Australia’s deserts cover 70 per cent of our land mass and
are home to three percent of our population. They are sparsely
settled, with small and scattered groups of people living a long
way from the markets and political centres of urban Australia. But
desert people have a vast amount of local and traditional knowledge
about the way deserts work, and they contribute $90 billion a year
to the nation through mining, tourism, land management,
pastoralism, service industries and arts.
The national challenge is to work with desert people to develop
sustainable livelihoods and settlements, thriving desert regional
economies and to increase their human and social capital. The
Desert Knowledge Cooperative Research Centre – an
organisation with 28 partners from business, academia, industry,
Aboriginal organisations and community groups - has accepted the
challenges and made them the basis of our Core
Projects.
Sustainable livelihoods recognises that jobs and income
interact in a complex way to support the health and wellbeing of
people and their settlements. The research covers Aboriginal people
managing culturally important water holes; remote area people
working through networks to monitor wind erosion and dust storms;
Aboriginal custodians of country managing wild fire; ways to retain
staff in desert settlements; and remote settlement Aboriginal
people managing water supplies, infrastructure and quality.
Thriving desert regional economies understands the need
to help create sound economies to support desert living and
investigates work, health and wellbeing in managing natural and
cultural resources; enterprise opportunities in bush food gathering
and marketing; 4WD tourism; smarter and more sustainable pastoral
industries; and success factors for small to medium enterprises in
desert settlements.
Sustainable remote desert settlements recognises the
need for a different approach to sustainability from the way people
work in urban Australia. Researchers are working on strong and
effective systems for making decisions and acting on them
(appropriate governance); understanding the size and nature of the
highly mobile desert population to underpin more effective and
equitable service delivery; and improved infrastructure that is
specifically designed for the desert, which has investigated
improving the thermal performance of houses, building livelihoods
into housing delivery and additional work on remote settlement
water management.
Increased human and social capital encompasses the
DKCRC’s education and training and social science programs.
Our education and training program covers the spectrum from
Vocational Education and Training, which recognises the need to
build up local level skills, to undergraduate and postgraduate
level. We partner with organisations like the Graham (Polly) Farmer
Foundation to help Aboriginal students reach their potential; and
research what is important in education for desert people. Building
human and social capital has involved us in: developing material on
collaborative research methods; developing and revising an
Aboriginal Knowledge and Intellectual Property Protocol; training
workshops for Aboriginal researchers; and promoting a research
culture of sharing emerging knowledge and insights.
All of our research is helping us develop a Science of
Desert Living, which is an emerging theory of the desert
syndrome (low productivity, sparse population, distances from
markets and political centres and little understanding of
significant local and traditional knowledge) and its effects on
everything from resource management, to service delivery,
enterprise and governance.
