Indigenous communities and GIS

Welcome to Location Matters, the podcast from NGIS, covering the world of mapping and location technology. Location is inherently a core part of Australia's first nation's culture. NGIS technology is now assisting in the education of all Australians by providing additional insight and context to areas of Aboriginal heritage, such as local languages, native title, sacred sites, and areas of historical significance and assistance with natural resource management. This is Episode 24 of Location Matters. I'm Sarah Butler, and today I'm joined by Andrew Dowding and Paul Farrell to discuss the growing prominence of GIS in Australian Indigenous communities. Andrew, you're the managing director of Taruru, which is a company that specialises in digital mapping of cultural heritage. What led you down this path? My first professional role out of university was that I went to work for a native title organisation in the Pilbara, and I was working alongside a lot of elders and community members, and I just saw the way they were using maps, these kind of large paper maps with not a lot of information on them, just kind of big white areas with sort of lines on them, and I could just always see the way elders were looking at these maps and not really understanding the information that there were, you know, the information that was sort of being communicated to them. And I began to introduce Google Earth into those discussions, these native title discussions around land use agreements and sort of natural resource management discussions, and I was able to see the kind of transformation in how people were able to communicate about their country and, you know, sort of from this sort of seat of authority and real knowledge. And so really, that's what really set me on this path, is sort of seeing the way that maps can communicate cultural knowledge, but also sort of power, like the power of native title and also, like, the impact of having really senior people being able to communicate really clearly to industry and government bodies. So once I saw that, I really, I began the company Taruru, and the name Taruru means sunset in our language. And yeah, I created in 2013, and we just continued to use Google Earth because it was such a powerful platform for visualizing Aboriginal heritage. So that's how I kind of started down this path of mapping. And Paul and Andrew, over the last 12 months, a partnership has formed between Taruru and GIS, which is called Winyama. What is the major aim of Winyama, Paul? Look, before I get onto that, I'll just explain how myself and Andrew got together. So Andrew got introduced to myself probably eight, eight months ago through a mutual friend and a client. And this friend rang me and said, "Look, I've got a guy," and he's looking to, he really wants to grow his business, and he's looking to partner with someone, and I've pointed him in your direction. So I met Andrew, and look, the first thing I was really impressed with was Andrew's intelligence, his background in what is our core business, which is spatial technology, which I think is rare in the Indigenous space. And I said, "Yes, okay, we've got a keen young guy here who's intelligent. All right, well, let's..." And over the next 12 months or so, we just got to know each other and talk. And over that time, I got to understand Andrew a lot more on where he's coming from, and we always had the intention of getting into business together. That was the aim, but I think it was important we got to know each other, and I think it was really, really good. We've often referred to it as our courting period. And then when we were in a good space, we went, "Right, yes, let's go and create something." So Winyama is in, it's a majority-owned Indigenous business. Andrew is the majority owner. NGIS is a minority owner of that business, but between Taru and NGIS, we provide the capability to Winyama. And what's our vision? Well, it's funny. I've got a philosophy with business. You start with the person, and you work it out as you go. If the person's a good person, they're intelligent, and got all the right attributes, you work it out together as you go along. So we've got ideas, we've got vision. I'm sure it will change over time, but fundamentally, we want to create a profitable and sustainable business. And we think if we do that, then along the way, we will employ Aboriginal people, and Andrew will develop through that process as well. And I think through that also, when we're doing that, we can start doing some good for the community as well, because I think there is, it's a real challenge. There's some real intelligent Indigenous kids out there, and young men and women as well. But sometimes there's a bit of a challenge for how they cross the barrier to get into an organisation for NJIS. So maybe something like Winyama, I'm hoping, will be a bit of a bridge for that. Yeah, no, I think it's fair to say it's an amazing opportunity for me to be part of, to form a joint venture, and really to have someone like Paul as a mentor, as a business mentor, which means a young person like me, like a young Aboriginal person gets an opportunity to enter a professional mapping service. And I think that's, I might not have been able to do that without the capability of NJIS, and someone like Paul, and the culture of NJIS, of organisations like NJIS, which have a kind of social arm. And so yeah, it really, it's the opportunity to enter the professional services and digital economy. So it's clear to me you're both equally passionate about supporting the capacity of the Indigenous community to do geospatial work. And what are some of the ways that maps and GIS can be used within these communities? Look, I see plenty of potential in the native tidal space, where Aboriginal corporations, native tidal bodies, are essentially tenure-owning organisations, and that they need to sort of monitor and monitor the changes in that tenure constantly. That's a constant battle for native tidal organisations, and I think GIS helps that significantly. And I think also like starting to transform the way people start to think of native tidals, so that you start to think of that tenure the same way that land planners do, and town planners start to think of tenure. So mapping out the way that people actually use the landscape, like they use it for hunting and fishing and subsistence, but they also use spaces in the landscape like for recreation, for health, for protecting sort of biodiverse areas that Aboriginal people use. And I don't think that's where native tidals really made that leap, and I think GIS can help to visualise some of that. Also, there's a massive opportunity in the ranger space, and the rangers have been starting to do a lot of natural resource management with companies like Australian Wildlife Conservancy and the sort of environmental surveys that are happening up in the Pilbara and the Kimberleys and other remote areas. And there's this kind of sort of swell of ideas around developing what's called the Indigenous Estate and trying to articulate what the Indigenous Estate is, and I think that GIS has a big role to play in how we articulate that. So it's not really about tenure and changes to tenure, it's also about maintaining the health of the country, and I think that there's some huge opportunities in that in this kind of remote sensing, satellite sensing space for organisations up in the up north. I totally agree, and I think this is huge opportunities, and I actually think it's not so much, I think it's not so much what GIS can do for the communities, it's actually what the communities using GIS can do for the state and the country, because Aboriginal people have been managing the land for tens of thousands of years and using maps to do this, and it was basically their survival. The maps became a critical part of their whole community's surviving, so they became very, very efficient users and parser and distributors to select groups of that location intelligence about their land. So I've always been a firm believer that the best, the metropolitan capital city is not the place where you should be creating location intelligence, location intelligence should be on the capture at the ground. So if we can have a whole network of Aboriginal communities or groups, or whatever that network is, collecting intelligence about the land in those areas, whether it be the Kimberley or down the Great Southern or the Pilbara, it doesn't really matter, and then having it fed in to other organisations, so they're actually then using the information, I think that's a great way to engage the regions and have them connected to the cities and broader outcomes around protecting our natural resources, but also broader regional development and making good decisions about what we should be doing and not doing out in our regions. So I actually think it's what they can do for the communities, but also what the communities, once they've got their capability and capacity up, what they can do for the rest of the state and nation. So Andrew, you also mentioned native title and ranges. What other kinds of careers can young Indigenous Australians pursue in the geospatial industry with regards to educating others about their Aboriginal heritage? Well, there's a lot of Aboriginal people dabbling in geospatial industries, like on the edges of it. I mean, you mentioned like ranger groups, but there's also like a lot of heritage managers, like Aboriginal heritage managers. So there's like heritage surveys for mining companies and for industry impacts. So they've got these a lot of different people using programs like Google Earth and Esri software, even kind of purpose-built software like up in the north, I've got iTracker and just these kind of purpose-built cultural databases that people are collecting information for and viewing in some sort of spatial portal. So I think that there's a lot of space. Well, there's a big trend now for like digitising Aboriginal heritage and managing that information in different formats. And I think that that's where some of the careers and some of the new economy will be sort of generated in Aboriginal communities in that digital like digital environments and managing and safeguarding that kind of data. So I think that's like a real that's like into the future. But I think that we're seeing the basis for that economy start to start to be generated through groups like ranger groups and native title organisations. So I guess we just have to see where that kind of leads to into the future. I was just going to say, I think this is one of the big benefits for forming Winyama. I know Andrew very kindly said, you know, I can be a mentor to him. I'm thinking of a young and Indigenous person who wants to get into the geospatial space. You can come to Winyama and be mentored by Andrew. So you now have a safe place for someone to come and develop their career with Andrew, but also with NGIS as well and our culture here, which is, you know, I would have to say we're very proud that we're very open and very accepting and I think a safe place for people to start their career. Andrew, you mentioned that a lot of Indigenous Australians are now dabbling in careers in GIS. Being an Aboriginal man yourself that's working in this space, what kind of advice would you give to people that might be listening to this podcast that might be considering moving down, you know, GIS as a career path? Apart from CINGER CV to Andrew. Now come and work for Winyama. I think it's actually quite a natural fit for Aboriginal people to consider mapping and geospatial work as a career and, you know, we are basically natural photographers and we've been performing like GIS practices throughout our songlines and kind of mental maps of country and I've seen that firsthand in native title organisations and other heritage work that I've done and I don't think people should shy away from recognising that that's a really valued skill set and we need to develop that as a community and I'd urge people to understand that, you know, a massive proportion of Australia's landmass is subject to native title and needs to be managed and that tenure needs to be managed from an Indigenous perspective so our communities have huge responsibility but also a huge opportunity to capitalise on that. Yes but not only that, our communities have really old and very specialised practices about how to look after country like Paul was saying and I think that sits really comfortably with geospatial practices to kind of infuse those two sets of knowledges about how you manage country but how you visualise that management as well. So yeah, I'd say it's a natural fit and people should really consider this as a career especially since, you know, it can be done out there in the regions and people don't need to be in cities to be GIS professionals and I think, you know, that's one of the valued things about the digital economy that it can develop in regional areas as well. And the other thing I'd say is you don't need a degree in GIS or computer science or anything like that. I mean, NGIS over the years has trained, we've trained long-term unemployed people in GIS, we've trained people throughout the Pacific islands who are with very few computer skills and we've trained them to come up to speed and actually help deal with climate change. We've trained African geologists and brought them over here and taught them about GIS but also talked about Australian. Having a degree is not necessarily a prerequisite to be successful in GIS. It's having good attitude, working hard and just having some natural understanding and aptitude and knowledge of the land and appreciation of geography. I think that they're the things that are going to make you passionate about this and want to learn. So if you're keen and hungry, I think there's an opportunity here to get into this career and, you know, we've got all the training materials to train people up. We just need people with the right attitude who want to learn and they want to be part of Winyama. So if anyone's keen, I'd encourage them to contact Andrew and contact Winyama and see what we can do. In September 2018, Australia hosted its first Indigenous Mapping Workshop in Sydney, which is an idea that was born and sort of created in Canada. It's now well established there and it's now well established in New Zealand. And last year, the first one happened here in Australia. And Andrew, you were one of the main partners for that with Taruru. What were some of the key takeaways of that event? Oh, look, I mean, it was really a pilot to run that workshop. Like it was a pilot that Google wanted to run here in Australia just to see how it kind of how it rolled out. And we really didn't know how it would span out. I mean, it was such a we we asked we asked hundreds of different organisations to come to the to the workshop. And we ended up with 70 individuals from Aboriginal communities across Australia. So everywhere from every state was represented except Tasmania. But we had Northern Territories, sort of Central Desert, Torres Strait Islander groups, like really diverse sort of, you know, landscapes. And we had native title groups, ranger groups, arts centres, language centres. So this really diverse group of people working in Aboriginal communities. And really, the takeaway was that they were all united by by mapping, really, and and what and a need to learn mapping and a need to learn how to manage data. So they're all facing the same kind of challenges out on country. And I mean, the real that one of the great things was we had these, you know, so we had these courses running on how to visualise your heritage and how to visualise other data sets. But then we also had these lightning rounds where people exchanged information about what they're doing out in the out in the on country and had these amazing 10 minute talks from snapshots of people's work from all over Australia. And I think that was really one of them, like the best takeaways for me, like seeing what other Indigenous people are doing in the mapping space was was phenomenal. So, but the other the other big takeaway was we had to, like you said, we had the partners from Canada and New Zealand come over. So Indigenous guys who are also partnering with Google and overseas and other industry partners. And they came and delivered like some examples of their work over over in Canada and New Zealand. And that was that was really beneficial for Aboriginal people in Australia to see the kind of international perspective of Indigenous people working in mapping and data and data management and all these kinds of these kinds of spaces. So, so it was a real it was a real exchange of information and knowledge sort of on a on a on an international scale, which I think was was the best takeaway. But but we had such great feedback after that pilot and it was a real success. And so now we're going to run the second Indigenous mapping workshop here in Perth in July 2019. And it's quite a natural fit, I think, for Winyama, you know, having the capability of NGIS behind us with marketing staff and event staff, but also with technical guys who can deliver some of the training. And and and yeah, so we've got more capability to pull off a larger event. And so we want to put the call out soon and and get people from all over Australia converging on Perth 2019. So I'm W Australia. I look, I just think it's an incredibly exciting thing that I think it it it points to a few things. It points to the need within Australia to provide something like this. The response was quite incredible. I think it's great that Andrew was so involved. I think the links with Canada and New Zealand are great that we're not sort of heading off by ourselves there. There's some lessons there. But I think the most important thing is the natural resource challenges that Australia faces are a very different to Canada and New Zealand. And I think it's really important there's a community here in Australia that's sharing issues around, you know, climate change and fire protection and those sort of things which are fairly unique to Australia. So we're going to have to develop a network here in Australia to make sure that everyone's learning lessons there, but applying all these technologies and lessons that everyone's using to make everyone better. I think it's just a fantastic, fantastic opportunity. It'll be very exciting to be involved in it. Well, thank you both for joining me on today's podcast. We've included some useful links on the website for our listeners who'd like to see some examples of how GIS and maps are being applied to Indigenous communities and also a link to the Winyama website. And if you're interested in the Indigenous Mapping Workshop for 2019, that's where you'll find all of that information. If you'd like to subscribe or hear more, visit the NGIS website or subscribe via Apple Podcasts, Spotify or Stitcher. Welcome to Location Matters, the podcast from NGIS, covering the world of mapping and location technology.