Did you know bread was an Australian invention? Neither did I, until I met this inspiring young educator

July 12, 2026 — 5:00am

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Corey Tutt is a Kamilaroi man, a former NSW Young Australian of the Year, who founded DeadlyScience, an educational charity that now employs 35 people to teach children across Australia about Indigenous science.

Fitz: Corey, great to chat again. Have you been busy?

CT: Very. I just finished my last NAIDOC week speaking gig at the Centenary Institute at Camperdown.

Fitz: Speaking to your theme, I imagine that most Australians have inherited a false view: that Aboriginal people before colonisation were jumped-up cave people, when in reality they possessed one of the world’s oldest and most sophisticated scientific knowledge systems. Is that a fair way of putting it?

CT: Yes. And I would add that I think the first colonists putting out that false notion was likely by design, right? It’s much easier to be cruel to people when you think they’re less than you.

CT: If you think that Aboriginal culture is a primitive culture, go to a supermarket, go and find some tea-tree oil. That’s a black fella medicine. They were the first people in the world to invent bread. They built one of the world’s oldest surviving man-made structures, the Brewarrina fish traps. They could tell coming weather patterns by the twinkling of the stars. This country’s First Peoples had this amazing culture, similar to the Aztecs, similar to the Egyptians, similar to the Romans, similar to Europeans. But theirs was knowledge through a different lens with a particular focus on sustaining themselves within their environment.

Fitz: OK, before we get to an itty-bitty of the nitty-gritty, how did you come to your own knowledge and passion in this field?

CT: I grew up in the Illawarra, and we didn’t have a lot. But I had a wonderful grandfather, a Kamilaroi man, who had so much traditional knowledge he shared with me – how snakes, for example, all have unique venoms that are individualised to animals in their area. My passion for science didn’t begin in a sterile classroom; it grew from a wild, consuming love for venomous snakes. I spent my youth fascinated by these creatures, eager to look past the fear and truly learn about each unique species.

Fitz: Your grandfather must have been a special man.

CT: He taught me so much about the natural world, and was like an encyclopedia, with one of the greatest minds I’ve ever known. I feel like I owe it to him and all my relatives to get his knowledge out there, and that’s where my love of science and connecting with other people comes from. And I was blessed to have your brother as my school principal at Dapto High, who really encouraged me.

Fitz: I wasn’t going to raise that! But OK, I guess, on the ground of full disclosure. How were you educated after mighty Dapto High?

CT: I worked in a wildlife sanctuary, then a zoo, and then I found myself working in the animal labs in medical research and I realised I hadn’t met another Aboriginal person in my space, and that really bothered me because our kids are so intelligent and so gifted, but they lack resource and opportunity. I was one of those kids, but from when I got a diploma from the Garvin Institute in animal technology in 2014 everything opened up. From there I did a research fellowship at Sydney Uni, went to Harvard Business School, and am now an adjunct professor at Western Sydney University.

Fitz: And where did your education........

© The Age