- Aboriginal elders in the far north of Australia’s Queensland state are preparing the next generation of junior rangers to conserve endangered southern cassowaries, take care of their traditional land, safeguard their culture, and hold on to millennia of acquired knowledge.
- Along with declining southern cassowary numbers, traditional knowledge and values are diminishing in youth who put more attention on Western knowledge and technology.
- The young rangers not only spend time learning in classrooms; they also go out into the traditional country with elders who help shape their character and identity as caretakers of their people, land, Mother Earth and themselves.
- Ranger Manni Edwards says the way to effective conservation in his community, and in Australia, is by bringing together scientific and traditional ecological knowledge, which includes wisdom and values that forge a connection between people and nature.
Manni Edwards credits his journey to preserving the wisdom of his elders to an encounter with goondoi 40 years ago.
At the age of 8, Edwards says, he saw up to 14 colorful goondoi, or southern cassowaries (Casuarius casuarius) moving together in herds, socializing and breeding across the vast wetlands of the cassowary coast in Dyirribarra Bagirbarra Country, what is today the far north of Australia’s Queensland state.
But over the years, these sights have become rare. Along with the bird’s declining numbers, traditional knowledge and the cultural significance of cassowaries have diminished among the young. Also fondly known as a “rainforest gardener” for spreading the seeds of the fruits that it eats, the southern cassowary is listed as endangered in Australia, with only 4,400 left in the wild in the wet tropics region there. (Much larger populations of the bird are found in Indonesia and Papua New Guinea, and the species’ global conservation status is least concern.)
“Spotting them in herds to now only one single female, or three to four males over a distance of about 55 acres [22 hectares] of land, is different now,” Edwards says. “There is a quick change of knowledge. Some experts now even view cassowaries as solitary beings, but we [Dyibal people] have known them to be social animals for generations.”
To stop the ongoing loss of knowledge and culture, local leaders bought part of their ancestral land from the state in 1982. They then created a conservation area where the young act as rangers and are taught the traditional ways to conserve it.
“We now own over 55 hectares [135 acres] of rainforest conservation area,” says Edwards, leader of the team of rangers. Indigenous title rights alone weren’t strong enough to drive forward their vision, he tells Mongabay. Edwards and his team included traditional knowledge classes taught by elders at the local First Nations school, Radiant Life College, where 109 goondoi rangers and about 200 junior rangers from outside Dyirribarra Bagirbarra Country are enrolled.
Elders and adult rangers aren’t just trying to impart knowledge to the next generation, they say. They’re trying to build character and identity as caretakers of their people, land and themselves. It’s not only about knowledge, but the traditional wisdom that tempers and shapes how to use it.
“It’s not the scientific element that we’re trying to instill, because a lot of them are very good at tech, but very few of them are taught the spiritual side of it, which again helps shape their character,” Edwards says.
Shaping these young rangers also comes with teaching a sense of responsibility to your community that the young and Westerners often forget, he says. “It’s like a kite with a string. The kite can fly anywhere. But if it hasn’t got a string attached, it can fly into the storms and get lost,” Edwards says.
To learn more about how they plan on shaping the next generation of Indigenous custodians, what character traits are important and what it takes to not just preserve knowledge but wisdom too, Mongabay spoke with Manni Edwards, ranger and cultural education officer of the goondoi rangers.
The following interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Mongabay: Why are goondoi so important to the traditional owners of the cassowary coast in the first place?
Manni Edwards: In our law and traditional knowledge, murrungurrun guwal means the voice of authority. It’s like an ancient voice. If we don’t have it, our people will stray or they will go on their own journey without discovering the purpose and the intent of why we’re here.
So, in what we call “Goondoi Country,” the cassowary is very important. It’s one of the keystone animals that oversee the revegetation and the creation of what we call the rainforest here (or dulgalwabu). And it is our job is to purchase land back and protect it as a conservation area to ensure that the numbers can restock up. That’s one of our major nine monitoring programs over in our country at the moment.
There is a very special seed in the rainforests called a Davidson plum [Davidsonia jerseyana]. This plum seed needs to pass through the gut of animal to germinate. And since the plum is toxic to other species and can only be eaten by the cassowaries, they swallow the entire fruit and excrete them, helping to spread seed over large areas. So this is how important having our cassowaries are. They also eat and excrete hundreds of [other] seeds.
We know that if the cassowary is not high in numbers and decline continues, we’ll lose out on multiple aspects of the rainforest [and the coast] which include vital medicinal plants, reefs, fruit plants, etc. Some of these are extremely rare because only the cassowary can stomach them and their seeds as they are toxic for other animals.
We also understand the importance of the cassowary because there is spiritual significance attached to it. We have a lot of stories about how the first stream was formed and led to the cassowary losing its ability to fly.
Mongabay: How are the you preparing the next generation to become traditional knowledge holders and environmental guardians?
Manni Edwards: In our traditional way of life, the holders of knowledge are the elder knowledge holders. We need to have them in the community ensuring that the oral traditional law, medicines and knowledge are passed down from our gabi [traditional leaders]. If that knowledge doesn’t get transferred down to the next generation, they have to rediscover themselves through texts or written lore. So the major thing we try doing with the Goondoi Junior Ranger program is that we link the elders with youths who are the next emerging elders.
The elders transfer knowledge in three ways. The first one is oral law. That’s where the program will take them out on the country, show them certain things and teach the oral law. The next one is “dreams and vision,” where they experience initiation and the purpose of different animals on a higher level of understanding, not just functionality. And then there’s the highest level, which we call face-to-face experience. They’ll teach anything from integrated things like multidivision and multidimensional understanding of spirituality. They’ll teach them language and the purpose of seeds, which holds a big space in our people and country.
The program also takes the ranger out into the country and shares practical teaching. We have integrated the Australian curriculum with all of our knowledge in terms of soil sampling, water testing, plant purification, medicine, etc. We then administrate that on a day-to-day basis so that we align it to our traditional knowledge and get an understanding of Western technology as well. Scientists come visit and help play their part as well.
For example, there’s an interesting word in our Aboriginal language. They call it napi, which is the balance of all things.
It’s the harmonious songline [traditional paths] of everything connecting and reverbing together in perfection. So when we teach our children, we impart the wisdom with a view that they are going to become the next elders. As we show them the cassowary eggs, the breeding season, the cycles, we would take them to the area where the male lays down, the purpose of why he does that and the intimacy that must be connected. Generally, people think he is trying to keep the eggs warm, but the embryo within is hearing a heartbeat and the pulse of its creation.
Then we teach them the science and Western side, which we call the written formula. The formula provides details like the date, the cycle, seasons and so forth.
Mongabay: Do you think this has been successful so far? Often youth want a sense of direction and attach themselves strongly to group identities. What do you think being a ranger, who guards and protects ancestral landscapes, means to youth? Does it strengthen their self-confidence and form their character?
Manni Edwards: The growth, especially in character development of youth, has been astronomical. That’s one of the biggest things in this generation. I say character really is something invisible becoming visible. We believe every child has the potential to become a ranger. They have different abilities within them, but the character reveals the nature and the quality of the individual. And so, what we try and do with the programs is that we’re instilling in them good aspects of our culture, our law and language. The character has to be equal to the level of the knowledge they hold.
If you only teach them knowledge without the testing of the character, you’ll just get people that are high-minded. They become rude and we’ve been taught by our elders that this is an imbalance. We also see it as a good quality to understand the purpose of not just you as the individual, but also the broader community. How we work together has a part to play.
The tests and hands-on experience we give them are the trial that produces their character. It is when you take them out into the country and put them into the environment to see how they operate within the company of this beautiful thing that we call nature. We see how they will respond and use their knowledge. Sometimes we go for turtle monitoring and we see the child’s reaction, whether they take too many turtles eggs out of greed or they only take what’s needed for the family.
We have an integrated environmental solutions system and they learn all the practical skills for testing water quality: testing for nitrogen, pH levels, etc. But we also make sure that the child has an understanding of the flow of water, its value, and how Mother Earth shares a symbiotic relationship with nature. It’s not the scientific element that we’re trying to instill, because a lot of them are already very good at tech. But very few of them are taught the spiritual side of it, which again helps shape their character.
Mongabay: Indigenous youths are the future custodians of their land, territories and cultural heritage, but around the world, Indigenous knowledge is on the decline in the next generation. What setbacks persist in transferring knowledge? How are the challenges overcome?
Manni Edwards: When we take our children out, let’s say, visiting one of our ancestral burial grounds and maintaining those areas, the flip side of what we see is that they get a grounding of who they are. And I think it’s like a kite with a string. The kite can fly anywhere. But if it hasn’t got a string attached, it can fly into the storms and get lost. That is similar to an individual. If the string is tied back to its ground, that gives the individual its identity. That’s the anchor of its origin, it’s starting point.
When you fly out, you see the world, grow with it and develop all of those good things, but you’ve always got that string coming back to that landscape knowing where you’re from — the origins of your existence. And there’s nothing wrong feeling a sense of responsibility for your country or community.
However, we have a generation that sometimes just wants to cut the string and go on a continuous flight, and with that the danger of struggling to find who they are always exists because they haven’t got anything anchoring them back to their origin. It’s sometimes really hard to explain to Westerners, the cultural and spiritual side of knowledge, because it’s one-dimensional to them.
So we ensure that our children are tied back to their land, people, culture — to keep them grounded and keep that knowledge. They can take the flight to live out their greatest dreams and fulfill everything. But we guide them to hold on to the traditional knowledge and let them know that they can always come back home no matter where they are.
Mongabay: As goondoi rangers are also engaged in reef conservation, can you share what traditional knowledge is used to strengthen reefs or identify any threats like coral bleaching?
Manni Edwards: I remember my father would tell us when the condition of the water was good or when something wasn’t wrong, to watch for the stingrays. If the water quality wasn’t really good or breeding grounds that weren’t producing, the stingray’s barbs would not be long.
So our ancestors would look at them while hunting in a place called Yadar Bay, and whenever our grandfathers would catch a stingray, they’d pull out the back of the barbs to see its length. If the barbs were about 15 to 25 centimeters [6 to 10 inches] in length, they would tell us that the water conditions weren’t good. In areas with bad water quality or circumstances, the barb would actually shorten. So they knew to pick up on this sign and it has become part of our traditional knowledge. We’d like to somehow share and put this information on a national level to help the government make decisions on our country.
This whole development with knowledge transfer has been a long and slow journey. But there are good reasons why the elders are concerned about what knowledge is to be passed on and what is to be kept just for us, so putting those parameters, practices and policies in play has been a bit difficult because we live in two worlds as First Nations people. We have our law, murrungurrun guwal, and then we have this national law and system that we have to abide by as well. We have a multidimensional approach to working, and at times working with the government is a bit difficult because their structures sometimes don’t sit in the ethos of how we and our systems work.
Mongabay: How did the interplay of Western scientific methods and traditional knowledge come along? Has using Western science had positive impacts on the environment and cultural heritage? Any challenges?
Manni Edwards: We’ve seen economic progress and personal development at a community level. Our people are upskilling and having phenomenal career pathways. In the last 30 years, we’ve seen an increase in the number of our First Nations people gaining space in industries that were once full of non-Indigenous people.
So the increase in economic benefits has helped the community make informative decisions. We try working with scientists, and all the information we get from them goes into our system. We download it and present it to our members at an annual general meeting and together we try to assess our environmental conditions. That’s all raw data from the scientists for community members to help see what’s happening here at an ecological level. Using technology is not the only way we make our decisions, but it has provided us with another eye into the area when we’re making a decision.
The flip side is that people highly prioritize Western measurements and technology. And that’s a danger that can happen because some of our people pick up on this way of thinking and it dilutes the importance of our knowledge. Our elders are strongly against this because they love to follow what we’ve been taught thousands of years ago.
Mongabay: What other steps do you think are critical to accelerate the transfer of traditional knowledge to the next generation of rangers?
Manni Edwards: We need to allow Mother Earth to restock itself and come back into alignment. We as the First Nations people should do no traditional hunting for some years, and we should not take any turtles off our country. It’s not to say that I don’t want to go and hunt and be able to fish and harvest berries and do all those beautiful things I grew up doing. But I can’t let my children do them. So we’re teaching a generation how to sustain that practice and stop these things.
We’re still teaching how to do it to ensure the future generations will one day have the chance to do what we did hundreds of years ago. And so we’re at real turning point. All the traditional owners and First Nations people that I’ve met along the northeast coastline are putting in place the practices and policies under legislation to see these changes happen. Hopefully our people and our traditions will have a chance in the future.
We also need a strong and clear voice in decision-making and we want the government to acknowledge our voices. We’re not just bringing something that’s fantasized. We want to bring our knowledge to the table because we are bringing more than 65,000 years of knowledge, culture and heritage.
Information and technology do carry weight. There is a true substance behind it, and moreover, science is a method, an approach and application. And we’ve done that for 65,000 years. So we need them to understand we are scientists, although we might not wear a white cape with glasses. We have had our people hold on to knowledge and discoveries for all these years. We need these voices coming up at the government level through a governing body or an individual entity that will represent the scientific capacity to speak on the ecology and biodiversity of our country — and how our traditional knowledge can assist in its restoration.
Banner image: Goondoi rangers performing a traditional dance at Etty Bay. Image courtesy of the Great Barrier Reef Foundation.
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