34 What is the Noongar Word For Sheep?
Amanda and Ersilia leave Geraldton for Morawa, get lost on the dirt roads somewhere northwest of Perenjori and eventually find themselves at a shearing shed in Bowgada. Over the course of a few days she learns again how good it is to be welcomed into a developmental process that has a big vision, is not ashamed to wear its heart on its sleeve and encourages everyone to arrive as themselves.
Looking out from the shed at Bowgada
If we forgive ourselves with every breath
Then we’re in line for a hero’s death
FONTAINE DC from Hero’s Death
Outside the shed, yarning
THE BOWGADA EVENT
Rod and Katrina Butler and their collaborators recently sniffed the air, decided the time was ripe and called for a gathering to be held on Saturday August 9. The chosen venue was a ramshackle old shearing shed on a property called Bowgada some 20kms out of Perenjori. The idea was to present the seeds of a project that had been gaining momentum with the people involved, to a wider audience.
Rod Butler
Rod and Katrina have been working with regenerative principles on their farm, Gimlet Ridge for several decades. Rod is also helping to run a sheep business connected to a project under management of Perth based company Carbon Neutral on a nearby property, Pine Ridge.
THE PLAYERS
Clint
Rod had forged a strong friendship with Clint Hanson – a Minang and Balladong Noongar elder - when both were employed by Carbon Neutral over a decade ago. He credits sharing time on country with Clint as a big part of what started to ‘wake up’ the land on Gimlet Ridge farm and validate and bring fully to consciousness his own connection to subtle energies within the landscape.
All the work he had done to lift the carbon and Ph levels and encourage biodiversity on his paddocks, was given depth, dimension and context with input from a First Nation’s man.
Phil Logue
Phil Logue, a local farmer who has been sharing the cropping and sheep workload with Rod and Katrina at Gimlet Ridge farm and Carbon Neutral’s operation, became part of the story early in 2019 *
Rod and his workers have been using a big mob of Rod’s sheep as a way to value-add to the carbon tree planting venture, by grazing sheep and experimenting with agricultural plantings between the rows of acacias and eucalypts. The sheep are being utilised as a tool to kickstart the fertility of the land.
The shift in thinking that Rod and farmers and pastoralists like him have brought to light in their way of working with animals and the land is profound. Louise Edmond’s, CEO of Carbon Sync and long-time ally of Rod’s, puts it beautifully:
“The shift is from farming animals to produce meat, to managing animals to enhance ecosystem services and produce carbon credits and biodiversity offsets. While still producing meat.”
She goes on to say this is a shift in perspective on the whole business of farming that predicates: ‘farmers becoming stewards of ecosystem health’. This is a shift in perspective that has the capacity to change the world.
THE GIMLET RIDGE IRREGULARS
Over time, in these few properties around Perenjori, a project has been taking shape, knitting itself together amongst shared conversations, online learning and dreamings from a loose confederacy of people drawn together by a mutual interest in regenerative ag in the wheat belt.
I think of this mob as the Gimlet Ridge Irregulars. Amongst our number are farmers, trainers, carbon project developers, stock handlers, storytellers, a food distributor, ecologists and health practitioners. All are connected by an understanding that a paradigm-shifting, whole picture push is required to drive the kind of change the wheatbelt needs to thrive. There is a core group who work on the land, and a wider crew who live between Geraldton, Perenjori, Morawa, Perth and beyond.
THE X FACTOR
When Will Hamlett got involved in the grazing plan earlier this year, becoming chief shepherd at Pine Ridge - things really started to come alive. A core aim of this group is to create employment and opportunity for local people – and it doesn’t get more local than First Nations people. Will’s involvement feels like a gift to the land and to the Wajelas, keen to learn from those who hold deep knowledge about the land and are willing to contribute what they know.
Clayton Lewis (in the beanie) and Will Hamlett
RELATIONSHIPS
Will and Rod have known each other for about 8 years through sheep work. Rod has been thrilled with the way Will and he have been able to work together over this season introducing intensive, short-term grazing techniques from the holistic ag trainer’s toolbox .
Will’s presence on this land has acted as an attractant for some of his family keen to get back on country and share what they know with their kids, so there is a bit of a ripple out into the First Nation’s community that something different might be happening.
WHATS THE NOONGAR WORD FOR SHEEP?
In early August, the people involved with the day to day work on the ag planting and sheep operations at Pine Ridge walked the mob of ewes and lambs and their attendant alpacas some distance to a shearing shed where a crew gathered to carry out the shearing.
Many complex relational threads had brought this band of men and their families together on this particular land, and it worked so well that things that happened over this time were still being talked about days later. It seems that the pleasure of the work and the satisfaction that came through a sense of shared purpose and responsibility allowed some magical stuff to happen. To Rod and Phil, it was a joyous time, and evidence that all the things they had been setting in motion were starting to flow in the right direction – which is, as Rod is fond of saying, when people start to move more towards what they want and away from what they don’t want.
AT THE HEART OF CARBON
There is now a core of people, both wadjelas and First Nation’s, who sense something developing that has the capacity to benefit everyone and the land. Energy for this get together at the Bowgada shed was high because trust and respect has developed between the players over time.
Over the last few years, words have been written, diagrams made, all the language of project development invoked to create boxes filled with descriptions of opportunities and problems, solutions and visions etc and handed around the Irregulars. It has been an ever-changing canvas of ideas.
There isn’t a blueprint per se, yet. More like a bunch of elements that seem to be fitting together – a pattern emerging from some raw ingredients – carbon capture and credits, the role of livestock, biodiversity above and below ground, the latest in microbial farming, regen ag thinking and Indigenous input, whatever that looks like. At the gathering at Bowgada, Phil talked about the importance of all the players feeling comfortable in the space that was being created. In the time he has been involved he has seen how things started to take-off when people got to play their natural game, and be valued for what they chose to bring to the party. This idea, that his mob was starting to move with coherence and ease in the right direction, was reflected in the relaxed way that the meeting in the shearing shed came together and how it unfolded over the day.
Rod’s mob
I’m starting to use the language of sheep-herding to get relational concepts across – I’ve been hanging around these blokes long enough to see how simple and profound are the understandings they are getting from working with animals and people within ecosystems, using observation and respect rather than control and manipulation as the key drivers for any action taken.
Close to the event, the group came up with a title: Maaman Marr Boodjar – Noongar for ‘Man’s Handiwork on the Land’.
BLOKEY
If it’s all sounding a bit blokey, it is. But oddly enough, women – and I’m one of them - and one of the Gimlet Ridge Irregulars – are firmly embedded in this mix.
Rod pointed out that for the last few generations the language in his small rural town of Perenjori has been that the girls wouldn’t be staying. The small towns have been leaching people for years as climate conditions changed, farms got bigger, technical innovations and chemical regimes reduced both the need for workers and the resilience and the productivity of the land. As the population died, businesses and services started to wither along with the sports clubs and schools. Of course, some young women stayed on to marry the son who took over the farm, or to take up a job in the few remaining businesses - but it is the men who had the social contract to stay and remained connected to the land.
And the ones who stayed all played footy!
THE FOOTY
What is it about the footy? if you are in any confusion, I am talking about AFL, proper footy. It has become a bit of a thing as it has gradually dawned on me that these farmers and others I know involved in the Regen Ag zone, especially those from small country towns, have forged friendships and alliances on the football field that have carried through into adulthood. The blokes laugh when I ask questions – this is clearly not something that they feel needs enquiry – their reflex is to deflect the question, crack a joke.
But I reckon it is worth noting that between these men, footy forms part of a raw understanding, a bond that adds richness and depth to relationships. It first became really obvious to me over months working on different projects with Rod O’Bree, a local farmer who works in land rehydration.
I was continually amazed by how many of his contacts were pre-cooked as it were, on the football field. From the guy who ran the local ag supply shop to the butcher, cop, the men running wheat and sheep operations; these blokes are shaking hands, or not, on an understanding that was first forged in a ball game decades ago.
‘Did you know this guy’? I’d ask.
‘Yeah, yeah, we played footy together.’ If they were younger men, chances are if Rod hadn’t actually played with them he had coached them at some point…a men’s club, alive and well and operating right under my nose.
Thinking about it – playing footy must be a pretty solid, embodied experience and a short cut to determining character. Physical courage, skill, recklessness, selfishness, team spirit, doggedness, ability under pressure, all these characteristics are on display and digested at the same time as the orange slices bought out at quarter time. And reinforced over dozens, hundreds of hours of training and playing sessions.
Meaning, the footy field for these blokes is a space where as boys and young males they got the measure of each other in a profoundly visceral way, that has tempered their relationships over their lives. In small towns, at least up until a generation or two ago, that was still likely to be, from cradle to grave.
BLACK MAGIC ON THE FIELD
And of course, footy has been one of the few spaces where First Nation’s boys and men could more than hold their own. Where a certain egalitarianism reined regardless of colour, within a society structured in a way that wasn’t keen to see this egalitarianism thrive.
I reckon this early knowledge of each other is part of the opportunity that has enabled these men to get past the crusted-on privileges and humiliations, as well as the superimposed political corrections that have not quite succeeded in healing relationships between people or the land over generations.
I don’t want to make the game of footy groan underneath too heavy a burden…are you thinking that I am going to segue into talk about the ANZACS or Gallipoli? Shame on you! As appreciative as I am of clichés – as all football lovers must be - I am simply embroidering the point, which is how trust is built in relationships between men on the land they share, and how respect grows into actions that succeed. I want to give footy its due. The weird thing is that I’ve only just noticed it.
GEORGE AND THE FINAL SIREN
Years ago I asked my small nephew George what he liked best about playing footy, a sport he was and still is, at age 30, obsessed with. He said, ‘Singing the song at the end’. This was a bit mystifying for his Auntie Amanda, until someone explained later that you only sung the team song if you won. Ooh. OK! The circle of boys with their arms around each other screaming tunelessly in a changeroom signifies a win. Of course!
Without being a footy tragic, I love the language and the cultural crunch of this behemoth that is our national obsession – but I had missed the obvious - possibly because I didn’t personally run around in the cold bashing into other people and landing on top of the ball in a big sweaty scrum as part of my weekly routine growing up.
Rod, Clint and Phil on Cave Hill discuss strategies for the game
Rod, Phil, and Clinton – the conveners and main presenters in the meeting in the shearing shed – are all big fellas. You guessed it. Ruckmen, all of them. Interesting, eh?
Rod presents
AT THE SHEARING SHED
So, to the shearing shed and that Saturday in August. The afternoon before the scheduled start of the meeting, we had a rough plan stitched together for the next day’s presentations. Rod would talk to a project that created opportunities for all to come together as true custodians of the land.
He is growing into his role as someone who can assist people to change their relationship to the land –keen to find a common language from where people can start to do the work to inject the land and its people with new spirit. From his own lived experience, he knows that doing a course and reading books can only take you so far. To have the courage to step out of mainstream of land management there has to be a belief that a new pathway will work. This is not a simple or quick thing to grasp – you never know where the big Ahha moments are going to come from. Patience, a lot of trial and error, and sensitivity to the particular context of the individual producer are key to reading and managing the land differently.
Clint was there to present the First Nation’s perspective. He is keen to see Aboriginal knowhow take its rightful place at the table within agricultural matters – and to see real jobs on country for young people. Generational lack of opportunity and the availability of sit down/prop up money has led to intractable problems – he is not alone in the Aboriginal community thinking that their kids are being ruined by a lack of incentive and access to work relevant to their lives. Clint’s pretty sure the wajelas are finally getting a handle on how landscape functions and he uses his easy-going humour to put some heart into the stragglers and doubters of all colours.
Phil’s job was to stitch the whole together .
On the morning of the meeting, Phil came a bit late, so we made him the MC. When he drove up with the portable toilet on a trailer, I gave him the news. Of the three, I explained, he was the only one who could be trusted to stick to a rough timetable – he saw the sense of it and rose to the occasion.
Cerrie Beech and Lou Edwards listen
And thanks to Lou, who set the tone for the day when she gave her first ever welcome to country, unrehearsed and from the heart.
AUSCARBON
The land we met on is borderline Rangelands territory, the dry edge of tough agricultural land.
Denis Watson, head man at AusCarbon, parent company to Carbon Neutral, had purchased a network of properties under an ambitious plan - the Yarra Yarra Biodiversity Corridor - over 10 years ago. 10,000 hectares of mostly degraded Agricultural land that had ceased to be productive under old management styles were going to be repurposed on environmental and social grounds, to be paid for by International Gold Standard carbon credits.
View from Cave Hill on Bowgada
The company’s land holdings are strategically placed to help create natural corridors encouraging the easy passage of insects and animals in a region that has typically been cleared of more than 95% of natural bush. Different enterprises including a beekeeping concern were tried at this time with the intention to add value the plantings, but in the ever shape-shifting world of the emerging carbon market, companies need to stay agile, and new directions are always being explored.
At the meeting Carbon Neutral were represented by general manager Georgiana, and Tom, a fairly new staff employee, both of whom came up from Perth. Richard Wilson, Auscarbon manager for farms in the area who lives up the road a bit in Canna, was also present.
ON COUNTRY
After introductions and a cup of tea, Rod brought around his big trailer. Usually employed to carry sheep, on this day it worked brilliantly to convey a mob of about 20, as part of a small convoy a few kilometres to Cave Hill. We all trooped up the slope, gaining a gorgeous 360 degree view clear to the horizon. Clint pointed out marks in the landscape indicating what would have been here when First Nations people were the land managers of this grasslands.
On the sheep truck
TESTING FOR WHAT’S POSSIBLE
From our birds’ eye view, work done over the years could be seen in the planted rows of young eucalypts and other species in the red earth. Between the rows the land was bare - no understory and no grasses.
Carbon Neutral hired soil carbon consultant Jennifer West, also present on the day, to take some soil samples to get a reading of the carbon levels in the soil of their re-vegetation land on Bowgada. At the start of the 2020 season, Rod and Phil scratched in a multi-species cover crop between the rows of trees over 50 hectares, the seed ‘loaded’ with biological stimulants and natural fertilisers to kickstart soil microbial activity.
From Cave Hill , Carbon Neutral tree plantings.
Depending on the rain Jennifer hopes to resample the site next autumn. If the rain triggers enough growth, Rod may bring his sheep in to graze the area, at least once, maybe twice, using a big mob within a short time frame.
With the next testing, what they hope to see is a small increase in carbon in the soil, a confirmation that will give them an idea of where best to plant their intentions and resources into the future.
It is a truth that no-one knows what is possible on this land in terms of farming and production. Land management techniques that connect all the dots by working with natural processes and the best of science geared towards regenerative practices have the capacity to take us to a future we are starting to envisage, now.
DOG VS ALPACA
A high point of the late morning field trip was when we stopped to examine plant diversity in a paddock. The mob of sheep was nearby and we watched one of the alpacas’ make a steely eyed stand against Rod’s dog Jack who came a little too close to a water trough where a lamb was drinking. I’ts not the first time I have experienced these unusually relaxed sheep: I put it down to Rod and Will’s astute handling, but getting to cruise around with a small pack of their own private security guards could be part of the story.
The alpacas in guard mode against Jack the dog, out of picture
THE FULL PICTURE
The story-telling throughout the day was about presenting the whole of the jigsaw puzzle – social and ecological renewal leading to a community returned to wealth and abundance on all levels. These ideas were broadly encapsulated by a triangle that places people and society at one point and land regeneration linked to wealth and abundance at the other two points. In the middle - making it all possible is Carbon. Carbon, now being dubbed ‘the second crop’ for its capacity to increase financial viability for land managers through carbon credits, is also the key to increasing fertility and productivity on the farm.
MORE SHEEP ANALOGIES
What this meeting made clear is that it has to start with people all sharing a vision that they know will value everyone’s contribution and head in a direction that they feel will benefit themselves and others.
If you’re thinking this sounds simplistic or obvious – you try getting a mob of sheep to walk through a gate that they decided they don’t want to go through. Feeling relaxed, trusting those you’re walking with, and believing that walking through that gate will give you what you want, are key to a successful transition to an unknown paddock.
CONVERSATION
After lunch, the ’three wise men’, so dubbed affectionately by Clayton Lewis, local Widi man and Carbon Neutral employee back in the day, stood back to let others say their piece. Anthony Thomas, local farmer from Three Springs, also on a path to reducing chemicals and fertiliser use within his cropping and sheep program, was positive about the work done and proposed. In his words: With what I saw today, with those soil types: I reckon you’re on a winner.
Mort Hansen, Clinton’s brother, up from Perth for the weekend, held the floor for a time. There was anger, sadness and plenty of bleak humour in the words he spoke – but he recognised the authenticity of the approach taken by the leads in this project. I take my hat off to you mob. It was good to hear those words from an elder who is convinced that re-connecting to country is one of the most positive things that could happen for the young ones in his mob.
Clayton Lewis, present with his sister, Caroline, her son Lucas and Lucas’s partner, Keesha echoed some of this positivity. Clayton has lived in Morawa for years. Caroline, Lucas and Keesha have recently left the city, Caroline to stay in Morawa and the young couple to Geraldton. The Lewis’s are back and they all expressed that having access to ancestral country and projects based on this country is an important part of their lives and the health of their youth.
Louise Edmonds, CEO Carbon Sync
Louise, whose own carbon soil sequestration project is building momentum to launch across the wheatbelt, spoke to the point of First Nation involvement with humility and clarity. She was quick to say that she has no answers to the question she is often asked: how can your project benefit First Nation’s people?
As a business leader she does not see her job as defining roles for Indigenous folk. She is keen to see flesh on the bones of this project – and sees her job as helping to create a business that has the capacity to draw out people’s sense of their own agency, to assist them to engage in their own development. Her aim, in her words, is that: ‘Indigenous people can participate in a way that is meaningful to them, to create the space that supports and enables them to be who they are.’
Phil had said earlier: Are we doing this for the right reasons? A theme was starting to emerge - the biggest innovations in regenerative and carbon projects don’t stop at techniques to build soil fertility, but are bone-deep attempts to re-configure ways to support the people that are at the heart of enterprises. It is a startlingly fresh notion to me – to envisage a business, a project, where success is based on all the people involved being able to drive the work. Where leadership is there not to inspire and motivate, but to develop opportunities that enable people to awaken to their own inspiration and motivation, to create and contribute.
Donna Peacock, an intuitive health practitioner, introduced herself to talk about the centrality of self-love to healing and health for all life. For Donna, a strong and direct presence, the spiritual dimension is as practical and ordinary a consideration as Vegemite toast. Some days later I looked up the roots of the word ‘health’. In old English ‘health’ meant to be sound, to be whole. There you go.
Katrina Butler (in the pink) and Donna Peacock look out
The talk turned finally, to the next step. Structure is needed, and a business plan.
The really tough stuff, the foundational work, the strengthening of relationships is well under way and creating its own momentum.
It is a fact that there is a big deficit when it comes to First Nation’s people trusting wajela initiatives - nothing, but nothing, will come of this project if these relationships fail. Trust, leading to respect is the road that must be travelled.
And of course, it would be excellent if this mob attracted the capital that understands the kind of renewal and regeneration it I really funding, so that a business model that is flexible and big-hearted enough to build on these foundations can be established right from the start.
That same night a storm hit, and the next day the rain came down. Surely a portent for the future.
Clayton, Lucas, Caroline, ? Andrew, Donna, Christine, Kingsley
The Noongar word for sheep is ‘jimba’ – possibly from jumbuck, the pidgin word Aboriginal and colonial settlers commonly used to talk about sheep. Wajarri language, covering tribal groups in the Murchison region is jiibu (jee boo)
So lets talk about sheep – in a common language that reflects the country that we all share.
There are many participants I didn’t mention in this story – –because this story could only be so long. Christine, Ersilia, Donna, George, Brian …many contributed to the beauty of this day
Brian Baxter (local regen farmer) and Jennifer West (founder, Carbon West) chat.
If you are interested in more background to the Pine Ridge story, listen to a recent podcast called Relaxing with Sheep.
For more on Phil Logue’s story of redemption, The Regen Parts 1 and 2
