Peter See, Director of Land programs at Kanyirninpa Jukurrpa
Peter See, Director of Land programs at Kanyirninpa Jukurrpa, talks about the impact of camels on Martu people, and on the process of negotiating a management plan that Martu agreed with.
The views, opinions, and other information expressed in these interviews are those of the participants and may not reflect the position of the Australian Feral Camel Management Project.
Transcript of Interview with Peter See – interview 8.04 mins
Peter See, you’re Director of land programs for KJ and you’ve been fantastic taking us around for the last few days, but probably a good starting point would be for you to tell us what KJ is and how you fit in the picture.
KJ is a Martu-controlled organisation and KJ stands for Kanyirninpa Jukurrpa, or holding or retaining, looking after, culture after dreaming or Jukurrpa. A significant part of the work that KJ does is about building communities and sustainable communities, Martu communities, and we have a strong land management program that has been built up over the past two years.
One of the things we’ve obviously been looking at is feral camels and the damage that feral camels do to infrastructure and also the landscape. But I guess one of the biggest impacts we’ve seen is the impact on the Martu people. Do you want to tell us broadly about that? What sort of impact do camels have?
Well, camels have had a big impact on Martu. I mean, when we first started the land management activities I spoke to Martu about what their concerns and issues were, and foremost Martu wanted to get back to country, they wanted to teach, take the young people and teach the young people, and they wanted to look after country.
When you’re talking about looking after country and you ask them what it means to look after country, for them it’s to bring back more bush tucker, more malu, more kangaroo, more emu, more animals that traditionally they would have hunted. And the other thing which they very clearly said was that there were too many camels.
In bushman days, in old days when people walked this country and lived in the desert, there weren’t any camels, but progressively over time camels have built up and Martu made the connection that the increasing number of camels have really impacted on the health of their waterholes, the health of their country and also on the number of their bush tucker and the other small animals which need water and food to live on.
It must be a very difficult decision for Martu because you can tell when you’re talking to people they have a real love of the land, a real love of flora and fauna. And I guess part of this, let’s be honest, part of this is also survival for them over centuries. It must have been a very difficult decision for them to make about feral camels?
Look, it was. Two years ago talking to Martu, Martu would strongly say, yes there’s too many camels but you know we don’t want to shoot them. Can’t we send them to the Middle East? Can’t we get people to buy them? Can’t we use them for meat and things like that, you know, Martu do? They are one of the Aboriginal groups in Australia that are actually happy to eat camel, young camel and stuff like that, but the reality is that when we looked at all the different commercial options they just didn’t add up.
This is country, which is a huge amount of country, a huge amount of desert, 13.6 million hectares, a lot of it is covered by long sand dunes which are up to 8 metres high. You’ve got the Gibson Desert in the far south-east, all very, very remote and inaccessible, and for us to be able to get those camels out and get them to market so to speak, we’d be paying other people money to actually remove the camels and Martu wouldn’t be making anything.
So, we looked at all those options and we talked with government, we talked with the pastoral stations, who are also impacted, and we talked to some of them on this trip, and Martu really came to the decision that while yes, culturally they were much more likely to say you can’t kill for the killing sake, Martu ended up making a really hard but strong decision to say that in wirrili country, in faraway country, they’d actually work with government to use aerial culling to actually reduce the number of camels, so that when they go back to country, and this is country some of them haven’t been back to for 20, 30 years, that when they go back it’s not trashed, it’s actually healthy again.
A recent return to country trip, the elders were horrified when they went back to discover that these very, very significant waterholes were just trashed: too many camels. Far too many camels for the country to be able to sustain.
I guess one of the other striking things about the last few days too has been that although this is a significant problem for Martu, it’s a relationship building thing because when you talk to pastoralists and you’re talking to mining companies, they seem to have this enormous amount of respect for Martu and really listen to their views about things, so obviously that’s the building of a relationship against a common problem.
Yeah sure, I think that one of the really good things that came out of that decision or part of the process which led to the decision by Martu to use culling as one of the ways to reduce camel numbers, was that we actually had really good dialogue with some of the pastoral stations bordering the western boundary of Martu country, as well as the Department of Agriculture and the Department of Environment and Conservation, all of whom we all sat down together and talked around the issues and went through all the different options that Martu, that government, that pastoralists had thought of before. We went through the numbers. We looked at those things and really it was a very constructive process and I think now, as you’re saying, you can see the benefits of that where there’s actually a lot of goodwill between those parties to actually move forward and actually resolve this, but not only just resolve it, now put in place processes that will actually be sustainable longer term.
There are around Australia, and probably around the world, a lot of people who love animals, animal liberation groups, who obviously find any reduction in numbers of any animal population repugnant. What would you say to those people on behalf of the Martu people? How would you give them a sense of just what a thing this is that they have to live with?
I think that Martu share their concerns. Martu don’t want to see the camels suffer. They think they’re a beautiful animal, and a lot of Martu grew up with a smaller number of camels, but knowing and having worked with camels or whatever. So, for Martu, Martu also get concerned when they have to go to waterholes, or they have to go to a waterhole and they find a camel dead in that waterhole and they pull the dead camel out and it falls apart. How do you clean out a waterhole when it has had half a camel in what is sometimes a small water source?
So for them, and we’ve seen photos of other parts of Australia where the camel numbers have got so high that in fact you have camels dying of starvation and dying of thirst all standing around a waterhole. That is not good for camels, and in reality when it comes to it we think that the aerial culling is probably one of the most humane ways to actually deal with this issue. It’s not perfect by any means, but neither is mustering a camel across multiple sand dunes, putting them on a truck and trucking hundreds of kilometres, thousands of kilometres to be slaughtered.
