Elder John Jones: Fraser Island - Is "wildernes" a racist term ?

'Hunters and protectors'

Aborigines argue it doesn't exist, a green critic says it's about recreation.
Even the Wilderness Society is rethinking the word. How did "wilderness" come to cause such offence?

Wilderness is a beautiful and biblical word, with ancient Old English origins - a place of wild beasts.
"I am the voice of one crying in the wilderness," says John in the King James Bible. In that to me it meant an uninhabited, savage, desolate and vast area, and it is mentioned at least 300 times.

Today, there is something almost magical about the idea of wilderness. It conjures up images of forest-clad mountains, gorges, wildlife and streams filled with crystal-clear water.

Wilderness has been one of the most powerful weapons in the environmentalist's arsenal - a verbal missile that anyone from a feral to a federal politician can use to effect.
When the word is invoked, the community knows environmentalists are speaking of a sacred tract of land - a word that is worth a thousand photos.

Around its standard, campaign after campaign has been fought to protect places with names that sing when coupled with the word wilderness - Colo, Franklin, Tarkine and Coolangubra.

It has helped to fill the coffers of environmental groups and hypnotised leaders such as the NSW Premier, Bob Carr, who has painted dark green on the map of the state in splodges that only the most thankless environmentalist could fail to appreciate.

It is easy to see why green groups are so attached to wilderness and how the word has become one of their most precious assets. No wonder, then, that conservationists are worried by Aboriginal requests for people to stop using it.

If the request came from a right-wing shock jock, farmers' groups or four-wheel-drivers, then it would be easy for environmentalists to say "no". Greens and their supporters, however, feel almost as passionately about Aboriginal rights and reconciliation as they do about conservation. Yet the two pet subjects have provoked an increasingly public brawl over the legitimacy and future of the word wilderness.

One thing is certain: the biggest beneficiaries will be neither the greens nor Aboriginal people. It will be those who despise wild places and the government authorities that run them.

Aboriginal leaders say wilderness is a racist term that perpetuates the myth of terra nullius, excluding them from managing traditional lands. On another front, some of the nation's most influential scientists say the word has distracted the public from the real environmental woes.

This is not just a debate over semantics, though definitions are important.
Already, Aboriginal people such as Wiradjuri man Shaun Hooper are negotiating with the NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service for co-management of reserves in the Blue Mountains. This could result in kangaroos being hunted with rifles in wilderness areas, and public vehicles having access to sites from which they are currently prohibited. Hooper says: "Conservationists talk about having the same feeling that an Aboriginal person has for country, but if they did, there is no way they would call a place like the Wollemi a wilderness."

In the past few weeks, for the first time in Australia, the name of a wilderness was nearly changed because of pressure from Aboriginal groups. Also, Australia's most visible wilderness lobby group, The Wilderness Society, no longer sees it as viable to remain married only to the word that has been printed on tens of thousands of their stickers and banners. Underneath their name they now talk about "Defending Australia's WildCountry". And their vision statement, which promises to "protect, promote and restore wilderness", will soon be expanded to include the protection and promotion of "natural process across Australia for the survival and ongoing evolution of life on Earth".

The WildCountry project's co-ordinator, Virginia Young, says the understanding of the word wilderness needs to be enriched, not abandoned. "It's a useful term that clearly needs to be redefined. [But] if we are going to be on about biodiversity conservation, then we are going to have to work through a different framework."

"WildCountry" is still about wilderness, but it is more about conservation across the entire landscape. "Wilderness means a place with an absence of impacts of modern technological society, not the absence of people and certainly not the absence of traditional culture," she says.

Tim Flannery, scientist, author and director of the South Australian Museum, has also weighed in on the side of the Aboriginal community, as have many prominent archaeologists. They say Aboriginal people visited and used every corner of the continent and that nowhere was empty of people until Europeans arrived. In other words, these scientists and many Aboriginal people see wilderness - especially the legislative version - as yet another act of dispossession.

"All of Australia has been a human-created artefact for the last 47,000 years," Flannery says. "There's nothing natural about the Australia I live in, except Lord Howe Island, which was a wilderness until 1788. The Wollemi Wilderness is no more a wilderness than if you had taken people out of the English countryside for 150 years. Wollemi has only been a wilderness for the last 100 years or so. None of these wilderness areas have got the biodiversity they had 150 years ago.

"This is another fallout of terra nullius. This was someone else's land and they managed it very carefully. I feel that the Aboriginal people were there, it's just that they haven't mown the lawn for a while."

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Definitions aside, it is a real possibility, warn greens such as Muir, that a generation of environmental victories are at risk because of attacks from the Aboriginal community and the scientists.
Wilderness has become the green movement's very own loaded dog.