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West Kimberley Place Report

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West Kimberley Place Report WEST KIMBERLEY PLACE REPORT DESCRIPTION AND HISTORY ONE PLACE, MANY STORIES Located in the far northwest of Australia’s tropical north, the west Kimberley is one place with many stories. National Heritage listing of the west Kimberley recognises the natural, historic and Indigenous stories of the region that are of outstanding heritage value to the nation. These and other fascinating stories about the west Kimberley are woven together in the following description of the region and its history, including a remarkable account of Aboriginal occupation and custodianship over the course of more than 40,000 years. Over that time Kimberley Aboriginal people have faced many challenges and changes, and their story is one of resistance, adaptation and survival, particularly in the past 150 years since European settlement of the region. The listing also recognizes the important history of non-Indigenous exploration and settlement of the Kimberley. Many non-Indigenous people have forged their own close ties to the region and have learned to live in and understand this extraordinary place. The stories of these newer arrivals and the region's distinctive pastoral and pearling heritage are integral to both the history and present character of the Kimberley. The west Kimberley is a remarkable part of Australia. Along with its people, and ancient and surviving Indigenous cultural traditions, it has a glorious coastline, spectacular gorges and waterfalls, pristine rivers and vine thickets, and is home to varied and unique plants and animals. The listing recognises these outstanding ecological, geological and aesthetic features as also having significance to the Australian people. In bringing together the Indigenous, historic, aesthetic, and natural values in a complementary manner, the National Heritage listing of the Kimberley represents an exciting prospect for all Australians to work together and realize the demonstrated potential of the region to further our understanding of Australia’s cultural history. The listing enriches and extends our understanding of the diverse histories and heritage values of the west Kimberley, perhaps in ways we are yet to fully understand and appreciate, potentially leading to unimagined benefits and new partnerships. Given the scale of this assessment it is impossible to tell all the stories about the west Kimberley. The extensive bibliography of the National Heritage listing, including histories, personal accounts, academic treatise and scientific literature, will provide a resource for those interested in delving further into their specific areas of interest. These are living stories, about living places: they tell of the forces that continue to shape people's lives, and have made the Kimberley what it is today. The National Heritage listing of the west Kimberley opens the way to the discovery, by the Australian public, of these and many more stories, that have yet to be told. A remarkable land- and sea-scape The Kimberley occupies more than 420,000 square kilometres on the north-western margin of the Australian continent. Its rocky coastline edges the Indian Ocean, and off the coast lie thousands of islands, many fringed with coral. In the wet north-west, the Mitchell Plateau (Ngauwudu) rises to nearly 800 metres above sea level at its centre, 1 in places dropping into steep escarpments, and losing altitude as it approaches the sea. Further south, Yampi Peninsula lies in a transitional area between the high-rainfall of tropical north Kimberley and the drier conditions characteristic of central Western Australia. These different environments meet in a complex landscape of plains, dissected sandstone plateaus, and rugged mountains. The central Kimberley, which includes the periphery of north Kimberley plateau country and the King Leopold Ranges, is very rugged; the physical structures here were formed by significant geological events which folded rocks intensely, many thousands of millions of years ago. That such evidence of a distant past can today be seen so clearly in the landscape is due to the region's remarkable geological stability. This stability has also allowed the much more recent appearance of extensive limestone ranges, built from the remains of an extraordinary reef complex which, over 300 million years ago, rivalled the Great Barrier Reef in size. The ranges have since eroded to form complex networks of caves and tunnels. Dinosaur footprints and tracks are another remarkable remnant of past life in the Kimberley; they are exposed in many places in the Broome Sandstone, along the western length of Dampier Peninsula. This coastline is subject to one of the highest tidal ranges anywhere in the world, and many of the fossil footprints can only be seen for short periods during very low tides. Inland of Dampier Peninsula, south of the broad floodplains of the Fitzroy River, the distinctive red of the pindan country opens onto a vast expanse of desert. Throughout the Kimberley, where water meets land – in estuaries, mangroves and mudflats, in moist vine thickets, along the banks of rivers and creeks, around waterholes or soaks – there is an abundance of plants and animals, some of which live only in the Kimberley, while others may have travelled from the far side of the world to nest or breed here. Animals rely on these refuges to congregate, feed, rest and reproduce. Such places also sustain Aboriginal people: for millennia these places have had important subsistence and sacred values, and have been the focus of ecological knowledge and traditional practices over seasons and lifetimes, for millennia (Pannell 2009). European settlers saw the Kimberley's vast tropical landscape as the last frontier: a remote place with lush river floodplains ideally suited to pastoralism. To the European eye, this untapped, undeveloped wilderness was rich with opportunity and ready for exploitation. But the Kimberley was already occupied by Aboriginal people who were the country's owners and custodians, and regarded the land and its natural resources as having been created and maintained by their Dreamtime ancestors who gave them responsibility to look after country and abide by its rules. Indigenous foundations of the Kimberley The Dreaming Like other Indigenous societies across Australia, Kimberley Aboriginal people believe that their traditional countries have been formed during an era of creation often described in English as 'the Dreaming' or 'the Dreamtime'. During the Dreaming both the natural and human world are formed coterminously by ancestral creator beings who are manifestations of powerful spiritual forces that permeate the cosmos (Blundell and Doohan 2009). The Dreaming is not a theory of creation out of nothing: before the Dreaming, the world was already in existence, but it was unformed or 'soft' as some Kimberley Aboriginal people explain (Lommel 1997). 2 In contrast to ontological views of the West, the Indigenous story of creation is non- linear in the sense that aspects of the present are considered both to affirm and to re- enact the events of the Dreaming. The Dreaming exists in a continuous past-present- future continuum, in what Stanner (1987) calls 'the everywhen'. Each Kimberley Aboriginal society has a rich body of religious narratives that concern the Dreaming. While such narratives are distinct for each of these societies, they all contain accounts of creator beings who 'gave' them their laws and customs. Importantly, across the Kimberley, these narratives describe how ancestral creator beings have 'made' the Indigenous countries that comprise the west Kimberley region. During their many travels and other exploits, such beings are said to have carved out the rivers, lifted up mountains and transformed themselves into rock formations and other features of the land, the sea and the sky. Some of the ways in which these Dreaming-derived laws and beliefs are transmitted from generation to generation are in the form of traditional narratives, art forms, and enactments through dance and song. Aboriginal children are taught these laws through 'wudu' or observation and practice. These verbal and visual expressions tell the history or stories of Kimberley Aboriginal people. In the words of one Bardi woman 'they are living stories; they are the spirit of us'. As integral strands in a broader corpus of Aboriginal being and knowing, stories are forceful social expressions. Explaining this relationship between power and knowledge, a senior Wunambal man stated, 'the story can't be told just anyway, anytime, people can get killed if they have the wrong information, and do not know how to respect the place, the place is still alive'. As this Traditional Owner's comments imply, the reproduction of stories has serious implications and sometimes dangerous consequences. So while some stories are public, others are more restricted in their use. Kimberley Aboriginal people have carefully considered the kind and nature of the stories they have contributed towards this National Heritage listing of the west Kimberley. 'Making' the country The Wanjina-Wunggurr people of the north-west Kimberley – which includes the language countries of the Worrorra, Ngarinyin, Unggumi, Umida, Unggarrangu, Wunambal, and Gaambera – explain that one of the most important activities of the powerful creator beings, Wanjina (Wandjina) and the Wunggurr Snake, is their role in 'making' the country. Like other aspects of their belief system, the Wanjina-Wunggurr people and indeed all Aboriginal people's concept of 'country' stands in stark contrast to Western views. In Western thought, country is often described with reference to its geology and topography, its climate, and its characteristic animal and plant forms. Country is considered an aspect of nature. It is a geographic space, often seen as untapped wilderness that becomes transformed into a culturally meaningful place through the actions of its human inhabitants, for example when humans create an agricultural or urban landscape. Such a Western perspective differs markedly from Indigenous views, including those of the Wanjina-Wunggurr people. For them, country is far more than a geographic location with particular topography, flora and fauna.
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