Clouds build up, fruits flower, Indigenous seasons change

00:00 Eliza Herbert: Bush Heritage acknowledges the Traditional Owners of the places in which this podcast was recorded and in which we live, work and play. We recognize the enduring relationships they have with their lands and waters and pay our deepest respects to elders past and present.

00:15 Otto Campion and his grandson Cyrus: (In the background, a Rembarrnga language lesson)

00:29 Eliza Herbert: The language you are listening to is the Rembarrnga language, and it is being taught by senior elder Otto Campion to his grandson Cyrus. If you are listening to this in the city, say in Sydney or Melbourne like I am, chances are you haven't heard this language before. Rembarrnga is one of the many language groups of central Arnhem Land that is being kept alive by elders like Otto and the ladies you will be hearing from today. I'm Eliza Herbert. And today on Big Sky Country, a podcast by Bush Heritage Australia, we're travelling to a remarkable place to learn how a community is coming together to document their languages and in doing so create their very own Rembarrnga and Dalabon seasonal calendars.

01:38 Annette Miller: My name is Annette Miller. I come from Bulman. My language is Rembarrnga, but I also speak Creole and different other languages. 

01:50 Shantelle Miller: My name is Shantelle Miller. I currently reside in Bulman Community in the heart of Arnhem Land.

01:57 Norrie Martin: Hello, my name is Norrie Martin. We're sitting right here now today  with Katie.

02:05 Eliza Herbert: Annette, Shantelle and Norrie are all part of the Rembarrnga language group and have been working together on the Rembarrnga seasonal calendar. The person they are talking to is my colleague, Katie Degnian, Bush Heritage’s ecologist for the Northern Territory who took a recorder out with her recently when she travelled to work with the Mimal Rangers.

02:22 Katie Degnian: How did the old people live with the different seasons?

02:28 Annette Miller: They were very clever, very clever. They see why they heed and the weather.

02:36 Eliza Herbert: Bush Heritage has been working in partnership with Mimal for roughly five years now to assist the Traditional Owners with their aspirations for healthy country. The Mimal Rangers look after an area known as the Mimal Land Management area that spans 1.8 million hectares in the geographical centre of Arnhem Land. It is a rich ecological and cultural landscape belonging to Rembarrnga, Dalabon and Mayali people. Picture savanna woodlands, freshwater creeks and springs, grassy plains and rock country full of bush tucker and lots of special things like rock art sites and spiritual places that are linked to dreaming stories. Picture a place where Rembarrnga and Dalabon people have lived in harmony with the seasons for millennia.

03:22 Vivienne Lawrence: When I see this cloud that's got horrible. It tells me for the raining season, for all the fish, all again it got egg and fat now because that flower when it pops up, you know.

03:37 Eliza Herbert: That's Vivienne Lawrence.

03:40 Vivienne Lawrence: My name's Vivienne Lawrence, my clan group with … (continues in her Dalabon language)

03:58 Eliza Herbert: The language she is speaking is Dalabon and this is her Auntie Joyce. 

04:02 Auntie Joyce: Alright then, yeah, my name's Joyce. I speak my first language, Creole and Dalabon.

04:10 Eliza Herbert: Katie gave them both a call to chat about their experience creating the Dalabon calendar.

04:15 Auntie Joyce: A lot of it is by flowers. When other trees bloom. So, a lot of our elders taught how when a flower comes up it means, you know, it's a certain time where it'll be good to go and collect kangaroo because you know it'll have fat if they see this particular flower.

04:35 Eliza Herbert: If you're wondering what a seasonal calendar is, it helps to know how Aboriginal seasons differ from Western ones. The western calendar is based on structural time, so summer starts on the 1st of December, autumn on the 1st of March and so on. And it is standard across the north and southern hemisphere.

04:53 Katie Degnian: So here in northern Australia non-indigenous people identify two or sometimes three seasons based as their name suggests, on the amount of rainfall. The “wet” and the “dry” and sometimes the “build up” leading into the wet season.

05:06 Eliza Herbert: Whereas Aboriginal seasonal calendars are based on ecological time and are strongly embedded in place. As an ecologist working on Bush Heritage's Aboriginal Partnership program, Katie sees learning local languages as an important part of her job so that she can use the right language to describe and care for country when working with ranger groups.

05:25 Katie Degnian: Rembarrnga and Dalabon people have very rich language to describe ecology and seasonal change. There's a lot of use of metaphor and similes, and I think the language to describe the ecology is really poetic. It really demonstrates that intimate intergenerational knowledge of the environment. And when these languages are translated into English, much of the depth of knowledge is lost.

05:53 Auntie Joyce: Well, we know when we feel the cold coming, so we know that the Yekku is coming through now. And it's like you can go and stay bush. You don't have to worry about the coolness because you can have comfortable sleeps at night and it's nice to sit around a big fire and yeah, yeah, cool. It's a really nice season. It's nice and cool.

06:15 Annette Miller: The flowers at the Woollybutt tree they come into play run about Marlawurru season, and it tells us the season for us to go and collect and harvest freshwater mussel and tells us when either a goanna or something like that is fat. And then when you go to the build up, the weather starts to change. There's cloud coming up. Clouds are coming in, you know, and all the little berries are starting to form on the trees, and that's when we said and we said to the kids, it's time for you to go and look at the gums are coming, you know.

06:55 Eliza Herbert: Annette is a board director of Mimal Land Management. She is also a teacher who has committed much of her life to educating children in her community.
At first, Annette and her daughter Shantelle started creating calendars with local school children. Then, after attending a conference in Darwin, where they saw calendars from other Aboriginal Ranger groups, they knew they needed to have their own for the whole community to use and learn from.

07:18 Annette Miller: And that's when everybody in our community said that we needed to develop and create a seasonal calendar for the Rembarrgna clan group and also a seasonal calendar for the Dalabon clan group.

07:32 Eliza Herbert: In 2020, Annette and Katie cofacilitated a series of community meetings to gather the vision and the goals that the elders had for the project, and since then, Rembarrgna and Dalabon speakers have come together from across Arnhem Land to share knowledge through a series of workshops at bush camps on homelands and at the Mimal Ranger Base.

07:54 Katie Degnian: Rembarrnga people identify seven and Dalabon people identify six main seasons that are based on a complex set of ecological indicators. For example, plants flowering, fruiting or seeding, or losing their leaves. Animal life, cycles of behaviours, astronomy, cloud types, wind direction.

08:21 Katie Degnian: And these are just some of the cues, seasonal calendars also incorporate harvesting times for bush tucker, according to sustainable harvests and when plants and animals have the most fat or nutritional value. And these seasons don't change roughly, but blend into one another and change from year to year.

08:45 Annette Miller: In Juwalkka the wet season, we're able to get a lot of berries ranging from Juppih, which is the black currant, Gorrwon the white current, Birrkoer is a green plum. Mallak is known as the Kakadu Plum.

09:02 Shantelle Miller: For big offseason like right now, so maybe Katie can call that by English. Name that tree. Which tree we're talking about.

00:09:09 Katie Degnian: Yeah, we call it the Yellow flowered kapok.

09:12 Shantelle Miller: Yeah, we call them Gandiguk. Right now they're flowering. They got big heap of seed right now and some yellow flowers. And then when it's brown, it comes to wool. The tree. Some tells us, like the time for grain or kangaroo. We see that tree when we've got yellow flower and we know that kangaroo we tell our grandchildren that kangaroo have little baby now.

09:40 Annette Miller and others: (Background conversation with children)

10:04 Eliza Herbert: As rewarding as the seasonal calendar project has been, it has also created an opportunity for people to voice their concerns about the future. One of the worries is keeping language alive.

10:16 Annette Miller: Well, remember, in a language it is important to me now is because I myself lost that language because our language was stolen from us. You know, it was stolen from my parents, my great grandmother and my great grandfather.

10:31 Auntie Joyce: And this is why it's very important for me as a grandmother. And I'm a grandmother of five, so I want to teach my grandchildren how my mom spoke to all her grandchildren, because this is where Vivienne picked up a lot of the Dalabon language. It was through her grandmother, my mother. And I've learned from my mother and Vivienne has been teaching me a lot, too. So, I mean Vivienne wants to hold our language strongly. It means something very important to our mom and to all the Dalabon speakers. We want to pass that on to our kids because if we lose this now, we won't have anybody to speak, to develop our language ever again.

11:30 Annette Miller: Even today, you got kids, people that are 30 or 40 and 50 years old. People here in the community, they cannot speak their language, you know, and seeing this, how it's through this seasonal calendar, they're now talking, there's a lot of talk in the community. That's it, it's saying, we want to learn too as well, so we're trying to teach people, not from young to old.

12:02 Eliza Herbert: But there was also another worry that kept coming up throughout this process. One that is being witnessed across the landscape with increased frequency and that is causing people to notice changes in the seasons.

12:14 Annette Miller: Yes, there is a lot of change with climate change. We're getting very, very hot, hot, dry weather seasons. When it comes, we saw that there were very bad hot fires as well as some very bad flooding.

12:45 Auntie Joyce: Yeah, well, that's the thing now. And that's what we see. Because, when we have that green plum season, you know we don't get very much of it. Whereas before there used to be like a big window where maybe you'd be lucky and get like a whole month of that green plum season? But now these days you only got a window like for a week, because if you don't get to it, the parrots are going to get to it and it sort of comes too late. The weather, I mean the rain comes too late. So, the food doesn't grow into a good size. You know, the trees almost half dead before it starts to fruit. 

Little bit worried for me because I am worrying for our animals and food because, you never know, I might go back with my children one day and live back there in my country. I need to eat those food and show my children it's getting hotter.  A lot of the elders are noticing that a lot of the rivers and billabongs are drying up. There used to be water there many years ago. I mean, I took my cousin out to this place where she grew up to where, you know, when she was very small and there was running water all year round. And when we go back now, she said there's no running water. You know, it's all cut off. It's been dried except water been dry out in Groppoli billabong, that's where we didn't get much food from that billabong, because there's fish in there. There's turtle. There's all kind of things too, you know, like all kind of animals in there. 

Yeah. That's the first time when the billabong been dry. And I've seen billabongs, you know that are very, very hot and you know, the fish are just gasping for air, you know. And because there's no oxygen. The water is so hot. It's so hot because the, the, the heat, you know, and we don't have much rain and, you know, one season we'll get a good rain and then, you know, maybe a couple of years you won't get good rain. So, you fall into the drought maybe for a year or two that you don't have these river or billabongs filled up where it should be to keep growing with all the fish and everything. But you know a couple of years you'll miss out because the rivers are dry, or the billabongs are dried out because of the heat. Too hot.

14:47 Eliza Herbert: To combat some of these concerns, Mimal Rangers are on the case. The Mimal Rangers, together with a group of neighbouring Aboriginal Ranger groups, make up Arnhem Land Fire Abatement an Aboriginal-owned and not-for-profit, carbon farming business. Mimal's fire management work is about conducting traditional fire management techniques with the help of new technologies, fine scale mosaic, patterns of cool fires and strategic fire breaks reduce the frequency and extent of late dry season wildfires, resulting in fewer greenhouse gas emissions.

15:19 Eliza Herbert: Since the project began in 2011, Mimal have abated just over 1,000,000 tons of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Income from this funds ranger jobs and work that keeps country and people healthy.

15:33 Annette Miller: We've all learned that we can now monitor and look at the seasonal chain through the calendar and go out and work out how best for the Mimal mob the rangers to go and do burning and how best the rangers can look after fire.

16:01 Eliza Herbert: And of course, all of this keeps coming back to one of the most important things, the next generation.

16:12 Auntie Joyce: It'll be something new for our kids to know that this language is around. It's been part of your great grandmother, your great, great grandfather, you know, it's been passed on. It's not like you hear about it and then you say that. Oh, yeah, my grandmother was a Dalabon person, but I can't speak the language. It doesn't, you know, you don't feel that connection of speaking the language knowing that you are tribe of the language, but you don't speak it, it makes you feel like you're not a proper Dalabon tribe.

16:47 Katie Degnian: Why did you want a seasonal calendar for the community?

16:50 Aunty Joyce: Ah. For our children and for us to see and so we could remember. Of course, we know. But this can remind us and know that there is a lot of bush tucker out for us and what time to find it.

17:11 Annette Miller: It's important those kids have a calendar, you know. They can read. Nowadays, kids are able to read and learn and tell the time, not time clock time. But you know the time changes of the seasons and how, when, when to look for food and already my grandchildren are reading those times. And one of them was able to talk to me the other day and he said to me, I'm going to look for gum. I'm going to look for berries. And I said to him, gum is ready. There were a group of children in my house yesterday, and they said we're looking for gum. So, I said gum is ready, but the rest of the food are not ready until November and December.

18:07 Eliza Herbert: Big Sky Country is a podcast by Bush Heritage Australia. A conservation not-for-profit, that buys and manages land and partners with Aboriginal people to protect our irreplaceable landscapes and magnificent native species forever. To learn more about our work, follow us on social media or sign up to our newsletter via the link in the show notes. Special thanks to John T Reed Charitable Trust for supporting the partnership between Mimal and Bush Heritage. A huge thank you from the bottom of our hearts to Katie Degnian and Annette, Shantelle, Norrie, Joyce, and Vivienne for taking on these interviews and sharing their knowledge and time with us. And thanks to Mimal Land Management for their support and for the vital work they do in keeping country healthy. This episode was produced by Amelia Caddy and myself, Eliza Herbert. Theme music is “Invertebrate City” by the Orbweavers and audio is mixed and mastered by Mitch Ansell.