Great Sandy Desert

• First Nations people please be advised this article speaks of racially discriminating moments in history, including the distress and death of First Nations people.
• On October 9 1873, George Augustus Frederick Dalrymple reclined in a boat on the glorious North Johnstone River in the coastal Wet Tropics.
• Dappled paths led to managed patches of open forest, groves of fruit trees, bananas and yams.
• First Nations groups such as Australia’s rainforest people had skilfully managed entire ecosystems over the long term, in what has been termed “ecology on steroids”.

Decoupling landscape from climate change

• The Pleistocene climate was cool and windy, with mega monsoons and long periods of diabolical drought.
• Here, in a magnificent cave system in Arnhem Land, people prepared a meal of native fruits and processed pandanus using an adaptable toolkit.
• This meal took place 65,000 years ago, when savannah stretched all the way to the island of New Guinea.

• The land was not a mindless resource but part of your family – and came with family obligations.
• Everyone, whether you were human, an animal, a plant, a river, fire, the sky or wind, was closely watched.

• The lagoon filled up, nestled in a landscape of moisture-loving shrubs and brushed by relatively cool fires.
• But then, the climate lurched to one of the long periods of horrendous drought instigated by an El Nino weather system.
• Through patch burning, they created a rich landscape of diverse habitat that sustained people and created niches for a wide range of species.

Extinction busters

• From before the last ice age, the ancestors of today’s Martu people would have witnessed great floods rushing down the Sturt Creek into an extensive lake system, Paruku (Lake Gregory).
• These lakes were ten times larger than today’s system, ringed by dunes covered in scrubby vegetation and flammable spinifex.
• Without cultural burning, it took mere years for fuel to build up and large wildfires to incinerate the landscape.

• Over the two decades of Martu absence, ten species of small mammal became locally extinct, including the rufous hare-wallaby, burrowing bettong, bilby, mulgara and brushtail possum.
• What’s more, 14 mammals, three birds and two reptiles became threatened.
• We will need to relearn these ancient techniques of managing country on a broader scale to cope with the changes to come.

• Penny has recently published a book, Cloud Land, with Allen & Unwin based on the Thiaki restoration project.
• Barry Hunter is a Djabugay man and chair of Terrain NRM, a natural resources management group.