Wetland forest culture: Indigenous activity for management change in the Southern Riverina, New South Wales

Abstract

This article applies the experience of one Indigenous organisation's activity in advocating the adoption of a cultural–environmental management approach in the forested wetlands of the Edward/Kolety and Wakool rivers, New South Wales, Australia. These experiences are analysed using the frameworks of academics' rethink of ‘nature’ and Indigenous people's philosophies of ‘Country’. In doing so, different understandings of fact and governance are shown to have implications for natural resource and environmental management. We demonstrate how Indigenous people express attachments to place and culture as part of reconfiguring modernity to create better conditions for their knowledges and priorities. This analysis takes place in the context of degraded river ecologies, intense debates about over-allocated river systems, the transfer of riverine forest lands to the conservation estate, and the contested Indigenous presence in colonial-settler societies. This research is a partnership between the research institution and the Indigenous organisation, and involved workshops, fieldwork and semi-structured interviews.