Summary

The shift associated with ‘environmental management’ offers great rewards and challenges to Aboriginal lore. With new generations coming into this space and their old people dying, new approaches and new tools are needed to help emerging leaders.

Change is inevitable and not to be too harshly pre-judged from the outside. A level of continuity is essential for Aboriginal people because connection to country, identity through language and ancestry, self-determination, unique knowledge and symbiosis with seasonal change, define them and give them surety and presence in an otherwise fickle and opportunistic society.

Ancestral knowledge of country is embedded in songs, stories and language, and heard on the voice of the wind, in the songs of the birds, in the seasonal cycles of spirits of country.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction
2. Saltwater Burning
3. Country Services People, not People Service Country
4. The Role of Land, Fire and Water in the Kaurna Cultural and Linguistic Renaissance
5. Cultural Burning: The Way Forward for Healthy Landscapes
6. "Caring for dat land…, as mob bin teik keya of dat Kantri longtaim"
7. River(s) of Resistance

Free download:University of Cologne (6MB)