Caring for Country
The sacred responsibility to maintain the health of one's traditional lands.
Caring for country includes physical management like burning, hunting, and gathering, as well as spiritual maintenance through ceremony and song. Neglected country becomes spiritually sick, and its sickness affects the people who belong to it.
When country is sick, we are sick. When we care for country, country cares for us.
Aboriginal land management practices are now recognized for their ecological sophistication.
Oral Tradition
Written about in
- What Aboriginal Australians mean by belonging to Country
Care covers the practical work of burning, hunting and gathering as well as ceremony and song. Country left untended is understood to become sick, and its sickness reaches the people who belong to it.