Working Knowledge: characterising collective indigenous, scientific, and local knowledge about the ecology, hydrology and geomorphology of Oriners Station, Cape York Peninsula, Australia

Abstract

The term, Working Knowledge, is introduced to describe the content of a local cross-cultural knowledge recovery and integration project focussed on the indigenous-owned Oriners pastoral lease near Kowanyama on the Cape York Peninsula, Queensland. Social and biophysical scientific researchers collaborated with indigenous people, non-indigenous pastoralists, and an indigenous natural resource management (NRM) agency to record key ecological, hydrological and geomorphological features of this intermittently occupied and environmentally valuable ‘flooded forest’ country. Working Knowledge was developed in preference to ‘local’ and/or ‘indigenous’ knowledge because it collectively describes the contexts in which the knowledge was obtained (through pastoral, indigenous, NRM, and scientific labour), the diverse backgrounds of the project participants, the provisional and utilitarian quality of the collated knowledge, and the focus on aiding adaptive management. Key examples and epistemological themes emerging from the knowledge recovery research, as well as preliminary integrative models of important hydro-ecological processes, are presented. Changing land tenure and economic regimes on surrounding cattle stations make this study regionally significant but the Working Knowledge concept is also useful in analysing the knowledge base used by the wider contemporary indigenous land management sector. Employees in this expanding, largely externally funded, and increasingly formalised sector draw on a range of knowledge in making operational decisions – indigenous, scientific, NRM, bureaucratic and knowledge learned in pastoral and other enterprises. Although this shared base is often a source of strength, important aspects or precepts of particular component knowledges must necessarily be deprioritised, compromised, or even elided in everyday NRM operations constrained by particular management logics, priorities and funding sources. Working Knowledge accurately characterised a local case study, but also invites further analysis of the contemporary indigenous NRM knowledge base and its relationship to the individual precepts and requirements of the indigenous, scientific, local and other knowledges which respectively inform it.