Sacred mountains celebrate decade back under Aboriginal management

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What began as a bold experiment - handing over control of two national parks in New South Wales to traditional Aboriginal owners a decade ago - is today being hailed as a landmark act of reconciliation.

In 2006 the NSW Government formally handed back Gulaga and Biamanga National Parks on the far south coast to the Yuin people, because of the significant cultural sites they contain and the living links to local Indigenous groups.

Gulaga, which was previously formally known as Mount Dromedary, is an imposing 823-metre mountain rising near the coastal town of Narooma.

Biamanga National Park includes Mumbulla Mountain, further south in the Bega valley.

To the Yuin people, Gulaga is known as the Mother Mountain, and has always been a woman's place.

It includes sacred sites where Aboriginal women would retreat for storytelling, ceremony and childbirth.

Meanwhile Mumbulla was a traditional men's mountain, and contains initiation sites where boys would become men of the Yuin tribe.

Gulaga board of management chair Iris White said the park was a "beautiful" and "spiritual" place.

"A lot of people enjoy [Gulaga] for its natural beauty," Ms White said.

"From a cultural perspective, there's a sense of connectedness with this place ... it's a spiritual place."

Ms White said generations of Yuin people had come to the sacred women's site high on the slopes of Gulaga, to share stories and conduct ceremonies.

Aboriginal discovery ranger Cath Thomas said when approaching the natural cathedral of huge granite tors, people were encouraged to remain open-minded.

"We've got to use our 'third eye'," Ms Thomas said, tapping her forehead.

"If you don't use your 'third eye', you don't get the story - the dreamtime story, and the dreamtime stories in the rocks."

Ms Thomas identified a huge granite boulder next to the track as the "healing rock".

"It actually brings out all their bad energy that [people] carry, and puts a lot of the good energy back in," she said.

"I feel like it gives me the energy that I need to take on the world."

Ownership result of 'decades of struggle'

The energy the Yuin people have harnessed from Gulaga mountain took a very practical form when they successfully lobbied the NSW Government for traditional ownership back in 2006.

Biamanga Board chair Paul Stewart said it was the culmination of decades of struggle for legal recognition of Indigenous links to their land.

"I'm just so happy to put something back," Mr Stewart said.

"Something 10 years ago that we used to drive past and say to our kids, 'that's ours' ... now we have got the chance to manage it."

Traditional ownership of the national parks areas means they are managed in very different ways to other parks.

For instance, a recently released Plan of Management allows Indigenous owners to close the parks to public access for cultural purposes such as initiation rites.

It also allows for the possibility of traditional fire management and hunting on site.

National Parks area manager Preston Cope said those land uses required a departmental rethink.

"There are a lot of native bush tucker foods around this park," Mr Cope said.

"In a normal park, it would be illegal to collect plant material, but in this park if you're an Aboriginal owner and you get permission from the board, then you can come and do that.

"Guns cannot be used - they'd have to use traditional methods for hunting."

Under the joint management arrangement, decisions about the running of the parks are made by the two boards, and implemented by the National Parks and Wildlife Service.

This is what this place is all about, sharing, and there's just so much to learn from it. Aboriginal discovery ranger Cath Thomas

Mr Cope said that added layer of bureaucracy could sometimes delay important decisions, but it added a level of community involvement rarely seen in other national park areas.

"One of [the board's] aspirations is for developing tourism on the park," Mr Cope said.

"If we were managing the park without Aboriginal owners involved, it would be a much more straight-forward business.

"We have to have everybody in agreeance with how the cultural heritage will be interpreted, and to do that, requires a fair bit of work that we wouldn't normally do."

But all parties agree that traditional ownership of the two sacred mountains had led to a cultural revival.

"Especially young people, because they don't know their culture - it's starting to get lost," Ms Thomas said.

"This is what this place is all about, sharing, and there's just so much to learn from it."

Watch this story in full on the latest episode of Australia Wide.

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Topics: indigenous-aboriginal-and-torres-strait-islander, indigenous-culture, narooma-2546, bega-2550, canberra-2600, nsw, act