The Teahouse in Melbourne's Chinatown seems like a strange place to talk about how Indigenous thinking can save the world, and that's partly my fault.  In violation of Lunch with the AFR protocol, I've selected the venue, though not out of choice. When I asked my guest, Aboriginal author and academic Tyson Yunkaporta, to pick a restaurant, his response was "anywhere in Chinatown is fine". So here we are.

I arrive first, and when Yunkaporta enters I immediately sense in his demeanour the same awkward reticence that I picked up in his book, Sand Talk. The book is subtitled "How Indigenous thinking can save the world", and as he takes his seat in the almost-empty restaurant, I tell him, somewhat ashamedly, his book was my first real introduction to Indigenous ways of thinking.