Dr Jodi Edwards has always been a trailblazer. As a girl, she busted the gender barrier to play soccer for NSW and represented Australia in powerlifting and weightlifting. As an educator, she has led the revival of the Dharawal language. Locally, Jodi has founded youth programs, helped create public art, led Indigenous SUP tours, written bestselling children’s books and won numerous awards, including 2022’s Shellharbour Woman of the Year.

This month, this proud Yuin woman with Dharawal kinship is embarking on another first: using her gift as a story sharer to research the relationships connecting dolphins, orcas, humpback and southern right whales with Land, Sea and Sky Stories in a project called Unbroken Whispers – The ripples connecting sea kin.

“It's such a big project, such an important project for me,” Jodi said during an interview at the University of Wollongong, where she is a Vice Chancellor's Postdoctoral Research Fellow with the Australian National Centre for Ocean Resources and Security.

Unbroken Whispers recently received $300,000 in federal government funding and will take Jodi and her research partner, ecologist Dr Chelsea Marshall, all along the East Coast to reconnect Aboriginal knowledges.

“The ancient coastline is what we're mapping, from a cultural perspective,” Jodi said. “We'll be looking for the things that non-Aboriginal scientists don't look for. So ancient billabongs, ancient artifacts, ancient engravings, ancient caves that have art still inside of them.”

“We start in Mirning Country, South Australia. We’re going to migrate with the whales.

“We’ll go in and out of Sea Country. We’ve looked at 20 communities that have whale kinship connections. We will go to those communities, spend time in there and then we'll travel with the whales when they go to the next community.

“We'll be out on boats, out on the water. We'll have drones up; we'll have hydro drones down. We'll be in the water, on the water, on land – because we're not only mapping the whale migration, but we're mapping the ocean floor, we're mapping the land that relates to the stories of the ocean, and we're mapping the sky that relates to the stories that relate to the whale migration.”

Research first of its kind

Jodi – whose Yuin ancestors were among the first cultural whalers – will also explore symbiotic relationships and how scientific truth has survived in age-old stories.

“Dolphins, to me, are like cultural custodians because they stay in their own area. The whales come through and share their songs and stories of the world. Then the dolphins to me are story sharers, they pass the stories on to their cousins the sharks. The sharks are the ones that say, enough talk. Sharks teach us about personal space, particularly the bull shark.

“Dharawal people have a kinship connection with the humpback [burri burri]. The humpback teaches us about moving Country and rising waters, an ancient story of climate change.”

Jodi is driven by the fact that research so far has been done through a non-Aboriginal lens. "I wanted to ensure that we were looking at our ancient coastline based on our stories, our songs, our dances, our rock art, because that's how we learn. That hasn't been done.

“It hasn't been done with Aboriginal people. Certainly, there has been mapping of the coastline done, and certainly at times they've talked to Aboriginal people, but this is more than just a mapping exercise.

“This is looking at the symbiotic relationship between whales and dolphins, sharks, marine life, the relationship that then goes back to land country and sky country.

“When non-Aboriginal people want to know something, they go to a library or they Google it. When we want to know something about Country, we go on Country, we find the story that goes with it.”

Stories are more than words, they are songs, dances, art and landscape.

“The coastline has never been mapped like that,” Jodi says.

“It's no good people just saying, oh, there's a whale migration pathway out there. Because there's a whale migration pathway on Country, there's a whale migration pathway in the sky. It's more than just Sea Country, there's an inherent and cultural kinship connection.”

How the project began

A Doctor of Philosophy, Jodi began her research long before the Illawarra’s proposed wind farm zone and current concerns over whales.

It started when she was writing a chapter on fishing practices during her PhD. Jodi’s fishing knowledge comes from her late father and her uncle, both of whom she nursed through cancer. “All they wanted to do was go fishing! But I always say, ancestors look after you and push you in the direction that you're supposed to go. So I'm forever grateful for that time.”

Her father – whose skill as a fisherman came from the depth of his relationship with the sea – taught Jodi to swim like a porpoise, dive like a dolphin, hold her breath and lie on the ocean floor in the sand like a stingray. Knowing that she would lose her dad and his knowledge inspired Jodi to start documenting the things he'd taught her.

“My dad passed in 2019. He made me promise him that I would finish my PhD,” she says.

Jodi did, and now she’s using her studies to reawaken the Whale Songline.

One of her challenges will be recovering stories suppressed by colonisation.

“We have been lucky enough to have staunch Elders across every community that didn't lay down, they just kept things underground.

“Yes, we had a period of time, 240 years, where we weren't legally able to practise our culture, So it happened subtly and today we're still practising and we're playing catch up now, to pass the knowledge to our young ones before the knowledge holders pass.”

The project aims to leave a legacy bank of stories to be passed on. “Not only to Aboriginal kids, but to non-Aboriginal kids because, at the end of the day, for me, they [kids] are the creators of the future.”

Jodi will be working with fellow whale woman Dr Chelsea Marshall, a friend and colleague she's known for years. 

“I couldn't have done it by myself. It's not the Jodi Edwards show. It's the Aboriginal community show. It's back to the old ways … where no one person held all the knowledges, we worked as a community so everyone had a knowledge, like a piece of the puzzle, you all had to work together, you were all equal.

“The important part is to privilege Aboriginal voices, because at the moment they're the silent voice in all of this.

“Most people are aware that there's lots of things happening around Sea Country, but nobody's really speaking to Aboriginal people. And Aboriginal people aren't speaking to anyone either; they are worried about what's going to happen to their information.”

Jodi says she and Chelsea have the advantage of being “insiders but outsiders”.

“We are insiders as far as we are two Aboriginal women who have whale kinship connection and outsiders because we don't have bloodline connections in some places like Tasmania.

“In each community, we'll connect with people and communities, and they will decide how and what can be shared. It's important to myself and Chels to help others understand – you know, just because you hear a story or you're told something, it doesn’t mean it's yours to share.

“There’ll be a lot of sharing of data with other scientists, it’s not a competition, it's important to share with each other so the research is thorough.”

Power of connections

The project is charged with revolutionary thinking, as Jodi has recovered her understanding of the cultural ties between matriarchal Yuin women and orcas, with whom they have kinship connections. These apex predators – rare among animals as they go through menopause – are matriarchs as well.

Jodi is also delighted to have linked LGBTQI couples and humpback whales, who raise their calves in female pairs. “They become mates and mothers to the calf,” she says.

“That would be a great Mardi Gras theme. I'd love to have our 2m humpback whale [from the Lake Illawarra Art Trail sculpture] on a float going down Oxford Street.”

The facts appeal to Jodi on many levels, mirroring the status of Yuin women as decision makers, as well as a poke in the eye for the current patriarchy.

“I would ask Donald Trump if he still felt as passionate about the whales, if he knew they were LGBTIQ,” she says.

“We can't continue to use science in one format, in a format that suits the politically correct agenda. We need to start to challenge some of the things people are saying, using the science, using the stories.

“There's a whole system that Aboriginal people have – stories that go back from generation to generation to generation that talk about a system that is led by women, a system that is accepting of LGBTIQ and, for me, they're the important things to drag out, in this world of anarchy.”

Orca behaviour even made her re-look at her own family dynamics. “The orcas allow their calves to stay with them for as long as they need – all their life if they want. And it's like, yeah, they’re the black fellas of the sea all right!

“So there's all these synergies.

“I keep saying to Chelsea, you are going to have to pull me back,” Jodi adds, laughing. “The truth is there will be time  the shoe will be on the other foot – that’s what’s good with Chels, we think along the same lines and challenge each other.  

"We are both for equality. I feel like, in my life, I've always had to fight for equality. I never remember any teacher saying to me, oh, you could be a marine biologist or a marine scientist.”

She does remember, in Year 5, getting into trouble for not handing in a school excursion note.

“I said, I don't need to go to BHP. And they said, oh yeah Jodi, you need to go to BHP because that's where you're probably going to get a job. Either there or at Woolworths to be a checkout girl.

“And I said, well, I don't think I'll be doing any of those.”

The first-of-its-kind Unbroken Whispers – The ripples connecting sea kin project is funded for two years.