Aboriginal Cultural Land Management for transport resilience

This project will develop a framework that identifies opportunities, structures, and collaborative activities to support the introduction and integration of traditional Aboriginal Cultural Land Management (ACLM) practices that will improve the resilience of the transport corridor network (framework).

In development of the framework, La Trobe University and Transport for NSW (TfNSW) will collaborate with local Indigenous organisations and communities in each of the three pilot areas (Upper Clarence, Mogo, Coonabarabran) to identify ways in which TfNSW can support, invigorate, and integrate community-led traditional practice into vegetation and land management such that it empowers Indigenous Australians to have meaningful involvement in land management, especially for managing natural hazards and risk.

Participants

• Transport for NSW
• La Trobe University

Project background

TfNSW are looking to develop a framework to make transport corridors more resilient in the face of increasing catastrophic weather events. A critical piece of that Framework is how ACLM can be incorporated into vegetation management standards, policies, and practices.

At the same time TfNSW also seeks to take forward the key priorities of their Reconciliation Action Plan (RAP), including:

• meaningful and collaborative community engagement in planning and designing TfNSW infrastructure that values connecting to country and the unique lived experiences of Aboriginal people.
• implementing and embedding the TfNSW Aboriginal Cultural Learning Framework to enhance cultural safety, cultural awareness and learning outcomes, including truth telling.

Alongside the commitment to the RAP, TfNSW is also responding to the recommendations of the NSW Bushfire Inquiry 2020 which identified that there was value in developing opportunities for cultural landscape management, and outcomes-based vegetation management, to increase resilience of transport network.

This project will investigate ways in which cultural and traditional land and water management practices can be incorporated into TfNSW vegetation management assessment processes and management standards to achieve the dual aims of increasing resilience (decreasing vulnerability) of the transport corridor to natural hazards (notably bushfire) and incorporating Indigenous cultural values into management and practice more broadly.

The approach taken in this project will include engagement, listening and collaboration with local Indigenous groups in each of the three pilot study areas to:

•ascertain local aspirations for incorporating cultural and traditional land and water management into vegetation management in the TfNSW transport corridor; and
•develop a strategy (i.e., methodologies, structures and principles) for implementation of the ACLM (i.e., a framework), based on the pilot study experiences and extensive literature reviews.

Project objectives

TfNSW is interested in understanding how culturally appropriate land management practices, through a ‘Caring for Country*’ lens can contribute to resilience on the transport network across all TfNSW functions.

The project objectives are to:

1. identify if and how traditional and cultural land and sea management can be used to build resilience into the transport network, and to natural hazards;
2. enhance our understanding and approach to adopting traditional and cultural land and sea management to support vegetation management;
3. identify, demonstrate, or illustrate the opportunities, benefits, and tension in co-designing, accompanying, and supporting Aboriginal people and communities in this work; and
4. identify opportunities, structures, investment, and collaboration required for a future initiative within TfNSW in developing a draft framework.

*(For Indigenous people, Caring for Country is an obligation and an honour. In caring for Country, Indigenous Australians draw on laws, knowledge and customs that have been inherited from ancestors and ancestral beings, to ensure the continued health of lands and seas with which they have a traditional attachment or relationship. This is a reciprocal relationship, whereby land is understood to become wild or sick if not managed by its people, and in turn individuals and communities suffer without a maintained connection to Country).

Please note …

This page will be a living record of this project. As it matures, hits milestones, etc., we’ll continue to add information, links, images, interviews and more. Watch this space!