Marketed as a celebration of Indigenous art, storytelling, and music, NYAA WA, a short film created by the musical duo Charlie Needs Braces claims to showcase “Traditional Custodians of the GuriNgai people” and to offer a glimpse into their deep connection with land, sea, and lore.
But this is not Aboriginal culture.
It is a high-fidelity fraud. A seductive simulation. A performance of cultic identity theft wrapped in music, landscape, and ritual language. And if we fail to name it for what it is, we enable the ongoing theft of our sovereignty, our kinship, and our truth.
1. The Lie at the Heart: A Genealogy That Never Existed
The creators of NYAA WA, Charlie Woods and Miri Woods, claim to be “GuriNgai women descended from the renowned Garigal leader Bungaree and his wife Matora”. This claim is repeated in interviews, awards submissions, grant applications, and performance bios. But it is a lie; a dangerous one.
Their claim relies on the invention of a woman named “Sophy,” whom they allege was a daughter of Bungaree and Matora. No historical, genealogical, or oral record supports this. No community recognises it. And no line of descent exists through her because Sophy never existed. She was fabricated in the early 2000s by Warren Whitfield, uncle of Tracey Howie, seemingly in an effort to manufacture a descent line where none was present (Kwok, 2015; guringai.org, 2025).
This myth of “Sophy” has been used to elevate Howie, Hird-Fletcher, and the Woods sisters into public-facing roles as so-called “custodians.” They have performed ceremony, spoken on Country, collected funding, and positioned themselves as Aboriginal leaders. But they do so in the names of our Ancestors, without being of them.
The “Sophy” story is not a cultural memory. It is an act of genealogical fraud; a settler invention made to authorise a settler performance of Aboriginality.
2. When Institutions Endorse the Simulation
If the fraud were confined to a backyard ceremony or Facebook page, it might be dismissed as delusion. But it is not. The NYAA WA project is receiving institutional support.
Charlie Needs Braces has received the Archie Roach Foundation Award for Emerging Talent (2023), funding from Music Victoria, and endorsements from media outlets like Loud Women and Beat Magazine. Film festivals and cultural programs have platformed them. Schools and councils across New South Wales have accepted the GuriNgai narrative into Welcome to Country ceremonies and curriculum materials.
This is not just neglect, this is institutional complicity. These bodies, often acting in good faith, have failed to conduct even the most basic verification of identity. They have platformed people who have been repeatedly notified of their fraudulent claims. They have rewarded performative Indigeneity over lived experience, descent, and law. And they have made it harder for actual Aboriginal voices to be heard—because those voices are now seen as “disruptive,” “jealous,” or “politically inconvenient.”
When institutions mistake simulation for truth, they don’t just ignore Aboriginal people; they replace us.
3. Aesthetic Laundering: How the Fraud Is Made Beautiful
NYAA WA is not ugly. That is part of the problem. It is full of sunsets, saltwater, animals, and songs about care. It superficially may appear, or feel like Aboriginal culture. But it only feels that way because its creators have copied the surface features of our stories without living the responsibilities that come with them.
This is aesthetic laundering; the process by which a fraudulent claim is made beautiful enough to be believed. The yidaki hums. The sea sparkles. The songs mention “connection.” But underneath this is no cultural authority, no kinship recognition, and no permission. It is a settler spells, not just songs.
Like Leni Riefenstahl’s infamous aestheticisation of fascism, NYAA WA attempts to use the tools of cinematic beauty to sell a lie. It spiritualises settler control and dresses it in the clothes of Aboriginal culture. It disorients audiences, not through hatred, but through simulation.
4. Cult Dynamics: The GuriNgai Network as Settler Cult Simulation
What NYAA WA reveals is not just personal opportunism, but the machinery of a settler cult. This is not hyperbole. It is a diagnosis grounded in the frameworks of cult psychology, including the work of Robert Lifton (1961), Janja Lalich (2004), and Steven Hassan (2016).
The GuriNgai network functions as a high-control, pseudo-spiritual organisation, driven by charismatic leadership, myth-making, ritualised belonging, and epistemic closure.
Its members including Tracey Howie, Charlie and Miri Woods, Rebecca Hird-Fletcher, and associated figures like Jake Cassar and Lisa Bellamy, perform Aboriginality through faux ceremonies, faux-environmental mysticism, and invented kinship lines.
This is not culture. It is cultic mimicry: a simulation of Aboriginal Law performed by people who have no right to speak it, act it, or claim it.
The GuriNgai formation mirrors all the classic traits of coercive environments: sealed information systems, elevation of leadership figures as spiritual authorities, and systematic suppression of dissent. Dissenters, including real Aboriginal descendants like myself, are not debated. We are erased, gaslit, or treated as irrelevant.
Within that cultic system, NYAA WA is not simply a film. It is a ritual artefact, a ceremony of public initiation into a false reality, where settlers become “custodians” and real Aboriginal people are rendered invisible. It performs belonging, but does not live it.
5. Spiritual Abuse: The Theft and Violation of Law
There is no word more important in our culture than Law. Not “law” in the colonial sense, but Law as sacred kinship, responsibility, protocol, and obligation. It governs how we relate to land, spirit, water, and one another. It is not performance. It is relational sovereignty.
What NYAA WA enacts is a grotesque simulation of Law. The Woods sisters refer to themselves as “saltwater women.” They speak of “connection to Country.” They sing about totems, land, and Dreaming animals. But they do this without permission, without descent, and without authority.
They play sacred instruments and perform faux ceremonies at NAIDOC events. They teach children songs grounded in fiction. They cry on camera, invoking ancestral trauma that is not theirs to feel.
This is not just cultural appropriation. It is spiritual abuse.
It retraumatises actual descendants. It confuses our children. It erodes the boundaries that protect sacred knowledge. And it teaches the public that Aboriginal culture is whatever a white-presenting person says it is—so long as it is beautiful, emotional, and well-funded.
The cost is not abstract. Real Aboriginal people are being pushed out of spaces, overlooked for opportunities, and silenced in our own ceremonies. Meanwhile, settler performers are celebrated in our name.
6. A Public Call to Action: Refuse the Lie. Restore the Truth.
To those attending NYAA WA at Pearl Beach: you are not witnessing Aboriginal art. You are witnessing a ceremony of imposture.
To the organisers, funders, media partners, and institutions who have supported this project: you are not elevating First Nations voices. You are platforming a settler cult that impersonates us, violates us, and displaces us.
And to everyone reading this:
Do not celebrate NYAA WA. Expose it for what it really is.
Do not mistake visuals for cultural legitimacy. Ask the hard questions.
Do not be silent. Silence is complicity.
It is time for institutions to stop rewarding fraud.
It is time for community members to demand accountability.
It is time for real Aboriginal voices to be heard, not just performed.
I write this not to shame individuals, but to name a system. A system in which settler desire masquerades as Aboriginal culture, and in doing so, denies us our truth.
I stand with my ancestors.
I stand with my community.
And I ask you to stand with us.
In solidarity,
JD Cooke Proud Carigal Marramarra man
Proud descendant of Bungaree and Matora
Founder, guriNgai.org and bungaree.org
A Long Con, Gone on Too Long. 
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