Keywords

Introduction

In this book so far, we have described a diversity of adaptation responses and touched on some of the challenges inherent in building Indigenous led adaptation, including a lack of resources, loss of traditional knowledge and the way in which colonisation and globalisation has caused ongoing trauma such that climate change further amplifies existing issues.

In this chapter, and using Australia’s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as a focus, we extend these considerations to reflect on the cross-cultural interfaces, particularly communications, that influence the success and implementation of Indigenous driven climate change adaptation activities on their Country.Footnote 1 The chapter draws from a 2-year project, funded by Australia’s National Climate Change Adaptation Research Facility (NCCARF) that investigated Indigenous priorities for climate change adaptation. The study included a survey, two workshops and semi-structured interviews with Aboriginal groups from South Australia, New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland, Northern Territory and traditional owners from the Torres Strait. The research helped identify some Indigenous priorities for managing and adapting to climate change impacts, but specifically, it drew our attention to the significance and role played by climate communications and the ways in which they could be tailored, and then used to encourage Indigenous people to participate in adaptation actions, as well as build cross cultural knowledge collaborations.

Climate Challenges

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in Australia are not just thinking about future and projected change, they are experiencing it in the here and now (Bird et al., 2013; Nursey-Bray et al., 2013, 2019; O’Neill et al., 2012; Petheram et al., 2010; Zander et al., 2013; DCCEEW, 2022). Climate change science shows that in Australia, there will be higher temperatures, ocean warming, hotter, and earlier and more frequent bushfires over extended periods, changes to fruiting and flowering regimes, disruptions to reproductive cycles in wildlife and fewer cyclones that will yet be more intense when they do occur. These climate changes will have multiple implications, one of which is the impact of sea level rise, which may result in potential dispossession and threaten cultural survival.

In Tasmania, coastal sites subject to sea level rise and wind erosion have affected significant rock art sites: in Preminghana, a significant Aboriginal rock art site on the West Coast, based on very friable crumbly rock, is under threat (TAC, 2012). Rock engravings are now commonly submerged by the sea and are protected only by seaweed. In another beach in southwest Tasmania, old established trees have been undercut by water action as a result of recent changes in the high-water regime. Along this eroding coastline there are five rock art sites as well as shell middens which are being destroyed by the rising sea. Middens are occupation sites, where Indigenous peoples over millennia have met and eaten together – the middens are often metres deep accretions of shells that represent what was harvested over the centuries. These midden sites are central to the identity of Tasmanian Aboriginal peoples, especially women who, as Cockerill (2018, 1) notes:

will barely recognize their submarine landscapes, and they will feel this ripple through their cultural identity. Living midden sites will be washed away… the process of cultural recovery among Aboriginal Tasmanians will be further hindered by weather, waves, species and other hallmarks of the Anthropocene.

As Emma Lee describes (Perspective 6.1), these impacts affect gendered cultural identity as well.

Perspective 6.1Identity in a Time of Rising Tides

Emma Lee

I have been an invited subject in both Jessica Cockerill’s evocative essay, Hauntology on country (Cockerill, 2018), and Jen Evan’s critical think-piece, Giving voice to the sacred black female body in Takayna country (Evans, 2018), to describe how Indigenous bodies are the geography of place in Tasmania, Australia. These writings highlight how, in particular, women are physically embodied by the connections to country. By this, our bodies are constructed in tandem with the things of country that make meaning in our lives. In Tasmania, sea country is where women’s governance power resides, where we make of ourselves the roles, responsibilities and obligations to family and country through inhabiting and reflecting marine resources.

Identity, then, as a trawlwulwuy woman of tebrakunna country is bounded by the relationship with sea country. I have always had a connection with the living midden sites of our country – the physical stories of our diets, lives and knowledges – told in the heaped shells, tools, ochre, shelters and human burials that rim and hug the coastline of Tasmania. To be part of a midden and to have my body reflect the contours and histories of these astonishing places is to define myself as an Indigenous woman.

Rising seas are not unknown for a culture that is 40,000 years old in Tasmania; our island home was once connected to the mainland of Australia. The land bridge was flooded more than 10,000 years ago and changed our histories. The midden culture had to be built anew, as our living floors of the past were subsumed by the great tides. Adaptation and resilience to change were previously not insurmountable challenges, we were able to rebuild our geography and create new middens that have lasted since then. As women, our identities and connections to sea country were not torn, but were a consistency and harmony that repaired and balanced the damage of those colossal sea changes.

The comfort I have in knowing that our women and their bodies were a marker for cohesion in creating the midden cultural heritage, giving rise to my identity, is tempered by the fact that those conditions are unlikely to be repeated today. Colonisation has wrought trauma and disruption to our lives and stolen our rights to continue to make our coastal geography as women of the sea. No more can we manage sea country, through the representations of middens, by providing food for our families, giving birth and being buried in them, singing the songs and applying the ochre that give life to our bodies and place.

The added pressure of the immediate dangers we live in today such as additional sea level rises and warming waters, has also meant that the middens that defined my body and identity are being annihilated. Middens I grew up with are now gone; the tides have washed them away. This gives rise to a question: am I still a trawlwulwuy woman if our middens are gone? How can I adapt my body when my connectors to sea country are destroyed? Do I drown alongside my cultural heritage?

These are not easy questions to face. Nor does it seem the responses are easily identifiable or accessible. The characteristic of my heart belongs to these places, they make me who and what I am today. Yet I must believe that there is an answer somewhere, that my very being will not disappear. Perhaps I am able to adapt to the immediacy of identity and middens and use memory and oral histories as the gateway to connection, but somehow this leaves me with unfulfilled desires to belong.

In my dreams I imagine that a great, future revolution will occur that allows us to return to our ways and rebuild our middens, in the process redefining our connections to new spaces, species and agency. However, hope is a poor substitute for action. I do not know the answers, but there is a glimmer for me as just one individual woman from tebrakunna country.

We survived then – through the rushing waters and again later when the strangers came - and we will survive now.

Somehow, I need to shift the tangible identity markers of middens into a statement of belonging in other ways. Perhaps this is what resilience means, to never give the power to define my identity to someone or something else.

I do not blame sea country for taking back what we made of her, the middens that represent our connections. Sea country has her own agency, her own story and journey. Resilience and adaptation may mean that I forge a personal peace with the life-giver that is each wave encroaching on my identity. Perhaps this is the lesson and story, that she remains and I go, regardless of my thoughts, identity and connections. Sea country is eternal, she will teach future generations the lessons that need to be known and these will be different from the lessons that I have embodied.

Adaptation to identity is personal and myriad yet connected with a life far greater than just this trawlwulwuy body. Sea country will guide me, guide many more to come, and the skills to read her, listen and know, do not necessarily change – just the answers. Identity, then, may well be nested not in the things that I once thought, but the ability to keep those old ways refreshed, invigorated and alive (Photo 6.1).

Photo 6.1
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Tasmanian Sea Country. (Credit: Emma Lee)

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Emma’s story finds resonance with the Ngarindjeri people of the Coorong in South Australia, where middens and sites of cultural significance are also at threat of erosion and sea level rise (Wiltshire, 2019).

However, many other kinds of cultural sites will be at risk. Coastal Aboriginal quarries across Australia (and related stone tool making workshops, often containing thousands if not millions of artefacts), are now often found out of place due to flooding. These quarries and associated workshops are rare and critically important cultural sites to Aboriginal peoples and their destruction due to climate change will cause irreversible cultural damage to their peoples.

Uluru, in central Australia is another example. Predicted to experience even hotter weather, drought, fire and flash floods, these factors will combine to affect the morphology of the rock in such a way that it may ‘weather’ the rock so that it will cause caverns, that will lead to a honeycomb effect, literally changing the face of Uluru. This impact will have profound implications for the Anangu people for whom Uluru is a sacred site (Hughes et al., 2018) (Photo 6.2).

Photo 6.2
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Uluru, a famous Anangu site, will be affected by climate change. (Credit: Melissa Nursey-Bray)

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In the areas hardest hit, forced or involuntary migration may be needed, and those in remote or rural areas will be forced to relocate or migrate. This is a serious issue in the Torres Strait, (the island region at the very top of Australia), where the displacement of islanders and thus migration to mainland Australia is likely (Hennessy et al., 2007). Yet, even when faced with the knowledge of climate change and the need to relocate, Elders in the Torres Strait simply do not want to move:

When the high tide and strong winds come together, it breaks. We pray we don’t lose our homes. We don’t want to leave this place. (Dennis Gibumam, cited in Roache, 2019, 1)

Security of tenure remains fundamental to achieving appropriate policy and cultural responses to climate change in Australia.

Many culturally important traditional harvest species for Australia’s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, such as turtle and dugong are also going to be impacted by climate change. For example, the Green Turtle has a reproductive cycle that is heat sensitive, with males produced in cooler temperatures and females in hotter temperatures. Over time, due to increased heat, more females than males will hatch causing reproductive imbalance and ultimately affecting hunting regimes. Similarly, as sea level rise and erosion cause some beaches to wash away, turtles – who have a magnetic imprint that enables them to return to the same beach to breed – will (and are) find it hard to return to the same beach to breed (Brothers & Lohmann, 2015). Increased storms, ocean acidification and warming will also affect dugong (another key cultural species), and the seagrass habitats on which they depend, affecting their range and distribution over time, and in turn cultural activities associated with them (Cavallo et al., 2015).

Many Australian Indigenous groups have also observed the impact of climate change on ‘bush tucker’ species, which now flower at different times, or not at all. In many cases, increased heat, or changes to precipitation and water regimes have restricted the distribution of key and important species. In turn these changes are affecting traditional knowledge as these species are the ‘signs’ by which people read the landscape and which are embedded within millennia old knowledge systems, are now changing (Photo 6.3).

Photo 6.3
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Wildflowers such as these in Arabana country are scarcer due to fewer rainfall events. (Credit: Melissa Nursey-Bray)

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Bush flowers – it’s make us sad, things are not the same, we used to get out and we used to get so many flowers, so many kinds, now you just get a few and there not whole areas in flower, used to pick whole bunches! (Arabana respondent, cited in Nursey-Bray et al., 2020)

In tropical savannas, such as Kakadu National Park, (in northern Australia), which is the country of the Bininj/Mungguy people, climate change impacts will affect sources of sustenance such as water birds, fish, turtles, magpie geese, crocodiles and freshwater food plants such as waterlilies (Bowman et al., 2010; Ibbett, 2010; Leger & Fisk, 2016).

It is not just natural and cultural systems and practices that are being impacted by climate change. Climate policy frames consistently overlook Indigenous realities in Australia, including the fact that the majority of Indigenous peoples live in cities. While 75% of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders live in cities, 75% of funding goes to those living on their Country, or are invested in land and sea management programs. Cities today thus remain the locations that most embody the continued colonist occupation of traditional territory, or as Cockerill (2018, 1) states so eloquently, “Western colonisation is a haunting that started with genocide and continues with the Anthropocene”. This situation creates an erasure of Indigenous peoples in decision making and policy about how to address climate impacts in both urban and remote contexts (Nursey-Bray et al., 2022).

It also means that socio-economic impacts are amplified by climate change. Along with many other Indigenous peoples who live in urban centres, including in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the United States, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Venezuela, Norway and Kenya (consistent with a broader trend towards global urbanisation), many urban Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders live in poor suburbs, in cheap, poorly built housing that are not well insulated or protected against heat, cold, or flooding (Brand et al., 2016; Horne et al., 2013). Often multiple people live in the same house, again making adapting to climate change very difficult. Heat stress caused by higher temperatures is harder to adapt to when many people live in insufficient and unsustainable housing, and further many cannot afford nor have access to air conditioning (or air conditioning that works) (Horne et al., 2013). In town camps in Alice Springs, Australia, heat stress and other impacts cause hospitalisation or death (Low Choy et al., 2013). Diseases such as dengue fever, are also predicted to become more widespread; people that live in tropical regions will face accelerated climate related disease risks (Russell et al., 2009).

Adapting to Change

Despite these challenges, Indigenous Australians have been active in pursuing adaptation and mitigation for their country and people. Some peoples such as the Arabana, the Torres Strait and Yorta Yorta have been developing their own adaptation strategies. For example, the Torres Strait Climate Change Strategy 2010–2013 asserts that:

This Torres Strait Climate Change Strategy provides our region with a guiding framework and action plan so we can proactively address current and potential impacts by identifying the range of priority responses required based on sound scientific research and community involvement. (Torres Strait Regional Authority (TSRA), 2014, 1)

Other groups focus on the documentation of climate change, development of indicators and seasonal calendars, (often led by Elders) as modes of knowledge transmission. The Miriwoong people in the Northern Territory have produced an interactive seasonal calendar, showing ongoing and future weather patterns, so as to help ensure younger generations to adapt to those changes. Some groups, including Girringun Aboriginal Corporation and the Northern Australia Indigenous Land and Sea Management Authority (NAILSMA) focus on the building of networks and partnerships with Western scientists to build on Country programs, including wider management models such as co-management. Other groups have harnessed their TEK about fire to work with governments and researchers to build carbon farming programs.

The West Arnhem Land Fire Abatement Project is a case in point; it is a partnership between the Aboriginal Traditional Owners and Indigenous ranger groups of the plateau, Darwin Liquefied Natural Gas (DLNG), the Northern Territory Government and the Northern Land Council. Through this partnership, Indigenous ranger groups are implementing strategic fire management across 28,000 km2 of Western Arnhem Land to reduce the frequency of wildfires and so offset some of the greenhouse gas emissions from the Liquefied Natural Gas plant at Wickham Point in the city of Darwin.

Other groups incorporate adaptation planning within wider management plans. For example, the Ngarrindjeri people explicitly address climate change in their Sea Country plan (Ngarrindjeri Tendi (2006), called Yarluwar-Ruwe:

We recognise the huge impacts of global warming on our lands and waters and all living things. In recent years we have observed changes in our local environment that tells us that climate change is a reality. We see that the breeding behaviour of birds is changing, and the fruiting and flowering of our bush foods is changing. We have watched our fresh water holes dry up or turn salty and we’ve seen our coastal camping places and middens washed away by rising sea levels. When we lose these places we lose not only part of our cultural heritage, but we also lose an irreplaceable record of Ngarrindjeri adaptation to climate change in the past. (Ngarrindjeri Tendi, 2006, 19)

At a community level, different groups tailor their responses to local circumstances. In Kownayama, Queensland, adaptation work focusses on sustaining wetlands, fire monitoring, town and weather planning and feral weed and plant eradication. Others like the Alinytjara Wilurara in South Australia, have developed climate ‘report cards’ which provide an assessment of climate impacts, so they can work out how to progress adaptation.

Currently there are also over 2100 Indigenous rangers who work within Ranger Centres across Australia to look after their traditional Countries. Many of these Ranger groups are now focusing on how to address and adapt to climate change. One example is the outreach activity run by the Dhimurru and Yirrkala Rangers in the Northern Territory. These Rangers based in North-East Arnhem Land work with their local schools to deliver a Learning on Country program about understanding climate change and its effects on seasons and the abundance of natural resources. In this program, Elders take students to important places in their region to teach/share cultural stories about important sites, sea-levels, tides, seasons and changes to the landscape through song and dance.

However, despite this array of adaptation innovations which show how Australia’s Indigenous peoples are employing both traditional and innovative approaches to cope with impacts of climate change and variability, finding ‘fit’ for them is still a challenge. There remain issues in achieving effective collaboration at both state and federal levels between Indigenous peoples and the government agencies responsible for climate change policy planning and development. Further, there continues to be challenges in the dialogue between western scientific researchers and Indigenous peoples as they seek to work out how to respectfully utilise traditional knowledge for adaptation planning. For example, for the Anangu people in South Australia, despite their extensive ecological knowledge - there remains a need to develop mechanisms that allow traditional ecological knowledge to co-exist with scientific knowledge to assist future planning and management of natural resource systems (Bardsley & Wiseman, 2012).

We argue that these tensions between Indigenous peoples and policy makers are amplified due to systemic inappropriate communication and engagement. Top-down institutional processes still dominate policy in ways that do not facilitate Indigenous voices and do not adequately recognise traditional cultures and practices. In July 2021, a National First Peoples Gathering on Climate Change, affirmed that Indigenous peoples “want to set their own agenda on climate knowledge and action”. In reflecting on these limitations, we argue that appropriate communication tools will help find fit for Indigenous initiatives within broader governance regimes and acknowledge the diversity in adaptation responses currently being brokered by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders across Australia.

Bespoke Climate Communications Are Key for Effective Indigenous Climate Change Adaptation

For the remainder of this chapter, the focus will be on exploring how the communication interface between Australia’s Indigenous peoples and those who are working in the climate change and adaption field may be progressed. Working with Indigenous groups in Australia (when there are so many) has particular challenges and we do not pretend that our findings represented in this chapter are representative, they are insights only that may provide guidance relating to future communications.

The first step is to seek out and learn the Indigenous communications landscape. Langton et al. (2012) argue that specific communications in an Australian Indigenous context are needed to help build policy responses at an institutional level. Choy et al. (2013) view Indigenous climate change communications as a necessary support mechanism for the development of collaborations between different stakeholders, noting that Indigenous communications and engagement should be designed to “ensure that the next generation of Aboriginal communities are across climate change adaptation to address issues of succession planning” (Choy et al., 2013, 2). For Green and Minchin (2014), communications and engagement are mechanisms used to help reduce health impacts in Indigenous contexts associated with climate change.

Climate change adaptation communications are also a tool for spreading knowledge about climate change itself (Moser, 2014). Appropriate communications can spur Indigenous peoples into action, and encourage their active involvement in projects that are designed to help Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples adapt to climate change (Nursey-Bray & Palmer, 2018). For Arbon and Rigney (2014, 482), communications and engagement are “the heartbeats - the centrering, the conveying of knowledge between non-Indigenous and Indigenous participants” and designed to help build relationships and resolve conflict (Cochran et al., 2008). Appropriate communications will also encourage Indigenous community participation in climate initiatives.

Different Understandings of Dominant Terminology Have Implications for Communications

The challenge of working out how to present climate terminology so it is culturally appropriate and has resonance is a key first task. As discussed in Chap. 1, key terms such as ‘vulnerability’, ‘resilience’ and ‘adaptation’, either do not resonate within different Indigenous groups or mean something completely different. Gaps in understanding between Indigenous and Western knowledge systems and in turn management are thus created. The different ways in which vulnerability and resilience paradigms are understood by Indigenous groups and science are illustrative of this dissonance: there is a systematic dichotomous conceptualisation in the literature (and within governance regimes), of Indigenous groups as either ‘vulnerable’ and/or ‘resilient’. This automatic adherence to the view of Indigenous peoples as vulnerable and or resilient can in turn, entrench existing and historical (i.e., colonially derived) structures that make the ‘other’ invisible in decision making, additionally complicating the way climate change knowledge is communicated (Nursey-Bray et al., 2020). Cameron (2012, 4) reflects that the very way scientists talk about vulnerability can limit the ways in which Indigenous peoples can have an input: “buttressing political and intellectual formations that underwrite a new round of dispossession and accumulation in the region”. Or as Maru et al. (2014) observe, Indigenous peoples often in fact have a dual narrative of vulnerability and resilience.

In Australia, our collaborations revealed a rejection of tropes around vulnerability and resilience in favour of assertions of agency and survival. The Arabana people of the Kathi Thanda-Lake Eyre region for example, conceived of themselves as neither vulnerable nor resilient. Instead, they saw themselves as survivors, whether of climate change, or colonisation:

We survived colonisation, we are fragmented and damaged but we survived; all that happened in such a small space of time, how is that different to, well, it is exactly the same with climate change, and we will adapt to that too, again maybe not unscathed, but we will survive. (Arbon, cited in Nursey-Bray et al., 2020)

We not weak! – ‘vulnerable’ you say?! We still here. Always have been, always will be…look, when you come to take our land away, when you come talk to us about climate, well, you might gotten burned in the sun (!) but we’ll still be here. We’re a strong people, not goin anywhere… (Marree respondent 4, cited in Nursey-Bray et al., 2020)

Country looks after us, we look after country, we survive together. We adapt together. Over generations and generations. (Port Augusta Respondent 5, cited in Nursey-Bray et al., 2020)

Significantly, we found that the term ‘adaptation’ is also understood in different ways: Western science explains adaptation as a natural autonomous process (what species do to respond to change) but also asserts it in the literature as a way of understanding how society responds to climate impacts. However, Indigenous peoples propose that adaptation is something that has always happened and is rooted in socio-political and cultural contexts. This view asserts that climate adaptation is not an abstract (or new) idea connected just to climate change, but one rooted in history and time connected to country and everything relating to it.

Adaptation then is not a new practice or concept, but a practice with ancient origins and framed in cultural/historical terms:

Well that idea you have of adaptation, you fellas a bit Johnny come lately with that one! We been adapting to change for ever. You might try take our language, our land, our customs, but we survived all that. Now maybe you want to help us adapt to that? Adaptation?, well that good to help get us jobs, get us some rangers to look after this country we got back now, that’d be good. (Marree Respondent 7, cited in Nursey-Bray et al., 2020)

In this sense, adaptation is the application of old ways to new days and in being constructed as such generates a sense of confidence and a positive outlook that while it is an issue that needs to be overcome, it can nevertheless be done. However, these terms are understood, or represented, we suggest that making the attempt to understand the different ways in which different Indigenous groups understand terms like climate, change, vulnerability, resilience and adaptation is a critical and necessary first step in the embedding and co-creation of appropriate forms of climate change and adaptation communications.

Ensure Messaging is Culturally Aligned and Connected to Country

As noted above, a crucial first step in communicating climate change and adaptation, is to understand and articulate how different terms such as adaptation are understood and the replacement of the dominant trope of Indigenous peoples being vulnerable/resilient with an Indigenous driven one of agency and survival is an important shift in narrative emphasis. Another question is whether or not climate communications are to be situated within positive or negative frames. In what ways do climate related communications need to be culturally attenuated; and, in a country like Australia where there are literally hundreds of (and very diverse) Indigenous groups, how is this balance sought? Who, moreover, will be the carriers, the messengers of these communications? Indigenous peoples, others, or both?

Framing theory helps to answer these questions as frames define problems, assist in the diagnosis of causes, enable evaluation of solutions and prescribe solutions that make communications “more noticeable, meaningful or memorable” (Entman, 1993, 53). Framing theory has been used in other research, where it has been helpful in understanding what triggers public interest in climate change news stories (Foust & O’Shannon Murphy, 2009) or to concentrate audience attention by anchoring it within a resonant cultural or social context (Lück et al., 2016). However, the use of framing theory does not tell people what to think, but instead presents solutions for how they could think about a particular issue.

Many different frames have been used to help communicators give meaning to the climate change story. Early work in this area pitched climate frames as a global issue and helped communicators target public audiences with the intent of making them understand that climate change is a global issue requiring international action based on strong scientific evidence (Palmer, 2013; Palmer et al., 2017). However, researchers argued that this approach was too abstract a notion for most people to grapple with (Painter, 2013), so other frames were introduced. For example, one frame represented climate change as an almost certain apocalypse, and a tipping point for all life on Earth (Russill & Nyssa, 2009). In 2006 climate change was predominantly framed as an absolute catastrophe threatening all life on Earth. Public polling at that time showed 68% of Australians believed “global warming was a serious and pressing problem… [and a] top-rated threat to Australia’s vital interest” (Cook, 2006, 4). At that time, negative framing was also driving high-level political support to tackle climate change, with the then Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd describing climate change as the “great moral, environmental and economic challenge of our age” (Rudd, 2007).

However, this negative framing was challenged in favour of a positive climate change narrative where it was framed as an opportunity to develop a bright new clean and green sustainable future (Futerra, 2010). Consequently, dominant frames about climate change and adaptation shifted from a negative to a positive. Evidence suggests that this change in framing was a mistake: in Australia, as climate change communications became friendlier and positive, public polling showed that people wanting governments to take aggressive action on climate change fell from 68% in 2006 to 36% in 2013 (Hanson, 2013). The Federal election of 2022 comes full circle, with people again overwhelmingly voting for action on climate change.

This history has relevance when deciding how to communicate climate change to Indigenous peoples. Efforts by the Arabana people, the Indigenous traditional owners of Kati Thanda – Lake Eyre region of Australia, highlight the saliency of whether or not to develop positive or negative frames in Indigenous focussed climate communications. When beginning the development of adaptation for their country, it was clear that there was very little interest when positive images and frames were used to describe the climate impacts in the region. However, when the framing was then revised, to construct climate change as a negative and direct threat to the Arabana and their Country, interest was engaged and sustained at a high level for the rest of the project. In this case, the Arabana did not need to be offered saccharine versions of climate change, where impacts are softened, nor required a positive spin to be put on the information. The use of negative frames effectively ‘hooked’ their attention (Nursey-Bray & Palmer, 2018).

Moreover, we found that across Australia, Indigenous peoples constantly asserted their own adaptive capacity, and their confidence in the agency and resilience of their peoples despite agreeing that climate change was a risk. From their perspective, when located amongst the issues they have already had to adapt to, including invasion, massacre, forced relocation from Country and the effects of the Stolen Generation, climate change was constructed as simply another issue that their people will contend with. It is important to develop direct and honest communications about climate change that align with Indigenous world views and their knowledge of country.

Indigenous Humour as a Climate Change Adaptation Education Tool

In collaboration with Indigenous colleagues, we identified that the frame of engagement and how it is situated within cultural world views about climate, we found that humour could be used as a deliberate tool to communicate information in meaningful ways. Humour is undeniably a central feature of Australian Indigenous culture (Duncan, 2014). It plays a pivotal role in shaping daily lives (French, 2014), and has always been a levelling force within Indigenous communities, used as a way of exchanging knowledge and the maintenance of Aboriginal identity (Duncan, 2014). Humour in this case is a complex institutionalised practice central to Aboriginal culture and is used to “regulate social behaviour by joking and shaming tactics” (Duncan, 2014, 2). Stanner (1982, 40) notes “the underlying philosophy of Aboriginal humour is likely to baffle a European mind”, because it is used in a way to deal with elements of their culture alien to a contemporary, non-Indigenous Australian. In particular, Indigenous peoples use humour to help them contend with the ongoing horror of colonisation, an experience non-Indigenous people can ever truly comprehend. Duncan (2014, 82) adds: “humour is the only way we get through hard times”.

There are some examples that support the notion of using humour to frame communications about a serious issue such as climate change to Indigenous Australians. For example, Redmond (2008, 257) references a comedy performed in the Kimberly region of Western Australia, where information about white invasion is performed to an Aboriginal audience who at times were said to experience “a radical loss of bodily composure” from laughing so hard whilst watching the show. Torres Strait Islanders equally use laughter in their culture, but using humour has to be utilised with more caution, especially if the focus is on a family group or an individual’s reputation who “may perceive a slight where none is intended” (Beckett, 2008, 295). The Yolngu dance troupe Chooky Dancers from Elchoe Island used humour as the basis for their dance routines to communicate their own messages about Aboriginal culture. The use of humour in climate change and adaptation communications has also been considered by Walker (2014, 368), who says it might be better “to take a playful and innovative approach in order to engage readers’ hearts and not just their heads” about climate change.

Many non-Indigenous people would find it difficult to comprehend such an approach. As Aboriginal Fulbright scholar Angelina Hurley notes, Indigenous lives and cultures are still being misunderstood and appropriated (Hurley, 2017). Therefore, there is a chance that an added benefit of utilising humour in climate change communications is that Western communicators (involved in the climate change adaptation field) might be enabled to reconstruct their understanding of Indigenous peoples, thus contributing to a wider appreciation and understanding of Australia’s Indigenous peoples. As McCullough (2014, 678) observes “humour creates a space wherein Murri people can talk to each other and fight against non-Indigenous understandings and perceptions of Murri life”.

Social Media Is a Preferred Means of Communication

We suggest that social media is also utilised as an appropriate means of communication: its modus operandi aligns with ancient cultural traditions of Australia’s Indigenous peoples. Indigenous peoples have always been oral and visual societies (Carlson, 2017). For millennia they adorned walls with art and used storytelling for the transferal of cultural norms and Indigenous law. While these traditions persist and are in use today, Australia’s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders have also moved online; they are prolific social media users and use it as a mechanism for sharing stories about important things that relate to a cultural group. Indigenous Australians use Facebook and YouTube as fundamental tools to express their voice and to help affirm cultural identity (Carlson, 2017; Rice et al., 2016). Described as a new frontier, the Indigenisation of social media in Australia means that not only do Indigenous peoples communicate with each other, but it opens up new ways of enabling others from outside of their world to connect and understand them in more meaningful ways (Carlson, 2017), including connections with their Elders, and to facilitate the transferral of important cultural information between generations (Carlson & Frazer, 2018).

Do Not Forget the Dreaming

However, even when achieving the right pitch in communications, there is an ongoing dilemma between knowledge and practice that has the potential to create an impasse in the development of climate communications with some Indigenous groups. For some Indigenous groups knowledge about, and articulation of, ‘the Dreaming’ (an English word used loosely to describe Indigenous creation narratives and religious belief systems), explains away the origins and causes of climate change, and potentially belief in the need and capacity to adapt to its impacts. For example, for the Gunggandji People climate change is central to their origin stories:

Land and sea country as an integrated cultural landscape is reinforced by our creation stories and Song lines that bind land and sea environments together. Often reflecting the great changes that took place when the sea rose up to flood our coastal plains of thousands of years ago. (Gunggandji Aboriginal Corporation, 2013, 10)

For some of the Gunggandji people climate change is not a product of human intervention, but is rather a communication from mother (Earth) that is meant to express her disgust with the way people were treating her. Thus the location of climate change as part of ancient cultural storylines, in many cases appears to engender a sense of fatalism or resignation; a sense that the situation was out of Indigenous control, power, and influence. Yet adapting to it is still conceived as possible when couched within ancestral lived history. An excerpt from the Gunggandji Land and Sea Country Plan (2013, 21) demonstrates this belief:

Climate change is another grave challenge to our country that is not of our making. However, like all coastal groups around Australia, Gunggandji people have demonstrated the capacity to adapt to climate change over thousands of years. Our ancestors have lived through a 10-metre rise in sea level, great changes in rainfall, the arrival of new plant and animal species and the great upheavals caused by volcanic activity as river courses changed and new land forms emerged.

While this assertion of Indigenous world views must be respected, it potentially creates a communication barrier. The adherence to traditional knowledge systems and a belief in adaptive capacity over time contests scientific knowledge about climate change, and its likely impacts on Indigenous peoples and their country. The act then of asserting scientific knowledge as the imprimatur for climate action could not only be perceived as an act of contemporary colonisation but simply rejected because it does not align with Indigenous world views around the causes of climate change.

Conclusion

In this chapter we have presented an overview of some of the key trends and perspectives of Australian Indigenous peoples as they face climate change. A key emphasis in the chapter has been the central role played by communications in building Indigenous adaptation to climate change, and the need to ensure their alignment with the particular cultural needs within each cultural group in Indigenous Australia.

Indigenous peoples across Australia are extremely active in the promotion and development of climate mitigation and adaptation programs. They have done so both independently and in conjunction with policy makers and researchers. They are not afraid of climate change and draw on ancient adaptation skills and practices to manage future changes. However, climate change and dealing with it will be a joint endeavour, and this has specific consequences for the development of key narratives, messages and modes of communication that will be culturally appropriate. Humour is one mechanism that could be used. Ultimately, the challenge of communicating climate change, always a complex challenge, has specific nuances when engaging with Indigenous peoples in Australia.