Cultural inscriptions of nature : some implications for sustainability, nature-based tourism and national parks

Kakadu National Park covers an area of some 19,804 km 2 extending south within the Alligator Rivers system from the coast of northern Australia. As the Management Plan 2007- 2014 makes clear, this land is an Aboriginal living cultural landscape where deep ongoing relationships exist between the Bininj people and their country. The poetry of Bill Neidjie, an Australian Aboriginal senior elder, provides a portal into this relationship for nonindigenous people. The landscape is the people and the people are the landscape. Jacob Nayinggul, a senior elder of the Manilagarr clan puts it this way: 'Land and people go together. Every place has a clan name, and every place has a clan.' Although Kakadu is inscribed on to the World Heritage List for its ecological values, the national park is co-managed with the Bininj people and it is Bininj 'cultural rules' that animate the management praxis of Kakadu. Equally, the tourism vision for the park emerges from Bininj epistemology. Jacob Nayinggul, who is also the current Chairman of the Kakadu Board of Management, expresses it in the shared vision for tourism in Kakadu: 'Our land has a big story. Sometimes we tell a little bit at a time. Come and hear our stories, see our land. A little bit might stay in your hearts. If you want more, you will come back.' The visitor experience at Kakadu is defined in terms of the 'extraordinarily beautiful' landscape, the ancient cultural heritage, the wildlife and the need for respect and protection into perpetuity. It is clear from the tourism vision statement that an understanding of Bininj culture, landscape and customary law are one and the same and indivisible. Culture is inseparable from the landscape.