Healing Country in the Central Murray Ramsar

The Central Murray Ramsar project is made up of three distinct forest areas the Murray Kolety Edwards and Wakool systems all interconnect and have an impact on redgum floodplains. 

We've had feral pests and weeds in our environment for many, many years now. Can’t expect those numbers to turn around overnight. 

We tend to build projects that are built from the bottom up where community involve Aboriginal groups involved. 

We get more closely to what they want to see, but then we start bringing in government agencies and research agencies to do monitoring and assessments within the Ramsar sites. 

Murray Local Land Services Ramsar Project help build the capacity for our people out on country because it's provided opportunity to work back out on country and access country and heal country but also build the capacity within our organisations, so we can maintain long term employment opportunities for our staff. 

Because we manage the land, we issue permits to Local Land Services. We do the operational plans, so we do work closely with them and their third parties. 

We formed a number of partnerships working with community and feral and pest animal control in the Ramsar wetland areas. Through those projects we work together with treating box thorn and rabbits and foxes. 

They progressed on to working with protection of native wildlife, with turtle projects and those kinds of activities. Murray Local Land Services contacted me a few years ago to do a test of how effective 1080 poison baiting was for reducing fox numbers and whether that protected turtle nests and if we also saw an increase in juvenile turtles and then we're also doing turtle trapping to see how the population structures have changed when that 1080s been used. 

We've been really heavily involved right through our country, and not only Yorta Yorta country, but also Barapa to the north west and Wamba country and further up north west trying to revegetate and rejuvenate a lot of those cultural spots that our ancestors used to use, particularly around the area of the Pollack and I guess it's the standard for, for what can be done. 

I spend a lot of time convening the community as that's what a lot of Landcare groups do. We've been working with environmental water delivery in the landscape with agencies and now we've got a valuable partnership with a range of those agencies on the ground. 

When we brought everyone in together, everyone has a different focus, whether it's a business focus or a personal focus. 

You know, they want to protect their own property or they want to protect their business, or they want to protect the environment. 

And so bringing all those ideas together and sitting around a table and talking about it and finding that middle ground, that sort of everyone is willing to sort of give a little for the greater benefit. 

The role we play is being a conduit between the community and government You can put the turtles back in the water and we'll grab the yabbies and we'll put them back in the container. 

We've become involved in this Ramsar related site to bring water back into some isolated ancestral creek beds. 

We decided that we get involved in this project to try and introduce some environmental water into to make it sort of bit more of a permanent fixture on the farm. Birds like the bittens can be breeding in the rice. They could also be breeding in the Pollack. So there's actually a harbour here for them if they if they want to move further north.

I was at the Pollack yesterday, and just seeing all the natural grasses and the natural water lilies and water plants and that we've helped along over the years come in and re-vege but, we were never able to get that real good head of growth because of the inconsistencies with the water. Now we've got water in there most year around it's just booming and all the native animals that are back in there, you know, the fish and the birds and the, you know, just all the little critters that call that place home. It's just an explosive area. 

For our rangers, we've sort of come back into a landscape that has been managed different to what we would have managed, you know, in the traditional ways. We are having to learn a new way. So we can't do this without the other partners that Ramsar Project have provided us with. 

We're learning new skills to be able to work within a changing landscape. We've worked with all those key stakeholders and particularly the First Nations groups of our area in trying to not only improve and maintain the condition of the forest areas and achieve environmental outcomes, but also try and provide opportunities for training and work and capacity building within those Aboriginal groups and take a bigger role in the management of the managed areas as well. 

The one common, all we all have is that health of the environment and if Aboriginal people it's about a healthy country, to be able to work on country and spend time on country goes to the local community as well. 

I mean, being a person that grew up in the middle of a forest, you know, to me that's a part of what I want and I want to be out in the forest doing stuff. Yeah, we have a common goal to to see that environment thrive and be healthy and sort of hope that that's there for our children in the future.