Ask Uncle Larry Walsh what's a typical day in his life in Australia and he arrives at a well-defined answer for his profession. "I tell young aboriginal artistes stories so they can use them within their arts." The 56-year-old Tungerong aboriginal cultural leader and storyteller is one of the only elders in Melbourne who focuses specially on storytelling, thus ensuring the continuity of ancient oral traditions. Dreamtime, a term coined by ethnologist Francis Gillen in 1896, refers to the period in which life came to be — the aboriginal understanding of the world. And this Wednesday, Walsh will perform dreamtime stories honouring the 60,000-year-old oral traditions of the Kulin Nations from South Eastern Australia, at a Mahalaxmi venue.

The session, organised by the Australian Consulate General in collaboration with Pomegranate Workshops, is aimed at students, educators and library facilitators. Walsh sees the younger generation as torchbearers for the future and even in a digital age, states that old stories still hold relevance. "There's one dating back 25,000 years that I tell. It's about a drought, but also about how we got the koala bear. When scientists examined the remains of that period, they were able to prove that there was a drought that lasted many years," he informs, proceeding to give another example of a tale on the origins of the platypus. In dreamtime stories, the animal is considered to be a hybrid of the duck and water rat. "It took scientists seven countries, three years and 10 million dollars to say the same thing; the platypus is supposed to be a mix of a mammal and a bird. So, back then, people knew without written knowledge how animals behaved and how they came to be."