Garma Festival

We the participants in the Environmental Management strand of the Djakamirri Wangawu forum at Garma 2002 assert that the term “environmental management” is a non-indigenous construct. That recognition frames our statement.

We assert:

1. Yolngu governance, as a form of Indigenous governance, embeds sophisticated land and sea management philosophies, strategies, and processes. Developing these forms of governance offers ways ahead for Indigenous people, non-Indigenous natural resource managers, and commercial operators alike.

2. This requires that there must be new forms of recognition of Yolngu governance, and more generally indigenous governance, by institutionalised government, and non-government organizations to facilitate a ‘New Deal’.

3. Policy formulation and implementation must be accountable to Yolngu and other indigenous forms of governance. This will require bureaucracies to recognise that Yolngu and other indigenous cosmologies embrace people, land, sea, plants, animals and natural forces with and as a single matrix of governance.

4. Partnerships for effective and sustainable environmental management must be negotiated. Negotiation of land and sea use agreements must incorporate the principles of

• Equity
• Compensation and repatriation of cultural property
• Precautionary principles of development.

5. To achieve these power relations need to be redefined at all levels. Power, authority, and access to resources to formulate and implement policy must to be radically redistributed. Part of redefining power relations is developing philosophical sophistication in translations between Indigenous and scientific cosmologies.

Achieving These Demands

Institutions: In northeast Arnhem Land two key Indigenous institutions with respect to these issues are Dhimurru Land Management Aboriginal Corporation and Garma Cultural Studies Institute. These institutions are committed to governance as Garma—what in English is often known as ‘both ways’. They are established as Yolngu forms of governance, being directly and immediately answerable within the Yolngu knowledge and power matrix. In less direct ways they are also answerable within the modern academy through the University of Northern Territory and the University of Melbourne.
They understand the purpose of an Environmental Management Garma as an open meeting place. It is a place for learning and teaching by all participants, and free exchange of information and explanation. It is a place for expressions of generosity and exchanging ‘gifts’ of great significance.
Both these organisations need recognition, funding and resources if they are to fulfil their potential as sites of significant exchange, negotiation, and reconciliation in environmental management.

A Project: A suggested starting point is the formulation of a cooperative marine turtle management strategy for the waters off Arnhem Land and the Gulf of Carpentaria. This plan will seek to engage communities in management of recovery, restoring and maintaining turtle populations at levels which can sustain a careful indigenous harvest. In many places in the world marine turtle populations are in steady and perhaps terminal decline. In Australia we still enjoy sea turtle populations that can support a modest harvest. (The exception is the loggerhead turtle Garum which is in serious danger and needs special care.) Indigenous communities have a central and critical role in ensuring sea turtles are wisely and sustainably managed. For them sea turtles are an important cultural and economic resource. They have engaged a subsistence harvest of turtles and eggs for millennia.

Indigenous communities all around the Gulf and across Arnhem Land want to negotiate the way in which resources are shared and used. These communities are more than just another stakeholder. They own the resource. Indigenous communities own 85% of the NT coastline. Much of the rest is subject to Native Title claims and negotiations.

We share a vision where scientists learn to work with Indigenous forms of natural resource governance and where the turtles (and other resources) worked with, are recognisable as at once both natural and cultural. Thus the project’s processes and strategies must embody a close and mutually generative partnership between Indigenous knowledge forms and Western scientific approaches. We seek to develop authentic cross-cultural collaboration, going far beyond the notion of ‘consultation’. We seek equitable and just ways for indigenous cosmologies and western metaphysics to mesh and enrich each other.

It seems that the breeding population of green turtle/Marrpan in the Gulf of Carpentaria forms a local and located ‘family’. Indigenous knowledge communities and scientific authorities concur in identifying the sea grass beds in the southern section of the Gulf as critical feeding grounds for this breeding population. This is a key habitat for the population. Controlling the effects of land-use and associated terrestrial run-off could well be crucial.

With the rise of commercial fishing and its technologically mediated intensification, we are faced with competing interests for reduced natural resources in the area. Current fishing practices are analogous to clear-felling and constitute a serious misuse of resources . Similarly of concern to Yolngu knowledge authorities is a growth in ‘illegal’ forms of indigenous turtle capture. Yolngu tradition maintains that while eggs may be collected from beaches, turtles should be hunted in the sea.

Key Issues: .

• Illegal fishing
• By-catch of legal fishing
• Ghost fishing (abandoned nets)
• Protection of critical feeding grounds
• Expanding data on the population and its migration patterns through joint endeavours of the various indigenous (all indigenous communities with interests in coastal areas) and scientific communities (conservation biologists, population biologists).
• Capacity of laws dealing with marine pollution: Should Commonwealth, or international law be engaged?
• Sea Country management areas with potential zoning arrangements negotiated equitably
•Education to promote awareness amongst those using the Gulf, with appropriate enforcement capacities and licensing arrangements

Possible Partner Organisations

• Dhimurru Land Management Aboriginal Corporation
• Garma Cultural Studies Institute
• Northern Land Council Caring for Sea Country program
• Parks and Wildlife Commission NT
• Northern Territory University
• Australian Research Council
• World Wide Fund for Nature
• Hermon Slade Foundation
• National Geographic Society
• Environment Australia