Worrk

Throughout Aboriginal Australia, fire has always been the most important resource management tool. Yolngu in this region have used it to achieve several purposes — to prevent large-scale destructive fires, to maintain clear areas for ease of walking, to communicate, for warmth and light. Certain techniques are used for capture of animals for food — the Yolngu call these fires worrk.

Several years ago, the Garma Cultural Studies Institute organised in collaboration with Dhimurru Land Management a teaching and learning research workshop on the techniques and meanings of worrk. With the collaboration with CINCRM in successive years, Dhimurru has sponsored other such workshops with the same objectives. Participants in these workshops have included Yolngu elders, students from the Yirrkala schools, and Balanda scientists and research students from the University of Melbourne.

Toward the end of the dry season, in a chosen location a series of fires is set that will encircle large animals such as kangaroos, which can then be speared by the hunters who have set the fires. In the burnt area, women capture goannas and small mammals that have retreated into shallow burrows. They may also make a snack of small land snails, roasted in a fire of twigs. The area that has been burnt will soon be covered with fresh green shoots, fodder that will attract larger animals. The procedure of choosing the site of the fire, of the hunters preparing to set the fires, fires covering the bodies with pipe clay, and of setting the fires, is patterned by ancient customs. Aboriginal law also confirms the right of senior landowners to decide when and where fires should be used.

Yolngu elder, Djalalingpa Yunupingu, noticed a decline in numbers of marine turtles. Djalalingba ordered the fencing and gating of the northern end of Cape Arnhem to protect the species that nest there. Six of the world’s seven species occur in Australian waters including the green turtle, loggerhead turtle, hawksbill turtle, olive ridley, leatherback and the Australian endemic the flatback turtle.

Later, a scientist with a concern to establish reliable data about the marine turtle populations of this region learnt about the steps that Djalalingba had taken, by imposing Aboriginal customary law, to protect nesting sites of several species of marine turtle. Dr Rod Kennett, CINCRM Research Fellow, negotiated a collaborative project with Dhimurru Land Management Aboriginal Corporation, and working with Djalalingba and other rangers, they examined the social and biological aspects of the management and use of marine turtles (miyapunu) by the Yolngu of northeast Arnhem Land.

The project partners are the Dhimurru Land Management Aboriginal Corporation and the Parks and Wildlife Commission NT, with recent support from World Wildlife Fund for Nature. By combining traditional and contemporary Aboriginal knowledge with non-Aboriginal (balanda) data and research methods, the project seeks to improve our current poor understanding of miyapunu distribution and ecology in the region, to quantify the harvest of miyapunu, and to record traditional management practices.

A key activity is radio-tracking migrating miyapunu via satellite to identify home feeding grounds. This will allow Yolngu miyapunu managers to identify other groups who share this communal resource.

Armed with the new knowledge from the project, Yolngu will be better able to look after miyapunu in their own country, as well as take a prominent role in marine turtle conservation in the Indo-Pacific Region.