Brown, A.J. --- "Review Essay - Wild Place, Aboriginal Place: 'Aboriginal Involvement in Parks and Protected Areas'" [1992] AboriginalLawB 31; (1992) 1(56) Aboriginal Law Bulletin 20

• Review Essay-Wild Place, Aboriginal Place: “Aboriginal Involvement In Parks And Protected Areas”

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Review Essay -

Wild Place, Aboriginal Place:
“Aboriginal Involvement in Parks and Protected Areas”

Edited by Jim Birckhead, Terry De Lacy and Laurajane Smith

Aboriginal Studies Press, Canberra. 1992

390pp, softcover, RRP $30

Reviewed by A.J. Brown

There is a sort of presumption that the assimilation of Aborigines to our way of life is a rational and appropriate approach for us to take. [However,] there is increasing evidence that many Aborigines, some of us believe the majority, do not think it rational and appropriate. We are dealing with two distinct logics of life....

For many Aborigines the major premise of their logic is what they see over the face of Australia... Many of them say to me: 'Your people do not know what they are destroying. They cannot know. If they did they could not want to destroy it.'

A Professor W.E.H. Stanner,
White Man Got No Dreaming[1]

As a society replete with Western controls and technologies, Australia is faced with all the challenges of cultural development - of developing and maintaining freedoms, recognising injustices and sharing power among the diversity of peoples that make up society. Interrelated with these questions of cultural identity, is the challenge of economic development, and our relationship with a fragile continent that, in the last 200 years, has become subject to ever more intensive exploitation.

These are two great dilemmas, and at the heart of them stand two issues - the ongoing predicament of Australia's indigenous peoples, and the future of efforts in environmental protection, most particularly in land and wilderness conservation. In the first case, there can be few insights into the current treatment of cultural diversity in Australia as telling as the historical relationship between Aboriginal and Islander people and colonising cultures over the last 200+ years. In the second case, the desire to protect wilderness - to save what's left - is a sharp reflection of a growing recognition across society of the way in which the Australian landscape has been similarly treated, and of a growing desire to understand the land, to respect and nurture it, and to repair some of the damage.

But where do these two sets of challenges meet?

Aboriginal Involvement in Parks and Protected Areas is a book which should help put lawyers, conservationists, land managers and policy makers some way down the track toward an answer. It is the edited proceedings of the conference of similar title held by the Johnstone Centre of Parks, Recreation and Heritage at Charles Sturt University, Albury in July 1991.

Reflecting a diversity of perspectives across the Kimberley, Cape York and Northern and Central Australia, through to New South Wales and Victoria, it covers topics including: the practical and political implications of Aboriginal land management; economic and legal issues; cultural site protection; models of Aboriginal involvement in conservation management; ranger training and cross-cultural education; and indigenous land management issues in New Zealand, Fiji and Alaska. These papers add considerably to the range of materials available to environmentalists and lawyers which explain the ongoing importance of Aboriginal ecological knowledge and cultural heritage to issues of environmental protection.[2]

Perhaps most importantly, the volume reflects something of the diverse views of the Aboriginal people who attended or contributed to the conference. From community leaders in the Kimberley to community rangers on Cape York, to supporting statements by the many white researchers with whom they have shared their knowledge, there are some strong common messages. The traditional ecological knowledge held by indigenous people across Australia has survived, in many places is very strong, and is elsewhere often in a state of regeneration and reinterpretation. The desire of Aboriginal and Islander communities to maintain and re-establish traditional relationships with their land, to regain legal ownership of it and to manage it in keeping with their cultural experience of nurture and sustainability, also remains very strong.

At both these levels, frustration in the face of political resistance from non-Aboriginal people and institutions is rife. East Gippsland's Albert Mullett, in his chapter No People, No Spirit, No Land', asks the basic question:

"It's taken 200 years for whites to ask black people to share their knowledge. Two hundred years? Why has it taken so long to ask about and show respect for 40,000 years of wisdom, culture and experience?"

But the book also documents some successes and current initiatives in non-Aboriginal attempts to support and co-operate with Aboriginal land management regimes. It describes considerable potential for the development of common approaches, and demonstrates something often reflected in the basic attitudes of environmentalists and Aboriginal activists, even if not always achievable - that there is much political and practical common ground, and need be no fundamental issue of conflict or general dispute between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal conservation interests as they stand today.

This should be music to the ears of any policy-maker with an interest in reconciliation between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australians. But is the music being heard?

The answer is uncertain. Australia's best-known models of Aboriginal-owned national parks continue to evolve with considerable success in the N.T., most notably under Commonwealth law at Kakadu and Uluru. The reality is that Aboriginal law can and is resuming its role as a basis for conservation-oriented land management, with non-Aboriginal recognition and support.[3] But other proposals for Aboriginal ownership and management of protected areas are collapsing - eg., in W.A's Kimberley.[4] Still others have been hugely problematic, largely because of the token and uninformed way in which they have been approached by non-Aboriginal governments - as subsets of the inadequate legislative land rights measures with which Aboriginal communities have often been afflicted. This is the case in Qld and N.S.W.[5]

As reflected in the Albury papers, the approaches of non-Aboriginal academics, ecologists, anthropologists, historians, land managers and environmental lawyers are all instrumental to the realisation of this potential for co-operation and reconciliation. It is on these practical, institutional and management issues and experiences that the papers focus. However, the attitudes that make up the non-Aboriginal community-based conservation movement are also at least as critical to the choosing of the future path. They are certainly attitudes to which policy makers have early recourse, along with the views of mining and development interests, when considering land use and management options. In this broader area, Aboriginal Involvement in Parks and Protected Areas is essentially silent. Neither book nor conference purport to include or reflect the views of non-Aboriginal environment groups per se.

However, many of the papers by non-Aboriginal researchers do ride on a range of assumptions about what it is that makes non-Aboriginal environmental ethics 'tick'. It is thus necessary to look beyond where this volume leaves off and to promote discussion of these assumptions, if conservation management is to develop its potential as an area of co-operation and reconciliation.

A current critical focus for this discussion is the relationship between the concept of 'wilderness' which is important to the development of non-Aboriginal environmental ethics in Australia, and the historical and ecological reality of indigenous occupation, management and ownership of 'wild Australia'. The concept of 'wilderness' is subject to fleeting and indirect criticism in the book[6]; yet, as more direct criticisms reveal, it is central to political and legal questions about the compatibility of Aboriginal and conservation interests.

Definitions of wilderness as places 'untrammeled' by 'man', where 'man' is a 'visitor who does not remain', are in wide circulation. For example, they have received statutory recognition in the U.S. Wilderness Act 1964, and the Wilderness Act 1987 (NSW). If this was all that the notion of wilderness involved, the spectre of substantial incompatibility between Aboriginal interests and wilderness protection would clearly be justified. Its historical and ecological inaccuracy has seen this notion of wilderness criticised as 'anti-human' and 'anti-historical'; while its similarity to the legal fiction of terra nullius has led to the understandable claim that "for the Aboriginal peoples of Australia, any definition of wilderness is problematic."[7]

However, there is more to wilderness than meets the eye, as is well known by environmental and Aboriginal activists who have worked alongside each other against developmental interests. Wilderness is a Eurocentric concept, no more nor less; it describes landscape from non-Aboriginal eyes. Today, for environment groups and land management agencies, wilderness is a land use classification which relates specifically to growing respect for the non-commercial, non-industrial, non-colonial values of those landscapes that have been least disturbed since 1788. Most recently, the Commonwealth Government discussion paper on wilderness protection defined a wilderness as:

"... an area that is, or can be restored to be, a sufficient size to enable the long-term protection of its natural systems and biological diversity; substantially undisturbed by colonial and modern technological society; and remote at its core from points of mechanised access and other evidence of colonial and modern technological society."[8]

Revision of the wilderness concept has resulted from attempts to grapple with a colonial history in which 'wilderness' began as a pejorative notion of landscape as 'empty wasteland' - as 'useless' unless improved or exploited by the forces of industrial 'progress'. Have non-Aboriginal values in relation to the environment begun to develop to the point where we can understand the importance of the roles of Australia's indigenous human inhabitants as land owners and land managers? For some, hopefully many, the answer is yes. Our awareness of the importance of wilderness remains incomplete unless it involves a recognition that this awareness is the product of an environmental and political history that is inseparable from the history and predicament of Aboriginal people. Wilderness in Australia is, by definition, traditional Aboriginal land.

What is central is the shifting in the concept, its growth as a cultural development, possibly as a step in the regaining by non-Aboriginal people of a type of knowledge that indigenous people have, in many places, never lost. The desire to identify and protect what remains as 'wilderness' is about more than upper-middle class bushwalking clubs. It involves a radical revision of how and why non-Aboriginal people view things as 'natural',[9] and the values recognised in that process.[10] It is an expression of fundamental concerns about sustainability, spirituality, social organisation, technological development and economic growth, as well as of the political and institutional consequences of these concerns.[11]

In the conservation concept of wilderness, we perhaps come face to face with what Professor Stanner identified in the quotation at the opening of this article; that it is time for us to question our fundamental assumptions of faith in colonial and industrial development, and to recognise the possible limits of Enlightenment rationality.

In these respects, the desire for wilderness protection can be viewed as the basis for a bridge between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal conceptions of landscape and country - possibly more than any other approach to conservation. There is certainly a strong movement toward co-operation between Aboriginal and wilderness interests,[12] one that many governments and vested industrial interests are not keen to support. At the same time, not all is necessarily well between all environment groups and Aboriginal communities, as highlighted by unnecessary and unfortunate non-Aboriginal concerns about what Aboriginal managers may or may not want to do with traditional lands on Cape York.[13] Very little is known among non-Aboriginal researchers about the contemporary environmental impacts of Aboriginal land management practices. But then, there is little widespread appreciation among non-Aboriginal people of the complexity of the finely balanced relationship between Aborigines and Islanders and their lands and waters, as developed over thousands of years, nor of the contemporary ecological and cultural significance of that relationship.

The papers in Aboriginal Involvement in Parks and Protected Areas will help promote this appreciation among researchers, lawyers and policy makers. For anyone concerned with heritage issues, they continue to pave the way for a rethinking of the relationship between Australian society and an environment that many non-Aboriginal people have only just begun to consider appreciating without exploiting. Wilderness is not peripheral, but central, to this rethinking.

The American philosopher Henry David Thoreau is acclaimed for having coined the phrase: "In wildness is the preservation of the world." But when thinking about claims over the environment, non-Aboriginal people must contemplate the full consequences of another statement by Thoreau: "What we call wildness is a civilisation other than our own."[14] Perhaps in this reminder, in a new willingness to accept and respect the knowledge still on offer from Aboriginal people, some of our current dilemmas may be more easily resolved.

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[1] Australian National University Press, Canberra, 1979, PP-324, 331-332.

[2] See for eg., Young, Ross, Johnson, & Kesteven, Caring For Country: Aborigines and Land Management Australian National Parks & Wildlife Service, Canberra, 1991.

[3] See chapters by Tjamiwa (p.7) and Willis, Two Laws, One Lease' (p.159). See also Tjamiwa, "Nganana Wirunya Tjunguringkula Waakarinyi: We're Working Well Together", Habitat 19(3),1991

[4] Nesbitt's chapter (p.251).

[5] The principal NSW test case is Mutawintji (Mootwingee) National Park: see chapters by Bates and Witter (p215), and Geering and Roberts (p.207).

[6] See Birkhead and Smith (p.3), De Lacy (p.288), and Sullivan (p.169).

[7] See respectively: Griffiths, "History and Natural History: Conservation Movements in Conflict?" in Mulvaney (ed)., The Humanities and the Australian Environment, Australian Academy of the Humanities, Canberra, 1991, at pp.90 and 93; and Sultan, "A Voice in the Wilderness? Aboriginal Perspectives on Conservation", Habitat 19(3),1991, p2.

[8] Robertson, Vang & Brown, Wilderness in Australia: Issues and Options, A Discussion Paper for the Minister for the Arts, Sport, Environment and Territories, Australian Heritage Commission, Canberra, 1992, p.26.

[9] See Robertson et al, op cit, chapter 2.

[10] Goodin, "A Green Theory of Value", in Mulvaney, op cit.

[11] See Brown, Keeping the Land Alive: Aboriginal People and Wilderness Protection in Australia, Environmental Defender's Office/ The Wilderness Society, Sydney, (forthcoming-1992).

[12] Robertson, A Proposal for a World Class Aboriginal Owned National Park and Marine National Park in the North Kimberley, The Wilderness Society, Perth, 1992; and Horstman, "Cape York Peninsula: Forging a Black-Green Alliance", Habitat, 20(2),1992, p.18.

[13] Heemal, "Black, Green and Red(neck): A Response to Recent Criticisms of Aboriginal Interests in National Parks", Cross-Cultural Management of Natural Resources, Seminar, Cairns College of TAFE, October 1991; Pearson, "Environmental Rights and the Rights of Indigenous People in Cape York Peninsula", Human Rights and Environmental Protection: The Vital Link, Workshop, University of NSW, October 1991.

[14] Thoreau (1859), as quoted by Nash, The Rights of Nature: A History of Environmental Ethics, Primavera Press/ The Wilderness Society, Sydney, 1990.