I am deeply connected to Pilungah and Ethabuka Reserve in far west Queensland, right near the NT/QLD border. The strongest picture that comes to mind when I think of my country is driving from Mt Isa towards the homestead at Pilungah and seeing that red soil. You see the gidgee trees lining the side of the road. You see vibrant red, plus splashes of green and a bright blue sky that turns a very deep blue-grey just before the rains roll in. It’s spectacular. And then you see these little wetlands develop in between the sand dunes where there’s a lot of mallee, eucalyptus and gidgee, and these bush flowers erupt from the sand. People have never seen that because they don’t get out to that country. Those bush flowers are magnificent, and it’s really only after those rains that they flourish. I love all the creatures that come out after the rains, too. The birds come, and the kangaroos and the little thorny devils.
Belonging
My bush name is Yuwea, because I was born with the first rains of the season. I was born and raised in Brisbane, but the Georgina Gidgee woodlands and the surrounding areas are my country — Wangkamadla Country. The feeling that comes over me when I get out there is indescribable: it’s an instantaneous sense of calm, almost like slipping into deep meditation. It’s a strong and powerful feeling of belonging, and of not even needing people, but just belonging to a place.
Kids on country
We don’t have the benefit of living out on country, and that’s because we need to work, and the jobs are not there. It’s important to get the kids back on country so they can understand not only the cultural significance of those places, but the scientific work that has been done there. We take them out and run workshops. My vision is to show them how western conservation and traditional conservation are not dissimilar, and that they actually are strengthened when used together.
For the next workshop we’ve got Aboriginal man and ethnobotanist, Gerry Turpin coming along. We’re going to be identifying bush plants and talking about their cultural names, their traditional uses and their scientific purpose. My mum will be coming and imparting cultural knowledge as the senior matriarch and knowledge holder of the family, and as for her own wellbeing.
We’ll also be looking for bush foods. There’s a kind of mistletoe, for example, with a red flower and a fruit that’s sweet like honey. We call it “snottygobble”, and that was Mum’s lolly when she was out bush as a kid.
The gidgee
We use the gidgee as part of cleansing ceremonies, and we burn it down and cook in the coals. We also use it to construct traditional shelters. Gidgee has a unique smell — reminiscent of sage or musk — and to me it’s imbued with memories. When you burn the leaves, the smell carries across the land. It’s incredibly cleansing. These trees also act as oases in the desert. You’ve got these rolling sand dunes coming in from the Simpson Desert into Queensland, and these beautiful, dense woodlands that offer refuge for people and animals (like kangaroos and dingoes) passing through. The Old People would have travelled through that country for kilometres and kilometres to hunt or to travel for ceremony, and they would have taken shelter in the woodlands.
The threat
The greatest threat to the whole area, and in Australia generally, is climate change. The hotter it gets and the less water that we have in that country, the more risk there is for those landscapes to die. Obviously with that comes a risk to the plants, animals and people that are sustained by that country. We have a lot of bushfires out there, predominantly as a result of lightning strikes. As climate change increases, firestorms become more frequent, and they carry quickly because of the sand dunes. If fire ravages that country it destroys the food sources we use for traditional hunting, as well as sacred artefacts. We also won’t be able to use gidgee if those landscapes are annihilated. These trees don’t just sprout everywhere: it takes hundreds of years for them to grow.
Conserving arid beauty
As Wangkamadla people, we’re very protective of Country. We’re trying to deter mining and that sort of business from our country because it’s incredibly pristine, even though it’s arid. People don’t appreciate arid landscapes in the same way they do coastal ones. They tend to overlook the beauty. We’ve been working with Bush Heritage since 2009. The conservation effort involves raising awareness about these arid zones and the importance of protecting them. There’s a project underway out in the Western Desert region to restore culturally significant natural springs. These springs hold ceremony in addition to being a water source, and some have been destroyed by bores that have been sunk over the spring and are now capped. But the stories and ceremonies still exist in those places. One of the springs in that country is an oracle spring. It’s a similar concept to that in Delphi, Greece, where people travel to the oracle to hear wisdom or see visions of the future.
My hope, now that we’ve had our Native Title determination, is that we might be able to work towards having rangers and our own research to facilitate right- way science. Right-way science blends cultural science and knowledge that’s been passed down through generations with western science, so that we can better understand how to support the ecosystem.
