Transformative Aboriginal agricultural methods: Maaman Marra Boodjar

Project lead: Edith Cowan University (ECU) and Maaman Marra Boodjar 

Project overview

Co-led by the Centre for People, Place, and Planet at Edith Cowan University (ECU) and Maaman Marra Boodjar, this project collaborates with industry and farmers to enhance environmental health through interventions. It explores Aboriginal agricultural practices and literacies, blending biophysical and cultural perspectives. The research braids Aboriginal place-based knowledge into local agricultural practices, using a methodology that combines field research with case studies of partnerships. By merging traditional knowledge with Western scientific methodologies, the project aims to create innovative metrics for assessing natural system health and resilience.

This project will establish protocols for evaluating the effectiveness of Aboriginal-designed landscape rehydration practices on broadacre farms in the Mid-West. This evaluation enhances climate resilience by addressing salinisation, floodplain erosion, and water management on Country. By examining knowledge transfer mechanisms, the project seeks to derive best practices for intercultural and intergenerational learning in agricultural settings. These principles can be applied in other communities to implement landscape literacies, benefiting future productive landscapes.

Expected outcomes

Expected outcomes are the development of a protocol and an intergenerational learning framework built around Aboriginal knowledge to understand practical ways to retain water in place and adapt to changing seasonal influences, climatic conditions and rainfall across the seasons and into the future. Additionally, it will provide baseline data on soil health parameters to illustrate the effectiveness of such an approach.

This project will begin to investigate how Aboriginal systems of knowledge can be understood and meaningfully and respectfully incorporated into local agricultural practices using a combination of both applied field research and case studies of Aboriginal/non-Aboriginal partnerships.

This work will address questions like:

What are the drivers and impediments to knowledge transfer? How does this knowledge system improve the natural capital of farming systems and climate/drought resilience? How are local agricultural practices transformed?

This project’s foundational aspects and protocols provide the beginning of a transformational system that can be transferred to other growing regions of Western Australia.

This project is supported by the South-West WA Drought Resilience Adoption and Innovation Hub, through funding from the Australian Government’s Future Drought Fund.