The Nature Conservancy in Australia - A Journey of Hope and Healing

View a slideshow to hear and see the connection between Aboriginal people and the lands of their ancestors.

Australia’s Aboriginal communities have a vital role to play in preserving the places, plants and animals that sustained and defined their cultures for 40,000 years. The Nature Conservancy is working with Aboriginal communities to preserve biodiversity and to enable descendents of distinct tribal groups such as the Noongar find their way back “on country” and revive rich cultures that are bound inextricably to nature.

A Message from Eugene Eades of the Noongar people of southwestern Australia

Eugene Eades and other members of the Noongar group in southwestern Australia. © Ami Vitale

Adopt-an-Acre® in Gondwana Link

When you help protect the Great Western Woodlands in Gondwana Link by adopting an acre in Australia, your gift will be matched 100 percent, helping to preserve twice as many acres.

As a Noongar man, I’d like to share that it is a powerful thing for us to be able to come back and reconnect to our homeland, mother earth, the boodjah. In the past our ancestors were the caretakers and managers of this land. Everywhere we find evidence of their movements, their traditions. We can learn from those traditions what we must do today and in the future, to live in the most balanced way possible.

I’m hungry for my land. I’m hungry for my culture. I’m hungry to come together with our white brothers and sisters — the two cultures need to walk hand in hand, side by side, on the one land and share the two histories, the two heritages and go forth together. I hope that we’ll learn on this journey how to heal the land so the land will heal us.

As I look around my homeland, I can see a lot of destruction, a lot of practices that aren’t right, so we have a big job ahead of us now.

We must encourage our young men and our young women to become involved and learn how to be the caretakers. We must help them restore their connections back to their homeland and to our Noongar way, our history and our heritage. Throughout this land is all of our dreaming*, all of our energy, our power. It flows around our blood.

On behalf of my elders and their ancestors I would like to say a special thanks to all who have engaged the Noongar people in efforts to care for this country, including The Nature Conservancy — and your supporters who are a part of this journey as well.

Nature picture credits (top to bottom, left to right): Photo © Ami Vitale (Eugene Eades); Photo © Ami Vitale (A relative of an elder of the Noongar group); Photo © Ami Vitale (Members of the Noongar group).