Wiinya Environmental Research Group

Our research projects

Centre of Excellence for Indigenous and Environmental Histories and Futures

2024 - 2030 (current)

Australian lands and seas have been shaped by thousands of years of Indigenous engagement, innovation, and management. To plan for the future impacts of change in the Anthropocene we must understand both long- and short term interactions between people, climate, land, and sea
– a central vision of the United Nations 2030 Sustainable Development Goals. We will directly address the urgent need to develop sophisticated data and models of the dynamics of past changes, including catastrophic change, to make Australia’s social-ecological future more certain and secure.

^{Location of Centre Indigenous Partner Organisations (in black). Green shading and blue squares show where Chief, Partner, or Associate Investigators have done partnership research on Country. Red dots: distribution of monitoring plots maintained by Partner Organisation Terrestrial Ecosystem Monitoring Network (TERN), a component of the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy.}

We have devised an ambitious research, engagement, and training program centred on Indigenous partnerships and Caring for Country. By co-designing research with Indigenous partners, Indigenous knowledges will reframe Western science to understand environmental baselines as historically contingent and anthropogenic. By creating innovative Science, Technology, Engineering, and Maths (STEM) and Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (HASS) methods of high-resolution hindcasting and forecasting, we will create the first truly transdisciplinary and transcultural understanding of Australian landscapes and seascapes. This will be achieved by looking back 1000 years and forward 100 years. This will radically transform current short-term and a historical frameworks that underpin Western science based management and policy-making.

^{Research structure of the Centre of Excellence for Indigenous and Environmental Histories and Futures.}

The Centre’s activities will have direct and enduring impact on the research, education, and public engagement sectors. The Centre will be a world-leading ‘point of reference’ for integrated
research at the interface between Indigenous and Western knowledges and sciences.

Our overarching intent is to catalyse a deeper recognition and broader uptake of Aboriginal- and Torres Strait Islander- led understandings of and approaches to managing land and sea Country. We will thereby positively influence public perceptions, and evidence-based policy-making on the central role that Indigenous knowledges and science must play in shaping sustainable futures for all Australians.

^{Strategy to translate Centre activities into outcomes and benefits.}

Through a transdisciplinary research program, co-designed with Indigenous Partner Organisations, we will:

1. Develop and communicate an integrated history of cultural and environmental change in Australia over the past 1000 years, informed  by STEM and HASS research, reframed  by Indigenous  knowledges and  Indigenous science, drawing from diverse cultural, environmental, and historical records.
2. Build on regional land and sea Caring for Country activities, strategies, and policies through the integration of Indigenous knowledges with long-term, high-resolution hindcasting to situate current environmental baselines and issues in historical context.
3. Forecast the trajectory of socio-ecological change under projected land-use, management, and climate change scenarios into the next hundred years.

In doing so, we will:

1. Recruit, empower, and inspire the next generation of Indigenous researchers and create a pipeline of Indigenous undergraduate and postgraduate students at a critical juncture in closing the gap in higher education and research.
2. Train  the  next  generation  of  Indigenous  and  non-Indigenous  research  leaders  in  culturally  appropriate, transdisciplinary methods and protocols, with particular focus on advancing Indigenous, women, and gender- diverse people across STEM and HASS.

The four central guiding questions are:

1. How did Indigenous people engage with, and modify, lands, freshwater bodies, and seas across the last millennium in response to changing cultural, environmental, and climatic drivers, and what are the lessons for future management practices?
2. How did Indigenous people adapt land and sea management strategies in response to increasing external contacts, beginning from at least the early 17^th century with European and Macassan contacts, as well as earlier contacts from other maritime cultures?
3. How did landscapes and seascapes respond to the cessation of active management by Indigenous communities in many parts of Australia (e.g. via fire) in response to permanent European occupation from the late 18^th century? What were the implications for biodiversity, fire management, and sustainable fisheries (and other resources) practices?
4. What are the implications of the answers to Questions 1–3 for constructing a new, extended environmental baseline to underpin future, effective, and sustainable land and sea management to obtain the best possible outcomes for Indigenous and wider community health and wellbeing in tandem with improved ecosystem health?

Traditional Owner-led restoration of urban billabongs.

2024 - 2027 (current)

In collaboration with Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung Cultural Heritage Aboriginal Corporation, Melbourne Water and the Waterway Ecosystem Research Group at the University of Melbourne this project aims to demonstrate the importance and efficacy of TO-led wetland management and
restoration using Melbourne’s degraded remnant riverine wetlands (billabongs) along the urbanised lower Yarra River (Birrarung). Rivers and wetlands have long been critical to human societies and hold significant cultural and ecological value. Despite their critical role in sustaining healthy societies and ecosystems, rivers and wetlands are some of the most degraded ecosystems globally. Wetlands that remain today are often under threat from human impacts such as changes to fire and flooding
regimes, urbanisation, and the spread of invasive plants and animals. Restoration of wetland health requires both knowledge of past ecosystem condition and local knowledge of management and care (i.e., knowledge held by Indigenous and local peoples). Indigenous peoples’ knowledge of wetland ecosystems stem from managing and identifying with their land and waterscapes for millennia.

For this project we will:

(1) Determine the historical ecological baselines and changes in fires, floods and vegetation of billabongs of the lower Birrarung (Yarra River) through Traditional Owner-led empirical investigations using sediment core analyses of charcoal, sediments, and pollen.

(2) Determine billabong vegetation, faunal and water quality responses to cultural burns and
wetting and drying through TO-led monitoring and assessment programs (including field-based surveys, environmental DNA analyses and water quality monitoring).

(3) Provide an exemplar of Traditional Owner-led investigations that inform the development
of restoration and sustainable management plans for culturally and ecologically significant urban wetlands.

Seven remnant billabongs along the lower Birrarung will form the basis of this study: Annulus, Banyule, Bolin Bolin, Burke Rd, Horseshoe, Montpelier and Willsmere. These billabongs have previously been identified as sites of ecological and cultural significance under Melbourne Water’s Healthy Waterways Strategy.

Past Fire Frequency and Intensity REconstruction (PF-FIRE) (Completed)

2021 - 2024

The austral summer of 2019/2020 saw the largest and most devastating bushfires in recorded history in Australia: the Black Summer Fires in southeast Australia. Australia is no stranger to fire, but have they always burned so hot?  The biota of this vast, dry and nutrient depleted continent is finely attuned to fire. A relationship honed over millions of years of fire-biota feedbacks. In southeast Australia, forests are dominated by highly flammable Eucalyptus trees (sclerophyll forests).

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders – Australia’s First Peoples – recognised the key role that fire plays in Australian ecosystem dynamics and they have used fire to manage, manipulate and create Australian vegetation landscapes since arriving more than 68,000 years ago. Southeast Australia was owned and occupied by a diverse number of Traditional Owner groups  who managed their Country with fire using small-scale, high frequency and low intensity burning – Cultural Burning. Cultural burning brings life to Country and keeps it open, clean and healthy.

Now, much of the southeast forest estate is managed with a fire-suppression mindset using hazard reduction burning around selected assets. Around 250 years ago, the British invaded the lands of Australia’s First Peoples. This marked the beginning of a continuing attempt to remove Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders from their Country and impose European-style land management regimes. This attempt has largely failed. The climate and geology is largely inhospitable to imported crops and livestock. The dependence on fertilisers and irrigation have exacted a significant toll on the Australian environment. The European attitude toward fire (characterised by fear) and “nature” have also had a major impact on the Australian environment. The attempt to remove Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders from Country and deny their skill and agency in shaping and managing Country with fire has caused widespread changes in vegetation across the continent.

Further, the futile attempt to suppress and fight fires on this continent has deprived ecosystems of essential disturbance, increased fuel loads and produced sick Country. More recently, climate change has caused an increase in extreme weather events (heatwaves, droughts and floods), adding to the pressure Australian environment faces. These three key factors (removal of traditional management, importation of inappropriate methods and attitudes and climate change) have resulted in Australia experiencing the fastest rate of biodiversity loss on Earth. The Black Summer Fires were concentrated in southeast Australia. Southeast Australia experienced the first recorded catastrophic bushfire in 1850 (nearly a century after the British Invasion) and there has been a marked increase in the occurrence of large and devastating catastrophic bushfires toward the present day.

This project brings together a unique team of experts in Indigenous knowledge and practice, fire ecology, palaeoecology and ecological modelling to understand how fires and fuels have changed over the past 500 years in southeast Australia – a period that spans Aboriginal management through the British Invasion to the present climate change world.

Murnongs on Maar Country (Completed).

In collaboration with Eastern Maar Aboriginal Corporation, Conservation Ecology Centre, Zoos Victoria, Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies and Glenelg-Hopkins Catchment Management Authority this project aims to provide the foundation for a revitalisation of Murnong (Microseris spp./Yam Daisy) cultivation using a novel combination of history, historical and contemporary ecology, palaeoecology and Aboriginal cultural knowledge. This project will take place across the lands of the Eastern Maar. Here, we will use an investigation of Murnong to illustrate how extensive and productive these food production systems were, what the biophysical environment of yam systems was like and how important they were both culturally and spiritually to the Eastern Maar people. This baseline data will provide information critical for understanding the community ecology and soil environment of Microseris spp. ecosystems, via the analysis of pollen. Further, charcoal stored in these sediments will shed light in the long-term role of fire in Microseris spp. agriculture. Core sampling will focus on lakes and wetland sediments adjacent to contemporary and historical areas of Murnong, to avoid disturbance from cultivation (digging) within Murnong fields.

In addition, we are also investigating the landscape across Carlisle Heath in the Otway region of southwest Victoria. This part of the project is looking into the role of fire and how appropriate and skilful application of fire can be used to manage fuel and biodiversity in the Carlisle Heath. Additionally, we are looking at how the vegetation has changed across the Carlisle Heath to understand what changes have occurred since Invasion and colonisation.