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[Music plays]
(Violet Lawson) My mother taught me a lot about looking after country.
You look after the country and the country will look after you.
My daughter Sandra and Peter and my grandchildren
they are out there helping out burning
yeah and looking after country.
[Music plays]
(Sandra McGregor) When you go out there, in the grass,
walk out there and just keep an eye out for pigs when you're walking out
they lie under the thick Hymanachne out there.
OK, before we start, you got your matches?
Alright cool, you know how to light it then?
I'll just remind you.
If you've forgotten, always strike downwards
and always strike your match on the downside of the fire
so you don't get trapped in flames.
(Peter Christophersen) When we burn the flood plains,
one of the important things is that we require a lot of wind to
actually move the fire out across the water.
And remembering the water can be over a metre deep.
So we need the big winds to actually push the fire out over those wetlands.
And burning before a storm comes is the prime time.
So you have this huge driving wind that's coming from the storm
and then suddenly the rain falls and puts it all out.
It's all over very quickly.
(Sandra McGregor) It's important to have the whole family involved so that
knowledge and skill is learnt out here
while we're doing the practical stuff.
So it's easier for them to watch how creatures move and how fire behaves
with wind and how we can show them how fire can actually burn over water.
(Peter Christophersen) Early in the dry season we have to put in
the early burns around the wetland fringes
and that protects the woodland from later fires,
which we would be putting in, in say September or October.
It's important that we burn the woodlands associated with the edges
and also the springs that feed into those wetlands
so that fires will not travel out later on in the year.
(Glenn Meade) Cultural resource management is the key object of the park.
As park manager I see the Boggy Plain's project
being the coming together of shared interest.
From Parks point of view were seeking biodiversity outcomes.
Aboriginal people living here are seeking
a sustainable ecosystem, to meet their stewardship
or their cultural obligations and for healthy food.
[Music plays]
(Sandra McGregor) This is the first burn here you can
see where the fires actually going through and burning
the dead grass underneath and then the new growth is actually
burning off and falling and as that falls
to the ground that will cure or dry in the next three
days and then you can come in and burn the green
grass that's fallen down that will cure for three days and
then, yeah, you can do your second lot of burns then.
(Peter Christophersen) Early results are showing that
with the removal of Hymenachne off the wetlands we have,
I think, in 2002, we reduced the Hymenachne by 40%.
And we had huge increases in other vegetation such as wild rice,
nalumbo, nimfeya, all the lilies
and we had a large recruitment of paper barks and other herb species.
You can see here, once we've started to thin out the native Hymenachne,
you can see all these other plants starting to come through.
Some of the different herbs have come back
and also this grass here you can see it's a much finer, thinner grass
and that's native rice and it's a very important food source
for the young fledgling magpie geese
and once they're old enough to move off the nest,
then the adults don't want to take them too far to find food
and so selecting a nesting site is very important
to enable them to collect feed very quickly.
The major significance in this project is that
Aboriginal people really have to take responsibility and
manage their different landscapes appropriately
particularly here in the wetlands where wetlands are continually changing.
People have to be up for that change and move
and manage those wetlands appropriately.
Not only for the biodiversity side of it
for National Parks but also for their cultural needs,
their sustainable lifestyles. To be able to hunt,
their major food sources from here,
and to be able to do that they have to manage them appropriately.
(Glenn Meade) The Boggy Plain project provides a learning opportunity.
For white fellas, such as me, it provides me an opportunity
to see how Aboriginal people use fire.
It also allows Aboriginal people to use science to communicate
to the world, that what they're doing makes a difference.
(Peter Christophersen) This is really a good example
of how joint management can work.
We have a National Park, we have park managers,
we have Aboriginal people on Aboriginal land
two different types of outlooks on life, two different sciences,
two different ways of doing things.
and I suppose, this is an example of combining all of those
differences into one package
and not only managing a landscape to suit cultural needs,
but looking at its major outcomes and relating them back to Park values
and I think this is the way that Aboriginal people
will be moving towards into the future.
[Music plays]