They both said, “Look, we’d like to do some work with Indigenous ranger groups.”
Mm’hm
So I asked them what they’d like to do and they said, “maybe some mentoring or whatever”, so I sort of suggested, let’s bring a group of rangers over from Arnhem Land and you guys show them what you do here in your country and then they can talk about what they do in their country. You can talk about the problems and the dramas you have, like carrying out your day-to-day job, and they can talk about you know the dramas they have and you can get together and how about making a DVD of it? And they both said, “Yep, let’s do it.” So that’s what we did last – in 2010 in March, we brought a group of six Indigenous guys from Laynhapuy over to Wildman River and Lance Spain and Gregory Peckem were the two Indigenous guys down there. And, it was kind of funny because no-one really wanted to get involved in it. No-one wanted to put money in. Anyway, so to get money to actually get those guys over, we did it all on Abstudy money. You’re allowed to bring people over for a certain amount of you know –
Away from base funding.
Away from base sort of funding, which is a bit of a nightmare, but we did it. It came over. The ABC Stateline got onto us and anyway, they came down and filmed all the stuff that we were filming on our little low tech cameras, they filmed it. It went to air and as soon as it went to air – it was a really good story. In fact the boys at Laynha won a Chief Minister’s award for it.
Right.
Okay. Then everybody wanted to get involved, you know like Parks & Wildlife, their media group wanted to get involved, CDU wanted to get involved, so it worked really well. So then we had to sort of like, it dawned on us that’s a really good way of recording what you do with these ranger groups that can’t read and write. And to be honest with you, they don’t need to know how to read and write to get the skills to do their job. Right? So then we started using the videos to record what we do with these guys. Now what we’d do, we’d sit down through the night, because we’d normally camp out, and just on a small computer we’d watch what we’d done that day. And it’s not cut into a movie, it’s bits and pieces but everybody would sit there and intensely watch it. So not only are you teaching them through the day but after dinner, these guys are coming back and watching themselves do these things. So it created this want to participate.