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Seeking an Indigenous perspective on development in cotton country

August 22, 2005

DoyAdCotter.thumb.JPGA research project based at The University of New England is aiming to ensure the prosperity of cotton catchment communities by encouraging Aboriginal participation.

The coordinator of the project, UNE Research Fellow Maria Cotter, said Aboriginal populations were often among the fastest-growing and most stable elements of these communities.

Ms Cotter, from UNE’s Heritage Futures Research Centre (HFRC), said she and her colleagues would be visiting such Aboriginal communities in northern NSW and south-west Queensland. “We’ll be talking at grass-roots level to community members to get their ideas on research projects that would benefit them and cotton catchment communities generally,” she said. “We’ve already done work, in an earlier project, to identify the knowledge of natural resources that is preserved in these Aboriginal communities,” she added.

The Cooperative Research Centre (CRC) for the cotton industry, recently re-formed as the “Cotton Catchment Communities CRC”, is funding the project. The University of Queensland, Queensland’s Department of Primary Industries and Fisheries, and the NSW Department of Infrastructure, Planning, and Natural Resources are participants in the project along with HFRC. They will present their findings to the Cotton CRC at the end of this year.

Brendan Doyle from UNE’s Institute for Rural Futures (IRF) explained that their report would enable the Cotton CRC “to develop a strategic research direction that incorporates Indigenous natural resources management and related economic development options”. Mr Doyle, who is IRF’s Assistant Director and a Program Leader in the Cotton CRC, pointed out that economic development would involve job opportunities for Indigenous people.

Members of the project team have had discussions with the Chief Executive Officer of Western Australia’s Wunan Foundation, Ralph Addis. The Wunan Foundation, based in Kununurra, is a community-driven organisation concerned with improving the economic participation of Aboriginal people in the East Kimberley region. Mr Addis, who studied and lectured in Agricultural Economics at UNE before becoming the Foundation’s first CEO in 1997, returned briefly to the UNE campus this month to complete a Master’s thesis on the economics of Native Title. While on campus, he led a seminar at IRF involving project members, representatives of Aboriginal communities, and others, in which he talked about the Foundation’s success in promoting Aboriginal participation in developments such as the tourism industry and apprenticeship schemes.

He said that irrigated agriculture in the Kimberley’s Ord River region was a prime example of an industry that was facing obstacles to its further development because of its inability, so far, to engage Aboriginal communities. “If you can’t engage those Aboriginal communities, developments (both industrial and social) will flounder,” he said.


Media contact: Maria Cotter on 0428 696 656 or Brendan Doyle on 0428 597 113.

The photograph displayed here shows (from left) Brendan Doyle, Ralph Addis and Maria Cotter.

Posted by Jim Scanlan at August 22, 2005 12:07 PM