NatureAssist

This is our country, it's important to share it with young generations.

And here it's more important because I want to show my kids what my ancestors left here who asked to look after.

We're here today on NAK Country on Crystalvale Nature Refuge, which is about 15 kilometers southwest of Coen on the Cape York Peninsula.

Crystalvale Nature Refuge spans 90,000 hectares and that area is dominated by eucalypt open Woodlands and eucalypt Woodlands, as well as some other important ecosystems including wetlands.

Crystalvale Station is part of three corporate carbon stations, all nature refuges, which form a continuous ecological corridor of about 500,000 hectares, which is pretty significant.

We have quite a unique set up in which we own a lot of the land that we operate the projects on and we run cattle operations on these properties as well as carbon projects.

We run Savannah fire management projects which use Indigenous inspired fire management practices to ensure the best possible outcomes for the environment.

A nature refuge is an agreement with the landholder and the Queensland Government where the landholder needs to protect and conserve the plants and animals and cultural heritage on the property, but at the same time is allowed to undertake sustainable economic activities.

We've received funding from the Australian and Queensland Governments as part of their Protecting Important Biodiversity Areas program and the Nature Assist program to build and work on maintaining existing fence lines and putting in some new fence lines to keep feral animals and stray cattle off the property and then fire breaks to improve the fire management on the property.

The whole aim to this turn of fire management is to prevent hot fires.

So we're doing like a preventative burn. It's a cool burn.

It just helps us manage our our hot fires later in the season to make fire breaks.

When it gets hotter and dry later in the season we can stop those hot fires.

We're trying to be as safe as we can and still run our cattle.

So it's all about management.

The funding that we've got has allowed us to work on an infrastructure plan and we have got funding to carry out ecological and cultural heritage surveys.

When the infrastructure works go ahead, they will avoid culturally or ecologically sensitive areas.

We can co-design that infrastructure together with nature and with the traditional owners of the land.

So with some consultation with Ngan-Aak-Kunch, they have selected certain traditional
knowledge holders of Ngan-Aak-Kunch, or Wik people who are out here to
identify culturally significant areas.

Some of these people have not been out here. They haven't accessed this for over 40, 50 years.

These sacred areas are significant to them in terms of traditional practices and and customs and and beliefs.

To them, it's more like coming home, being back on in country.

I pay my respect to the Wik people for allowing for me to be part of this project.

My name's Frederick Thomas Shortjoe.

I am really from here Coen, my mom's from Aurukun and I lived at Aurukun.

When I got here, I feel like, oh, I am home.

I feel lively when I'm when I first got here. Today, we went around to trying to find to put the fence over the ancestral grounds. Our story places.

We look for if there's any axes that they left.

Could be a stone axe. We don't touch that. We leave it where it belongs.

If you find a bone, we won't touch it. We leave it.

So we are trying to protect it from people coming in. Combined with us, its more working with us, not against us, but with us.

It's more important than for you, your father and your kids and your kids, kids, your grandchildren.

Keep your home, connecting the land and the people.

It's a very privileged and humble feeling to be a part of something as significant as this.

It's being part of someone else's journey.

You know, everyone's very protective of certain sacred areas.

And as an Aboriginal woman myself, I understand how that is.

And they're willing to share that with another territorial group or other people.

It is, it's kind of humbling.

I guess it's about including engaging the traditional owner groups out on country and Corporate Carbon has got this approach of engaging with the TO groups and having them involved in every aspect of the stations and the leases.

My future vision of all of this it is to see more Aboriginal people, more traditional owner groups,
actively engaged in all activities on Country, whether it's protecting significant sites, whether it's mustering, fencing, taking care of the property, being part of all the healthy Country and
incorporating traditional knowledge on land management.

The Crystalvale Grant has enabled us to properly manage the land better with those fire breaks and those fences that we're doing there and working with the local indigenous groups to help us with the fire management and to help us with just understanding the land better.

We've become a bigger part of the community too.

It's been wonderful to be part of this program and this has really allowed us to showcase how cattle and carbon can work together and at the same time manage the land sustainably.

So we can now have healthy country which helps the local communities, it helps the cattle operations and it helps the carbon operations.

And that's what we're trying to do at Corporate Carbon to show that you can successfully run these two different economic projects at the same time and maintain a healthy ecosystem.

And I think what's even more special is being here with the traditional owners as well and learning from them at the same time.

And that's what we want to take forward and make sure that we learn from them and incorporate their ways of managing country into our ways of managing country.

This project is supported with funding from the Australian Government's Protecting Important Biodiversity Areas program and the Queensland Government's Nature Assist program.

The name of the place is Ardgour and it's about 150 km from Charville and about 50 km from Cunamulla we're at 8,300 hectares inside the boundary fence. We find the Southwest Queensland country ideal for cattle and carbon they both work so well together and that's what Paniri is all about. Well previous to 2016 see it was run commercially as a sheep and a wool growing property. A lot of the out buildings and the old wool shed and stuff you can see was great once and it's not now it's just uh lack of use and lack of people living here. It was very obvious that it needed a spell, a rest the country needed to regenerate, we saw a great opportunity to have a carbon project and also work with the Queensland Government to introduce the Wildlife Refuge. So in establishing the nature refuge we've applied for funding under the Nature Assist program which is the Queensland Government's program for landholders that established nature refuges on their property. So the Nature Assist program involves removing 45 km of internal fencing, we're doing some fire brake clearing around the perimeter of the property and that's around 37 km of boundary clearing um which will really protect the natural assets on site and doing cultural and environmental surveys as well. Adgour station is dominant with the mulga regional ecosystem on site but we've got some really special habitat features here which are the wetlands, they're part of the Wyandra-Cunnamulla Claypans Aggregation and they're really important because they're listed under the directory of important Wetlands of Australia, also they're ephemeral Wetlands so in times of inundation they'll become special habitat areas for water birds and we're hoping that they come back to life as part of the nature Refuge project. We've engaged ecologists that are accredited under the accounting for nature framework and that's really going to give us critical data for the flora and the fauna on site. We're collecting baseline data of all different straters of vegetation which can be used to score the site out of 10. We're able to see where the land is deficient so that can also allow them to have a look at you know methods that they can use to get a better uplift in the land and allows them to really target areas that are that are failing. We're really going to be able to see you know what we've got here and then when we come back to some of those critical points that we've surveyed we'll be able to see well how has the species improved over time do we have more diversity of species and we'll be able to see you know what kind of habitat we're creating in country and what fauna we have coming back onto the property. Nature refuges are in agreement between the landholder and the state government that are looking at sustainable practices so we're trying to look at cohabitational use rather than just one form of use and there has been a lot of success in it, it's pretty important considering we have food security, we've got nature issues, we've got decline in species and just allowing someone to come in here and still work the land but work it in a sustainable manner which allows improvement of the ecosystems and habitat which is a pretty special thing. You know if you're working together with all of the stakeholders you can manage land more effectively so I think it's really important to send that message that it's about carbon cattle and conservation it's all of the mix that makes holistic land management.