Nourishing Terrains: Australian Aboriginal Views of Landscape and Wilderness

Deborah Bird Rose is an anthropologist who conducted fieldwork with Aboriginal Australian communities, and this report, prepared for the Australian Heritage Commission, documents Aboriginal understandings of land and country directly from community consultation and collaboration rather than from secondhand ethnographic literature alone. Its strength is that it was produced in direct relationship with Aboriginal knowledge holders and for an official heritage purpose, giving it both community grounding and institutional accountability. Its limit is that Aboriginal relationships to country vary enormously between different nations and language groups across the continent, and this report reflects the specific communities and country Rose worked with and consulted, not a single uniform Aboriginal cosmology that can be extended without qualification to groups not covered by her research.