To understand why we are telling this story, and the way in which we are telling it, you need to know a little bit about the importance of Tjukurrpa to Aboriginal people in Central Australia.

Tjukurrpa are the stories which have been passed down from generation to generation, they come from the time people call "the Dreaming" or "the Dreamtime".

They tell the stories of how everything began, the first ancestral spirit beings, the journeys of these ancestral beings, where they sat down, who they met, who they gave birth to, where they left their tracks, how they made mountains, rivers, waterholes, stars, plants and animals and where the ancestral beings went back to the earth. and where their spirit lives today.

Tjukurrpa contain the information about how people are descended from those ancestral beings, where their own spirit comes from the earth and one day will return.

Tjukurrpa teach people about their relationship to the land, their father's and grandfather's country and their mother's and grandmother's country. It teaches them about their responsibilities for looking after the land, maintaining their country, their ancestors' spirit and their own spirit.

Tjukurrpa also teach people about their relationship to other people. Who are the right people to marry, who they are responsible for looking after, their obligations to other people and who is responsible for and have obligations to them.

Tjukurrpa hold the information about the law. There are men's and women's law business which is secret and sacred.

Tjukurrpa hold the information about what happens when people go against the law, and do not honour their obligations to look after the country or fulfil responsibilities to other people.

Tjukurrpa hold the stories about healing and medicines. They teach people about life and death and the transformation from one to the other.

Tjukurrpa are stories with many layers of information and meaning. People must learn these stories.

Tjukurrpa are taught through oral stories, song, dance and ceremony. They are taught by the elders and the people who hold the stories. Different people are responsible for looking after and teaching different stories or parts of stories, while others are responsible for making sure that the songs and stories are danced and told in the right way.

Children start learning stories when they are little, when they travel with their mothers, aunties, grandmothers, fathers, uncles and grandfathers. When they go hunting and visiting they learn stories about the country, about bush foods, what can be eaten and the times they should be eaten.

As children get older they are taught more of the deeper meanings of these stories. When young boys become men and young girls become women they must go through rites where they begin to learn the law business. As women and men grow older they learn more meanings and become the holders of the stories and become responsible for looking after the country, enacting the law and teaching the stories to the next generations coming up. This is the cycle of life. This is Anangu/Yapa way.

Tjukurrpa is at the heart of people's being. It connects them to the past and the present and provides them with the systems of meanings, knowledge and law which forms the basis of their world view. For us who are Kardiya, to try to understand the importance of Tjukurrpa and the ways in which it informs people's lives is an integral key to finding ways of working with people.

Historically, for desert people in Central Australia, where food and resources were limited, finding food and performing the ceremonies for Tjukurrpa to ensure the increase of those food sources was and continues to be a primary responsibility in peoples lives.

People have categories of food sources, one of which is called 'Parma' in the Walpiri language, or 'Ngkwarle' in the Arrernte or 'Wama' in the Pitjantjatjarra group of Central Desert languages. The words refer to the category of naturally occurring concentrated sweet bush foods.

As in all desert cultures concentrated sweet foods are an essential life preserving source. They can provide an almost instant energy boost and can sometimes give enough energy to be the difference between life and death.

Food within the category of 'Parma' is also attributed with special spiritual powers and meanings (Spencer Tjapaltjarri, Franks and Nangala, 1993:15). Given the scarcity of such foods and their importance, people have Tjukurrpa and ceremony to increase Parma foods, naturally enough because everyone wants it and needs it to keep on coming out. There is no Tjukurrpa to stop Parma or to send it away.

When alcohol and refined sugar products were brought into Aboriginal cultures, people incorporated these new foods into the category of 'Parma' foods, but, unlike the life preserving qualities of bush Parma foods, the effects of alcohol were and continue to be devastating.

The problem is that indigenous people only hold the stories for increasing the positive powerful qualities of Parma, they do not have Tjukurrpa which teaches them about where alcohol comes from, how it affects people, how to use and respect it and how to decrease the devastating effect of this new form of 'sugar'.

This is a very important point, the significance of which might take people who are not aboriginal to Australia, some time to study and to understand.

It is because of Tjukurrpa that this story is being written here today in the way that we have written it and the way that we have performed it.

This is the story of Dionysis, who we have now called Sugarman.

He is the one who has the power to tell the story of Parma.