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Denise Goodfellow

I came to Darwin in 1975 after the suicide of my brother and the near death of my sister a few months later in a car accident. I worked as a music teacher, and then took up an offer to shoot buffalo for a pet meat firm. I loved the work and my colleagues, but because of my young daughter couldn't do it full time.

In 1981 I stood for Darwin City Council in an attempt to save mangrove habitat. Learning that Indigenous people lacked representation I tried to win the trust of those in my ward by accepting an invitation from a senior woman to catch a snake. After four hours wading around a muddy billabong inhabited by large estuarine crocodiles, I caught a water python. When this became public knowledge, I was threatened with prosecution, to the horror of the women in the community. To protect me the senior woman adopted me so that I could hunt legally. In following years I worked with her and other women to rid an Arnhem Land settlement of abusive police officers. Elders named me Lawungkurr after an ancestral woman still respected for her mediation skill.

In the early 1980s I began work as a specialist birdwatching/natural history guide and as a biological consultant, carrying out surveys of fauna and flora right across remote NW Australia, often working alone. The ignorance of operators was appalling, as was the racist and sexist attitudes of some. However, they weren't alone. Such attitudes were built in to the structure of government and the bureaucracy as I discovered when training Indigenous rangers in 1989. The lack of understanding of Indigenous people is still rampant buoyed by the structures of government and business.

In 1993 I ran a national campaign against operators in Kakadu National Park who were ramming crocodiles with boats to make them jump for visitors. I was blacklisted by the local tourism industry, and still today am regarded by some as "the enemy"!

In the early 2000s, at the request of my Bininj (Aboriginal) sisters, I helped them established a small appropriate tourism project on their country, Baby Dreaming, in western Arnhem Land. This program aimed to fit tourism to Indigenous people, not the other way around. The first visitors – an American couple - made such an impression that elders later drove 450 kms to my home to tell me the visitors were “great” and more were welcome. Previously they’d been scared and distrustful of white people. Elders also decided to make their prized hunting waterhole a sanctuary for birds. Unfortunately we lost our little bit of government funding. Despite my decades of experience as a guide and the elders' thousands of years of experience looking after visitors to their country and teaching others, we were all considered unaccredited (we didn't have a Cert. 4 in training). Elders said if that my experience in the field wasn't enough what hope was there for them.

I worked as a wildlife and Indigenous adviser to television ("Deadly 60; Nicolai Drozdov's World of Animals and others), and in 2000 was contracted as an interpreter/transcriber on the Lonely Planet’s "Guide to Aboriginal Australia". In 2009 I was invited to lecture on birds and other wildlife of the Top End, conservation and Indigenous tourism throughout the US. In 2011 the Sabah Tourism Board invited me to speak on the issue of attracting visitors to their country. This year I shall be speaking at the Colombia Bird Festival and next year in Hawaii. I always highlight the importance of both genders in birdwatching tourism, an area that has largely focused on male perspectives.

My book, "Fauna of Kakadu and the Top End" (published 1993) has been utilised as a text by the University of NSW for thirteen years. "Birds of Australia’s Top End" (published in 2000, 2005) won high praise in the US, and from some Australians, despite a campaign in this country against the book (and me). My autobiographical "Quiet Snake Dreaming" is used in European educational institutions, and also in cross-cultural awareness courses (not in Australia though). American author, Jonathon Franzen described QSD as giving him "huge insight" into the lives of Aboriginal Australians.

I am presently vice-chair of Wildlife Tourism Australia, and doing a PhD on American couples who travel internationally to watch birds, through Southern Cross University.

I believe that the institutional bias that works against Indigenous people is also reflected in attitudes towards women and seniors. Not only does it stifle us as a people and locks out the sort of diversity needed to give government resilience, but it works against our international interests, for example it prevents Australians from developing the sort of world view needed when one is dealing with trading partners such as China.