July 06, 2008
Reluctant Recognition of Rainforest Heritage
On the 11th July 1987, Australians voted the ALP and Bob Hawke into federal government. Labor’s campaign promise, to stop logging within Queensland’s Wet Tropical rainforests via World Heritage nomination, was well supported and true to its word, inscription was ratified a mere sixteen months later.
World Heritage listing for the area’s Cultural Heritage was not sought in Australia’s nomination. The listing of the Wet Tropics was for natural heritage only. The tenor of the nomination rather celebrated the extraordinary natural values as if they had been found, like a hidden treasure, for the remarkable good fortune of humankind. Their urgent protection, through the highest order of protection available to Australia, was justified by their discovery.
But for the people whose lives and livelihoods were a part of the nominated landscape, there was also dishonour and disenfranchisement. Under the nobility of World Heritage, domestic maneuverings usurped economic benefits and amenity towards emerging interests with lesser familiarity.
The indigenous peoples of the Wet Tropics, in particular, were offered tokenistic recognition of traditional ownership, but were structurally excluded from management authority. The fact that the very values identified for World Heritage listing remained a living testament to indigenous land management practices, was not only overlooked by Australia, it was also severed from continuity.
After more than twenty years of effort to convince Australia to re-nominate the Wet Tropics for Cultural Heritage values, indigenous interests have recently won the support of federal environment minister, the Hon. Peter Garrett MP, for inclusion on the National Heritage List; whilst not quite World Heritage, it is a step in that very direction.
Taken from the Wet Tropics Management Authority website: story places (natural features such as mountains, rivers, waterfalls, swimming holes, trees) are parts of the Wet Tropics landscape that are important to Rainforest Aboriginal people as they symbolise features that were created during the ancestral creation period (sometimes called the "Dreaming" or the "Dreamtime"). These places have powerful meaning and properties. They may be considered dangerous to approach or take resources from, except in prescribed ways or by the right person. These places must be respected, not damaged and must be managed carefully by the expert guidance of the relevant Traditional Owners.
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May 05, 2008
What is Wilderness? (Part 2)
"For many aboriginal people, wilderness offers no cause for fond nostalgia. Rather, it represents a tract of land without custodians."
Martin Thomas, 2003, The Artificial Horizon. pg 29.
'The Three Sisters' - A rock formation in The Blue Mountains. Photographed May 4, 2008.
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What is Wilderness? Part 1, August 15, 2005
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March 24, 2008
Comprehending Footprints
No, this is not a photograph of my two left feet … I will only claim the shod one at the left. Australia’s heaviest native land animal, the adult female Southern Cassowary Casuarius casuarius johnsonii, left the imprint of the other. As can be seen against my size-10 clodhopper, this is a bird that would fill a room.
On the issue of footprints, tracking is an invaluable skill taught to traditional indigenous children throughout time. It is a form of literacy, although the script is somewhat unenduring. Nevertheless, as it is with tracking, translating faded writing is entirely possible if the essence of the letters and their sequencing allows reader anticipation to conform to the growing meaning of the prose.
Much is reported about rates of illiteracy in indigenous communities, but the tracks presented in the assessment are of an overly unfamiliar passing and in an abstract form. Would non-indigenous Australia be regarded as equivalently illiterate in its performance of an indigenous test of tracking comprehension?
Many years ago, I crossed the path of an indigenous elder at the outskirts of a Warlpiri settlement in the Tanami desert. His concentration was on the ground before him as he walked along. I asked what he was looking for and he replied Killarwi, his son. He was tracking him. The truly astonishing part was that the track was awash with footprints; around two-hundred and twenty kids passing eight times per day at least five days per week. And yet the elder was able to read the passage of his son’s amongst all others. As an outdoor educator, this was a skill that I would very much like to acquire.
More recently, I was denied a commercial activity permit to enter Daintree NP from my adjoining property. The deposition of the Principal Policy adviser of the region included reference to a phone conversation with a Dr. John WINTER. He wrote:
“Dr. WINTER indicated to me that 4 expeditioners spent five days on the summit of Thornton peak (sic). These expeditioners formed paths simply by walking through the ferns. D. WINTER (sic) indicated that on a return visit about 8 months later there was no signs of any recovery to the vegetation from the damage done by trampling of the expeditioners.”
For such an important matter, I regarded the testimony very poorly. Who was to say that the impact was exclusively the expeditioners, or that in the intervening period no other had stepped foot on this portion of the landscape? And what of the thousands of feral pigs running rife throughout the Daintree and the other, more legitimate inhabitants?
Much is spoken these days of the ‘footprint’ of particular impacts, but I must say, the reading of tracks to give comprehension is a skill that is sadly lacking in contemporary curricula. Whilst governments provide recurrent funding for English literacy to be taught in indigenous communities, there is no counter-part for the employment of indigenous trackers in non-indigenous institutions.
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December 10, 2007
Native Title Deal
According to a report in today’s Cairns Post, the Federal Court of Australia has made a consent determination, handing over a major management role of 126,000 hectares in the Daintree, to the Eastern Kuku Yalanji native title holders.
The determination has resulted in a major reconfiguration of land ownership and management arrangements across a complex array of World Heritage tenures.
The report states that 33,300-hectares of state-owned land has been declared for the exclusive occupation and use of the native title-holders. 96,600-hectares has been recognised for non-exclusive rights, including rights to the water and to fish and hunt in the water, the right to camp, hunt, gather resources for personal (non-commercial) needs and to conduct ceremonies. 16,500-hectares of Aboriginal freehold land has also been declared for residential and economic development.
The determination took over thirteen years to finalise. A range of benefits, negotiated under the broader indigenous land use package, will include a greater role in managing parks and reserves and a veritable doubling of national park estate between Cooktown and Mossman.
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December 03, 2007
Uluru to be Banned from Climbing?
According to Zoie Jones of ABC News, University of Western Sydney Researcher, Sarah James has found that attitudes to climbing Uluru have changed, and the time might be right to close the climb altogether.
Interesting that it has taken so long to come to such a reckoning, when Uluru - Kata Tjuta National Park became only the second property in the world to be listed as a cultural landscape in 1994.
Australia nominated the property in recognition of its cultural heritage importance and committed to manage those values in accordance with its international obligations as defined within the World Heritage Convention.
The fact that it has showcased for the world its reluctance to prohibit climbing, despite World Heritage obligations and also the stated wishes of the traditional owners, is indisputable.
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October 01, 2007
Kin and Country - The Cape York Indigenous Conservation Agenda (Part II)
The progress of the Cape York Conservation Agenda is carving a deepening rift between indigenous interests and those of metropolitan-based ‘green’ groups. Whilst the former lobbies for social engagement within real economies, the latter crusades for an often over-simplified notion of environmental protection. Over-arching this ideological tussle, government verily executes authority for the political rewards of popular support.
Considered a significant conservation achievement by the Wilderness Society, Queensland’s Wild Rivers Act was declared in 2005 for the stated purpose of preserving the natural values of rivers that have all, or almost all, of their natural values intact (in Cape York could have sufficed).
The more recently introduced Cape York Peninsula Heritage Bill 2007, purports to provide for the identification and cooperative and ecologically sustainable management of significant natural and cultural values of Cape York Peninsula. It also restores rights to the exercise or enjoyment of native title, under the amended provisions of the Wild Rivers Act and establishes a new class of protected area under the Nature Conservation Act 1992; namely national parks (Cape York Peninsula Aboriginal land).
The Queensland Government has offered an indigenous economic and employment package, including confirmation of 100 indigenous ranger positions and support for indigenous arts, culture and tourism enterprises. Of course, the nature of this support will greatly influence the outcome of the package.
Current arrangements on Cape York merely provide the public with an illusion of conservation for significant natural and cultural values. Reserves have been declared and land management agencies provided with statutory authority and budgetary allocations, but much of Cape York’s natural and cultural heritage is excluded from subsidized economies and tourism markets tend to go where the getting is more profitable.
The Cape Tribulation section of the Daintree National Park is a relevant example: Half-a-million visitors per year cross the Daintree River ferry, but commercial activity entitlements are almost exclusively held by operators from the abundantly developed accommodation hubs of Port Douglas and Cairns, whilst independent travelers are completely subsidized to enjoy access entitlements without any payment whatsoever.
The full gamut of government influence, including permit allocation and moratoria, subsidization on a tenure-exclusive basis and ecologically protective development impediments on non-government tenures, ensures that very little economic benefit goes to the community within the attraction. This paradox is fundamentally important to Australia.
If isolated communities are required to conserve their natural and cultural heritage values, without reverting the landscape to the kind of conflicting development that underpins the economies of regional accommodation centres, they must be provided with prosperous conservation economies.
Such a requirement would be achieved with far greater success, with the removal of contradictory influences. Indeed, if Australia was to invert its influences, so that commercial activity entitlements were exclusively issued to local operators and full-cost-recovery was required on public reserves only, whilst off-reserve conservation land-uses were subsidized to the full extent to provide visitors with the illusion of free-entry, change in tourism economies would swiftly swing in favour of the communities at the centre of conservation significance.
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September 18, 2007
Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples
I have long held the view that the relationship between indigenous and non-indigenous Australia is self-defeating. Belonging to the same landscape; bound together in territorial respect for the aspirations, life and memory of our own constituents; surely it can be agreed that the dislocation of indigenous peoples from their living cultural landscape is as abhorrent as the eviction of non-indigenous Australians from Australia.
Nevertheless, Australia had little choice but to refuse to ratify the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples adopted by its General Assembly last week.
ABC News quotes Prime Minister Howard as saying, "We do not support the notion that you should have customary law taking priority over the general law of the country."
Upon closer consideration, however, elements of the declaration reveal far more insurmountable implications.
Article 28 (in particular):1. Indigenous peoples have the right to redress, by means that can include restitution or, when this is not possible, of a just, fair and equitable compensation, for the lands, territories and resources which they have traditionally owned or otherwise occupied or used, and which have been confiscated, taken, occupied, used or damaged without their free, prior and informed consent.
2. Unless otherwise freely agreed upon by the peoples concerned, compensation shall take the form of lands, territories and resources equal in quality, size and legal status or of monetary compensation or other appropriate redress.
When the High Court ruled that native title and pastoral lease could co-exist, we saw the federal parliament amend the Native Title Act to provide greater certainty to pastoral interests and effectively rewrite history against indigenous interests.
For Australia, the implications of Article 28 alone, is insupportable. It is a very great shame that the Declaration was framed in such a manner, when so much of it stood for such gain.
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April 24, 2007
Kin and Country - The Cape York Indigenous Conservation Agenda
Mr. Gerhardt Pearson (Balkanu Cape York Development Corporation CEO), Professsor Tim Flannery (2007 Australian of the Year) and Ms. Tania Major (2007 Young Australian of the Year) introduced the Cape York Conservation Agenda at a public seminar yesterday, at the Shangri La Hotel in Cairns.
The Cape York Heads of Agreement, signed off on the fifth day of February 1996 between the Cape York Land Council (CYLC) and the Peninsula Regional Council of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC) (representing traditional Aboriginal owners on Cape York Peninsula), the Cattlemen's Union of Australia Inc (CU) (representing pastoralists on Cape York Peninsula), and the Australian Conservation Foundation (ACF) and The Wilderness Society (TWS) (representing environmental interests in land use on Cape York Peninsula), was of central importance.
As I understood the essence of the seminar, it was not so much that the negotiated resolution of historic conflict was being celebrated, but rather that the agreement had been effectively abandoned, leaving Cape York as the only region in Australia without an appropriate NRM Board.
I thought it was a shameful indictment on Australia (and particularly its self-proclaimed conservation sector) that indigenous representation of Cape York needed to introduce a conservation agenda at all. Indeed, the division of representative interest in the agreement reeks of racial arrogance. The ACF and TWS are merely representative of the popularist environmental lobby. Their environmental bona fides, compared with Cape York's indigenous record, is hysterical. And yet, the division of representative interest is inscribed within the agreement.
A traditional owner took the opportunity to announce that his people's consent for the declaration of substantial increases in National Parks was taken under duress, by processing requirements that rendered Native Title contingent upon the relinquishment of vast tracts of tribal lands to the state (with the open arms of the conservation sector).
Professor Flannery described Australia's indigenous people as 'professors of fire' and encouraged them to pursue scientific knowhow, particularly in dealing with a landscape overrun with feral weeds and animals. He encouraged the economic potential of carbon sequestration and expressed a hope for indigenous Ph.D's.
The very impressive Young Australian of the Year, Tania Major, spoke eloquently about the linkages between recovering from a generation of welfare bondage and entry to the real economy, in terms of cultural obligation and the necessary removal of perverse regulatory obstructions.
Gerhardt Pearson led the audience along a challenging pathway of historical wrongdoing and contemporary betrayal and yet he was still able to enunciate the generosity of a people who recognise the need for mutually respectful cooperation and co-existence.
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