“How to get people to care for Mother Earth in a careless country?”. Sydney Festival’s answer to that question is Plant a Promise – a multi-part program in the hands of Kuku Yalandji woman Henrietta Baird. It involves talk, weaving, planting, an installation by Kuku Yalandji weavers, Florience and Adalene Williams, and a dance performance. Having seen three of these parts, I’m afraid I have to say that the talk was the most powerful (but least attended), the weaving was charming, while the dance was chaotic. In Bangarra’s Studio – which of course set up expectations – there was at least a wonderful set by Lara Week conjuring burnt trees to place us in 2020 Australia (or today’s LA), flickering with fiery embers internally, then offering an enthusiastic audience an opportunity to plant epyphitic growth on their trunks.

Earlier that audience had given the lie to the Opposition’s determination to do away with Welcomes to Country. For they’d not only paid earnest heed to our Welcomer’s promise to take cultural responsibility for us, but positively relished the ceremonial aspects of his subsequent Smoking Ceremony.

Sadly, the dance that followed involved much rolling on the ground, the changing of clothes and cartoonish acting as politicians, mixed into a soundscape journey through the trauma of fire, the battles to stop it, the arrival of rain and the renewal of Nature. Many left clutching a native grass and may get the chance to plant it in The Domain on Saturday. But once again (pace Dark Noon), I felt the heroic performers – Tara Robertson (8 years at Bangarra), Andrea Adidi (Saibai), and Harlisha Newie-Joe (TSI, Samoa and Cape York) – were being misused by their choreographer.

Last Saturday, I’d learnt a whole lot more about caring for the whole system rather than for individual plots or plants. Four speakers with real experience had been convened by Henrietta Baird – with cultural burning guru Victor Steffenson offering the hopeful message that aligning with nature and circumventing the bureaucracy can work – his example was a slow burn at the Mt Annan Botanical Garden achieved in conjunction with the Garden’s Chief Scientist, Brett Summerell. Summerell himself admitted that the scientific community and Ancient Knowledge needed to interact to overcome the fear of Nature that people had developed post-2020. But Steffenson feared that “capitalism doesn’t really want Indigenous Land Management – which isn’t just about fire, everything needs to take on board Indigenous Knowledge”.

Plant a Promise was a brave project, from which I drew the conclusion that Knowledge is probably best shared through words and ideas rather than simple movements of the human body. The dance continues until Saturday.