Reintroducing Traditional Indigenous Land Management Practices

Trial burning at the Friends of Grasslands workshop under the Indigenous Values in the Landscape Project at the Garuwanga property, Nimmitabel, 2012

In 2011-12 a series of "Indigenous Values in the Landscape" workshops were held in the Snowy Mountains region. These workshops focussed on active management of the landscape, vegetation communities and fauna through traditional indigenous practices.

» Re-introducing Traditional Indigenous Land Management Practices: Trialling the re-introduction of Traditional Indigenous Land Management Practices proposed by Rodney Mason under the Kosciuszko to Coast Partnership – Adopting Traditional Land Management Practices on the Monaro Project 2012 - 2013

It is becoming increasingly accepted that when people arrived in Australia with the First Fleet, they observed a managed landscape. Bill Gammage’s recent book, ‘The Biggest Estate on Earth” provides an account of this.

» Bill Gammage discusses 'The Biggest Estate on Earth

According to Gammage, early settlers observed that much of the landscape comprised grasslands and woodlands. The understoreys of the woodlands were essentially native grasses with patches of tidy shrubs. Often these observers described the countryside as parkland. However, within fifty years of the settler’s arrival the landscape had changed.

Woodlands became untidy, thick with trees and matted with shrubs, gullies appeared and became eroded as natural vegetation was removed, pastures deteriorated as nutritious grasses were replaced by less desirable species and there were declines of native species and many species became extinct. The introduction, mostly deliberate and sometimes accidental, of exotic plant and animal species has added to this degradation.

Although farming and land management practices have improved, better practices are not universal and landscape restoration may improve if our current Custodians of Country adopted traditional Indigenous practices.