COMMUNITY
The historic deal to return land to the Aboriginal community
Iarrive at preminghana, a 500ha property north of Marrawah on the north-west tip of Tasmania, late on Sunday afternoon. I’ve been invited here to camp tonight with about 150 members of the Aboriginal community, ahead of tomorrow’s momentous handback of former cattle property Kings Run in the Tarkine, about half an hour’s drive south, to its original owners. It is to be the next chapter in the wonderful story of the late cattle farmer-turned-wildlife tour operator Geoff King and his wife Margo Jones, and is expected to leave its mark on this remote corner of the world and beyond.
As dusk descends, adults talk by the campfire and children play nearby. There is a sense of great anticipation for the handover the next day, when the 338ha property will pass to the Aboriginal Land Council of Tasmania in a landmark deal partially funded by a $325,000 gift from philanthropist Graeme Wood, along with $60,000 from other donors to the Tasmanian Land Conservancy and Bob Brown Foundation and $680,000 from the Indigenous Land Corporation.
Many people, including King once, see this part of Tasmania as cattle country. But this has never been the dominant view of the Aboriginal community. In many parts of Australia, Aboriginal people were forcibly removed from their land to make way for cattle, then corralled into taking part in their land’s destruction as farm labour.
In Tasmania, they were simply expelled, from the early 1820s, when their removal became a government priority.
The King family ran cattle on their land from the 1880s, until Geoff King started to realise the incredible importance of his land. In a reversal of the past at Kings Run, cattle made way for the natural environment and Aboriginal culture in the mid-’90s. As King removed the cattle, he began restoring the environment and receiving visitors instead. Wildlife biologist Nick Mooney, whom King once credited as being part of his environmental “wake-up call”, opens Monday’s speeches on behalf of Jones, who is there in spirit but chose not to attend the ceremony. Mooney points out that Kings Run has only ever had two owners, the King family and Aboriginal people.
Former Greens leader Bob Brown describes the handback as a “small step in recovering, for all Australians, a loss we have in our hearts at what was done in our past”.
Conservationists and Aboriginal leaders describe the mutual benefits of the new future secured for Kings Run and how it took courage to see that their goals aligned.
“On a planet that desperately needs its eight billion people to reconnect with the land,” says Brown, “Aboriginal people are our leaders in this, both in body and in mind.”
About 200 people gather for a smoking ceremony in a clearing sheltered by trees and scrub a few hundred metres from the rugged shore. Two young men, bodies painted with ochre, dance around the fire and audience before inviting everyone to walk slowly through the thick white smoke, rich with the incense of fresh eucalyptus leaves, to cleanse their spirits. Faces beam in acknowledgement a common vision has been realised.
The first collaboration between the TLC and the Aboriginal community was at trawtha makuminya (formerly Gowan Brae) in the Central Highlands in 2013. “Kings Run is the second, and hopefully not the last,” says Stuart Barry of TLC.
Rangers from the Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre who manage preminghana will manage Kings Run, which comprises heathland, grassland and wetlands and is home to threatened species including the Tasmanian devil, wedge-tailed eagle and orangebellied parrot. Its Aboriginal heritage is rich in shell middens, fish
traps, seal-hunting hides and the remains of hut villages. It was part of a seasonal hunting area carefully managed with fire. “These places have helped to correct the misconception that our people just wandered around aimlessly without settlement or structures,” says TAC’s Andry Sculthorpe.
Wotif founder and tourism developer Graeme Wood, who met King on a hiking tour of the West Coast in 2009 and is known for his environmental philanthropy, says it was “impossible for me not to get involved in this project”. “The impact of that environment was deeply memorable: the rawness and those pounding seas that are the graveyard for so many vessels.”
But it was King who made the biggest impression. “He was an inspiration for me,” says Wood of the former cattle farmer, who died aged 58 in 2013. “He showed that the courage of one’s convictions can make a demonstrable change in one’s own lifetime, despite personal attacks from the less aware.”
Above all, though, Wood’s readiness to help is his reaction to the treatment of Aboriginal people. “Physical Aboriginal massacres don’t happen in 2017, but the spiritual and political desecration of Aboriginal history continues unabated, seemingly cheered on by the Hodgman Government in an attempt to gain a few votes in the North West,” he says, emphasising his belief Aboriginal heritage sites should not be open to 4WD access. “A piece of irreplaceable art or culture lasts only until it is destroyed for all time.”
Days earlier, UN special rapporteur Victoria Tauli-Corpuz urged world leaders to do more to defend indigenous communities, saying they are the most effective custodians of the environment.
Speaking at the ceremony, land council chairman Clyde Mansell says his community has waited 200 years for this. He then commits to perpetuate King’s legacy of conservation. “Today we once again become custodians of this land. It is part of us. We need it.”
As we explore the property after the speeches, along the jagged and raucous shore, past the seal-hunting hides, to King’s famous shack where he treated visitors to dinner, and back through the hinterlands, it seems clear Kings Run will inspire people for many years to come, including through soft tourism and education.
Hundreds of generations spent time on this land: being born, living, loving, dying, enduring ice ages and changing sea levels, while other civilisations around the world came and went. Now this story once again includes future generations and unwritten pages – a feeling of permanence has returned. “It has been a long past, but we have a long future,” says Sculthorpe, concluding the ceremony.