Social implications of bridging the gap through ‘caring for country’ in remote Indigenous communities of the Northern Territory, Australia

Abstract

‘Caring for country’ is a term used to describe the complex spiritual affiliation that encompasses the rights and responsibilities that Aboriginal Australians have with their land. It includes their custodial responsibilities for keeping the land healthy and its species abundant. This ontology and associated practice of ‘caring for country’ continues across large sections of the Northern Territory of Australia through customary practice and through the Indigenous Ranger Program. This Program has been described as a ‘two toolbox approach’, which combines traditional ecological knowledge with more conventional land management practice, to manage landscapes for their natural and cultural values. Since 2007 there have been several policy initiatives which have changed the dynamics in Aboriginal communities which in turn has affected the structure of the Indigenous Ranger Program. In response to the dire social conditions facing Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory, the Commonwealth Government initiated the Northern Territory Emergency Response, which was a ‘top down’ approach with very little community engagement. At around the same time there was a shift in the way Indigenous Rangers jobs were funded. The unintended impact of this was a reduction in the number of Aboriginal people connected to the Ranger Program and potentially less input from culturally appropriate decision makers for land management. Another influencing policy change involved a shift in Commonwealth funding for land management from Natural Heritage Trust to Caring For Our Country funding. This new funding is more targeted and has changed the nature of the Ranger Program to being less ‘program based’ and more ‘outcome based’ by packaging many land management activities as ‘Fee for Service’ contracts. The transformation is taking place in a prescriptive manner. In this paper we advocate a more community-based approach which allows for greater community involvement in planning, decision making and governance.

Working Knowledge: characterising collective indigenous, scientific, and local knowledge about the ecology, hydrology and geomorphology of Oriners Station, Cape York Peninsula, Australia

“…V. Sinnamon's perspective reflects a deep commitment to the right of Kowanyama people to govern and manage their own estates, but also to indigenous NRM and cultural landscape management as important forms of contemporary work, both in terms of maintaining ecologically-valuable landscapes and in promoting sustainable indigenous livelihoods in remote areas. Contemporary NRM is an increasingly important component of indigenous peoples' relationships with their country, particularly in regional and remote areas (Larsen 2008;Altman and Kerins 2012;Gorman and Vemuri 2012). Formalised NRM agencies and funding provides resources and opportunities for people to visit and care for places that matter to them, but in doing so it affects the timing of visits, the activities undertaken and the landscape features that receive priority.…”

“…Working Knowledge explicitly references the utilitarian and pragmatic nature of contemporary indigenous NRM work, which is increasingly reliant upon external-funding regimes and focussed on (auditable) results overseen by non-local institutions and bureaucratic governance structures (Smith 2005;Gorman and Vemuri 2012). Yet Working Knowledge also references past histories of work (including subsistence activities often invisible to the cash economy), highlighting the continuities of these increasingly formalised activities with a longer historical process of material and economic engagement with the landscape.…”

Innovation in Management Plans for Community Conserved Areas: Experiences from Australian Indigenous Protected Areas

“…Nevertheless, government and traditional owner agendas can be hard to reconcile , 2012, Smyth 2011, Gorman and Vemuri 2012. One in-depth analysis (Walker 2011) found that traditional owners and partners who participated in a review of management effectiveness of the Northern Tanami IPA agreed that management should give priority to objectives that are of prime importance to traditional owners.…”

“…Traditional owners also seek economic outcomes from their country, such as an abundance of animal species that are valued as food (Wilson et al 2004), paid work that engages young people with traditional estates (Luckert et al 2007, Sithole et al 2008, Gorman and Vemuri 2012, and payment to elders for their cultural leadership and IEK teaching roles (Douglas 2011). The Australian Government's IPA Program takes advantage of the interface between these longstanding aspirations and government goals for biodiversity conservation Smyth 2003, Gilligan 2006).…”

“…The term "country" (Stanner 1965, Myers 1986, Rose 1996) is widely used by indigenous people to encapsulate land, waters, plants, and animals together with multifaceted relationships that link people and various elements of their customary estates as described by Prober et al (2011) and Holmes and Jampijinpa (2013). "Caring for country" involves the maintenance of these relationships (Young 1987) and is also used to refer to a wide array of natural and cultural resource management activities that draw on IEK, science, or conservation management knowledge , Ens et al 2012, Gorman and Vemuri 2012 often under the epithet "two-way" (Muller 2012, Preuss andDixon 2012).…”