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2 INTERVIEW TOPICS AND THEMES: ENVIRONMENTAL AND
LANDSCAPE PROCESSES
Part 2 of this report contains the bulk of the comments from people who participated in the
research. These are organised into themes and categories which reflect the ecological and
NRM orientation of the project. A preliminary list of questions oriented to key themes and
categories was generated for the semi-structured interviews, and the themes and categories
were reanalysed and refined once the interviews were complete. Key topics include:
observations of geographic and temporal variability at Oriners; rainfall, water and flooding
cycles; the presence and distribution of animals (both native and introduced); different kinds
of human activity in the area; landscape processes such as mustering patterns, erosion and
fire; and a synthesis section which notes some major characteristics of the „working
knowledge‟ documented from Oriners. These topics are dealt with in turn in the sections of
Part 2 which follow.
2.1 Variability and Change
Section 2.1 describes how people interviewed compare Oriners with other parts of the
Mitchell catchment and wider Cape, and how they see the area varying through time. This
section includes statements about key geographic features (2.1.1) and variability (2.1.2).
Variations within a year (ie seasonal changes) appear in a range of ways as one component
of other sections in Part 2, notably in the sections on rainfall and water flows, animal
movements and human access. A number of people also noted changes in weather patterns
and in the wider environment over their lifetimes which they saw as permanent, rather than
part of normal variability. These appear in 2.1.3. Observations of change outside normal
inter-annual variability was not a universal perception, as comments from other participants
show, but was a significant theme in observations of the Oriners and wider Cape landscape
over the time these cattlemen have lived there. The comments in section 2.1 further indicate
the distinctiveness of the Oriners area, people‟s knowledge of it over different timescales,
and that such change in the area is perceived as an ongoing process.
2.1.1 Geographic variability: Oriners regional comparisons
2.1.1.1 Oriners country- water, plants and soil
Key features of Oriners noted below include many creeks, sand ridges, soil which becomes
boggy in the wet, and plants which differ in either kind or in numbers from elsewhere on the
Mitchell. Such features give the area its distinctive character, and Viv Sinnamon recalled the
reactions of people who saw the area for the first time during the pre-purchase inspection:
Marcus Barber: That first trip, can you remember what your first impression was? Having
spent a lot of time down the rest of the Cape or other parts of the Cape?
Viv Sinnamon: Oh just how different it was. Like we‟d always heard about this Oriners,
mythical Oriners place where people used to get their lancewood and stuff, because I‟d
heard about the trade. There‟s a forest people that used to trade forest gear for baler shells
and then return them, trade them back for neck shells and things like that. We knew that
Xanthorrea [grass tree] gum and forest products like lancewood and good ones like this 17
went back towards the coast. But yeah it struck us as very different and quite isolated too
of course. We come from the delta, coastal delta country where there‟s heaps of cabbage
palms and big wetlands and stuff like that and [here at Oriners] it was quite obviously very
dry, quite sandy soil, big stands of broad leaf tea tree, you know, the steel blue fellers. It
was called „forest country‟ by the mob up there and of course there are others who talk
17 During the interview, Viv Sinnamon was extracting gum from Erytheophloem chlorostachys
(Cooktown Ironwood). This gum is of higher quality and easier to harvest than gums on the delta, and
Viv thought this may be because of the softer sandy soils at Oriners compared with the higher clay
content soils of the coast.
Working Knowledge at Oriners Station, Cape York
37