Dr Georgia Ward-Fear, Macquarie University

Balanggarra Elder, Gregory Johnson, smiles during a sunny wet-season day on ‘Boab Avenue’ at Oombulgurri floodplain, in the East Kimberley 2013. Greg is culture man and his work as a Balanggarra Ranger was pivotal to the success of the original taste aversion program with Yellow spotted goannas (‘Gundalla’; Varanus panoptes). We demonstrated that wild goannas could learn not to eat toxic cane toads if we gave them small, nausea-inducing cane toads first. That study paved the way for the rest of the taste aversion program with reptilian predators, now widely adopted by management agencies.

Oombulgurri floodplain is an ancient meeting place for people across the eastern Kimberley, for corrobboree, stone tool making and food gathering throughout the long dry season. The once vibrant remote community was forcefully closed in 2011 and the houses stood for a long time like sentinel ghosts, slowly being reclaimed by nature. Greg walks one day to visit his old home in the community and finds a folder with family photos of his baby daughter, now grown up. He plays the guitar and often sings lines to old country songs as he wanders the floodplain, scouting for goannas and noting the areas that need to be burnt to ‘cleanemup’. One day I find Gregory, carving a Boab nut. The ghostly figure of a Wanjina stares back with small eyes. The rain maker, with no mouth, otherwise the rain would never cease. Greg hums and speaks language as he carves. Beneath it an Ungud wriggles around, water serpent dreaming.

At the airstrip the rangers wait to go home carrying 10 shopping bags of Boab nuts from Boab avenue. Boabs are in short supply in Wyndham, and everyone likes to carve. A cardboard box is filled with 10 large barramundi from Allison river, to take to the old people who can’t fish in Wyndham; there are also water bottles filled with Dorrimon river water, for those at home to taste.  Over three years our goanna project allowed us to go back to Oombulgurri with many Balanggarra people, back to Country.

A crocodile snacks at dusk. A remote wildlife camera catches a freshwater crocodile (Crocodylus johnstoni) at a taste aversion bait station in Bandiln͟gan (Windjana Gorge) Bunuba Country, in the central Kimberley. We have been working together to train crocodiles with taste aversion, before the cane toad invasion arrives. The limestone gorge system is an ancient sacred place for Bunuba people and was especially important in the history of Bunuba’s colonial resistance movement, at times led by Bunuba warrior Jandamarra. Bunuba people who entered the system utilised a series of hidden tunnels and pathways up through the limestone peaks, thus could never be tracked.

Across the late dry season, the Lennard river condenses into a series of small pools, containing huge numbers of crocodiles. The population is very vulnerable to mass mortality if they cross over with high numbers of toxic cane toads at this time of year, when little other food is available. This is a culturally significant population and Bunuba are hugely invested in monitoring and protecting this totemic species.

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.