We are taking a look back at stories from Cosmos Magazine in print. In June 2024, Cat Williams reported on the postgraduate science students working with Indigenous families to put Noongar knowledge on the map.
“Western technological societies continue to fail biodiversity,” Stephen Hopper tells me bluntly.
A world-renowned ecologist and professor of biodiversity at the University of Western Australia (UWA), Hopper believes that Indigenous land management practices could be the secret to saving Western Australia’s landscapes. This is why he works with Traditional Owners to combine Indigenous knowledge with scientific research. He’s spent a decade on Merningar/Menang and Goreng Country near Kinjarling/Albany, WA. It’s a rugged landscape near the coast, with tall marri forests and large granite outcrops.
“You learn something different every time you have a yarn or go out bush,” he says. “I’m continually amazed by the generosity of Elders to share their knowledge.”
During the first few years, Hopper built relationships with Noongar Elders and families, including Merningar Elder Lynette Knapp, who has a very close relationship with the university. “They’re my family,” she says. “It’s like going out bush with my family.”
Together, Hopper, Knapp and another UWA academic Alison Lullfitz supervise a number of postgraduate students in projects that document Noongar innovation and knowledge (kaartadijin, pronouced cart-a-jin), ranging from traditional burns to animal traps. These collaborations are combining Noongar kaartadijin and Western science to produce important new Australian research – and an exciting model of how to combine such different knowledge systems.
Fire
Fire is central to Noongar life and is the focus of one of Hopper, Knapp and Lullfitz’s PhD students, Ursula Rodrigues. With a background in ecology, Rodrigues is researching prescribed burning, as well as investigating storytelling in science.
Eliza Woods, a Goreng Noongar Elder, says it’s exciting to be involved in Rodrigues’ work. “We haven’t had access to our land for many, many years; it’s only through UWA that we can do this,” she explains.
This is primarily due to government restrictions around fire in areas such as national parks, of which Merningar and Goreng Country have many, including the Stirling Ranges, Waychinicup and Porongurup.
There are plenty of published ecological studies using historical information to describe Aboriginal fire practices. But Rodrigues says there is little research working with contemporary Noongar people to understand current fire regimes, how they have adapted and how they might adapt in future.
Knapp, for example, believes that current Western burning practices do not help land management. “There’s absolutely no way you can just chuck fire sticks from the air,” she says.
Both Woods and Knapp say that traditional burns were seasonal to benefit the plants, as well as the humans and animals who ate them. “That was their supermarket,” Woods says.
Part of Rodrigues’ research is to assess “cultural resource species”, which includes bush foods. Noongar people are concerned that bush foods are less common than they were historically, so research is investigating whether smaller burns can increase the abundance of specific species.
For Rodrigues, a typical day in the field involves everyone rolling out onto Country: open land, with some thick bush. “There’s a couple of 4WDs, four or five Elders … maybe a few kids or grandkids.” She describes an army of people including land managers, land owners, rangers and researchers.
“Traditional burns were seasonal to benefit the plants, as well as the humans and animals who ate them”
“We spend quite a bit of time deciding where [to burn] and just spending time in that place,” Rodrigues says. Before they burn, the team sets up camp and has a yarn. Rodrigues says they discuss the weather, how they will light the fire, and listen to the aspirations of the Elders for the burn. These Elders have burned plenty of Country before, and this knowledge was passed down from generations before them.
The yarn is important for Woods and her family to share stories. “We can train the young ones, teach them about the weather,” she says.
But before the yarn and the burn, there’s work to do for Rodrigues’ research. “We spend a couple of days doing some really in-depth … data collection at the site,” Rodrigues says. She developed a data-collection method combining fire behaviour and species composition into a simple format, so anyone can be involved. This means that Elders and Indigenous rangers can participate to gather data suitable for research standards. “It’s learning for us too,” Woods says.
At each burn site, they make a field herbarium: a sample of the plants growing in the area. These are taken three times: before the fire, a week after and then in the following spring.
“We measure the arrangement of biomass … at the surface level, and then move all the way up into the trees,” Rodrigues says. Biomass refers to the total amount of organisms living in the area.
When the team is ready to begin burning Country, it is always an Elder who lights the fire.
It’s too early in Rodrigues’ research to have data to confirm the burns’ success, but she says there is anecdotal evidence for landscapes recovering well from the fire. Rodrigues is looking at how to apply fire depending on what plants are present, and how fire could be applied at a metre-by-metre scale, across the Noongar seasons – which hasn’t been done before.
Woods says “it’s healing” to participate, and is grateful to UWA for continuing connection to Country. “We keep telling our story [because] we want people out there to know our culture is alive and well,” she says.
Water
For thousands of years, Indigenous people have found ingenious ways to collect and contain water. While many rivers flow on Merningar and Goreng Country, Noongar people also created gnaama boorna (pronounced narma borna), which translates to ‘waterhole in a tree’.
Anna Ischenko completed her master’s project last year on gnaama boorna, and describes one as “a tree that was horticulturally managed by Noongar families … over generations”.
To create gnaama boorna, Noongar people would remove the middle shoot of a tree sapling, creating a circular depression. As the tree grew, they would make the hole bigger through fire or manual carving. “Basically, over generations, you have a tree with a hole in the middle that stores water,” Ischenko says. Funnels were also carved into side branches to direct rainwater into the waterhole.
During the research, Ischenko worked with Knapp to confirm the cultural and historical importance of the trees.
“Aunty Lynette [Knapp] … has driven this project. She was told about these trees by her father, and they hadn’t been recorded before – until she showed Steve [Hopper],” Ischenko says. “There’s evidence of these trees in early colonial diaries, but they haven’t been documented in any [scientific] literature.”
“There’s evidence of these trees in early colonial diaries, but they haven’t been documented [by science].”
The first part of Ischenko’s work was to identify and measure gnaama boorna in order to create a foundation of knowledge. Alongside Elders, she developed identification criteria to distinguish a gnaama boorna from a random hole in a tree – namely, that a gnaama boorna has an unusual branching structure, has been altered by people and has a basin-type hole in the trunk.
In the second stage of Ischenko’s research, she interviewed Elders about the most important factors that influence travel across Country. She found out these were distance to water, avoiding dense vegetation and avoiding sacred sites. From this information, Ischenko created a model to trace the most efficient path to travel across Country, and found that many known gnaama boorna lay along these routes. “The factors going into the model is what Indigenous people said was important, not necessarily what the literature presumes to be important,” she says.
From the model, Ischenko walked some of these routes and found more gnaama boorna. When Ischenko showed Elders her model, they thought it looked accurate based on their knowledge of Country, and could imagine where their ancestors may have walked. “It was a feeling you just can’t explain,” Knapp says. “Getting to see that map was really awesome.”
Gnaama boorna are mostly found in marri trees (Corymbia calophylla), which Ischenko says hold medicinal properties in the sap and bark that could seep into the water. There is anecdotal evidence that the water can reduce stomach aches and have anti-microbial effects, resulting in debate over whether gnaama boorna were primarily created for water or medicine.
The trees are at risk from being cut down or burnt in wildfires or prescribed burns. Ischenko, alongside Knapp, is working to get gnaama boorna trees on a cultural heritage tree register, to protect them for future generations.
Food
Another one of Hopper, Knapp and Lullfitz’s students is Susie Cramp, who recently submitted her PhD thesis investigating food sources on Noongar Country.
Cramp’s research documented granite lizard traps, which look like a slab of granite, around one metre long and held up by a smaller ‘prop’ stone, creating a space underneath for reptiles. They have been constructed by Noongar people for thousands of years, to lure animals into a ‘safe’ spot, so reptiles could be caught and eaten, providing the necessary calories for survival.
According to Knapp, many people still use them.
Like Rodrigues and Ischenko, Cramp’s fieldwork approach is different to Western science. “The main activity is to set up chairs in a nice spot and making sure everyone’s got a cup of tea, and usually a biscuit,” she says.
They yarn about where they should research, and who should come along. Once everyone is out bush, they talk about lizard traps and share stories. Cramp says that without Elders, she wouldn’t know anything about where to find the traps. “It’s their cultural knowledge that reveals so much,” she says.
Cramp measured 750 lizard traps across 100 granite outcrops over three years, and says she didn’t scratch the surface of how many traps are present. Aside from measuring the trap’s size, Cramp used cameras to identify seven reptile species using the traps for various behaviours, including basking and hiding from predators. Animals included karda (goanna, Varanus rosenbergi), noorn (tiger snake, Notechis scutatus) and yondi (king skink, Egernia kingii). Knapp says that if the trap was built on a steep outcrop, it could even catch small wallabies.
Cramp’s research found no difference in the presence and behaviour of reptiles between traps and natural uplifted sheets of granite, which are a well-established reptile habitat. These data are yet to be published, but the study provides the first evidence that the traps – artificially created environments – have now become natural habitat for reptiles, whether Noongar people are using them as traps or not. “They’re culturally very important, and now there’s data to show that they’re ecologically very important,” Cramp says.
“They’re culturally very important, and now there’s data to show that they’re ecologically very important”
Granite outcrops are sacred for Noongar people, but lizard traps are increasingly under threat. Rock crawling in cars had damaged 70% of surveyed traps, while rock stacking (where people create cairns) had altered 50% of surveyed traps. “It’s great that people are connecting with nature,” Cramp says, “but we need to make sure disturbances are minimised.”
Cramp says that the best way to conserve lizard traps is by management strategies led by Elders, along with minimising disturbances and removing the barriers for Traditional Owners who care for Country.
There is anecdotal evidence that like gnaama boorna, lizard traps are found along commonly travelled paths across Country. “They created the pathway for where we walked,” Knapp says.
The future of Noongar Kaartadijin
The collaboration between Noongar Elders, their community and these postgraduate students has connected scientific and cultural knowledge to reach a common goal: restoring natural landscapes in a culturally sensitive way.
This work has built a significant knowledge base and demonstrated a successful method of scientifically combining Indigenous knowledge with Western science.
“We continue to be surprised and elated by the depth of insight and breadth of conservation actions inherent in traditional Noongar life in this global biodiversity hotspot,” Hopper says.
He, Knapp and Lullfitz will keep supervising postgraduate students at the University of Western Australia. They hope the research projects will lead to increasing levels of biodiversity on Merningar and Goreng Country, as well as demonstrate the importance of Noongar people’s knowledge. “When we first started working with the girls down at the uni … they didn’t know much about Aboriginal survival techniques,” Knapp says. “Now, I can’t say anything in language in front of them! It’s been a brilliant journey.”