BY LYDIA STROHFELDT

First Nations families are combining a multitude of skills and traditional practices to create unique forms of climate activism in Australia.  

With First Nations peoples disproportionately impacted by the effects of global warming and the fossil fuel projects propelling it, these voices are elevating Indigenous struggles and solutions to transform the climate movement in the nation.

Rikki Dank, a Gudanji and Wakaja woman originally from the Northern Territory’s Barkly Tableland, is a climate change activist and owner of Indigenous art gallery Lajarri. She was one of only four Indigenous Australian delegates at the COP26 Climate Summit in Glasgow last November. 

Ms Dank and her family have been on the frontlines of climate injustice for more than 30 years, as 85 per cent of her country is now leased to fracking and mining projects, without community consent. 

“We will be going out bush one day and all of a sudden there's a fence and it's locked,” she said. 

“[My grandmother] might speak only 15 to 20 words of standard Australian English but she speaks five other languages. [Fracking representatives] took her aside and got her to sign something,”  Ms Dank said. “That was us giving them what they believe is consent to frack our country.”  

This lack of Indigenous consultation is far more common than not. 

Less than 10 per cent of Australian mining companies have publicly stated their engagement with Aboriginal communities regarding land rights, according to 2020 study by the University of South Australia.  

Failure to work with traditional owners has not prevented fossil fuel lobbyists from retaining federal support. 

In 2018, the then Morrison Government successfully pressured the NT to lift its moratorium on all fracking activities by withholding the state’s GST funding. 

Though Origin Energy announced its plans in September to divest 100 per cent of its projects in the NT’s Beetaloo Basin, companies such as Empire and Armour have pushed forward with fracking in the same region.

Ms Dank said the effects of these projects are detrimental to her community, as sacred sites and water sources have been made inaccessible or contaminated. 

“We’ve seen lead poisoning the water … people tell us you need to be careful about how much fish you eat from the [McArthur] River … that they’ve actually got to buy bottled water,” she said. 

“If [these companies] are not expecting us to move, are they seriously thinking that we are going to sit there and just drink poisoned water?”

In response to the destruction of her family’s country, Ms Dank is showcasing Aboriginal art as a “vehicle to share stories” and to advocate for change.  

After opening the Middle East’s first Aboriginal art gallery in Dubai, she now uses curation to connect loss of land with the changes in art she is bearing witness to. 

“Aboriginal people are starting to paint the mining and the fracking as the story [rather than Creation], because in certain areas we can’t go to our sacred sites — they’re gone,” she said.

“That means we can’t follow that songline … We stop talking about it and practising those ceremonies.” 

This shift in art is concerning for cultural continuity, but Ms Dank said it is also a “strong, powerful story because it’s saying that this stuff is happening to our country, and a way for the artists to protest, to demonstrate, to show they’re not happy about it”. 

She said the response has been overwhelmingly positive as the artists, stories and histories behind the work have “lit up [something] inside” people and left them “blown away”.  

While Ms Dank and these artists are turning colour and canvas into activism, Worimi man and Indigenous co-chair of Reconciliation NSW Joshua Gilbert is using his expertise in agriculture and traditional Aboriginal knowledge to make Australia’s farming landscape more sustainable.  

Having successfully lobbied the NSW Farmers Association to support climate action with policy change, Mr Gilbert said it is important to acknowledge Western farming’s contribution to greenhouse gas emissions and draw on Indigenous wisdom to reshape the industry.  

“Indigenous people still own 54 to 60 per cent of Australia's land mass today, so it seems quite inept that we have a political system, agricultural sector, even the environmental sector to some extent who don't engage with mob on a daily basis,” Mr Gilbert said.  

“[We] have an Indigenous population who have the longest knowledge system … and have certainly experienced quite severe climate activities over a long period of time.”

Implementation of Indigenous practices in food systems and climate adaptation could help achieve zero hunger globally and reduce the agricultural industry’s hefty carbon footprint, research shows. 

According to a 2013 report by the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organisation, with greater access to land, resources and funding, Indigenous farming has the potential to produce more food while emitting far less than industrialised agriculture.

Mr Gilbert said despite these solutions offered by Indigenous wisdom, there are still crucial barriers preventing First Nations farmers, and Indigenous people more broadly, from being meaningfully included in the climate space. 

“There is a misunderstanding of the power structures at play.” 

Those who typically narrate the story of climate change tend to maintain the status quo by framing “poor mob” as those who are “going to miss out on stuff”, rather than empowering Indigenous people to “be engaged and act on that”, he said.   

Local and traditional knowledge from First Nations people has been excluded from national conversations about climate change in research, data and media coverage, a 2021 report by the Lowitja Institute showed. 

Prioritisation of victimhood over agency has in fact been so prevalent, a study published by the Journal of Politics and Strategy in 2019 referred to it as the "canary in the coal mine" effect — the idea that Indigenous communities are used to create alarm without being presented the opportunity to lead climate action. 

Mr Gilbert said next year’s expected referendum to enshrine a First Nations Voice to Parliament has immense potential to redress this imbalance and use reconciliation to resolve the environmental injustices faced by his community. 

“Truth-telling is going to fracture our relationship a bit [between Aboriginal and non-Indigenous Australians],” he said. 

“Land is kind of the healer for that activity: we need to really come together, sit on land, tell those yarns and think about what that pathway forward is.”

Ms Dank shared Mr Gilbert’s hope for collaboration. 

She said there is a lot of opportunity for non-Indigenous Australians to start “learning from local mob” about our Earth and connection to it.  

“Culture, land, language, family are all intertwined … You pull that thread and the whole fabric of a person’s life or a nation’s life will come apart.”