Format: Paper presentations with roundtable discussion
Convenors:
Sven Ouzman, UWA Social Sciences, Archaeology and Centre for Rock Art Research + Management, sven.ouzman@uwa.edu.au
Emily Poelina-Hunter, Lecturer – Monash Indigenous Studies Centre, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia, emily.poelina-hunter@monash.edu
Lachie Carracher, Nulungu Research Institute, University of Notre Dame Australia; Martuwarra Fitzroy River Council; Friend of Marturwarra; lachlan.carracher@nd.edu.au
Martuwarra/Fitzroy River is a 733 km long cultural landscape that contains heritage ranging from Aboriginal rock paintings, ancient and modern, stone tools, stone arrangements, songlines and stories, European sites of colonial occupation/invasion, and heritage still in the making today. It is home to diverse Aboriginal nations as well as non-Aboriginal people and is a source of daily and spiritual sustenance. Climate change on this landscape has included radical rises and falls in sea level, vegetation, precipitation, pyrogeography and the like for tens of thousands of years. Aboriginal First Law has adapted to manage the effects on heritage of a changing environmental and social landscape over time. This includes understanding Martuwarra RiverOfLife as sentient and living ancestral serpent being with whom people enjoy a set of reciprocal responsibilities to ensure wellbeing. This is not a conservative approach. For example, the 2023 Martuwarra floods caused significant physical damage to living things, the environment and heritage. To understand the flood’s effects on heritage we employed an Indigenous-led digital ‘StoryMap’ approach to better understand what ‘heritage’ is, what it means to different people, and what actions to take to manage change to this heritage. These activities take place within a state where resource extraction enjoys unprecedented access to ‘resources’ with poor, absent or culturally inappropriate legislations and protections. In this session we share experiences ranging from young and Indigenous ‘River Keepers’, Traditional Owners, and academics in both formal papers and an open session to share challenges and responses to these challenges, to learn, network and craft effective responses to the changing world around us.
Papers:
Trail for Life
Lachlan Carracher, Martuwarra Fitzroy Council, Australia
We start the session with a short film—a digital medium the youthful Martuwarra River Keepers are most comfortable with. This provides a visual introduction to Martuwarra Fitzroy River heritage and the increasing environmental and humanly created challenges and opportunities to the region’s archaeological and living heritages. Crucially, Martuwarra RiverOfLife has agency, personhood and reciprocal responsibilities with the adjacent diverse communities—Indigenous and non-Indigenous. This film conveys their thoughts and hopes as they seek to ensure sustainable and long-term economic and socio-cultural livelihoods along Martuwarra.
Natural Disasters Are Always Cultural: Using Water and Fire to Map and Manage Cultural Heritage in a Changing Planet: Case Studies from the West and East Kimberley, Australia
Sven Ouzman, Archaeology and Centre for Rock Art Research + Management, Social Sciences, University of Western Australia, Australia
Current climate change management is destined to fail because it draws predominantly from nature-based models, with social contexts typically peripheral or absent. Lessons from Aboriginal Australia provide elegant, practical ways to bridge the unproductive nature-culture divide. Decadal Healthy Country Plans provide seamless integration of land and water management within a cultural frame of reciprocal responsibilities between humans and the more-than-human world around us. We can service these responsibilities by, for example, working collaboratively on Country to map heritage sites in a widely accessible digital StoryMap format. Similarly, catastrophic fires are better understood as opportunities to use preventative burning practices as a force for the positive management of cultural heritage. This kind of networked work helps recast policy and practice into a blended ‘third way’ combining traditional and modern ways of managing and relating to our changing planet.
Lessons from Wiliyanoo
Emily Poelina-Hunter, Monash Indigenous Studies Centre, Monash University; Director, Madjulla Inc, a Nyikina not-for-profit cultural organisation, Australia
Wiliyanoo (freshwater mussels) are very clever creatures and have lessons to teach humans about how to look after the Martuwarra (Fitzroy River) in the Kimberley region of Western Australia. I have a special relationship with wiliyanoo, as it is my personal jarriny/jadiny (totem). In Nyikina culture, our totems teach us to be good humans and show us how to care for our environment. The human and non-human totemic relationship is all about living respectfully together in a safe and sustainable way that creates an ecological harmony or reciprocity to everyday life and ceremony. Wiliyanoo has lessons for me to learn and I need to see myself as a student and co-researcher to this creature who lives in the waterways of the Martuwarra and is already adapting to climate changes and the impacts of colonisation and industrialisation in the Kimberley region. I hope the lessons from wiliyanoo discussed in this presentation will become part of the knowledge shared with visitors on an ecotourism Walking Trail project that is being developed, showcasing the significance of Martuwarra Country from both western science and Indigenous perspectives.
Downstream
Lachlan Carracher, Nulunugu Research Institute, The University of Notre Dame Australia
Martuwarra is at a crossroads, one way leads to investment in forever ‘green-collar’ industries, focusing on the preservation of ecological and cultural values that are proven to stimulate economic growth. The other leads to broad-scale extractive industries as seen in the neighbouring Pilbara region, Australia’s quarry.
How do we move downstream together towards a future of well-being and resilience?
What is the most powerful tool in impactful conservation outcomes?
The Living Water Heritage (LWH) project by was a novel response to improve access to and engagement with the National Heritage listed West Kimberley Region, specifically focusing on Martuwarra. A rich tapestry of multifaceted and interwoven heritage values blankets the Martuwarra’s watershed. LWH is an online educational resource that caters to a diverse audience the project unpacks the National Heritage criteria while staying true to the Traditional Owner Voices that co-created this resource.
The media-rich virtual exhibition has three themes Culture, Country and Truth. LWH provides insight into landscape-scale threats, exacerbated by ongoing colonisation and anthropocentric climate uncertainty. In this session, I share lessons learned working on the LWH project as we all move downstream.