The Martuwarra Fitzroy River is Western Australia’s largest River and largest listed Aboriginal cultural heritage site. It has been cared for by First Law and Indigenous land management practices for millennia. Over the last 150 years, it has experienced multi-scalar damage from agriculture, mining and invasive species. Interventive measures are now required to improve the health of the River and the communities that live along it’s banks.
The twenty-first century has already been characterised by substantive shifts in theory and law on legal personhood. There have been profound legal commitments to the full personhood of disabled people, dramatic new applications of personhood to natural entities such as rivers, and ongoing debates on the legal personhood of animals, artificial intelligence, and corporations and their public interest responsibilities. These shifts present an opportunity to re-examine our understanding of legal personhood. We may be able to move away from the white, European, able-bodied, cis-gender male approach to legal personhood that has dominated much of the world
As part of Living Nature 20201, we hosted a conversation about Aboriginal science, the rights of nature and the unprecedented land grab that threatens Australia’s Kimberley region with Indigenouse rights activists, Anne Poelina and film producers, Nick Wrathall. The Kimberley region of North-Western Australia is one of the world’s most ecologically diverse areas, with one of the last untouched coastlines left on Earth. It is also home to 200 remote Aboriginal communities and the oldest surviving culture in the world.
On the first of our Water Justice Hub Researcher’s series, we talk with Dr. Anne Poelina: Chair of the Martuwarra Fitzroy River Council, Adjunct Professor and Senior Research Fellow at the Nulungu Research Institute at the University of Notre Dame and Managing Director of the Indigenous not-for-profit organisation Madjulla
In July 2022 Professor Stephen Muecke and his doctoral Research Assistant, Jennifer Eadie from the University of Notre Dame, spent time on the River Country with members of Yurmulun (Pandanus Park) and Balginjirr communities to conduct the Feasibility Study of the Martuwarra Walking Track.
The Martuwarra Fitzroy River is Western Australia’s largest River and largest listed Aboriginal cultural heritage site. It has been cared for by First Law and Indigenous land management practices for millennia. Over the last 150 years, it has experienced multi-scalar damage from agriculture, mining and invasive species. Interventive measures are now required to improve the health of the River and the communities that live along it’s banks.
A submission to the Special Rapporteur on the rights of Indigenous Peoples on: Indigenous Women and the Development, Application, Preservation and Transmission of Scientific Knowledge available at Figshare
Professor Anne Poelina, Dr Magali McDuffie and Dr Alexander Hayes have completed and lodged a submission to the United Nations Human Rights 'Special Procedures', Indigenous Peoples and Civil Society, attention of the Special Rappoteur on toxics and human rights.
