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My name is Malcolm Uhl and I am a Senior Ranger with the Ngurra Kayanta Rangers. I’m from the Wangkatjungka community which is about 90km out of Fitzroy Crossing [in Western Australia’s Southern Kimberley region]. It’s a little small town, and my Country is way out in the Great Sandy Desert – Ngurra Kayanta.
It’s really remote, it’s hard to get to town. If we travel from Fitzroy it’s 280km to come into our Country, and that’s a long way.
It’s real good having an IPA and good to be back on Country. Just feel like home. When I go out on Country, spirits come to me and I’m alive again. When you come to Country, it brings life back. You just look around the Country, you feel, you know, I feel light.
It’s good working for Ngurra Kayanta Rangers. Our Ranger job is to look after Country and take our young kids out on Country, show them what Country looks like and stories from Old People.
My Old People are here, you can feel the spirits of them calling you, it’s them letting you know you’re on Country now. When I get back on Country, the spirits, they welcome me, ‘oh, here he is’. Jammu is [what] we call grandfather. So my grandmother and my Jammu, they’re both from one Country.
When I go there it’s like they’re beside me, I can feel that presence of them, they’re beside me and telling me what to do and the right direction on this Country. My Old People, the spirits, keep talking to me, ‘go and do this because it’s your Country’.
Our Country is mainly filled with spinifex and there’s no roads. Ngurra Kayanta Country has got the largest sandhills in the Great Sandy Desert, twice as big [as any others], and there’s no access road on Ngurra Kayanta Country, but we do fly in with choppers.
We’re going to put a couple of roads in now that we’ve got our IPA but that worries me. The Canning Stock Route is an access road into Ngurra Kayanta but I need to block that from Country because we’ve got a lot of issues about tourism going into Country and digging up waterholes without permission from our Old People.
Ngurra Kayanta is a massive, massive desert. We’ve got night parrots, feral cats, dingoes, camels and wild horses, and also cattle on our Country. At the moment we’re having a discussion with the pastoral leases that lets cattle graze on our land because it’s native title, and we don’t want that animal grazing on our Country because they’re destroying our waterholes.
Managing fire, it’s looking at that wind that blows on top of the spinifex. There’s a right way of burning, if you do the wrong way of burning you’re finished, you get surrounded. Right way, you get vegetation up, more vegetation for more food, resources and all that, for more animals, like night parrot and turkeys, emu, kangaroos.
We haven’t seen night parrots recently, but we’ve done a bit of a Ranger job there and putting up sound meters just to hear the sounds of night parrots. We got one a couple of years ago but we still want to find more on our Country. We found some eggs but unfortunately last year it got destroyed by an arsonist and it devastated our Country. Yeah, we got real hurt.
So on that Country we found two eggs so there’s more night parrots on our Country. I want to do more night parrot work, going out on Country and putting up song meters just to get sounds of that night parrot and where they live and what their habitat is.
The dingo is a significant animal because it’s a protector. It [stops] feral cats from eating night parrots. There’s a special dingo that leads you to waterholes, you follow that track and it leads you to waterholes and wild grass. That shows you where water is.
We got Dingo dreaming, but sometimes he a good source of meat, too. People used to eat dingo meat a long time ago, our Old People. Good eating too… same as cats. I tried it [cat] before with my uncle. He passed away. He was a good tracker. He followed the track right through in the spinifex, if he [cat] was in the spinifex, you hit him across the head. Because there's no way of escaping the spinifex, if you get in the spinifex that cat cannot get out. Yeah, it prickles everywhere.
So (we can) share those skills with young people and also, then you can control the cat population.
Now that we’ve got this IPA dedication, that’s why I’m bringing young people back on Country and telling them about our Country, and telling them this is your grandmother’s Country and you belong to this Country. It’s in here, it’s in your blood, it’s in your body – it’s all in there, it’s connected to you.
She won’t let you go, he won’t let you go, because you’re part of that Country, you don’t own that Country, that Country owns you.
We pay our respects to all the First Nations people around Australia and their unbroken commitment to keep Country strong on land and sea. We acknowledge Indigenous partners, Traditional Owners, Elders past, present and emerging and extend our appreciation of their support and guidance of our daily work.
