Song Medicine

3-minute film | TEDxSydney

After a spate of suicides in the remote Western Australian town of Leonora, local Ngaanyatjarra elder Glen Cook revived an ancient healing song to help his community grieve, gather and begin the slow work of healing.

BushTV produced a three-minute documentary film capturing this powerful act of cultural leadership. Rather than framing the story through crisis alone, the film centred Glen’s decision to draw on ancestral knowledge as medicine. The song was not presented as a performance. It was presented as a responsibility.

Filmed on Country, the story documented how cultural practice can hold communities through trauma in ways that external systems often cannot. The revival of the song became a collective moment, bringing people together through shared memory, voice and belonging.

The film was presented at TEDxSydney, offering a national audience a rare insight into song as living medicine. It demonstrated that healing in Aboriginal communities is not only clinical. It is cultural, relational and deeply connected to land and language.

Song Medicine stands as a reminder that when crisis strikes, the answers are often already present within culture. Sometimes what is needed is not a new program, but the courage to sing again