Understanding barriers to women caring for Country

This report examines the systemic, cultural, and gendered barriers that prevent Aboriginal women in New South Wales from fully exercising their cultural authority to care for Country in New South Wales. It recognises Aboriginal women as custodians of Law/Lore, knowledge and ceremony who play central and enduring roles in maintaining the health of Land, Sea and Sky Country. Despite their deep cultural authority, women continue to be marginalised within environmental governance, natural disaster and climate change resilience and preparedness.

Through an extensive literature review and barrier analysis, the report explores how intersectional discrimination including systemic racism and sexism exclusion from decision-making processes have disrupted women’s critical roles in maintaining the Dreaming through caring for Country. These barriers are further compounded by gendered expectations, lack of access to resources, and the undervaluation of Aboriginal women’s knowledge reducing communities’ resilience to the impacts of environmental decline, climate change and the increasing frequency and severity of natural hazards.

The report is structured around six interconnected themes for women caring for Country: Law/Lore, kinship, ceremony, land, sea and sky, each demonstrating the holistic and relational worldview that underpins Aboriginal women’s caring for Country. Narrated through the Seven Sisters Dreaming stories and on-ground case studies demonstrating each theme. The barriers analysis uses a two-eyed seeing approach integrating western systems thinking, and the Aboriginal relational Bidjaay yugal gaay methodology to identify the barriers and understand the impacts of the interconnected, reinforcing systemic and relational feedback loops with the seven barrier areas:

1. gendered biocultural loss
2. intersectional discrimination and silencing of women’s voices
3. erosion and devaluation of women’s cultural knowledge
4. patriarchy and gender bias in systems
5. colonisation and historical dispossession
6. institutional and policy exclusion
7. socioeconomic inequality and care burdens.

At the core of the analysis is the recognition that gendered biocultural loss, the erosion of interconnected cultural and ecological systems, undermines both biocultural resilience and women’s ability to fully exercise their cultural authority to care for Country.

Bidjaay yugal gaay is used as a biocultural resilience framework embedding an Aboriginal relational ontology within systems thinking to map the interdependent relationships between culturally significant species, Law/Lore, kinship, ceremony, ecological indicators and reciprocal obligations. Using both cultural and scientific indicators this framework positions biocultural resilience as both the measure and the method for addressing gendered biocultural loss. The observations centre strengthening Aboriginal women’s biocultural resilience, governance and cultural authority across multiple scales and timeframes.

National priorities include a national policy framework for gendered biocultural resilience and long-term funding for gender parity Aboriginal-led cultural restoration. New South Wales priorities include co-developing a New South Wales biocultural resilience framework and monitoring evaluation reporting improvement (MERI)framework and investing in place-based cultural restoration and intergenerational leadership programs.

Aboriginal women are caring for Country and resilience leaders for communities in the face of increasing impacts of environmental decline, climate change and frequency and severity of natural hazards. Without this gendered biocultural resilience, caring for Country cannot be fully realised.