

This approach differs from the usual WTT model, in that the text was written by doing the activity, rather than generating the activity from the text, which aligns more with Yolngu ways of knowing.

We made sure that the experience would be open ended, that is, we didn't know what the story would be, only that the theme would be traditional ways of living. What ended up happening was full of comedy and tragedy. We wrote the story in both languages, and recorded it to make this video.