The Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area:
Joint management of sacred creation country,
Tasmania, Australia

Ecology and biodiversity

From the fire-managed button-grass plains to the world’s tallest flowering eucalypts, we once lived in the limestone caves and coastal dunes to conserve this biodiversity of our precious temporal rainforests. We told stories of the animals, such as the Tasmanian Devil, and of the emu, now long gone from TWWHA country. We watch the scientists try to save the orange-bellied parrots, but are sad they do not include our knowledges. Our songs cannot stop the sea-level rises that destroy our living midden sites who are thousands of years old and protect the natural values in-shore like a large cloak.

Governance

We have been excluded, since first inscription in 1982, from conserving and promoting TWWHA country cultural OUVs according to our governance structures (Lee 2016a). Our peoples undertook advocacy to rectify this during the drafting of the new plan of management in 2014. The first joint management plan for any Tasmanian protected area resulted in 2016, where the Australian and Tasmanian governments statutorily approved the new plan of management for TWWHA country.

The joint management governance, between the Tasmanian government and Aboriginal Tasmanians, lies with a newly established cultural management group that sits within the Department of Primary Industries, Parks, Water and Environment. The cultural management group will act as an intermediary to link the management of natural and cultural OUVs, provide advice to the Director, and take a lead role in shepherding project and policy work in conjunction with us (Department of Primary Industries, Parks, Water and Environment 2016).

Management

In repairing the past neglect of cultural values, such that in 2012 less than one per cent of the total TWWHA country budget was dedicated to the cultural OUVs (Australian Government 2012), an additional $575,000, for example, has been set aside by the Tasmanian government for further research into the cultural OUVs and consultation with our peoples (Groom 2015). This research will aid in delivering the Key Desired Outcomes (KDOs) of the new plan, including assessing TWWHA country as an outstanding Aboriginal Cultural Landscape under the World Heritage Convention (Department of Primary Industries, Parks, Water and Environment 2016).

Lessons Learned

• The sacredness of TWWHA country infused our advocacy methods to focus on the relationships with stakeholders, rather than locked-in outcomes that left little room to build on strengths developed over the course of the plan (Lee 2016b).
• The key strategy of ‘reset the relationship’ (Hodgman 2016) – a Tasmanian Government policy that was borne of our Aboriginal leadership (Lee & Hamilton 2016) – guided our actions to further link the joint management of TWWHA country to constitutional recognition as First Peoples (Lee 2015).  Constitutional recognition was formally delivered in Tasmania a month after the TWWHA country plan of management became statutorily approved (Department of Premier and Cabinet 2016; Groom 2016).
• To ‘reset the relationship’ meant that traditional authority, such as our Elders, was recognised as a legitimate governance structure by the government.  • To ‘reset the relationship’ meant that traditional authority, such as our Elders, was recognised as a legitimate governance structure by the government.
• To inform the public of our commitment, we distilled our advocacy message as a mantra of ‘culture not politics, families not organisations, relationships before agreements’.
• At the heart of TWWHA country sacredness was our desire to use the symbols of rock art and creator beings as a means of collegial and non-adversarial advocacy that respected the rights of all people and a plurality of views to enjoin in good governance and sound management.
• In 2015, the Reactive Monitoring Mission from the World Heritage Committee stated that the comprehensive level of participatory engagement by us, on our own cultural terms, was noted as outstanding and “both the quality and the level of participation in the process appear high by global standards” (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization 2016 p. 10).
• As our Old People did for 40,000 years, we care for TWWHA country through respecting, knowing and enacting sacredness.