News and Events

2005 Media Releases

HOW TO MAKE THE MOST OF OUR DESERTS

Australia’s desert regions could achieve far more if we combine the knowledge built up by Indigenous people over millennia with that acquired by modern science.

This was a major point in the Alfred Deakin Lecture by Dr Mark Stafford-Smith, CEO of the Desert Knowledge Cooperative Research Centre at CSIRO Alice Springs in late April.

He gave his address to a large audience at the La Trobe University, Mildura.

Dr Stafford-Smith told his audience that the deserts of the world have been the cradle of civilisations— the source of waves of fierce self-discipline and innovation, particularly in the Middle Eastern Arab world and the Gobi further east.

He said they have been sources of life and religion, yet are often perceived as dead and inaccessible. However they are not lifeless and it is not a coincidence that world-shattering ideas emerged from such extreme environments.

‘To survive, people need an intimate knowledge of the environment and strict rules for behaviour. Social groups without such characteristics won’t last long. Local knowledge evolves over long periods of time and has served long-persisting nomadic pastoral groups in North Africa or Aboriginal peoples here.’

But deserts do not remain static. Environmental drivers like weed introductions, shifts in climate, and changing farming technologies and social drivers like population growth, loss of mobility, and border controls, cause change and require the development of new local knowledge.

Aboriginal people, pastoralists and small businesses develop their own local knowledge over time from experiences but even the process of developing the knowledge is itself failing as change comes upon many systems far faster than the experiences can accumulate.

Dr Stafford-Smith said that new and mutually respectful partnerships between local knowledge systems and western scientific methods were needed to speed up the development of local knowledge.

In desert Australia, one vital source of knowledge which is well-tuned to the environment can be found from partnerships with Aboriginal people. Millennia of surviving on the land has provided them with an immense store of understanding about foods and medicines and other natural resources uses.

Knowing what to use and how to use it is only one part of the equation. Perhaps more importantly, Aboriginal people had active or passive ways of looking after these living resources. They maintained increaser ceremonies, they renewed landscapes with fire, they moved from place to place to avoid putting on too heavy a harvesting pressure and to find the latest storms.

Most intriguingly they had taboo areas in which hunting and collecting was not normally allowed. An example, in the western MacDonnell’s, was several square kilometres around a permanent waterhole which guaranteed key animals a refuge.

In addition, Aboriginal people had also organised themselves in complex social systems to relate to these resources. Skin names create webs of relationships and mutual obligation which ensure resilience against the vicissitudes of a variable environment.

Separating ownership and management of key resource species cleverly balanced rights and responsibilities. They established extraordinarily sophisticated ways to hand down local knowledge about travel routes and resources.

The greatest lesson to be learned from many so-called primitive cultures is to see life and the environment as a single holistic system, not separating humans from their actions and impacts.

There are 500,000 people in desert Australia, but split among five or six jurisdictions, and living in this amazing pattern of a few big service centres surrounded by 860 or so small communities.

‘We’re a tiny mob, made feebler by not making alliances across those borders. Central Australia, for example has an immediate catchment of only 60,000 people or so. Two thirds of these are non-indigenous, many of them transient and with most of the younger generation in the mindset to move to a city. The other third is indigenous – also very mobile but mainly within the region, and more likely to stay.

For further information:

Please contact Dr Mark Stafford-Smith, Tel: 08 8950 7162, or La Trobe University Public Affairs Office, Tel: 03 9479 2316.