CA SE STUDY ‘Shake the bush’: working together on climate, housing and energy justice These communities are facing the failure of policy around the collision of climate change and energy regulation. It's dangerous for Indigenous communities.” Dr Simon Quilty Norman Frank Jupurrurla and Dr Simon Quilty have their own term for their research and advocacy. They call it ‘shake the bush’. “That’s how we get the government and Papulanyi [non-Indigenous people] to listen to us,” explains Mr Jupurrurla, a Wumpurrarni man of the Warumungu people of Tennant Creek and the Barkly region of the Northern Territory. “We shake the bush until the fruit hits the ground.” Mr Jupurrurla and Dr Quilty, a Papulanyi man who has lived and worked among Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory for decades, have been friends and allies since they first met when working respectively as ambulance driver and local doctor, in Utopia, north-east of Alice Springs. Mr Jupurrurla has long been a powerful voice in Tennant Creek. According to Dr Quilty, he is “fighting for justice, not just for his family but the whole community”. They have joined forces to ‘shake the bush’ in pursuit of climate justice in the Northern Territory, where they see colonisation and racism inflicting new injustices upon Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, as climate change threatens communities, culture and Country. As well as working at the community level, they are speaking out together in national and international forums, including the prestigious global scientific journal Nature Energy, about energy justice and the need for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people to lead the way in Australia on climate adaptation strategies. Mr Jupurrurla said Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people recognised that the climate was changing decades ago, independent of Western scientific reports. They may not have called it climate change, but they saw its effects. On his Country, extreme heat is scorching grasses and trees black, as if bushfires had come through, drying out local waterholes, killing off ancient shade trees, disrupting seasons and breeding, and, in some places, “getting too hot for Ceremony”. PHOTO: Dr Simon Quilty and Norman Frank Jupurrurla 38 Transforming Power: Voices for Generational Change