Steve Hopper

The eucalypts were just such fast-growing things that they gave an economic return very quickly if planted widely.

It's been like a second education for me.

My kudjul bidawang is what I call it, which is two Noongar words, kudjul meaning number two or second, and bidawang is the initiation grand journey that every young adult goes.

male and female Noongar would go on throughout southwestern Australia.

So I, you know, I spent the first part of my career mapping plants and trying to work out how to care for them using western science approaches.

And the failure, unfortunately, of most conservation efforts has been patently obvious that, you know, we're not doing a crash-hot job.

There's more and more endangered species as time goes by.

And yet the Aboriginal peoples that occupied Australia for what, up to 65,000 years, some current estimates are, bequeathed to us the biological diversity we have today.

They must have been doing something right.

And I was curious to learn about that.

So I left Kew and came to Albany specifically to conduct research in the last two decades on that question.

And the dreaming is fantastic.

You know, it's framed around you don't own country, country owns you.

Family is central and family embraces not only the extended family with humans but all the totems and all the animals and plants and also the landscapes.

That's all regarded as part of family.

And knowledge is cherished in the dreaming so that particularly, you know, the older you get...

the more valuable you become to your family because you retain the stories and pass them on to younger generations.

When you think about how Western culture regards country, for example...

It's as a commodity.

Land is there to make money out of.