Expanding visions of eco-cultural seascape protection to Marra Country

Building on the successful development of collaborative mapping of values, threats and risks to sea Country next door, we were invited by the NT Government Flora & Fauna and Fisheries, Commonwealth Marine Parks and Namultja Aboriginal Corporation with the Maranbala Rangers to extend our gaze west to Marra Country. The team sought spatial information to guide decisions about what kinds of management actions could be implemented in the nearshore areas to protect collective marine values. We built a collaborative list of 20 values encompassing elements of the non-human environment, alongside Marra and non-Marra values around food security and their lived experience. Marra sea Country is home to some of Australia’s most important dugong populations, forming a continuous eco-cultural landscape connecting through to Yanyuwa Country. It also provides vital stop-over habitat for migratory shore birds, known concentrations of internationally endangered elusive species like the Freshwater Sawfish and Speartoothed Shark, and a complex culturally enlivened seascape with strong kujika and governance.

This is a multi-disciplinary project, within which there are collaborative ventures and responsibilities of Kuril & Currawong alone. We support this project by:

• Extending past co-developed practices to represent eco-cultural values, seek and construct spatial data to represent them, and use spatial cumulative risk assessment to identify hot spots of concern for management

• Collaboratively working with all interest holders to represent their unique perspectives and disentangle complementary desires across parties from those that create conflicts of need, and use mapping to target where these conflicts are situated to identify solutions

• Communicating the approach and its findings to the Marra community and extended neighbours at on Country meetings and throughout project delivery

Marra Country

(all photos generously shared by Laura Angus)