WfHC - cover page (not to be used with pre-printed report ... - CSIRO

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
This is a report about a local ecological knowledge recovery, documentation and modelling
project in south central Cape York, Queensland, Australia. It was funded through the Water
for Healthy Country Flagship of the CSIRO under an agreement between the CSIRO and the
Kowanyama Aboriginal Land and Natural Resource Management Office (KALNRMO). The
geographical focus of the project is Oriners Station (Figure 2; Figure 3) but it also contains
material relevant to Sefton station and to other Indigenous lands north of the Alice River.
Oriners is an area of the Cape that is associated with Olkol speaking peoples and contains
some places of considerable cultural importance. In the wet season, Oriners country
periodically floods and the soils become saturated and boggy, but these characteristics have
also meant that the area is relatively undeveloped, undisturbed, and of high ecological value.
From the 1940s, the Oriners area was owned and used as a cattle station by several
members of the non-Indigenous Hughes family, a well-known and longstanding pastoral
family in Northern Queensland, and many of the workers on the station during this period
were local Indigenous people. In the early 1990s the property was purchased from the
Hughes family by the Kowanyama Council and since that time, Oriners has been
intermittently occupied by a subset of Kowanyama people (sometimes called „the Oriners
Mob‟) and managed for its conservation, natural resource management (NRM) and heritage
value by the KALNRMO. The key community objective has been to get people back onto the
country and this report reflects the ongoing commitment of the KALNRMO and the wider
Kowanyama community to building and maintaining a socially, economically and
environmentally sustainable presence at Oriners. Indigenous people from around the region
recognise the value and distinctive characteristics of the Oriners area and want to see it
managed well. For them this project is one step in that ongoing process.
The report also reflects the aspirations of the Water for a Healthy Country Flagship of the
CSIRO, which committed significant funds to investigating and modelling indigenous
hydrological knowledge and ecological understanding at key sites in Northern Australia. This
was part of the ongoing commitment of the CSIRO to appropriate research partnerships with
Indigenous people, particularly in the area of knowledge documentation and natural resource
management.
The project report collates and synthesises some key aspects of knowledge about the
Oriners area. It is divided into 5 parts. Part 1 introduces some key framing concepts for the
report. The first of these is „Working Knowledge‟, which is preferred here to more common
labels like „Local‟, „Indigenous‟, and/or „scientific‟. Working Knowledge is used because it
collectively describes the contexts in which much of the knowledge was gained (Indigenous,
pastoral, NRM, and scientific work), the provisional and ongoing quality of that knowledge,
the fact that the men offering it come from a range of backgrounds (local, Indigenous, and/or
scientific) and the fact that this report is oriented towards ongoing NRM work in the area.
Other key concepts are „Oriners Mob‟, which describes the contemporary Indigenous people
most closely associated with the station, and „flooded forest country‟, which describes its two
major distinctive characteristics from the perspective of its Kowanyama owners. Part 1 also
reviews key literature related to the area, focusing on cultural, historical, and linguistic
sources, describes the fieldwork methods (primarily semi-structured interviews) and the
research participants. Finally it discusses the regional and strategic significance of Oriners as
both a distinctive property and a key component of a growing number of properties in the
area more heavily oriented to Indigenous and NRM objectives than to pastoral activities.
Working Knowledge at Oriners Station, Cape York
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