Download the Book: Strata: deserts past, present and future (PDF, 1.1MB) By Mandy Martin, Libby Robin and Mike Smith

The Project: The Strata project is innovative in three major ways:

1. It adopts a genuinely humanities approach to environmental management
2. It focuses on a singular place - not a theory for 'everywhere'
3. It takes seriously the aesthetic dimensions of place, and their potential for cross-cultural discourse.

Background: Management for 'sustainability'

The Strata project stems from an assumption that environment management is the art and science of accommodating all perspectives for the best possible outcome for a particular place. By focusing on a single location, it is possible to combine several methods that together provide different evaluations of multiple values that can inform and enrich management practice.

The Puritjarra rock shelter in the Cleland Hills, in the south-western Northern Territory is a singular place - with an extremely well-researched archaeological history that provides a deep-time framework for considering how best to manage it at a number of scales. The site was on the edge of shallow seas - the Larapinta Seaway - in the Cambrian and Ordovician - drying out in the Silurian era some 414 million years ago. One large sand dune on the edge of Australia's inland sea hollowed out as it weathered and became a well-protected rocky cavern, a place where eons later, people came to shelter from high temperatures and sandstorms. Mike Smith and his teams have found detailed evidence of environmental change over 100,000 years, including evidence linking vegetation change to climate change patterns documented in this period. Most importantly, Smith's research shows how, for 35,000 years, people have lived in this 'extreme' environment. The material remains of this long habitation provide insights into the adaptations people have made to accommodate the irregular supply of resources (such as food and water) in a landscape associated with some of the world's most variable climate conditions. This historically finely grained, site-specific data provide an empirical framework against which to plan both for long-term climate change, as well as for the year-to-year variability that makes this place so extremely challenging for humans to live in. Puritjarra provides a focus for a wider region, the Northern Territory's western desert lands. This country is largely traditionally owned and managed, and it has important environmental and biodiversity significance for all of Australia.

One of the greatest challenges facing environmental managers today - particularly in departments where cultural and natural dimensions of the environment are managed together as they are in Australia's Department of Environment and Heritage - is to take the imperatives for biological conservation, cultural heritage and economic futures forward together. The Strata Project makes a contribution to this integration. The Australian Heritage Commission (AHC) has recently integrated aesthetic and cultural evaluation, including emotional responses to the Australian environment, into its management criteria. The artist Mandy Martin, who worked with the AHC in formulating structures in this area, brought her experience in cultural evaluations of Indigenous and non-Indigenous cultural values to the Puritjarra site.

It is difficult to manage land for environmental value and human usage, accommodating Indigenous cultural values, scientific biodiversity values and the new aesthetic of 'inspirational landscapes' advocated by the AHC. However, there is now a building history (since the 1970s) of the scientific and Indigenous communities working together, developing various environmental practices for specific places. Examples include 'co-management' in some national parks and reserves, and community conservation initiatives on Aboriginal lands. There is widespread acceptance that traditional owners and ecological scientists can work together in specific places for good cultural and biodiversity outcomes. In the Desert Knowledge initiatives (Desert Knowledge Australia, Desert Knowledge CRC) this is taken even further - and positive economic outcomes for communities are also sought.

In this literature, however, there is little discussion of non-Indigenous cultural values, and the methodologies of the humanities and creative arts are seldom brought to the 'interdisciplinary' discussion table. The Strata project tested a method that combined aesthetics and the history of ideas to create positive linkages between emerging cultural management practices, environmental management and existing values held by traditional owners and scientists (in this case archaeologists). It has also produced a book about Puritjarra that will enjoy a wide audience. It has already made its way into the Ikuntji Arts Centre, the Haasts Bluff school and other community groups in the region, as well as to the board rooms of environmental management agencies in Alice Springs, Canberra and beyond.

A humanities approach to cultural heritage and environmental management?
The study of science in the late twentieth century has increasingly become the domain of sociologists and anthropologists of science, rather than of historians. Sociologists raised concerns about the social construction of scientific 'facts', whilst anthropologists analysed the 'everyday life' of science in a laboratory. Little work has been done, however, on science in the field - and in particular, sciences like ecology, geology and archaeology where place is an extremely significant to the research design and outcome. This project has sought to take seriously the idea that 'place' as well as society more generally influences on the shape of scientific discourse. Questions around this theme are particularly helpful when considering the intersections between western scientific knowledge (which is often portrayed as 'universal') and Indigenous ecological knowledge (often considered local or parochial). Australian Aboriginal peoples prefer story-telling and resist the distinction between nature and culture: country is a place that gives and receives life. Traditional knowledge is deeply dependent on place. There are no universal 'everywhere' stories. Country and knowledge are inseparable, yet such connections are often overlooked in western scientific knowledge and this is the case even for sciences that are empirically field dependent.

Studies of Indigenous science especially in relation to land and environment in India and Africa are revolutionising environmental history and the historiography of science. But the history of scientific exploration in Australia has largely ignored Indigenous knowledges, despite the fact that the re-evaluation of Indigenous agency and perspectives has been a major growth area in Australian cultural studies since the 1980s. Australian Indigenous knowledge of nature has begun to creep into Australian science and land-management practices in practical ways because of community pressure, yet there is still a dearth of ways to talk about this - and to enhance such work. The language of dominant natural resource management paradigms makes assumptions about what is 'relevant' to management and executive summaries inevitably favour scientific, generalised and western practices of environmental management and these often drown out or fail to come to grips with humanistic, local and non-western ideas about the connections between people and environment.

Not a theory for everywhere: A scientific 'sense of place'
How do scientific paradigms shape (and perhaps limit) understandings of environment or 'place'? Environmental sciences can provide particular insights into views of place generated by the scientific eye. The term 'sense of place' was popularised in Australia by George Seddon, a scholar who is deeply interested in the scientific dimensions of place. But the growing literature of 'place studies' has tended to focus on political, psychological and spiritual rather than scientific, aesthetics of place. This is a pity because a western scientific view of place has distinctive political dimensions and these are little explored in the Australian context. It also serves to divide the criteria for environmental management into the 'cultural' (or human-centred) and the 'natural' (or scientifically-based), overlooking the shared possibilities offered by scientific cultural understandings. The Strata project focuses on a site very significant in Australian archaeological discourse and considers manifold of perceptions of this place. While the Puritjarra area is well-documented scientifically, it has not until very recently been the focus of sciences that are most commonly central to environmental management. For this reason it is a timely study. Currently, there is work on the fire ecology of the area in support of community-based environmental management and conservation initiatives and there is consequently a real need to understand the Cleland Hills and their potential for biodiversity conservation within the broadest possible framework. Ecologists and land-managers often work at the cross-cultural frontier and so their sites are also places where Indigenous and scientific understandings of nature might come together. The Strata project provides another forum for bringing together and evaluating these mutual processes.

An aesthetic of management
Strata explored the historical interconnections between a range of sciences dealing with environment and land management. It also considered the values that an aesthetic appraisal can offer. This is critical because such an appraisal is not limited by language. Both Indigenous ideas and western cultural ideas can find new expression on canvases. Traditional stories lend themselves to art as well as telling. The aesthetic approach, we found, opened up dialogue between western and traditional understandings, and bridged the gaps between some of the silos of knowledge that fragment western understandings. Differences were welcomed, not suppressed or diverted because the agency for the idea remained with the artist. The idea was not filtered through the categories of management practice as is so often the case.

The artistic methods of western environmental artist, Mandy Martin, and eight traditional Ikuntji artists brought out shared and differing visual perceptions of Puritjarra in 2004. In addition, Martin initiated collaborative art works with the archaeologist, Mike Smith, who has studied Puritjarra for 25 years. Martin also produced art-works with Guy Fitzhardinge, a pastoralist, Jake Gillen, an arid-zone ecologist, and with me, the environmental historian on the team who grappled with the history of the ideas about this landscape.

Western intellectual traditions tend to favour either nature (the sciences) or culture (the humanities). They also often divide the temporal from the spatial. Desert landscapes are both natural and cultural, with historical and spatial dimensions. Intellectual traditions can shape and limit what we see and value in a landscape, and therefore our actions and understanding. New methodologies can open up new ways to see, understand and to act.

As an environmental historian, my task was to try to bring together the visual representations of this rugged landscape and its limited resources with its important deep time history. The Strata project showed how aesthetic, archaeological and traditional ideas challenge some strongly-held settler-Australian assumptions about the Red Centre and how it ought to be managed. Disciplinary diversity is one of the hallmarks of environmental history and in this project about central Australian deserts; archaeology, aesthetics and non-western traditional knowledge are added to its methods. Landscapes demand a visual appreciation and narrative voice, and this project sought to add both of these to the ideas about environmental management in the Australian desert.

The Strata project would not have been possible without the generous intellectual support of the artists and administrators of the Ikuntji Arts Centre, the Ikuntji council and executive, Mike Smith, Mandy Martin, Guy Fitzhardinge and Jake Gillen. For financial and institutional support we are grateful to the Australian Research Council (DP0208361), Land and Water Australia (ANU42) and the Centre for Resource and Environmental Studies, Australian National University. For comments on this from an international perspective, I am particularly grateful to environmental historian, Jane Carruthers.

Further information: Dr Libby Robin