Steve Hopper

And it took me a microsecond to think this through, and all of a sudden, oh yeah, so my ockbills, my hilltops, are CART.

And the opposite of ockbills, I coined another acronym called YODFULS, which stands for Young Often Disturbed Fertile Landscapes, and they're usually lowland places in the landscape.

associated with water, you know, around rivers, along the edge of lakes, along the edge of the ocean.

And there the organisms behave much differently and evolve much differently to the ones that are up on top.

So I thought, ah, my original idea in science has been around for 65,000 years.

It does, doesn't it?

So simple, so easily conveyed, so beautifully conveyed.

So it taught me a little bit about, you know, no more acronyms.

Yeah, this is entirely Knapp family oral histories coming down through generations.

Lynette lived it for a while with her family in Denmark, and her father, who was the primary informant on oral history as an elder...

lived in Albany and he often came over and they looked after him.

And there's a hill on the estuary that Denmark town sits on called Weedon Hill by Whitefellas.

It was mentioned in Colonel Barker's journal when he was one of the resident bosses in Albany very early in the 1820s.

He went on an expedition that first touched Denmark and was told by Morkery, his Noongar guide, that that hill was called Warrumbup.

Now, warr, one of the translations of it in the local Noongar dialect that Lynette speaks, is female kangaroo and also female generally.

So the name the Noongars gave indicated very clearly this was a female place.

If you go up on the top of this hill, there are big granite boulders and sheet rocks, and there are carry trees, which are the second tallest of all eucalypts, second only to regnans from Victoria and Tasmania.

And where the big boulders were pushed up against the basal trunk of the carry trees, an outgrowth had developed such that it looked like these boulders, which were up to five metres diameter, had literally been given birth by the carry tree.

And that was their story, that the trees gave birth to the rocks and then the rocks spread out across the landscape to really important places, equivalent to Uluru in many ways in terms of the local culture.

So it was her way of, and her family's way of saying, without trees we are bereft, we are lost.