Summary  Indigenous ecological knowledge can inform contemporary water management activities including water allocation planning. This paper draws on results obtained from a 3‐year study to reveal the connection between Indigenous socio‐economic values and river flows in the Daly River, Northern Territory. Qualitative phenological knowledge was analysed and compared to quantitative resource‐use data, obtained through a large household survey of Indigenous harvesting and fishing effort. A more complete picture of Indigenous resource‐use and management strategies was found to be provided by the adoption of mixed methods. The quantitative data revealed resource‐use patterns including when and where species are harvested. The qualitative Indigenous ecological data validated results from the quantitative surveys and provided insights into harvesting and resource management strategies not revealed by the discrete time‐bound surveys. As such, it informed the scientific understanding of patterns of resource use and relationships between people, subsistence use and river flows in the Daly River catchment. We recommend that natural resource managers, researchers and Indigenous experts prioritise collaborative projects that record Indigenous knowledge to improve water managers’ understanding of Indigenous customary aquatic resource use.

Indigenous voices in government-led natural resource management planning processes are often marginalised, misinterpreted, or excluded. Third parties, including government-employed geographers, can act as knowledge brokers in defining Indigenous values and interests so they might be included in government planning processes. This paper reviews and assesses a research partnership that evolved to document the complex and diverse ecological and hydrological values held by Ngan'gi speakers about the Daly River and connected water places in the Northern Territory, Australia. The development of trust through the slow building of a relationship based on place-based dialogue, a key aspect of participatory action research (PAR), created the foundation from which a mutually beneficial and respectful research partnership was able to, and continues to, evolve. Both research partners' perspectives are revealed here to articulate why the research partnership was deemed a success. Key lessons learned from the research partnership include the importance of trust, respect for place-based learning, researcher and institutional flexibility, and awareness of the intricacies of relationship building and the benefits that research engagement can bring to Indigenous people and communities. We aim to further dialogue among geographers and interested disciplines as to the potential for PAR methods to foster mutually beneficial Indigenous-non-Indigenous research partnerships.

In caring for Country, Indigenous Australians draw on laws, knowledge and customs that have been inherited from ancestors and ancestral beings, to ensure the continued health of lands and seas with which they have a traditional attachment or relationship. This is a reciprocal relationship, whereby land is understood to become wild/sick if not managed by its people, and in turn individuals and communities suffer without a maintained connection to Country. It is well understood by Indigenous people that if you ‘look after country, country will look after you’. Indigenous knowledge systems that underpin the local care (including use and management) of Country are both unique and complex. These knowledge systems have been built through strong observational, practice-based methods that continue to be enacted and tested, and have sustained consecutive generations by adapting continually, if incrementally, to the local context over time. This paper describes a research partnership that involved the sharing and teaching of Ngan’gi Aboriginal ecological knowledge in order to reveal and promote the complex attachment of Ngan’gi language speakers of the Daly River, Australia, to water places. This engagement further led to the incremental co-development of an Indigenous seasonal calendar of aquatic resource use. The seasonal calendar emerged as an effective tool for supporting healthy Country, healthy people outcomes. It did this by facilitating the communication of resource management knowledge and connection with water-dependent ecosystems both inter-generationally within the Ngan’gi language group, as well as externally to non-Indigenous government water resource managers. The Indigenous seasonal calendar form has subsequently emerged as a tool Indigenous language groups are independently engaging with to document and communicate their own knowledge and understanding of Country, to build recognition and respect for their knowledge, and to make it accessible to future generations.

No abstract