Sacred Plants Australia · Speaking & Conferences
Ethnobotanist · Field Researcher · Conference Speaker
Plants. People. Place.
Founder of Sacred Plants Australia and an independent, self-taught ethnobotanist exploring culturally significant plants through field expeditions, living cultivation, ethnobotany, botany, chemistry, biochemistry and molecular biology.
The work
Since 2013, Stevan’s work has combined field expeditions, long-term cultivation and independent study across ethnobotany, botany, chemistry, biochemistry and molecular biology.
His presentations bring those worlds together through original field photography, video and sound alongside scientific research and traditional accounts. Each source is identified clearly and treated on its own terms.
The plants, people and places are the story. Stevan’s role is to carry that story carefully, accurately and compellingly into the room.
Selected public presentations
These two ticketed events retain public online listings and mark different stages in Stevan’s speaking work.
The Yopo presentation brought together archaeology, ethnobotany, botany, cultivation, chemistry, biology, cultural history and Piaroa cosmology. The material was subsequently expanded into a free 15-part YouTube series.
Watch Yopo: Ayahuasca’s GrandfatherProgramme-ready talks
Structured for fast scanning, each talk pairs a clear proposition with documentary or archival material. The visual language stays consistent while the subject matter remains distinct.
Ethnobotany · archaeology · culture
An Ethnobotanical Exploration
Drawing on archaeology, botany, cultivation, chemistry, biology, ethnobotany and Piaroa cosmology, Stevan explores Anadenanthera peregrina as both a living species and part of a cultural tradition extending deep into the human past.
Core question: Can an ancient tradition enter modern consciousness without being separated from the people who carried it?
Culture · science · context
What We Lose When We Separate Medicine from Culture
Modern science is extraordinarily good at isolating variables. This presentation places contemporary scientific and clinical approaches beside community-based traditions and asks what each can reveal, what each may overlook and what changes when a plant practice is separated from its history, people and context.
Core question: Is the molecule ever the whole medicine?
Toxicology · preparation · knowledge
Where Medicine, Toxicology and Traditional Knowledge Meet
Plants, venoms, animal secretions, insects, unusual foods and other naturally occurring substances have entered traditional systems in ways that depend upon knowledge of preparation, dose, timing and circumstance.
Core question: How did people learn to work with substances where knowledge can determine whether something becomes medicine, poison or neither?
Knowledge · transmission · stewardship
What Does It Really Mean to Preserve Knowledge?
A seed can preserve genetics. It cannot preserve a story. Drawing from living cultivation and field expeditions, this presentation examines what happens when elders age, languages change and knowledge once carried naturally between generations begins to disappear.
Core question: How do we help safeguard knowledge while the people who carry it retain control over what is preserved, shared or kept private?
For programme teams
One provocation
“When sacred plants are severed from land, lineage and ceremony, they cease to function as traditional medicine. What remains is chemistry consumed by a culture with no shamans, no elders and no spiritual compass.”
Stevan Sipka
The statement asks a larger question: what do we actually mean when we call something medicine? Is it the molecule alone, the person administering it, the setting, the culture that developed the practice, the relationship with the plant or the meaning surrounding it?
The approach
Relationship before recording
Field expeditions begin with relationship. Stevan and his family arrive as outsiders, often without a shared language and relying heavily on a trusted local guide who becomes host, interpreter and cultural bridge.
Trust develops through ordinary life: sharing meals, working in rice fields and gardens, helping prepare roofing, chasing pigs and chickens and lending a hand wherever help is welcome.
When the answer is no, the answer is no.
Accuracy as method
The account is not improved, romanticised or rewritten to fit Western expectations. Wherever practical, it is checked so misunderstandings can be corrected before the material travels further.
The responsibility of the witness is to make sure the story survives intact.
The plant · the chemistry · the human
Botany helps explain how the organism lives. Chemistry reveals what it contains. Biochemistry helps explain how its compounds interact with the human body. Ethnobotany asks what happens when people build relationships with that plant across generations.
Traditional knowledge is not accepted simply because it is old. Scientific explanation is not treated as complete simply because it is modern.
Listen carefully. Investigate seriously. Identify the source. Remain willing to change your mind.
Living stewardship
Sacred Plants Australia maintains a living collection containing more than 300 ethnobotanically significant species.
For Stevan, cultivation is another form of study. Years spent growing a plant reveal seasonal rhythms, reproductive habits, vulnerabilities, resilience and responses to changing conditions that are difficult to understand from a photograph, dried specimen or written description.
Before the chemistry, mythology or human interpretation, there is a living organism.
Field journals
The Field Journals hold relationships, places and encounters in long form, with direct experience, cultural context and external research kept distinct.
Field archive
Three frames, three contexts. Generations, identity and relationship remain visible rather than being reduced to decorative background.
For organisers
Stevan brings together disciplines and experiences rarely represented by a single speaker: living cultivation, field experience, ethnobotany, chemistry, human biology and cultural history.
Formats include keynotes, featured presentations, extended visual lectures, panels, moderated conversations, podcasts, interviews and selected educational events.
Speaking enquiries
If your programme is seeking more than trend, theory and borrowed language, bring Stevan into the room. The living plant, the field, the science, the culture and the people who carried the knowledge arrive together.
If you are organising a conference, symposium, festival, panel, podcast or educational programme, include the event name, proposed date and location, audience, preferred format, approximate session length and topic of interest.
