Dr Alison Lullfitz, University of Western Australia and Shandell Cummings, Merningar woman and Indigenous consultant.

Fostering Connection through Women’s Bush Camps. (Credit: Rocio Almuna Morales, University of Western Australia).

This photo shows Lynette and Shandell’s hands as they bind several branches of Purrong (Melaleuca uncinatum) together using twine (thin strips of Lepidosperma sp. foliage) to make a bush broom. 

Since colonisation, limited access for First Nations peoples to their traditional lands has universally remained an obstacle to intergenerational cultural knowledge transfer and caring for Country across Australia. While this holds across all genders, on Country teaching and learning opportunities for First Nations women can be particularly limited. Recognition of a need to increase such opportunities led to our running two pilot family-based camps in late 2022. Funds from the 2021 Bush Heritage Right Way Science prize made this possible.  These camps provided an opportunity for multiple generations of women of one Merningar Noongar family to gather on their Country on the south coast of WA. At the camps, younger family members and collaborating ecologists learned traditional skills and knowledge from Senior Elder, Lynette Knapp and her daughter, Shandell Cummings. In the process of learning on Country together, younger Merningar women learned traditional skills from their grandmother and mother, while the ecologists and all Merningar women yarned about and recorded the shared experience of what they were observing. Example topics were the age and type of plants targeted, manipulation of these attributes using fire or harvest, seasonality of activities, the species’ habitat and other concurrent cultural activities.  

Noongar Country is globally renowned for its botanical richness, much of which is under threat and poorly understood by science. In Noongar society, plant knowledge is largely the domain of women. With increasing age of knowledgeable female Elders who grew up in bush camps on Country, this is vital and urgent work for wellbeing of First Nations people and their Country. Based on the success of this pilot, we are currently developing a larger scale, multi-family project for which we hope to attract funding. 

Shandell Cummings and Dr Alison Lullfitz were awarded the 2021 Bush Heritage Australia Right Way Science Award.

Fostering Connection through Women’s Bush Camps. (Credit: Dr Alison Lullfitz, University of Western Australia).

This photo shows Lynette and Shandell teaching Shandell’s daughter Jaymee Woods and collaborating ecologists, Ursula Rodrigues and Susie Cramp to make bush brooms. All of these women are collaborators on the cross-cultural Walking Together project, based at UWA Albany, Western Australia. The project focused on documenting traditional ecological knowledge and exploring insights for Indigenous-led biodiversity conservation going forward.  

This piece has been extracted from an online gallery of images from Indigenous ecological practitioners around Australia. Images in this collection tell the stories of programs continuing, reviving and protecting the ecological practices and knowledge held by First Nations people for millennia – consult the full gallery here.