This ceremony was far from nowhere and a once-in-a-lifetime experience to see through the lenses of the local mob known as the Quandamooka people, who are tangata whenua of the Moreton Bay area where Stradbroke Island nestles into.
You can only take in so much when baptised into the oldest living culture on the planet.
All through the ceremony, an almost intoxicating aura permeated from these people, when you are "on country" as they term the chosen spot to farewell and let go their loved ones.
Although I had seen a whole lot of life on my own walkabout of the world this was almost off the planet from go to whoa.
Watching and listening to the wise old woman conducting the ceremony was mesmerising.
The regal-looking, softy-spoken kuia painted a picture of a culture she could trace back through whakapapa [lineage] of 25,000 years. Twenty-five thousand years of looking after the land and each other without ever wanting to own anything - other than their right to go walkabout in their Dreamtime.
This on its own blows my mind, given the recent reckonings of our wisest and wealthiest scribes who tell us today we are leaving the information world and heading into the imagination one, and the companies and CEOs who can dream with a story behind their brand will be the Fortune 500s of the future.
There is a deep unclouded wisdom amongst these Dreamtime people, and it goes counter clockwise from the blinkered thinking we have of them.
For me, it is one born of ignorance and failure to look past the rabbit fence. Then when the white fulla finally worked out the fence was far from rabbit proof, the easier option was to lock them up after filling them full of booze.
Leaving the Quandamooka people behind left me with a loss I found hard to reconcile, perhaps it was because I had witnessed something so special that only a generation of stolen children could understand.
And it followed me back to the mainland.
Everything that happened on this day was ordained right up to the time we arrived at Suncorp that night to watch the seemingly invincible All Blacks cop a flogging from the Aussies.
Losing against the Ngati Skippies is one thing but losing against them on their home turf when you are part of the mob inside is a whole different experience.
It was if the Murri Mob (Saltwater people of Queensland) had followed us to Suncorp and, when their dancers put up the challenge in front of a huge flag emblazoned with their own artwork, it was always going to be game on for the Ngati Skippy mob.
How cool to see their culture honoured on their jerseys. For the first time, Australia had woken up to what they have in their own backyard as we have in Aotearoa when it comes to our point of difference in our indigenous culture.
I couldn't have cared less who won, rugby and the Aboriginals of Australia were winners on the day, by pulling down the fence and putting up a bridge for Australia to walk across.
As for the game, our mob went walkabout into the never-never and never ever looked close to tying Skippy down.
When the locals were trying to sink the slipper in post-match, my Queensland cuzzie's comeback of "now you know how the Blues feel eh!" was priceless, as were the lessons learned from a day when reconciliation took a giant step forward in Australia.
Sometimes, we as native New Zealanders need to look at life through other indigenous cultures to appreciate the giant steps we have taken forward to bring our country together.
Without consciously knowing we Kiwis have created a pathway for other indigenous cultures to follow. ABOIWI could be the beginning of a global indigenous pathway.
I want to spend as much of my Dreamtime as possible learning from and with a mob who have walked it longer than any other on the planet.
