Caring for Country: Indigenous responses to building futures in Australia

If you want to participate via zoom, please register below and a zoom link will be sent out the day before the seminar.
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Várdduo seminar invites Professor Melissa Nursey-Bray, the University of Adelaide.

Caring for Country: Indigenous responses to building futures in Australia

In this presentation, Melissa will introduce the history of Indigenous resource management in Australia, provide some case study examples based on her own work, and reflect on what insights and lessons can be learned from them as well all strive to meet the challenges of living in the Anthropocene.

Australia has been home to hundreds of Indigenous nations for millennia, with each group identifying with and belonging to specific territories, called Country.  Today, despite the impacts of colonial invasion, Indigenous peoples have led a suite of resource management initiatives that ‘care for country’, that are built on age old knowledge systems, and contemporary partnerships with governments and conservation groups. Example of such initiatives include the employment of over 1200 Indigenous Rangers looking after country, co-management in South Australia and the Great Barrier Reef, traditional hunting and harvesting plans, Indigenous protected areas, and climate adaptation/carbon farming initiatives. Collectively they represent innovative leadership that has created collaborative pathways for socially just conservation futures.
 
 
Professor Melissa Nursey-Bray is a human geographer and Professor within the Department of Geography, Environment and Population, in the School of Social Sciences, Faculty of Arts, Business, Law and Economics (ABLE). Her research investigates the connection between people and the environment and focusses on how to engage communities to be part of environmental decision making, particularly in the context of climate change and biodiversity protection. She is currently working on a four-year Fellowship that investigates how different knowledges can work together to address biodiversity and climate change impacts.