St. George Down Under

Caring for Country-Aboriginal Land Management/Attitudes Towards Country

May 8, 2009 at 4:32 pm (In AUS) (aboriginal, aboriginal burning, aboriginal knowledge, aborigines, aborigines and attitudes towards country, aborigines and land management, aborigines burning, aborigines outback, australia, caring for country, settlement)

2.14.11-UPDATE–For more of my writing, visit SaintProse.com.

I finished this essay at around 2am last night after an AWESOME night of dancing in Greenwood, North Sydney. I’m not as proud of it as I am of most of my essays, as I kinda just threw it together, but it still might be interesting for those of you who don’t know about or are interested in the Aborigines…

Caring for Country

                Aboriginal Australians are a unique people. For tens of thousands of years they have inhabited some of the most unforgiving terrain in the world. Extremely hot and dry deserts, poisonous and dangerous animals all are characteristics of their environment. It is due to these realities that the Aboriginal people had to adapt to their land and nearly become one with it. Caring for their environment and their knowledge of it became their specialty, livelihood and survival. It is because of this that the Australian Aborigines are some of the most knowledgeable people on the topics of caring for country, nature habitat and basic happenings of their environment.

                To fully understand this topic it is first important to define what the Aborigines mean when they refer to ‘country’. To the Aborigines, country is a living thing more similar to a person than a location of inhabitance. Aborigines ‘talk about country in the same way that they would talk about person: they speak to country, sing to country, visit country, worry about country, feel sorry for country, and long for country’ (Rose 1996, p. 7). It is an entity to be cared for, looked after, and maintained. It has the ability to die, as well as to flourish and provide for those who rely upon it. In other words, ‘country is home, and peace; nourishment for the body, mind and spirit; heart’s ease’ (Rose 1996, p. 7).

                Due to their intense bond with their environment Aboriginal religion and spirituality deals heavily with country. Their creation story, known as Dreamtime or the Dreaming, has many different versions due to the many different tribes, but all are characterised by elements of ‘country’. For instance, ‘the Aranda people of Central Australia believe that sometime in the distant past, sleeping superhuman beings, who were at the one time human and animal, spontaneously broke through the surface of a lifeless and cold earth.’ These ‘superhuman beings’ created guidelines for human behavior, among other things, and when finished, ‘returned to the rocks, trees and waterholes or to the sky’ (Broome 2002, p. 9).

                Earth and country is the genesis and starting block of the Aboriginal creation story. It is because of this that most all of the Australian country is sacred to an Aboriginal tribe in some way. The country is their temple, their church, and they have spent the thousands of years they have occupied the land learning about and caring for it. There are many places where there are strict limitations and restrictions on certain activities to allow for the flourishing of flora and fauna. James Kohen, author of Aboriginal Environmental Impacts writes, ‘In many areas the sacred site is protected. No hunting, fishing, gathering or burning can take place within prescribed boundaries. Often the site is a nesting or breeding place. Dreaming sites thus function as refuges’ (Kohen 1995, p. 49).

                For the Aborigines to survive they had to become extremely knowledgeable with their surroundings and interactions with animals. They came to learn where animals bred, when certain plants came to fruit, as well as very specific details about organisms that were essential to their survival. In one example, ‘during severe droughts the Bindibu people could find and catch frogs which stored water in their bodies from deep beneath the ground’ (Broome 2002, p. 14). Even in the most unforgiving circumstances the Aboriginal’s deep and vast knowledge kept them alive and well.

                When the first settlers arrived in Australia they felt the Aborigines didn’t manage or take care of their land. They couldn’t have been further from the truth. According to Deborah Rose, ‘management of the life of the country constitutes one of Aboriginal people’s strongest and deepest purposes in life’ (Rose 1996, p. 10). As was stated before, the management and caretaking of the country is important to the Aborigines because it is their temple, but it was also their survival. Without their environment functioning in a way they understood their existence was doomed.

                Deborah Rose continues, going on to write that ‘skilled and detailed use of fire, (along with others), were responsible for the long-term productivity and biodiversity of this continent. In addition to fire, other practices include selective harvesting, the extensive organization of sanctuaries, and the promotion of regeneration of plants and animals’ (Rose 1996, p. 10).

                For thousands of years before the British arrived the Aborigines had employed a somewhat sophisticated method of management in the form of fires. They would burn areas of their land in order to stimulate the growth and reproduction of plants and animals and remove underbrush that would aid in possible unwanted fires. Also, burning was essential for many trees and plants because they ‘required fire, either in order to flower, or for their seeds to germinate’ (Rose 1996, p. 50).The burning also formed environments that were more suitable for kangaroo and large wallabies, who made up a large portion of the Aboriginal diet (Kohen 1995, p. 40).Physically, the burning “replac(e) mature forests with open woodlands and grasslands” (Kohen 1995, p. 49). The Aborigines, it seems, were very intensely in tune with their environment and knew how to tweak it to produce the best circumstances for their survival.

                Although the Aborigines were gifted and cunning hunters, they were smart in that they knew that if they over-hunted their food source would be depleted. ‘Where there were deep valleys, running water and much timber, the natives invariably set aside some parts to remain as breeding-places or animal sanctuaries’ (Rose 1996, p. 50). Quite contrary to Western belief at the time, the Aborigines had in place strict conservation rules and practices that rivaled the sophistication of anything practiced in the Western world.

                Aboriginal relations with their land has not changed over all these years, but it has become more difficult, and in some instances impossible, for them to manage their land as they had for tens of thousands of years. When the British came to settle Australia they interpreted the Aborigines’ nomadic lifestyle as not occupying or developing the land, and seized it from them. An Aboriginal elder is quoted as saying, “Sacred place, all over our Aboriginal land was sacred, but we see now they have made a map and cut it up into six states” (Kohen 1995, p. 35).                                

                Another elder went to say, “White people just came up blind, bumping into everything. And put the flag; put the flag” (Rose 1996, p. 18).  The settlers came to annex land that was occupied previously for tens of thousands of years, and did it with little-to-no thought of the Aborigines or their connections to their land and country. In 1835 legislation was declared saying that “the land belonged to no-one prior to the British crown taking possession” (Australian Government n.d.). It was at this moment that the ability of the Aborigines to manage their land was forbidden.Some of the ‘settlers’ first acts were to clear the land to ready it for development. The careful balance that the Aborigines had struck with the ecology of the land came tumbling down. ‘Once European settlement began in the Sydney area, the impact on the flora and fauna was almost immediate. Clearing of the land resulted in the loss of habitat for a wide range of animals, and they became locally rare’ (Kohen 1995, p. 107). Instead of creating sanctuaries and protecting the breeding grounds of these animals, the settlers ruined their habitats, and in turn depleted their food source.

                The contrast between the Aborigines and the British impact on the land is summed up concisely and emotionally by Dame Mary Gilmore, the ‘daughter of one of the early Wagga Wagga settlers (Kohen 1995, p. 35). “…When I asked my father why we could not get fish as formerly, he said, ‘When the blacks went, the fish went;’ meaning that the habit of preserving the wild was destitute in the ordinary white settler” (Kohen 1995, p. 50).

                  At the root of the land management conflict and the changing of relations between the Aboriginals and non-Aboriginals in relation to country are the basic views towards the land and country that the Aborigines and British held. As was previously outlined, the Aborigines felt that the land was a living thing and that they were from and of the land. It is ‘a place that gives and receives life. Not just imagined or represented, it is lived with’ (Rose 1996, p. 7).  They also felt that ‘those who destroy their country ultimately destroy themselves’ (Rose 1996, p. 10).

                In relation to ownership, the Aborigines believe that ‘individual members of complementary skin groups have rights and responsibilities over specific Dreaming tracks and sites on the tracks’ (Walsh & Mitchell 2002, p. 9). The British, on the other hand, felt that land was to be owned and that it was nothing more than a place or a location. They also felt that it was irresponsible and somewhat savage to let land thrive and exist naturally without developing it. To them, land was to be divvied up and the maximum yield squeezed out of it.  

                  At the time of settlement the British felt that the Aborigines ‘live(ed) in a state of nature (that) did not use the land in a progressive manner’ (Attwood 1996, p. X), and this set the tone for changing attitudes of the British and Aboriginals. The British didn’t respect or understand the sanctity of the land that the Aborigines observed, and started with clearing the country for their development. They were nearly the exact opposite of the Aborigines, who were ‘people (who) were land managers, not land exploiters’ (Kohen 1995, p. 128).

                At the present day, the Aboriginal views and plans for the land directly clash with non-Aboriginal views and plans.  When addressing the issue of whether or not there can be shared common land between the Aborigines and non-Aborigines, there seems to be no answer other than ‘no’. Both parties want different things for the land, and there is no option for coexistence. For example, one of the Aboriginals’ main desires is to preserve their land for religious and ritualistic practices. They would like to see the land untouched, except for their traditional management methods.

                The non-Aborigines, on the other hand, would like to develop the land, putting in roads, housing settlements, and other characteristics of what they consider to be ‘civilization’. Mines are also a very big issue in the land-rights battles of Aborigines vs. non-Aborigines.

                In many instances it is physically impossible for Aborigines and non-Aboriginals to share land. It is virtually impossible to keep land protected and in its ‘dreamtime’ state while simultaneously running a mine on the same land. The only way to somewhat ‘share’ the land is to declare parts of the country as Aboriginal land and other parts as non-Aboriginal land. That is the only way that these two parties can share Australia.

                Rose is correct in asserting that ‘The notion of caring for country is quintessentially Aboriginal,’ and that ‘nowhere in the world is there a body of knowledge built up so consistently over so many millennia’. The Aborigines, over there tens of thousands of years on the Australian continent, have been forced to compile an extensive knowledge of their country and its management in order to survive in some of the most unforgiving land in the world. Their method of regeneration by burning, along with placing sanctuaries around breeding grounds, shows their deep and intimate knowledge of their environment.

 

 

 

REFERENCES

                 Attwood, B 1996, In the age of mabo: history, aborigines, and australia, Allen & Unwin, Sydney.

                Australian Government n.d., European discovery and the colonization of australia, viewed 16 March 2009, http://cultureandrecreation.gov.au/articles/australianhistory/.

                Broome, R 1994, Aboriginal australians: black responses to white dominance, 1788-1994, Dah Hua Printing, Hong Kong.

                Kohen, J 1995, Aboriginal environmental impacts, University of New South Wales Press, Sydney.

                 Rose, D 1996, Nourishing terrains: australian aboriginal views of landscape and wilderness, Australian Heritage Commission, Canberra.

                  Walsh, F & Mitchell, P 2002, Planning for country-cross-cultural approaches to decision making on aboriginal lands, IAD Press, Alice Springs.