L1. Foster reciprocity and relationships in land management
Embracing a holistic approach to land management in partnership with Traditional owners.
To date, we have approached council-owned land as a set of property assets – roads, parks and public properties like libraries and community centres. This has been useful, but it also has been a very narrow view of the land, and in many cases we have forgotten that our public assets are unceded Country. Recent science is catching up and learning from and with well-established Indigenous knowledges, to highlight that we are part of our local ecosystems, and when those ecosystems are unhealthy we suffer too. Healthy ecosystems are essential to human and nonhuman species wellbeing, and vice versa.
Working with Traditional Owners groups, local governments should shift to a management lens that sees all land as Country, and that all Country should be managed respectfully not only for us, but also for the species that form the ecosystems around us. When this is our starting point, our streets, council properties and parks and reserves can shift to biodiverse, healthy components of the local ecosystems that form the Country we all belong to. Build on relationships already in place with Land Councils, or other Traditional Owner groups, to understand their ways of looking after and caring for Country. Develop, maintain and foster relationships based on reciprocity for people and land.
Case Study Parklands cultural burning in Carriageway Park, Tuthangga, City of Adelaide
Cultural burns, also known as fire-stick farming, have been adopted in Aboriginal culture and are conducted to enable fire to burn slowly and purposefully, in a motion referred to as ‘trickling’, to cleanse and rejuvenate the land that the fire passes over. The City of Adelaide’s Horticulture Team, project managers and members of the Kaurna community, workshopped with traditional fire practitioners to become educated on the value of the process of cultural burning and understand the conditions for the right fire for the right country.
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