PICTURE this: Ethnobotanist and biologist Glenn Wightman is halfway up a tree on Milingimbi Island, off the coast of Darwin, collecting leaf specimens for the Herbarium, when Maw Ulk Muwuy, an elderly woman of the local Aboriginal clan, asks just what he is doing there. As custom requires, Wightman had already been granted permission from the clan to collect specimens, so he explains what he is doing up the tree. Maw Ulk Muwuy looks at him surprised, and says that it is useless just recording the western names of the plants and animals when her clan knows much more about these than a white man ever could. [Source: Australian Broadcasting Corporation 2004]
The project
Enhanced contemporary awareness of food biodiversity and the challenges that confront ecological sustainability has drawn the attention of science to indigenous knowledge. It has been estimated that before 1788 Australia and the Torres Strait Islands were home to clans numbering about 750,000 people speaking 700 languages. Modern historians and anthropologists describe Australia at that time as ‘unspoilt country’, in which the people lived in kinship with their environment and all that sustained them in ways that challenge the comprehension of Australians today. As south-western Australian Noonger elder Craig McVee remarks: ‘The bush was our supermarket. We only took from it what we needed, but we all shop at the co-op now’. As homogenisation in contemporary Australia threatens indigenous knowledge, Slow Food in Australia will collaborate with indigenous communities where this food knowledge exists – and in numerous places it remains very rich – and adapt the lessons of Slow Food’s Terra Madre, contribute to knowledge sustainability and ensure greater public awareness of its benefits.
Collaboration
Glenn Wightman is one of the few non-indigenous Australians to have developed a deep understanding of the country’s traditional plant and animal knowledge. Graduating from Melbourne’s Monash University in 1981, Wightman has since worked closely with the many Aboriginal communities still inhabiting the top half of the Northern Territory, an area rich in plant diversity, to help them record this precious knowledge in a scientific and culturally sensitive manner. His books on the plants and animals of northern Australia are in some cases the last surviving record of knowledge that has been passed down through Aboriginal Australian generations over thousands of years. This published information – on which indigenous communities are consulted and over which they retain full authorship and copyright – extends from major ethnobotanic works to ‘bush tucker identikits’.
Work is also being done by Desert knowledge, an Australian cross-government and central Australian communities’ project which seeks to improve local economies, community livelihoods and society in Australian desert and arid lands. It is charged by legislation to pursue ‘ecologically sustainable wealth creation’ in central Australian and adjacent desert communities in northern South Australia, eastern Western Australia, western New South Wales and far western Queensland. It specifically targets information collection and research, education and training and market development for desert knowledge and products.
Philanthropy
In 2002 the American-based Christensen Fund launched a new programme and funding strategy aimed at enhancing the world’s awareness of the interface between natural environments and human cultures, specifically indigenous, tribal and minority cultures. The goal has been to sustain indigenous creativity and renewal through projects that build resilience and sovereignty, rather than ‘freezing’ or ‘preserving’ cultures and ecologies. Australian grant recipients in 2007 shared US$2.16 million [A$2.46 million] for projects encompassing art, music, ceremonial participation, ecological sustainability and the economic development of traditional knowledge. Charles Darwin University received A$1.1 million to develop a culture-based economic framework for northern Australian traditional landowners.
Knowledge recognition
Australia is a signatory [1993] to the Convention on Biological Diversity, within which is a mechanism to provide for the recognition and protection of indigenous knowledge. Almost a decade ago, research by the Australian Parliamentary Library highlighted the significant contribution of indigenous knowledge to the identification and collection of plants for food and pharmaceutical use. But it also noted that this contribution remained largely unacknowledged, with few – if any – financial benefits accruing to the source of this knowledge: indigenous people. Slow Food International president Carlo Petrini has recently written about the phenomenon of ‘emergency ethnology’ described by French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss – that the value of indigenous society demands our defence because of indigenous belief that humans are ‘recipient and not master’ of creation and the natural world. Petrini believes it is incumbent on Slow Food to collaborate in a practical way for the protection of indigenous people’s vision of the world. ‘Let’s help them to understand that they are not of interest to us just because they possess valuable diversity and enrich the network,’ he says, ‘but also because they represent a model we can look to and learn from. Let’s help them to understand that we need them even more than they need us.’