4-11 July is NAIDOC week – a celebration of Australia’s 35,000 year history of game management

NAIDOC Week celebrations are held across Australia each July to celebrate the history, culture and achievements of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. NAIDOC is celebrated not only in Indigenous communities, but by Australians from all walks of life.

NAIDOC originally stood for ‘National Aborigines and Islanders Day Observance Committee’. This committee was once responsible for organising national activities during NAIDOC Week and its acronym has since become the name of the week itself.

This year’s NAIDOC week theme, Heal Country, is particularly relevant for Australian hunters as it asks Australians to reflect on our relationships with the land and nature. As hunters we continuously seek to continue to explain our own place as hands on, practical naturalists in Australian society.

Australia has a long history of hunting and wildlife management. Aboriginal people across Australia have hunted wildlife for at least 35,000 years, relying on hunting as a food source, clothing, shelter, and cultural and spiritual needs.

During that time, the Aboriginal people left physical evidence of their activities that now survive as cultural heritage places and objects. Aboriginal places and objects can be found all over the country and are often near major food sources such as rivers, lakes, swamps and the coast.

In 1933, Aldo Leopold described game management as “the art of making land produces sustained annual crops of wild game”. Leopold at the time traced game management back to the Mongols and Kublai Khan. There is clear evidence however that indigenous Australians had the drop on the Mongols by about thirty thousand years…give or take.

Historically, Aboriginal people tended to live in groups of anywhere from 30 to 90 people consisting of multigenerational families linked together by ties of kinship, religion, spiritual belief and ceremony. These groups did not travel unceasingly through the landscape but, rather, moved usually within a certain territory within which they harvested resources that were seasonally abundant and managed those resources to ensure harvesting was sustainable.

The resource management practices adopted by Aboriginal people traditionally included methods
that ‘secured food species available in the field all year round which enabled a more or less immediate consumption of foods and required only limited storage.’ The use of fire ‘created grazing pastures in the woodlands for animals, which therefore naturally congregated there’. Other reported methods included the use of fish traps which ‘constituted an ecological system for catching the maximum number of fish with the minimum effort, while at the same time sustaining the stock.’ These methods all point toward a systematic understanding of the natural balance of the land that is now widely accepted by scientists that these methods had achieved an ecological balance across Australia.

In a modern context hunters work collaboratively with traditional owners on practical management programs on country and in utilising and celebrating the bounty of the land. Be that through ADA’s remote community hunter education program in the Northern Territory or our wild deer management programs throughout the country which actively seek to protect cultural assets.