Commitment to our country

Chapter 11

Commitment to our country Cherry Daniels, Edna Nelson, Julie Roy and Priscilla Dixon

This chapter is based on recorded conversations about the history of the Yugul Mangi Rangers between female Yugul Mangi rangers – Cherry Daniels (retired), Edna Nelson, Julie Roy and Priscilla Dixon – and non-Indigenous scientists from the Australian National University – Emilie Ens and Gill Towler. The majority of the conversations were held in English and sometimes the women discussed things with each other in Kriol, the lingua franca (main spoken language) of the region. Cherry, as the most senior woman, did most of the talking and therefore, parts of the chapter are written with Cherry as the first person using direct quotes from the recording (in italics). The other women clarified or verified things she said and sometimes spoke about other events or stories. The conversations were held in the Ngukurr Language Centre and at different places along the bank of the Roper River in October 2011. We sought further documented information and recollections from other people to substantiate some of the dates and details of which the women were unsure. Emilie has worked with the Yugul Mangi Rangers since September 2008 and was ‘adopted’ and given a skin name by Cherry Daniels as her granddaughter, her abuji. Gill’s skin name is Burlanjan, which according to Indigenous kinship systems, makes her Cherry’s sister, her baba. The Yugul Mangi Rangers are based in Ngukurr and work on behalf of the Yugul Mangi traditional owners – the Marra, Ngandi, Alawa, Nunggubuyu, Ritharrngu, Wandarrang and Ngalakgan people of the lower Roper River and Gulf of Carpentaria region of south-eastern Arnhem Land (Figure 11.1). Yugul Mangi is said to mean ‘together as one’. Their management area covers approximately 20,000 square kilometres of land and sea country.

A bit about Ngukurr Ngukurr is situated on the northern bank of the Roper River, 120 kilometres upstream from Port Roper, the mouth of the Roper River in the Gulf of Carpentaria. The town lies on the southern border of Arnhem Land and 360 kilometres from the

174

Commitment to our country

Figure 11.1 Language groups in southern Arnhem Land

(Courtesy: BJ Baker and J Hughes)

nearest regional centre, Katherine. According to the 2006 Census, Ngukurr had an Aboriginal population of 862 and a non-Indigenous population of 45. Ngukurr was the place of the first mission in Arnhem Land, the Roper River Mission, which was established in 1908 by the Anglican Church Missionary Society. Over the next 60 years, Aboriginal people of the lower Roper River catchment were forced into the mission, inhibited from practising their culture and coerced into discovery of ‘sober and responsible mainstream norms’.1 In 1968, the Church Missionary Society transferred administrative control of the mission to the Australian Government, but the church has continued to have a strong presence in the community. After the transfer the settlement was renamed Ngukurr, the name by which the Aboriginal population had always known the place. 1

As quoted in J Taylor, J Bern and KA Senior (2000) Ngukurr at the Millenium: A baseline profile for social impact planning in South-East Arnhem Land, CAEPR Research Monograph 18, Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research, Australian National University, Canberra, 10, viewed 2 April 2012. For more on the Roper River Mission see EK Cole (1968) A Short History of the CMS: Roper River Mission, 1908-1969, Church Missionary Historical Publications Trust, Melbourne; RS O’Donnell (2010) The value of autonomy: Christianity, organisation and performance in an Aboriginal community, in Anthropology, PhD thesis, University of Sydney, Sydney; EK Cole (1971) A History of the Church Missionary Society of Australia, Church Missionary Historical Publications Trust, Melbourne.

175

PEOPLE ON COUNTRY

Introduction by Cherry Daniels Hello my name is Cherry Daniels I was a senior ranger, I started up the project way back in 2002 and I retired last year. But now and then people come to me, and I do consultancy work with the rangers. It makes me really happy when they come back to me. To me I am still a ranger, in a different way, not different really … we just look at both sides, Indigenous and non-Indigenous, we are still rangers of our country. I was born at Ngukurr, brought up at Ngukurr. When I was a little girl I used to go out bush with my grandparents, not my real grandparents, my step-grandparents. They took me down to Limmen Bight. They taught me how to manage country our Aboriginal way. They used to tell me not to cut certain trees, or not to pull up certain grass because they were our food, our medicine, that we used to use. So they made sure that we never touched those things [when it wasn’t necessary] and we built fire at the right time. Not when I wanted to make a fire. If I picked up a fire stick to try and go and burn how I wanted to do it, they used to tell me, ‘Don’t do that my girl you can’t burn now, it’s not the right time. You burn when you need to’. So sometimes we used to build fire to tell people that we are coming home. And then we see other fires, that fire would tell us that there was a ceremony over there. And people were moving to that place, for ceremony. Sometimes a fire would tell us that there are other people staying in that certain place, going camping, hunting, looking after that part of the land. You know when I talk about these things it makes me feel really sad inside because today, we don’t do that. We are victims now. Victims of what is happening now. But we are not the victims of our land. To me, that is what I am looking at. This river here [the Roper River], us people, our Indigenous people looked after that river very well. We made sure, like our old people made sure, that we didn’t muck up the land, our land at the bank of the river. We used to go and swim in the river, sleep along the river bank, travel along the Roper River to Port Roper and further to Limmen Bight or to Numbulwar (see Figure 11.1). People will be travelling and then trade, we used to trade along this river bank. Marra people would give canoes to some people from the Ngukurr area and they would give us something else, maybe spears, hunting things. I know a lot of things have changed both ways, western, Indigenous. But we try and bring those together to make it look same, or make it feel same, so that respect will be there all the time for us. Not only for us Indigenous, but for non-Indigenous people as well. We all call ourselves Australian. We are all Australian. We live in Australia. So we come as one big group of Australian people. We teach each other how to look after our country Australia. We try very hard to tell people not to go and touch things that belong to us. There are significant places that we like to see there all the time for our children to see. Those significant places are not there some of them, because they have been ruined by intruders. I call intruders people who come into the land of other people and intrude and take away what we own. Sometimes I get really angry when I see that.

176

Commitment to our country

Starting up our ranger group: Even Indigenous women can be rangers On a few occasions, Cherry told how she perceived the establishment of the ranger group. The other women corroborated what she said. In the late 1990s, prior to the women establishing the Yugul Mangi Ranger group, a group of male land owners worked with the Indigenous Land Management Facilitator (Joe Morrison) and Greening Australia to control Mimosa (Mimosa pigra, a weed of National Significance on the Australian Government’s Alert List for Environmental Weeds) on the Phelp River floodplain and undertake early controlled burning. Later, they often worked with the Yugul Mangi Women Rangers and formally joined the group which, with funding from the Community Development Employment Projects program became, in 2007, the Yugul Mangi Rangers. Before I started off the Ranger Program, I was working as a coordinator of the Women’s Centre. But then in 2001, four women who were working at the Women’s Centre were invited to a women’s conference at Gunlom [in Kakadu National Park]. So we talked about it and I said ‘let’s go to this conference and hear what other women are saying about things, giving their issues and what we think is best for us. It could either be an ongoing thing or just stop there at that meeting’. Beautiful place … where we were introduced there and then we asked whether women can be rangers, they said ‘Yeah sure! Plenty of women are rangers! There are women rangers around the world’. They told us that even Indigenous women can be rangers and we were very glad. There were about 150 women there altogether from Borroloola, Oenpelli, Kybrook, which is near Pine Creek, and us mob from Ngukurr. On the first day there we heard the speeches of other women and the person who chaired that meeting asked us if anyone had anything to say, maybe give a speech … so they chose me to give a speech on the next day. On the second day I gave a speech. My main point in that meeting was identity. Identity is an important thing in both-ways, western culture, blackfella culture. Our identity is very important to us. We carry it here, in our heart. We don’t carry it on a piece of paper. What I spoke about was my cultural identity, who am I? Wherever I go to Aboriginal communities, people who look at me and say who are you? I’ll call my name, what’s your skin? I call my skin name, and where’s your country? All that stuff, cultural stuff, that’s my identity. My Indigenous name is Wulumirr. If I go up to the Top End and I tell them my clan, my clan name is Wulngurri, ‘Oh’ they’ll say, ‘We are connected in ceremony, our ceremonies are the same, your dreaming came up to my way’, they’ll say that and they’ll respect that. That’s what they did when I went up all the Top End area. They knew me by clan, by my name, by my skin and by my country. That was my identity, Wulumirr. My skin name is Burlanjan and in Oenpelli language, you call ngal-kangila that’s the same as Burlanjan. And around this river here, I’m Bujayin, that’s in Yugul Mangi language. After the meeting that day in the afternoon about 4 o’clock we went back to our camp and we talked about it. There was Grace Daniel, Marjorie Daniels,

177

PEOPLE ON COUNTRY

Edna Nelson and I. We spoke about it, discussed what we can do and there we decided that when we come back here [Ngukurr] we’ll start up a ranger program. They appointed me as their supervisor. So we came back and I had a talk to people here, we had a community meeting, they all talked about it in that meeting up there and people said, ‘Oh that’s a good idea Cherry, let’s have women rangers here’. So we started off and Marjorie worked along with us, not for long, maybe just for few months but then she got sick. So I went round to the community and talked to women from different clans and we joined up nearly 22 women working at that time. But then some of them started dropping off, you know, because of their husbands, they get jealous. While we worked as rangers we had nothing. Walking around the community asking for help, the CEO at that time gave us a bit of help. They gave us a wheelbarrow; they gave us couple of chainsaws, some tools that we could use to work around the community. So we started off helping Greening Australia. Greening Australia were working as Landcare people. But we women were just rangers. There were many of us, but as time went on we had drop outs, women started dropping off. They saw that the job was a bit too hard for them, they weren’t ready for it. They were not committed to it. So we ended up with 12. Then from 12, four went off and there were eight. And in the middle of this work we did some training on land conservation. We asked for someone to come down and help us, be our lecturer, to learn more about land conservation. So we went to the Batchelor College Annexe in Darwin, and we did some courses, workshops on land conservation. At the start we were paid through CDEP [the Community Development Employment Projects program], not government. I know that’s government money I suppose … different kind. Middle money. About $450 a fortnight we received. Anyway, I was satisfied with that. When we started working as rangers we walked around Ngukurr, working here and there then we asked if we could do up the old cemetery, make it a sanctuary. When we started doing this government gave us some money but then we don’t know what happened to it, got lost somewhere in the middle. We don’t know where it went. Anyway, we worked and they gave us some material to use like shovels, spades, crowbar, whipper-snipper, chainsaw and a couple of jerry-cans that we could use. And we had a motorcar – it was a wheelbarrow. We used to push that wheelbarrow around with our fuel in it and our tools. Pushed it to wherever we went to work in the community. Then we also started doing some work with Greening Australia. They gave us some tools and we started planting trees around Ngukurr. We did that from 2003. Around this time we also started working from the old ranger shed next door to my house. Then we started discussing getting a coordinator who can work on the papers for us. The NLC [Northern Land Council] organised for three people to come down so we could interview them for a coordinator position. That was how we got our first facilitator. So we worked along and then realised, ‘Aye! We can’t just keep pushing this wheelbarrow around when working! We need to go out bush too and see and do surveys of our animals and plants and faunas, you know, and our creek-beds,

178

Commitment to our country

Figure 11.2 Sequence of Yugul Mangi Rangers logos from 2002–2006 (right), 2006–2007 (middle) and 2007–present

(Courtesy: Yugul Mangi Rangers)

our billabongs and our rivers’. So we decided to write a letter about it. We did write a letter, our first one, but these people up there didn’t help much. So we decided to write a letter to ILC [Indigenous Land Council] and in less than two weeks we got a reply back – there’s a vehicle waiting for you in Tennant Creek. I tell you, all the girls that worked with rangers were so happy … they had shaky voices poor things! We were so glad that we had a vehicle at last. And it had that same logo, that one we got here now.

Meaning and development of the Yugul Mangi Rangers logo In 2004 Clarry Rogers drew that logo (Figure 11.2, left image) but then it was just women rangers written on it. Yugul Mangi Women Rangers, that’s all. That was in 2004. Our ranger logo represents two big trees, white gum trees that grow along the bank of the Roper River. They were significant trees. They represent the community. This is a dreaming site where the kangaroo came and it jumped in the river. And it is there in the river today. This part is very, very important to us, our significant part of Ngukurr. This river is an important river. It reminds us or tells us many things in our ceremonies. Our ceremonies come from this river as well. Not only on the land, in the river as well, right up to the Bar, Roper Bar, and down to here. This is all Ponto’s land and those trees, they were very important trees. They had names those two trees; they were called wabulngarra and barralda. And those two men, one of those men, his son is a ranger now. That’s why he looks after this country. He’s always working. On our first ranger logo we had just Women Rangers, Yugul Mangi Women Rangers. Now it’s both, men and women together. The men joined the Yugul Mangi Rangers in 2006 so then we changed our logo to ‘Yugul Mangi Rangers’. Then in 2007 we changed it again to ‘Yugul Mangi Land and Sea Management’.

179

PEOPLE ON COUNTRY

The Yugul Mangi Rangers There has been a core group of rangers since the start of the group. Some people have come and gone, but a core group of nine rangers has remained. Three women have been there from 2002 with a fourth since 2006. Four men, who had been working with Roper River Landcare and Greening Australia since the late 1990s, joined the group in 2007. Over 10 years of operation, the Yugul Mangi Rangers have had five changes in the coordinator/supervisor with two periods (about one year each) of no official coordination. According to Cherry and the women, the rangers struggled with most coordinators over control of the day-to-day business. However, they were glad to have assistance with managing the office work, acquisition of equipment and vehicles, establishing links to external organisations and development of the ranger group itself. The coordinator that was viewed most favourably was the only one interviewed and chosen by the rangers themselves. All the others were ‘sent down’ by the Northern Land Council. Of the coordinators Cherry said We didn’t even interview these later coordinators, they just came. NLC just sent them out without even discussing with us and telling us who they were. They just came. Bad manners. She [one coordinator] came here once and we had an argument at Nalawan I tell you. She thought she was doing the right thing but she wasn’t. They just picked her out to come and help us with the weed stuff and doing a bit of paperwork. Anyway, we didn’t like her, I didn’t anyway. So she didn’t come the next time we worked. Too bossy … she used to sit and do paperwork and tell us what to do. ‘You can’t tell us what to do, we already know what we are doing’ I said to her. He [another coordinator] worked at Nitmiluk National Park. He was only here for two months. He came along with his partner. She didn’t like to stay here. So they just took off without even telling us ‘We are going now, we are resigning’, they just took off.

The governance and operational arrangements of the Yugul Mangi Rangers have changed considerably since they started. As Cherry alluded to earlier, initially, they were paid through the Community Development Employment Projects program, which provides part-time wages at no more than unemployment benefits (see Chapter 1). The Yugul Mangi Community Government Council controlled their finances. However, with news of the new shire government structure that was going to replace local governments, and fear that the shire would acquire all their assets, the rangers worked with the ranger coordinators at the time to develop an incorporated body known as the Yugul Mangi Land and Sea Management Corporation. Representatives of the seven clans of the Yugul Mangi people make up the board of the Yugul Mangi Land and Sea Management Corporation. The corporation was declared in 2008. However, at this time, the ranger coordinators 180

Commitment to our country

left and the Northern Land Council began to administer their finances including the full-time wages they received through the new Working on Country program. Administration through the Northern Land Council has, however, created different challenges for the rangers as the office is based in Darwin, 600 kilometres away, and telecommunications are often down in the region which creates obstacles for planning, decisions and purchasing. The women spoke about the history of challenges involved in managing their finances. Over the years they were not entirely sure about the details of their income streams, how their money was managed, or by whom. For example, the rangers and traditional owners were supposed to be paid a total of $3000 by a pet-meat company for feral horses culled in the region. However they were not aware of anyone actually receiving the money. Cherry, Julie, Edna and Priscilla said that they helped get a truck full of meat from horses at three different locations. One of these was Cherry’s country and she was supposed to get money as the senior traditional owner. However, she said she did not receive any money and did not know of anyone who did.

Training and conferences While working, the rangers have continually been building their skills, knowledge and confidence through formal and informal training programs and conference attendance. These activities were spoken of very highly by the rangers and were suggested as key to the development of the group and their success in maintaining strong partnerships and networks with the community and external organisations. All of the rangers have qualifications in Conservation and Land Management, their coxswains licences and have recently started Certificate II in the Seafood Industry. The first ranger conference from all around the world Indigenous people came there, 700 people. I got that speech there, it’s in my book what I said. That’s when we were given the champagne after my speech. When I went to that Ross River conference they asked me about motivation … I spoke about motivation. Because when you are motivated it’s not leadership! You are the leader yourself. When you are doing leadership things it’s you who gotta do that thing and the people will follow you, then you get motivated by doing all those things. Then, you become the role model of those things, not only things what you do but with people. That’s the one I used to talk to them all the time, speak to them my girls. That’s why they love me and I love them! I took Edna down to Canberra and we did that leadership course down there. That was in 2007. Just women. This young lady she is recognised by all women around Australia, Indigenous women. She got certificate for it, for doing that training.

181

PEOPLE ON COUNTRY

Figure 11.3 A group shot of the women rangers’ workshop held at Gulkula, near Yirrkala

Our work as rangers Going out on country The importance of being a ranger and why we do these things is because of our country, we get things from the country, not only food, our ceremony comes from it. That’s the connection there. That’s why it’s so important for us blackfella. You gotta go out there and see what’s happening, you know, whether your country is looking still the same or has changed a bit so we talk about it and we say ‘there’s something wrong there, something has happened there’. Like something in a sacred site must be missing or must’ve fallen. That’s why we’ve gotta check our country all the time, make sure that sacred thing is still in the same place and hasn’t been moved by someone who is an intruder. They can be both-ways intruders, Indigenous and non-Indigenous. That’s why we make sure our country stays the same as … and even our paintings, our rock paintings. Even significant places we make sure that they’re still there but significant places, you know, they are important, but even though it might get washed away by the rain or by the floodwater we know where that thing has been so that spot it is still significant to us. And, like our sacred things it’s always there. If we see it’s something missing or ‘What happened here? Something has been done here’ then we get really upset inside. That’s our identity that’s going from there.

The rangers have been involved in two long bushwalks with old and young community members to promote the intergenerational transfer of Indigenous knowledge about management of country. The first bushwalk in 2008 was 182

Commitment to our country

from the Stone Country to Salt Water from Warrpani, Ngilipitji, Lake Katherine right down to Costello. In late 2009 Clarry Rogers worked with Joe Morrison (Northern Australian Indigenous Land and Sea Management Alliance) and Don Duggan (Greening Australia) and his family to get funding for a five day walk which retraced the steps of his father from the Old Mission near Ngukurr to their ancestral country to Wuyagiba. This walk was also filmed and made into a DVD.

Burning country Fire management is a major focus of the Yugul Mangi Land and Sea Management Corporation’s work. While many of southern Arnhem Land’s traditional owners live in Ngukurr and other communities they do not have access to their country in order to undertake seasonal fire management activity (due to lack of resources such as vehicles). This means that in some areas the rangers must undertake this activity for, rather than in association with, traditional owners. The Yugul Mangi Land and Sea Management Corporation works regionally on fire management and is a part of the wider Central Arnhem Land Fire Abatement project. Here, they work with other traditional owners living in Numbulwar, Bulman, Ramingining and Maningrida. The Central Arnhem Land Fire Abatement project is contiguous with the West Arnhem Land Fire Abatement project focused on the Arnhem Land plateau (see Chapters 9 and 10). The Yugul Mangi Land and Sea Management Corporation works closely with, and is supported by, Bushfires Northern Territory. Rangers, along with traditional owners, undertake annual fire management planning and are involved in on-ground burning, foot-walk burning and aerial controlled burning. Several rangers have their bombardier (aerial burning) tickets so they can undertake prescribed control burning from helicopters in very remote areas. Sometimes we’re frightened of burning. Because a lot of our sacred sites have trees, special trees that we respect very much. Before the Mission times, the old people didn’t burn near sacred sites. They used to burn a long distance away from our sacred sites. But then, those fires were messengers to other tribes. Say if my tribe would be travelling down coming down to Ngukurr they’d burn up there but long way from our sacred sites. Then, ‘Ah look at that, people might be coming down this way, our way’ and they’d be burning all the way till they get closer to Ngukurr’. Ah that came up from the Ngandi way that must be Ngandi people coming down’ and then maybe the Ngalakan mob would be travelling from here, going up, that’s what they use to do, the Ngalakan people use to come up. There was always a man, one man, come up with messages to bring our Ngandi mob down here for ceremonies. Those fires were ceremony fire telling us that ceremonies would be put up here or put up there somewhere and saying that they are coming. It was always in the dry that they burn, not when wet season or early dry or late dry always … around about June/July/August. They also used to burn for hunting. If we went looking for goanna, that was in the dry season, we’d burn that area, that goanna area, and then the next 183

PEOPLE ON COUNTRY

day we’d go back and see fresh tracks, goanna going in and out of holes, or for echidna, brown sugarbag, lots of things. That’s Aboriginal way. The Munanga [non-Indigenous people] way, they burn too much and that’s not good.

Feral animals What feral animals we have here is donkeys, horses, pigs, cane toads, buffaloes … they go into our billabongs, they muck up the billabongs. Then when we go, human beings go to get something from those billabongs there is nothing there because of what happened; the animals got there first. Why did they [non-Indigenous people] bring all those animals to Australia! They are not our animals! They are not our natives, our native animals don’t do that to our billabongs, they don’t muck up our billabongs. They go to those billabongs but they don’t do anything like muck things up. So we’ve been working with Emilie and Gill to build fences around some billabongs to keep the feral animals out [see Chapter 3].2 We’ve fenced around Nalawan, which is a significant billabong. I own that billabong. My country. We’ve found out that those billabongs are looking much better than what they were before way back in the 1990s and early millennium. When we fence off those billabongs we’ll see more birds there, we’ll see more lilies. We don’t expect fish because it’s too shallow for fish to be there … only little fishes, but not big ones. But because when I was a kid growing up we used to go to that billabong, we used to get lots of lily roots, lots of lily pods and even the stems. And we’d be bringing them back to Ngukurr and I’d be helping my grandmother grinding the lily pods. Make dampers. We don’t do that anymore! Where’s all those skills! All gone! Because of what happened by intruders coming in. You know what I mean by intruders? They are invaders, creeping through our land. Those silly, stupid people who brought those things in here should not bring those silly animals to our country, mucking up our land! I am urging for all those things [species] to come back to me but I can’t get them because of what happened. Those creeping invaders coming in. Not only animals but weeds as well ... plants. We asked our coordinator if we could get someone to teach us to do firearms so we did firearms training, all of us. Then we did lots of training on feral animals, shooting, and AQIS [Australian Quarantine Inspection Service] stuff. We also did some feral animal work with CDU [Charles Darwin University]. We made traps for pigs. One time we built the traps out at Wanmuri, on the plain, no any bigi bigi [pigs] been going in there! We didn’t catch anything … the only thing that was trapped in there was a little gubai gubai lizard.

Julie also added that they had not done any work on cane toads. Although someone did a talk on cane toads, ‘But just talk, no action’. She also said that they did not have any feral cats. About donkeys, Edna said that they do not kill them but that 2

EJ Ens, G Towler, C Daniels, the Yugul Mangi Rangers and the Manwurrk Rangers (2012) Looking back to move forward: Collaborative ecological monitoring in remote Arnhem Land, Ecological Management and Restoration, 13 (1) 26–35.

184

Commitment to our country

‘they are mucking up the land too’. She said that there were more coming up on the southern side of the Roper River too. In 2007 and 2008 the rangers also worked with the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation to eradicate big-headed ants from Ngukurr. They did it a couple of times and then the ants were gone.

Weeds Weed control is one of the main activities of the Yugul Mangi Rangers, which they take a lot of pride in. In 2003 they started working to control Parky (Parkinsonia aculeata) and Rubber bush (Calotropis procera) mainly down on the Roper River floodplains and at Yellow Water, a billabong near Ngukurr. Priscilla said ‘There’s no Parky at Yellow Water now because we had weed control from Katherine come and we worked along with them’. Since then, they have also worked to control Mimosa (Mimosa pigra), Noogoora burr, Gamba grass (Andropogon gayanus), Caltrope (Caltropis procera), and more recently the Mission grasses (Pennisetum polystachion and P. pedicellatus). Priscilla said that ‘now … we been mainly working on this parky and mimosa…every year that’s been our main ones we’re doing because there’s a lot. Sometimes we take the boat down the river so we can get to the weeds on the floodplains’. In 2009 the Yugul Mangi Rangers and Roper River Landcare won the Northern Territory Landcare Award for their control of Weeds of National Significance Parkinsonia aculeata and Mimosa pigra. They were also nominated for a National Landcare Award for which Priscilla went down to Canberra.

Biodiversity surveys The rangers have been involved in two formal fauna surveys. In 2005, they did the first one with Batchelor College, as part of their Conservation and Land Management Certificate. The second one was conducted with Northern Territory Parks and Wildlife at Maria Island in 2007. In 2005, we went and put out 68 traps, Elliott traps, at Wuyagiba. Nothing went in those traps … only a little Dunnart mouse, a lizard and a cane toad. And that Dunnart mouse is not our native mouse … our native mouse is the hopping mouse. One time, at that time when we took those Elliott traps out there, we had school children with us.

Priscilla said that ‘In 2008, Parks and Wildlife wanted to take only a couple of rangers for three weeks to Maria Island, but then everybody wanted to do it so we got them to break that to two weeks and the men went first and then we went. We trapped bandicoots, we caught spiders, skink, gecko with pit-trapping, Elliot traps and cage traps’.

185

PEOPLE ON COUNTRY

From 2009 to 2011 the rangers also worked with Emilie and Gill to collect and identify plants and develop a local herbarium. They have mainly focussed on wetland plants and are planning to expand this research to include ethnobotanical information.

Small enterprises A number of external organisations have worked with the rangers to establish small wildlife-based enterprises, including a barramundi farm, crocodile egg sales, pet-meat production, sugarbag (native bee honey) and soap making (using bush medicines). However, none of these projects has flourished to become viable, sustainable enterprises that bring in substantial revenue.3 The rangers do still collect (Figure 11.4) and sell some salt water crocodile eggs each year to a nearby crocodile farm and are collecting sugarbag, and they continue to express interest in pursuing some of the other activities.

Biological and border security The rangers started working on biosecurity projects with the Australian Quarantine Inspection Service, Customs and the Water Police in 2004 and more recently with Ghostnets Australia and the Northern Territory Government Fisheries Branch. With the Australian Quarantine Inspection Service, from 2004 to 2010, the rangers collected mosquitoes, ants and plants. The mosquitoes were checked for diseases and the ant and plant species were monitored for harmful invasive exotic species. During this time, they also worked with Quarantine staff to conduct post mortem disease assessments and collect blood samples of buffalo (Figure 11.5) and pigs and more recently ducks to check for bird flu. Customs and Water Police staff have also worked with the rangers to develop marine patrol and sentinel programs. The rangers have frequently patrolled the Roper River and south-western corner of the Gulf of Carpentaria to monitor the activities of tourists, fishermen and illegal vessels. They combine this with marine debris and ghost net removal. However, over the last year, the rangers’ boat, the ‘Roper Queen’, has been waiting for repairs and they are still waiting for a new boat, so there has been little marine patrolling.

3

A Fordham, B Fogarty, B Corey and D Fordham (2010) Knowledge foundations for the development of sustainable wildlife enterprises in remote Indigenous communities of Australia, CAEPR Working Paper 62, Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research, Australian National University, Canberra, viewed 2 April 2012.

186

Commitment to our country

Figure 11.4 Yugul Mangi women rangers collecting crocodile eggs for sale

(Courtesy: Yugul Mangi Rangers)

Final words from Cherry When we did ranger work I gave them that word commitment. Commitment … I drew a diagram and I told them to write that diagram there [points to her head] and put it there in their hearts [puts her hand on her heart]. And when I did it on that piece of paper it was all in red, the word commitment was in red. And I explained to them what it meant. So a lot of them took that in their [crosses her arms over her chest] … and it was reinforced in them. They were proud. Our proudness didn’t come out. We had that proudness inside here [crosses arms over chest]. We had pride in our heart because we are Australian, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous helping each other. People coming from town, from cities to give us what they were taught. And then balancing these cultures together with ours made it easier for me and for my fellow ladies to cope with whatever the non-Indigenous people did. And that made me really proud, not only me, but also those people that worked with me.

187

PEOPLE ON COUNTRY

Figure 11.5 Conducting post mortem disease inspection with Australian Quarantine Inspection Service staff

(Courtesy: Yugul Mangi Rangers)

188