The gateway to Arnhem Land is the East Alligator River, and it does not welcome you quietly. Saltwater crocodiles patrol the crossing at all times. Cross carefully, and then, just like that, you are in. The landscape shifts almost immediately. The feeling shifts with it.

Arnhem Land is not a national park. It is not a tourist destination. It is Aboriginal land, and you cannot enter without the permission of the Yolngu people who have managed it for millennia. The permit system is real, the cultural protocols are real, and there are two places within the land where no balanda, no non-Yolngu person, has ever set foot. That fact is a reminder of just how much here remains entirely on Yolngu terms.

The invitation to visit came through a family connection built over a long period of time before filming began. Being adopted into the family meant learning skin names, learning which country belongs to which family, and learning the language names for everyone. The northeast corner, where the family lives, takes a couple of days to drive to from the river crossing. That distance alone tells you something about the scale of this place, and about what it means to do it properly.

Waywaydi and his family led the first excursion: a freshwater spot inland, a place for a swim, lunch, and time together. From the drone, the water could be seen threading out of a series of large waterholes upstream, a beautiful clear stream cutting through sandstone country. It looked like it could hold barramundi. The plan was to walk and see what turned up.

Deon, a Dhimurru ranger for nearly ten years, warned as they approached the water's edge. "By the edge of the water, the creek, there will be venomous snakes around," he said, matter-of-factly. Then he mentioned that he had once been called out to this very waterhole to remove a 3.5-metre crocodile from a trap after a visitor's dog went missing. The hole looks pristine. It is paradise. It is also not to be underestimated.

In Yolngu Matha, the language of the Yolngu people, the word for crocodile is baru. The rule when swimming is simple: know where the baru is before you get in. If you don't know, you don't get in. The best backdrop ever filmed on Wild Reaches, and you still check first.

Walking down to the creek, Deon spotted a suitable tree and cut a spear shaft from it. He explained the process as he worked: cut the green wood, burn it and leave it, then clean it off and let it dry. Heavy when green, light when finished. Straight when you get the bark off and let it cure. "It's heavy. Heavy now. When you take the skin off, then look," Deon said, handing over the green shaft. Even fresh-cut, it was already running straight.

Later, back near camp, Vernon revealed the name. The spear shaft is called the meelee. One of the Yolngu's favourite spear shafts for making ceremony spears. Not just a tool for hunting, but a material with cultural significance, used in the spears carried at ceremony. The same tree that grows along the creek bank produces something that connects the everyday and the ceremonial.

Jeffrey Monungarrich is an elder and clan leader from the Gumatj clan. His role in the community is leadership, keeping the community safe and passing Yolngu knowledge to the younger generations. But his broader purpose, as he describes it, is building bridges between Yolngu and the modern world, between the old ways and the current moment.

"The biggest role in my life is building bridges to the reconciliation of how indigenous Yolngu can cross over and how the modern world society can cross over to our culture, the Yolngu culture," he said. "In that very important space I always see this: I am threading my culture into the modern world's culture. And when I see that, that's truly a vision of mine from a very young age. And I continue doing that while I now am an elder and a leader in my own community here. And I love it."

That threading, literally, happens through pandanus weaving. The ladies of the community strip pandanus leaves and dye them using plants harvested from the bush. The yellow dye comes from the roots of a particular plant, a yellowish root visible once you know what to look for. Jeffrey explained that once the bush fire has gone through, the dry yellow leaves mark the plant from a distance. You look for the new shoot coming up beside the old plant, the one that reaches waist height and has all the yellow spreading out through it.

The plant that gives the yellow dye is called tunum. Its texture is almost like sandpaper. The roots go into boiling water, and the stripped pandanus strips soak in that dye bath. Yellow is the base. To shift toward a deep orange, fire ash is added to the dye water and it transforms the colour entirely.

"We have experiment like this one: if we're ready with enough colour of gunga pandanus, then to change to another colour we use the fire ashes to put it over and it'll turn that into really orange," Jeffrey explained. "That dark orange colour. So you can mix up the boiled water, the colours, to make a new colour."

No synthetic paints are used in pandanus work. Every colour comes from the land around them. A red plant produces a red dye. Other plants produce other colours. Each one is tied to country, to season, and to the knowledge of who harvested it and how. The weavings carry that knowledge, not just in the pattern, but in the material itself.

The plan for the day was to catch food, cook it up under the she-oaks, and spend time with Dion and Vernon on the coastal flats. The creek crossing to get there involved wading through water where a large crocodile had just been seen heading upstream. Either way, the crossing was quick.

The weapon of choice was the spear and woomera. The woomera is a spear-throwing device that dramatically extends power and range, and watching it used on a school of mullet in glassed-out conditions is something else entirely. There is so much more power when using the woomera. Dion called the mullet good size for the fire, and the teamwork across the flat was fluid and practiced, two hunters who had been doing this their whole lives.

Vernon, further back along the flat, speared one and then dug a hole in the sand and dropped the fish in it, covering it over. The eagles circling overhead were the reason. Dig a hole, hide your fish, keep hunting. Come back for it later. That is not a hack. That is just knowing the environment you are in.

Out on the point, three large queenfish, metre-plus animals, were patrolling the edge in calm water. A fly rod had been left up on the point when it got windy earlier in the day. By the time the flat had glassed out and the queenies showed up, the rod was too far away to retrieve. That is the kind of thing that stays with you. Three big queenfish, flat calm, no fly rod. Next time.

Back on the beach, fresh turtle tracks cut across the sand, one set heading up from the water and one heading back. The turtle had been up to lay during the night. The eggs were somewhere in the sand, buried in a chamber beneath the disturbed surface.

The technique for finding them takes practice. Dion and a family member worked along the sand with long sticks, probing gently until the stick dropped slightly through the air pocket above the egg chamber. Then they checked the end of the stick for egg residue. When they found the spot, they started digging by hand, carefully. "Do not take them really rough, otherwise they get popped," Dion warned. The shells are soft and leathery. Rough handling breaks them.

Vernon Gurruwiwi Marika Gurruwiwi has been playing and making the Yidaki since he was three years old. His father taught him everything: how to find the right hollow tree, how to cut it, how to play it, and how to carry it in ceremony. That knowledge came from his father, the same way his father's came from the generation before him.

"My father used to teach me for making Yidaki, the playing Yidaki, how to find Yidaki, how to cut Yidaki. He taught me since I was a little boy. Yeah, since I was 3 years old, I was making Yidaki and learning with my father," Vernon said. Now he plays in ceremony, in dance, and he is carrying that knowledge forward to the next generation. Bungul djama, the ceremonial gathering, is where the Yidaki belongs most deeply.

The Yidaki is not just an instrument. It is inseparable from Yolngu ceremony and from specific country. Different homelands carry their own songs, their own ceremonial obligations, their own elders whose knowledge must be passed down before the next generation can fully step into their role. Vernon is still learning, even now. "All right, now it's in my system, going in my head. I'm in the time for teaching for these other young ones."

That lineage, father to son, country to ceremony, old people to young ones, is what this whole trip was about. The hunting and the fishing and the bush tucker are part of it. But the deeper current running through everything is transmission: knowledge that only survives if it keeps moving through people. "Ladies and gentlemen, my name's Vernon Gurruwiwi Marika Gurruwiwi. I hope you like it. Maynmar."