Learning Garawa

00:00 Eliza Herbert: It's a two-day drive from Darwin to Robinson River in the remote Gulf of Carpentaria. The road leading there is long, and at times tiresome. Drivers of the few rattling road trains carrying cattle and iron ore charge down the narrow Carpenteria Highway, passing one lonely vehicle marked with the Bush Heritage logo. This vehicle is headed towards the Gulf to help support the annual Waanyi Garawa Biodiversity and Culture Camp where local kids and elders will gather on country to share stories, language and learn about the local biodiversity.

This is Big Sky Country, a podcast by Bush Heritage Australia. Sit back today and join me, Eliza Herbert, as we hear from Garawa community leaders, elders and rangers in the remote Northern Territory to learn how they are keeping their country healthy and their culture alive. This here is elder Uncle Jack Green and elder Aunty Nancy McDinny.

01:12 Jack Green: My name is Jack Green and I'm also a cultural advisor for Borella Barkly region and I'm a Garawa man and this is part of my country.

01:21 Eliza Herbert: Elder Uncle Jack Green is one of the leaders in the community who helped bring about the annual culture camps.

01:27 Jack Green: Reason I wanted to get it going was so I can get my family back out on the homeland so they can learn their kids more about country how you are connected to the land properly. And that's the reason I ended up as a coordinator for Waanyi Garawa rangers. We want to carry on our knowledge that we've been given from our family elders in the past and we want to pass that on to younger people to understand more how they're connected to the land.

01:59 Nancy McDinny: Hello, my name is Nancy McDinny and I'm a Garawa lady, but I'm from the western Garawa. That's where I'm from. And all my fathers, they speak Garawa, so I learn from them.

02:14 Eliza Herbert: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures are diverse and complex. They are made up of over 150 language groups and 350 clan groups. While cultures and customs vary among groups, knowledge of things like seasons, plants and animals, ceremony and law have typically been passed down orally through each generation. 

Elder Auntie Nancy McDinny is a linguist who has spent most of her life speaking and passing down her own Garawa language and knowledge.

02:42 Nancy McDinny: We had good life, walking healthy, eating bush tucker, no shop food, no vehicle, just on foot. The welfare came in 1960 to 1964, picked us up at the Robinson down here. “Old  settlement”, we used to be down here. We called it Dagana. 

I've lost it, a little bit, that language, but I had to go back and learn it again. When I go back for holidays, sitting down with my dad and my grandmother, my mother's mother and my grandfather is a Garawa. And my dad’s uncle, he used to speak to me in Garawa, so I started learning very strongly again. And now today I can speak language for my father's language and my mother's language, when I got back. 

Because it's Garawa Country, we have to speak Garawa with the children here and this camp was really lovely and beautiful. You know, kids was enjoying themselves. It was good. So, we’d always be there with them kids and speak, you know, like called the name of different animals in Garawa language.

04:08 Eliza Herbert: At the camp, about 30 kids are sitting by a tree, shaded from the late morning sun. They are from the Northern Territories Robinson River School and are with Waanyi Garawa elders, including Nancy. They're learning how to describe the landscape and animals in Garawa, like the Gulf tree gecko and the black whip snake.

04:27 Nancy McDinny: Yeah, December.

04:27 Kelly Retief: Comes after that first storm.

04:30 Nancy McDinny: After that first storm we call it midual or wet season. 

Children’s voices: Proper wet season. Yeah, big rain. 

Nancy McDinny:  Big rain that is called “night and day” from April to May and June, July, August. It's good time for everybody go hunting.

But when we notice that dragonfly, it gives us time to say that the end of the season coming.

04:53 Nancy McDinny: Yeah. And March, March, the Dragon flag. Tell us it's coming to cold.

04:58 Eliza Herbert: They are making what's often referred to as a seasonal calendar, which you may remember from season one of this podcast. It's a practice to document local indigenous seasons through language. Kelly Retief, Bush Heritage Aboriginal partnership manager for the NT, sees these calendars as an important meeting of culture and science with significant cross-cultural value.

05:24 Kelly Retief: Seasonal calendars can capture a really rich source of information because it's recording stories, it's recording language, it's recording those important seasonal changes on country. That in turn, you know, indicates different cultural protocols that are traditionally followed. Again, it's a beautiful cross-cultural tool that threads local knowledge and science and that is flexible enough that it can speak to multiple audiences. Yeah. And I think that's why seasonal calendars have been so popular with Traditional Owner groups.

06:13 Eliza Herbert: Creating seasonal calendars and mapping the rich knowledge that goes into them is just one of the things done during the camps. Terry Mahney has been working with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities for over 30 years and runs many of the activities and workshops alongside Kelly.

06:30 Terry Mahney: My name's Terry Mahney. I'm an ecologist and I work for myself in a business called Ground Up Planning and Ecology Support along with my partner. 

The camps have become an integral part of the yearly calendar. They're a combination of two things. One is doing wildlife surveys, finding out more about what's on the country, how many of them there are, where things are distributed, building up a strong picture of the wildlife, including plants and animals. 

The other aspect of the camps is that it's also cultural. Chances for cultural activities to strengthen and pass on cultural knowledge of the country.

07:13 Kelly Retief: The culture camps are an opportunity to most importantly, just to support getting traditional owners back out on country. Whereas in the old days people would have walked that country and shared stories across that landscape. 

Today a lot of places that the camps have visited have not been visited by T.O.s for a long period of time. And so probably the most important outcome from the culture camp is just to be able to support traditional owners to get back on country and to reconnect with the stories of those places.

07:58 Eliza Herbert: When Kelly says TOs, she's referring to Traditional Owners. This is a common abbreviation that you may notice a few times in Big Sky Country episodes.

08:07 Terry Mahney: And I also hope that it also provides a motivation and interest and an opportunity for the kids to see there's actually work we can do in this area. You know, when we're finished school, we can become indigenous rangers on our own country, looking after our country, looking after our culture, keeping us strong and healthy, and then passing that knowledge on to our next generation.

08:32 Eliza Herbert: The Waanyi Garawa rangers work to protect the Ganalanga-Mindibirrina Indigenous Protected Area. The Garawa Rangers look after the Garawa Aboriginal Land Trust and help to support the camp and are currently working to finalize their healthy country plan. The camp was held among rolling savannah hills, which lead down to the junction of Robinson River and Limestone creek. In this part of the country, wet and dry cycles dramatically transform the landscape, and the ranges are here for all of it, including Karen Noble and Donald Shadforth.

09:04 Karen Noble: Hello, my name is Karen Noble. I'm a Senior Ranger, Senior Garawa Ranger. And I've been working as a ranger for eight years now. 

Well, first I was just working casual, I was the only woman at the ranger force. For like I think 3 or 4 years. And later on, down the track we had two more ladies join in. Well for me, it was a big challenge, you know, just to stay in the job, you know, not just be slack and say I don't want to do this anymore. But I just kept pushing myself in and doing most of this camp, taking kids around the country feels good. Even the kids loved it.

10:03 Donald Shadforth: This sort of program here just to start them off from when they're young. As they grow older, they'll look back at their grandmother’s country and say nobody’s looking after my grandmother’s, grandfather’s country. I like to do something about it. That's the thing. They’ll wake up in the future and realize that they'll be losing their culture and then at the end of the day, they'll be passing it on to their children, our language and our culture.

10:37 Karen Noble: So, we’re doing controlled burning. Long time ago before we had the rangers, we had wildfires, right? Real wildfires. And killing all our emus because emu don't move from their nest. They’ll sit there until the fire goes through. After we did that control burning, the emus was coming out. Even them little chicks. Got plenty of them.

11:08 Eliza Herbert: The Ganalanga-Mindibirrina Indigenous Protected Area was declared in 2015, but that doesn't mean it's immune from threats. Accelerated climate change and introduced plant and animal species continue to disrupt the balance of ecosystems across the area. Feral pigs and horses and large wildfires are among the perpetrators. 

The Rangers’ work is important and is supported by ecologists and facilitators like Terry and Kelly, who also helped to put together a formal plan to support Traditional Owners vision for country. It's called a Healthy Country plan, which you may recall from our episode on the land snails of the Kimberley.

11:48 Kelly Retief: A Healthy Country plan articulates Traditional Owners' vision for country. They're essentially a management plan and like other management plans, they contain. targets for what healthy country should look like and should be. For example, they contain strategies and activities or actions that need to be implemented in order to breathe life into traditional owners’ vision for country. 

But I think the most Important thing about Healthy Country plans is the actual process of developing the plan itself, because it's about supporting on country, clan based consultation, talking with the right people who have the cultural authority to speak for country and ensuring that in developing this vision for country, that it's being developed from the ground up and that the vision is being captured in the words, in language of the Traditional Owners and elders themselves.

As you know, Garawa Traditional Owners are at the final stages of completing their Healthy Country plan. It will now be about how that plan is going forward and how to ensure that pathway towards developing good partnerships is once again, you know Aboriginal-led, making sure that the relationships with other stakeholders are negotiated. Upfront and that, as Bush heritage has done, that we've played a supporting and enabling role in helping traditional owners implement their vision for country.

13:50 Eliza Herbert: Night falls on the camp after five days of learning and connecting on country. Kelly and Terry joined the kids, rangers and elders to sing and dance.

14:01 Terry Mahney: What were the names of some of the different dances you were doing?

14:04 Children's voices: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't know, buddy.
Blind woman, Giddy giddy …. 
We liked dancing, swimming, painting, making baskets
Oh yeah, we like making spears as well.
We should stay for another night. It's good here. Fresh breeze too.

14:37 Nancy McDinny: We really loved when the kids were dancing and learning at the same time how to sing. So, this is why we like to be in this camp, bringing kids out and singing for them, dancing and teaching them to sing, to carry on with the songs and dance, we don’t want their language to get lost.

15:11 Eliza Herbert: Big Sky Country is a podcast by Bush Heritage Australia, a leading not-for-profit conservation organisation, protecting ecosystems and wildlife across the continent. We acknowledge the traditional owners of the land in which this episode was produced and recorded, and recognise and respect their enduring relationship with their land and waters, we pay our respects to elders, past and present, and any Traditional Owners listening today.

To learn more about how you can support our work, visit the links in the show notes and make sure to subscribe to this podcast. Follow us on social media or sign up to our newsletter to get all the latest news. 

Bush Heritage Australia and the Northern Land Council have been supporting the Annual Biodiversity and Culture Camp for six years now, a special thanks to elders, Uncle Jack Green and Auntie Nancy McDinny, rangers, Karen Noble and Donald Shadforth, Kelly Retief and Terry Mahney, Stuart Hewson, Jason Berrup and George Dodrill and all of the wider community for sharing their stories with us. Special thanks to the Rhumbarriya Traditional Owners who welcomed us to their country and shared their time and stories with us. Thanks to Reitz Maida and Luke Enright for their contributions in facilitating and supporting the camp.

This episode was produced by Will Sacre and myself, Eliza Herbert. Theme music is “Invertebrate City” by the Orbweavers and audio was mixed and mastered by Mitch Ansell.