Profiles: Noongar Boodjar Plants and Animals

Contains information on species of plants and animals found on Noongar Boodjar country. The information has been collected by and with Noongar Boodjar people as part of the Noongar-Wudjari Plant and Animal online Encyclopedia Project

Project summary

Noongar Boodjar Language Centre (NBLC) in Perth have partnered with the Atlas of Living Australia to link Noongar-Wudjari language and knowledge for plants and animals to western science knowledge to create the Noongar-Wudjari Plant and Animal online Encyclopedia.

This project focused on the Noongar-Wudjari clan, from the South coast of WA, and worked specifically with Wudjari knowledge holders - Lynette Knapp and Gail Yorkshire to record, preserve and share their ancestral language and knowledge about plants and animals. Knowledge and language for 90 plants and animals were collected and are now ready for publication through the Atlas of Living Australia (ala.org.au).

The Noongar-Wudjari Plant and Animal online Encyclopedia Project centred around intergenerational knowledge transfer by working directly with traditional knowledge custodians of the bloodline of Wudjari Nation, Lynette Knapp and Gail Yorkshire, to collect, record, protect and share ancestral ecological knowledge. The project focused on training young people in language, ancestral and cultural data collection, fieldwork, community consultations, data management and presentation, plant and animal identification and cultural mapping.

On-Country visits were an integral part of this work and from August 2020 to September 2021 we conducted three on-Country trips, firstly to consult and plan the project with the Traditional Custodians – Gail and Lynette, and two field trips, with these Custodians, to collect language and knowledge for their Country’s plants and animals.

Visiting Country is important because Indigenous ecological knowledge comes from life experience, being part of the land and accessing knowledge from 70K years of oral tradition. Bringing the Wudjari knowledge holders together, on their traditional Country, activated their language brain and their bilingual and autobiographic memory – an active process of interpretation, inference, and reconstruction. This meant the more they discussed stories of plants and animals, the more they remembered.