Almost 20 years ago, the rains once came down while at Newcastle Museum 80 people gathered for the very first Puliima Conference. For co-founder Daryn McKenny, it felt like more than coincidence.

"The rains watered the seed to what it has become today," he said of that day in 2007.

"We provide the place and the space, but our people bring the energy."

That seed, nurtured over nearly two decades, has now flourished into one of the world's largest gatherings of First Nations language champions.

In 2025, Puliima returned to Garramilla (Darwin) on Larrakia Country, welcoming more than 370 presenters and over 900 delegates who came carrying languages, ideas, and stories from across Australia and around the world.

Together they represented more than 196 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island and 20 international Indigenous languages, creating a living chorus of past and future voices. The theme for this year, Echoes of the Past, Voices of the Future, called participants to honour their ancestral teachers while igniting a fire for the generations who follow.

"Our future is us, and it is also those who are following us, those who we are now igniting their fire with," Mr McKenny told the gathering.

The growth of Puliima has mirrored the growing awareness of language across the nation.

"Puliima started with just 80 people in 2007, and it just slowly grew every two years," Mr McKenny reflected.

"In 2017, when NAIDOC's theme was Our Languages Matter, numbers lifted to 500. In 2019, the International Year of Indigenous Languages brought 800 people to Darwin. Then in 2023, at the launch of the International Decade for Indigenous Languages, we had 1,084 people attend. That's what's happening; our languages are becoming the equal cousin, no longer the poor cousin to culture, art and performance."

The conference's growth, he said, was proof that investment works.

"Puliima is showing that investment works within our languages. Of course, we need more, but this is where coming together ignites the fire."

The 2025 program reflected that urgency. Delegates heard from language workers of the NPY lands, from Canada's Commissioner of Indigenous Languages Dr Ronald Ignace, and from revitalisation leaders like Philip Windsor and Callum Clayton Dixon, who brought back their high country languages from fragments of just a few hundred surviving words.

Workshops explored digital tools for capturing speech, community-led projects that returned languages to schools, and the central role of youth in keeping language alive. The spirit of intergenerational transfer pulsed through every room, echoing the words of the Voices of Country Action Plan: stop the loss, center the communities, care for Country, tell the truth.

Yet alongside the stories of success, the challenges were laid bare. Each morning began with a moment of silence to honour Elders and speakers lost.

"We can lose a language within one generation," Mr McKenny reminded the audience.

"It can take 30 or 40 years to bring it back. So yes, our languages are on a knife's edge."

He warned that despite recent commitments, investment remained patchy.

"At the moment we've just got one government department, the Office of the Arts, funding our languages federally. None of the other federal government departments invest. It's pocket change. This should be whole of government."

He urged not only government, but also corporate partners, to step up: "If Google, Apple or Microsoft want to be in this country, they should be investing in the oldest living languages of this world."

The weight of the work was balanced by the energy in the rooms. Delegates left inspired by the diversity of methods being used: language apps created on smartphones in remote communities, dance and song as living dictionaries, archives re-opened to uncover words not spoken in decades, and young leaders stepping up to continue the fight.

Mr McKenny said that what Puliima offered was belonging.

"It ignites the fire for those who think they're alone, and we continue to stoke the fire of those who keep coming," he said.

As the conference closed, its theme rang out as both a call and a promise. The echoes of the past — carried by ancestors, by birds and wind and rain — will always guide. But it is the voices of the future, the children now learning to speak words their grandparents never heard, that will carry languages forward.

In Mr McKenny's words, "Puliima, in the Awabakal language, loosely translated to mean 'to make voice, to speak'. Please all continue to use your languages to make voice and to continue to speak."