TEASER (7 minutes): Director's Cut Between the crumbling red crags of the empty islands peppering King Sound off the northwest Australian coast churn some of the most treacherous currents in the world. Powered by Earth’s greatest tidal extremes, the name given to these rips by the ancient Mayala people who once populated the Buccaneer Archipelago, is ‘Noomool’. Great skill was required to navigate a Mayala raft between the islands, and the penalty for misjudgment could be death. These waters, at the price of many a diver’s life, became the hunting grounds of white pearlers who, in the 20th century’s great boom, reaped the precious pearl-shell to depletion. Long since taken from the islands, the remaining Mayala now live strewn over the mainland, bereft of the spiritual connection to Country vital to the Aboriginal soul. Mayala leader Aubrey Tigan is the last exponent of ceremonial pearl-shell carving, or ‘Riji’, and his work is prized throughout the world. In 2011, an 85-foot pearling vessel captained by Steve Arrow, a modern-day pearler and Aubrey’s friend, took the Tigan family on a return to Country. In a time when the traditional ways are dying with each elder who passes, Aubrey has reached an age when he must pass his knowledge on to his descendants. This voyage was his chance to confide the secrets of the spectacular islands, the skills of spear-making, and the art of reading the Noomool, to prepare his grandchildren for one day accepting the mantle of the Riji-carver, to teach them how to smoothe, carve and stain the shells, and share the spiritual message of the ancestors who command his inspiration in his dreams, and whose calls, if unheeded, can cost a man his health. The islands of the Mayala are bursting with mineral wealth. Now, under threat of their compulsory acquisition from the State, Aubrey has, on behalf of his people, leased some of them to Pluton Mines. In so navigating the greatest spiritual threat his people have ever faced, Aubrey’s mastery of opposing currents has once again become, in many senses, a matter of cultural life and death.