The college administrator from Perth has spent a year (and eight pairs of shoes) walking across the country ‘to find the truth of Indigenous Australia’. The reality, he tells Lucy Clark, is far worse than he had imagined

By the time Clinton Pryor reached the great red rock of Uluru, they were calling him Spirit Walker. Spirit Walker in news headlines, “Go Spirit Walker!” yelled out by supporters along the way, #SpiritWalker in twitter feeds.

It was roughly the halfway mark of his epic journey for justice, a 5,800km (3,600 miles) walk over 360 days from Perth in the far west of Australia to Canberra in the east. His walk was to highlight the plight of Indigenous Australians and it was here, more than anywhere else, that he felt his ancestral spirits by his side. For Pryor, Uluru is “the heartland, where all the songlines connect you”, and his arrival was a moment of enormous personal impact.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Pryor: I’m thinking about going to England to see the Queen’

“I had always wanted to go there as a child, but to walk there was the most beautiful, amazing thing I could experience,” he says when we meet, four days after the end of his walk. “Just to be there at Uluru where our culture began – I was crying with joy when I saw it. I could not believe I had walked there from Perth.”

Pryor is as dog-tired as you would imagine - yawning often, rubbing his eyes, stretching a body that has walked between 30 and 60 kilometres a day for almost a year. At first, he says, his legs “were killing me”, and he battled knee pain throughout, but they’re “pretty good” now.

He started the walk with a closely shaved head and looking “baby-faced”, but now has a long beard that lends gravitas to a man who says he’s much wiser than when he started out – if still frustrated by the reception he got from politicians following his arrival in Canberra last Sunday.

Pryor arrived to cheers at the Aboriginal Tent Embassy on the lawns across from Old Parliament House – “I just cried with joy” – but meetings with politicians were, he says, dispiriting. He was disappointed that prime minister Malcolm Turnbull would not meet him on his terms at the tent embassy; according to a statement released by Pryor’s team headlined “Spirit Walker walks out of meeting with prime minister”, Turnbull and Indigenous affairs minister Nigel Scullion talked over the top of Aboriginal Elders when they finally met.

“How can I say it? I felt like it fell on deaf ears, I felt frustrated,” Pryor says. “I walked 6,000 kilometres to come here, and only got 20 minutes ... there’s so much more to discuss.”

Living in poverty

It’s been a journey of tragedy and dispossession for this 27-year-old Wajuk, Balardung, Kija and Yulparitja man, who was working as a college administrator when he joined the protest against the forced closure of isolated communities by the Western Australia state government – including Mulan, the community he had lived in as a child.

It was during this protest – on Heirisson Island, in the middle of Perth’s Swan River – that he first had the idea to walk to Canberra to meet the prime minister and present him with a growing list of grievances about the state of Indigenous affairs in Australia.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Pryor meets prime minister Malcolm Turnbull: ‘I walked 6,000km and only got 20 minutes.’ Photograph: Lukas Coch/EPA

Pryor took a year off from his job, set up a crowdfunding page and started training in a gym while money came in from supporters: a total of $16,667 (£10,300) to pay for tents and sleeping bags, satellite phones, film equipment, lodging fees plus support vehicles – a car and a long-distance bicycle – for the two companions who travelled with him as he walked from town to town, 30, 40, 50km a day.

Pryor set out to “find the truth of Indigenous Australia” – and the reality, he says, is far worse than he had imagined. “My people are living in poverty: third-world conditions, some with no water, food prices so high, jobs are not given to our people, suicide, lack of services, lack of education.”

I knew I was walking into a town full of racism and hatred Clinton Pryor

What he found corroborates the statistics: that Indigenous Australians, who make up 3% of the population, die earlier than other Australians and have far worse health, educational, economic and employment outcomes. Government attempts to redress the disparity by setting targets and monitoring the markers of disadvantage via the Closing the Gap reports have failed, with the the last report showing Australia was failing to meet the targets in six of the seven measures.

Pryor’s first leg took him from Perth to Kalgoorlie, a 600km walk north-east through the Western Australia bush to attend the funeral of 14-year-old Elijah Doughty. Doughty, an Indigenous boy, was killed in August 2016 when hit by a ute while riding a motorcycle, a tragedy that led to racially charged riots, a manslaughter charge for the man driving the ute, and the handing down of a three-year sentence on the lesser charge of dangerous driving occasioning death. Pryor felt trepidation: “I knew I was walking into a town full of racism and hatred,” he wrote in his diary.



From there he walked to Leonora, where he arrived to a community raw with the pain of suicide. “Leonora has the name of so many people committing suicide – when we got in there, two people had [recently] killed themselves. There’s nothing out there: there’s a lack of services, no counselling, no proper education. When you’re out in towns and you can’t get jobs and you’ve got no one to talk to, people feel depressed. People feel alone.”

From Leonora, Pryor had to pass through the 155,000 square km of the Gibson Desert on his way to Uluru, 16 tough days of trekking in 40-50 degree heat that almost did him in. “I threw my stick away and wanted to give up. I said, ‘what am I doing out here?’ But then I sat down and thought about my ancestors who walked across country, and it gave me the understanding of how they did it.”

He kept going to Uluru, simultaneously the most inspiring and most challenging destination. For there, Pryor went into the settlement he says most characterised the inequality of the lives of Indigenous Australians living in remote communities, Mutitjulu.

“That was the one that hit me the most,” he says. “Near Uluru, seeing the traditional owners, the custodians, living in third-world conditions while there’s a resort on the other side, [only] five kilometres away.

“There’s poverty, there’s no new housing, no income – and then you have this resort that is making so much income from tourism. I feel like the resort should be under the control of the custodians so they can make some money for the community, for the people, not use our people and the land to make wealth off it.”

The long road to justice

Pryor believes the starting point on the long road back to justice for his people would be treaties between the Australian government and the 500-plus Indigenous nations in the country – and he says Australia’s sovereign nation, the United Kingdom, must be part of these treaties too..

“I’m thinking about going to England to see the Queen; hopefully she will listen to us,” he says. “All we want is what should have been done from the very beginning when colonists arrived here on our shores – to talk about treaties, with our people and the Queen, but on our terms, as her system was built on our lands.

Before she steps down, maybe the Queen can do something from her heart and give us what our people want Clinton Pryor

“I’m hoping to take 40 Elders [Indigenous leaders] with me to discuss these things and gain international support. We want to fix the problem. Politicians put their heads in the sand and don’t want to know. I know she’s a very old lady and a very beautiful old lady, but before she steps down from the monarchy, maybe she can do something from her heart and give us what our people want.”

From the heartland of Australia, Pryor continued to walk through countries and communities – talking to Elders, being welcomed into homes or fed around bushfires by farmers, and wearing through eight pairs of shoes as he walked.

For all the disappointment at the end of the road, there were many moments of personal joy. Most days his diary entries began with “Good morning it’s another beautiful day for walking!” – and much of the country’s beauty was a revelation to the boy who had never previously travelled beyond Western Australia.

Dingoes, kangaroos, emus, goannas running free. Inexplicably, a donkey in the main street of Docker River “with the sun shining on it and walking towards me, one of the best things I’ve ever seen”. When he reached the Western Australia border with the Northern Territory, he met the invisible line that marked the end of his home state with childlike joy: “What’s gonna happen when I cross?”

It's 50 years since Indigenous Australians first 'counted'. Why has so little changed? Read more

He found love in Port Augusta, when his “missus” Kerry-Lee Coulthard joined him for the remainder of the journey. On Twitter he inspired multiple threads of other Indigenous Australians seeking to learn more about their own country, and in schools – “30 or 40 along the way” – he spoke to kids and urged them to follow their dreams.

“My main message talking to the kids was, if you’ve got a dream, go after it, but you’ve got to believe in yourself. Nobody can tell you that you can’t do it. Look at what I am doing, I’m walking across an entire country chasing my dream, and you can do the same. This walk will always be up there in history – to inspire young generations to get up and make a difference to themselves.”

If you have experiences relating to this article that you would like to share, please email inequality.project@theguardian.com