A national celebration of Indigenous knowledge and science should be held the day before Australia Day, a group of Aboriginal elders has said, as they put forward a plan for an annual event to restore and share traditional knowledge, particularly around land management.
The people from the Lake Eyre Basin region are calling for other Indigenous groups to join the campaign.
“If we can get all the leaders interested and ready to rock and roll they take it back to their communities and tell it for what it is, and try to create it for what it is, hopefully we can enjoy a day that we created,” Don Rowlands, Wangkangurru and Yarluyandi elder, told Guardian Australia.
Rowlands, who is a ranger in the Simpson Desert national park, and is driving the campaign, said he’d like to see Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people come together on 25 January to “enjoy a day and remind us of how we were,” and keep traditional knowledge alive and of better use.
He hopes it and the Australia Day which follows it will eventually become a long-weekend celebration of Australia’s past, present and future, and reduce the pain for Indigenous people associated with 26 January, often referred to as “Invasion Day”.
Under the plan, proposed at a meeting of elders in Birdsville, fiercely protected traditional knowledge would be passed between tribes and non-Indigenous people, under the strict guidance of elders, in order to share land management techniques.
Natalie Stoianoff, law professor at the University of Technology, Sydney, and the director of the master of intellectual property program, said the initiative could have a positive impact on Australian society and the environment. However, the sharing of knowledge would need to be protected by legislation to ensure it is not used by medical researchers, pharmaceutical and nutrition companies for commercial gain without their knowledge or consent.
A forum on Indigenous knowledge, for which Stoianoff was on the committee, resulted in a white paper urging the NSW state government to enshrine in law protections against exploitation of the knowledge and resources of Aboriginal communities. Such protections would be beneficial to Rowlands’ plan, she said.
“Without a similar framework in place or without confidentiality agreements or patents in place, the knowledge shared simply becomes part of the public domain and the Indigenous community would no longer have ‘ownership’, or more correctly custodial rights, under Australian law.”
A letter written by Darian Hiles, spokesman for the group, said Aboriginal people want to teach non-Indigenous Australians how to care for land “using knowledge and methods that have been gathered over thousands of years.”
“I think we need to get back to the basics and to the stories that talk about how to manage the land,” said Rowlands. “Even though I think a lot of the country is too far gone, in a sense, we need to look after what we have left.”
Rowlands said the day would serve as a springboard for educational and training events through the year.
“I always think about when the pioneers first came into this country and brought in their cattle and took up properties, they didn’t listen to traditional people on how the country worked. Aboriginal people have all this historical data on how the country operates – good times, bad times, and places in between.” he said.
“We need to start the process of talking about how it was, and how we want to influence land management and connection to the country and how Aboriginal people managed the land, like fire management, fire farming, how that produced more than you think.”
