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Introduction Connection to Land Climate & Landscape
Sea Management Land Management Feral Animal Management

Connection to Land - Past and Present

Caring for Country Connection with Land History
Today's Communities New Forces Ranger Groups

Traditional land and sea ownership is based on customary law, passed from generation to generation.

This sacred trust involves defined groups or people, their ancestors and descendants.

In many areas, a system of 'managers' and 'owners' operates. Land managers generally have maternal links to land while landowners generally have paternal links to land. Aboriginal landowners and managers have specific and complementary rights and obligations to ensure the spiritual and physical health of defined areas of land.

In other areas, different land tenure systems operate.

Caring for country

Many of the rights and obligations associated with Aboriginal land tenure systems are neither documented nor detailed in formal legal titles.

Individual clans 'speak' in different capacities for particular areas of land and generally have a responsibility to protect and look after sites of cultural and religious significance, known as dreaming and sacred sites.

Over the years, as people moved around their estates, tracking shifts in the availability of important resources, they actively managed the country, largely through a prescribed burning regime handed down from their ancestors.

Connection with land

Aboriginal landowners continue to be reliant on the natural environment for both spiritual, social and economic well-being.

Creation ancestors form part of a living landscape and practices such as hunting and foraging have an important place in contemporary Aboriginal life.

Throughout Aboriginal land in the Northern Land Council area, there remains a strong belief in the land as sentient, or that ancestral spirits imbue the landscape, creating a situation in which spiritual and physical aspects cannot be altogether separated.

History

Today's Communities

A substantial number of Aboriginal people also live in the four major, predominantly non-Aboriginal, centres of Darwin, Nhulunbuy, Katherine and Jabiru.

But despite significant increases in the Top End's population over the past two decades and the outstation movement, large areas remain sparsely populated.

An absence of people from the land brings its own unique problems, especially in a highly fire-prone environment that is also vunerable to invasion by exotic plants and animals. There is increasing evidence that the changes in fire regimes that occurred when Aboriginal people left the land during the colonial era are causing widespread change in vegetation and subsequently in the dependent fauna.

New Forces

Although Aboriginal people have coped with massive changes in the past, there is no room for complacency.

The future of north Australia's natural environment, from the inland savannas, tablelands and drainage systems to freshwater coastal plains and fringing seas, reefs, ranges and islands, are subject to a range of new forces which cannot be called natural. Some are global, others are national, regional or quite local - but all are directly or indirectly the result of human activity.

While the outstation movement has led to the revival of traditional land management practices, Aboriginal landowners and managers are increasingly recognising the need to apply two sets of knowledge to land and sea management - traditional ecological knowledge and contemporary, science-based knowledge.

Ranger Groups

The Caring for Country Unit has been the driving force behind the establishment of Aboriginal ranger groups throughout the Top End as a way of fusing these two approaches to land management.

Today there are more than 20 Aboriginal Ranger groups across the almost 200,000 square kilometres of land now owned by Aboriginal people in the Land Council's area, which includes about 87% of the Top End's coastline.

Ranger groups provide a formalised structure for the transfer of traditional knowledge from old to young, as well as being a vehicle for the training and employment of young Aboriginal people living in remote areas.

To support the ranger groups' activities the CFCU has developed partnerships with a number of external funding agencies including Territory and Federal Government departments, various research bodies such as the Tropical Savannas Cooperative Research Centre and the Key Centre for Tropical Wildlife Management, the Natural Heritage Trust and the Worldwide Fund for Nature.

As more ranger groups join the ranger network, Aboriginal peoples' ability to care for country and manage pests will also increase. This growing capability is already recognised at a national level, with Aboriginal rangers' expert knowledge of country seeing them fulfil vital roles both in border security and quarantine protection.