Arabella Douglas On Intimacy With Nature And Its Relationship With Indigenous Entrepreneurship

Arabella Douglas is a Minyungbul Bundjalung woman, and a visionary leader, here and on the world stage. She leads a TO group Currie Country with grace and grit, imagination, and intellect.

A food activist, lawyer, economist, and scholar, Arabella harnesses the power of food to drive social, economic and environmental change.

She is a nation builder who understands First Nation sciences are indispensable for any effective response to our combined climate, environmental, social, and economic crisis.

A lead author of the Currie Country Social Change Bundjalung Nation Flood Report 2022, Arabella is currently tackling carbon sequestration, rapid housing solutions, and food security.

Arabella has just returned from the UN where she advocated on rivers having living being status and legal personhood status, as well as First Nations role in green economics.

Arabella advises government, industry, and community groups.

Arabella discusses how non-Indigenous people can discover their ancestral connection to the environment and key lessons learned from the First Nations business movement currently leading widespread change.

Highlights from the interview (listen to the podcast for full details)

[Tom Allen] - To start off Arabella, could you please share your background and what led to your passion in creating positive social and environmental impact?

[Arabella Douglas] - Like many people, I started with my career. I was always interested in law, and I'm an environmental lawyer by trade. At the time I started, there was nothing known as social impact or social sustainability. People were just becoming familiar with greening, conditions around development and land use. I've obviously grown up as an Aboriginal person. I've grown up on my own country and innately been involved in First Nations land matters. The combination of those things, university and my professional life saw me play a role in the native title space as the Director of Native Title services groups. For example, I was at UNSW leading the Native Title 10-point plan when John Howard was Prime Minister, in response to the Mabo decision and land use.

Moving forward, I became involved in the environmental planning space, working for blue chip companies and law firms. It was the merging of those two matters which drew me to reimagining social and environmental impact. It also addressed my heart work. I haven't done a lot of professional work for Aboriginal communities per se, because I always offered that work on a voluntary basis because it was heart-driven. I've cultivated my professional skills with mentors in my life; one told me, "get out of criminal law and get into environmental planning law, because it's more technical and sits in a superior jurisdiction in New South Wales." That mentor guided me on using my passion for science. I've always been interested in science generally, and using it in a technical way.

As you mature in life, what you're really seeking is a way to combine your heart work with your skills.

Currie Country as a formulated idea has been around for more than 20 years. Because I've been in the Native Title space, I've been the Director of state agencies. In my career, I have been CEO of several different organisations, and I still work for very large corporates globally. In my own consulting, I realised they're all great things to do when you want to pretend. You can live fancily in the city and have a really flash job, but the important part is to build your own nation where you're from and be responsible for that.

Currie Country is the legacy piece of my life in that it's using all my skills, talents, and focuses on the people that call my nation home. I'm not taking a view of trying to change the world through one item, floating above it and trying to get interest nationally and globally.
I am taking an approach of building, rebuilding, and remapping my own population for the next generation.

That includes the next 25 years or until I die; the next two generations. That's what Currie Country is about. That's why it's a CO-Led (Cousin Consortium) organisation. It's not about me trying to sell something to the broader market, it's me being responsible for leading my own nation and citizens who call this place home.

What projects and work are you involved in through Currie Country?

Currie Country is a Cousin Consortium model, so there are about 3,000 people in the Currie family. The first part of this work was driven from my mother who passed away 14 years ago. She basically said to me, "you do fancy stuff for big companies. Why don't you help the family?" It sounds like a simple statement, but when you've got 3,000 people with complex dynamics going on and you've got to go through archaeological, cultural and anthropological material to reorder people and figure out what your nation and language is, it's a large task. But, I just approached it like a project management plan. For the first five years, it was about bringing the family together and everyone getting to know each other. The next five years involved the agenda of cultural consistency. This was sharing cultural knowledges across all those lines and organising people. Then of course, in that phase, people started telling me they had small business ideas, so they might have been doing education in primary schools, or guided walks in some area. I decided to platform and create our own supply chain. One part of Currie Country is about 34 small business operators who do a variety of different things from educating junior, primary, and high school students, to executive training for businesses, guided tours, tourism and youth pathfinders (that's engaging young people with the environment for healing).

Looking at an assembly of small businesses, it helped me and my own family work out what skill gaps we had, so then I went on a mission to create lawyers, engineers, doctors, anthropologists, and archaeologists in my family. We supported their role and education, because we are organised enough to say, “get those skills and bring them back, then together we can do what we do." That's the phase we're at. People have a lot of nieces and nephews who are highly qualified, and they are going into what I would call young professional development. After University, they are going out and getting dirty in the big, bad world, and then bringing those learnings back. Currie Country also operates as a charity (Currie Country Social Change is our charitable arm), which includes think tank work for not only us, but the environmental space generally.

We support other Aboriginal organisations in our nation as well as contribute to the larger state, Commonwealth and international agenda items. The charity does the think tank work. The projects that fall under that impact the environment and we offer as services things in the environmental space. My cousin, Rachel Cavanagh, leads our environmental space. She is an Environmental Scientist, so she does cultural burning work. She is 20 years out of Departments of Environment, et cetera. My sister's an Archaeologist, so she does archaeological work. Together with others we are all committed to using our skills for our cultural thriving.

We have historians, writers, and creators in the family, and so for me it's about creating an army of people that are soul enriched, know their place in the Aboriginal dialogue both here and internationally, and are committed to what I would call environmental centralising as a living proposition.

We understand we are not a hierarchy, we are not above the environment. In fact, it is your job to observe, understand, and work with it.

Currently we're doing some lobbying for a few groups, grant writing, and supporting them on bigger pieces such as writing back to the government about treaty. For example, I was on a viewing panel last night for a film coming out called You Can Go Now by the works of Richard Bell, an activist who, as he says, is masquerading as an artist. We contribute a lot to the Indigenous dialogue. We help smaller voices get heard by agitating for them and writing for them, making sure their voices are a part of that national dialogue.

Where have you seen strong opportunities for communities to tackle deep rooted social, cultural and environmental problems?

There are opportunities for all communities, wherever you are. It need not matter if you are here with me. I'm on the Tweed, Byron and part of the Gold Coast; that's my country. But there are opportunities wherever you live, and it is about knowing yourself and culture first, and then engaging with First Nations people wherever you live. The reason I say that's the best route to take is in the UK people are re-wilding and doing large environmental works. All around the world, people have seen because of the climate crisis that they have an individual responsibility to assist us in how we manage and live upon the Earth. You can only get that by understanding what informs your thinking as a person when it comes to the environment. When people say, "I want to learn about First Nation Sciences", I generally take them on a journey of exploring their own culture outside of when they first came to Australia, because in that story you'll find intimacy of who you are as a person with the environment. The UK is a very good example, because the Crown has only been around for 1,000 years. It was in that time prior to that that all clans had a relationship with the environment. It served their food security, healing, it rituals and medicinal requirements which were connected to how they moved as a society and how they operated as communities. Then the Crown started because they believed God himself came down and said, "you're amazing." Then we developed what legally is known as the Divide Right of Kings, which means the King's priority sat above every other human being, and they started taxing plants. You get aspro or aspirin in your cupboard which comes from willow wood. This is a tree that was taxed originally and then synthetically produced, and now we buy it in supermarkets. There was a relationship of people who used to have willow wood, boil it a little bit, and sip it when they were unwell. That was taxed and then taken from people's lands, and then those other elements/resources were also taken and taxed from people's lands. What's interesting in Australia is people know it was a convict settlement and a colony, but what they don't realise and don't think about is how were people made poor? Why were they stealing bread in London? They were committing crimes because when you go back on that journey, they had a similar experience to First Nations people here, which was they were moved off land for resource exploitation. Their lands, medicines and their food systems were taxed and exploited, and you get the stories of Robin Hood, sheriffs, and you start to understand those processes.

In our own dialogue in Australia, we don't question how people were criminalised, how they were made poor, and how that is a process of being shifted from your intimacy of land. Land gives you everything that you need; the environment can give you life. Its only purpose is to give human beings life.

It's there to serve, feed, nurture, and inspire us, but these other concepts we've created upon Earth are simply manufactured concept. First Nations people are more intimately connected with that history, because we've only had that interruption for 230 years, whereas people in Europe have had their Crown interrupting them for a thousand years, and so they don't remember who their societies were before that exploitation.

When people ask, "how can people tackle social, cultural, and environmental problems better?" The first thing I'd suggest is to know your history. Look beyond a thousand years ago at where your family roots were from.

Explore a little bit of that history and think to yourself, "I can see we had a clan or a community that had similar rituals, relationships to land, and different types of systems before they moved into Crown interruption and the industrialisation of the world."

Aboriginal people do not have a monopoly on intimacy with land. All people have that relationship, it is a matter of finding ways to remind yourself of that role and then when living on this continent, starting to explore it.

Start to think about that and ask, "why is it that I feel great 36 hours after I've been in a green environment?" Know why that is, research that question. If you do that, you then understand what Indigenous sciences are, Indigenous Standpoint Theory is, what it can offer you and how you might see both the problems of the world and your role in solving those problems? How do you have a role in it? What is your job as non-Indigenous Australians? I'm not interested in people saying, "let me know everything about First Nations people in Australia." Your role is to know everything about you and when your culture had that intimacy. Bring that to a conversation and table with me, and together we will tackle problems from the same lens.

What do you believe urgently needs to happen in Australia to help bridge the gap experienced by Indigenous Australians?

There are a couple of things. One is that Indigenous people will never abandon land, unlike if you come from a culture where you think, "I've used the land as much as I can now, I'm moving on," (there are lots of examples of that where you'll see post mining towns turn to nothing). The people who will remain will be First Nations people. They don't abandon their land. In terms of societal gaps, it is about the role power is playing in that conversation or dynamic. I'm sure most Indigenous people reject the notion you need to feel empathetic or sorry for Aboriginal people.

What you need to do is challenge the power you hold.

We saw a very good example with Stan Grant this week with the ABC, a big news institution. They would be considered progressive by a lot of people's definitions, yet he himself was isolated inside that institution. That's not a problem Stan has, it's everyone else who makes up the institutional thinking. It comes down to what do you do? How do you understand racism is not an Aboriginal problem? Racism is a structural concept created by those in power to serve an agenda of maintaining power and oppressing a group. That's the purpose of racism. But what's happened over time is people confuse those behaviours with cultural indicators. If I was to say tell me the cultural characteristics of white culture, most white people have challenges saying this without being juxtaposed to black narratives. People might say, "we're scholars, engineers, agriculturists, machinists, and industrialised people, that's our cultural narrative." But when you break that down and look at how that cultural norm has been created, underneath that is a myriad of diversity where those things have been taken from, exploited and used. Even the the word ‘caucus’, that's a First Nation's word taken from the Americas, like tomato, tobacco or potato. The word ‘caucus’ is a First Nation's concept. Yet, if you were to be an alien and come down today, you would believe that caucus is a European or institutionalised word that talks about democracy. But it's not that. It's actually democracy taken from First Nations behaviour and then transited over on a boat.

If you look at for example the Blue Poles piece of art which was contentious in Australia because Gough Whitlam purchased it (and it was the most expensive piece of art), drip painting, the style used, was also a stolen art form from First Nations people. People don't know that. When you are looking at what are the challenges, the challenges are to look at the evidence of social issues and think about your role. How am I analysing the problem and what do I need to do when explaining this? Sometimes it means just speaking up and saying things like I just said. Sometimes, people talk about Maslow's theory, for example. Maslow stole that idea from Blackfoot people in the Americas when spending time with First Nations people. The element Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs failed to add was one extra step, which is spiritual connection. Because he couldn't manage that thinking in his brain at the time, he left that out of his hierarchy. Now you can't go anywhere in the Western World without people understanding what Maslow’s Hierarchy is about. They know what it means, they often do policy designed on it, they motivate their teams based on it. But in fact, if you look at the origins of that, you'll see he spent time with First Nations people and adopted their hierarchy of being. But, he failed to include the special intimacy of environmental connection, because he couldn't grapple with that. That's what First Nations people were trying to tell him. We were trying to say, "all these things work if you have an intimacy with the environment." You must have that. Even if non-Indigenous people just with their own awareness decided to challenge concepts and started saying, "that's actually a First Nation's notion," we would be in a better place. If I keep saying that in all the spaces I'm in and familiarise myself with what has been adopted or plagiarised, that goes a long way to bridging the gap. It means that First Nations people don't have to argue for their excellence, contribution and being.

If I was to talk about the perfect non-indigenous ally, they would be the person not obsessed with my culture, but those who challenge what is taken for granted. That's the active person I want to see. Their activism does not need to be benevolent towards me, their activism needs to challenge the very notion of how their culture is operating, power and how it's being dispersed, abused, used, and constructed.

That's the healthy non-Indigenous position for me.

What advice would you give to impact-led entrepreneurs who are working hard to establish or grow their enterprises?

I've thought about this because I've had the question before, and I work in a space of behavioural economics called cross-cultural experimental economics. It comes from the Asiatic narrative of economics working through cultural behaviour. One of the things that's very interesting to me, is if you are a business and you want to set up in Singapore or China, you would be asked by the government to undertake a serious cultural awareness component for your CEO and executive team. They expect that, because what they want you to understand is the tempo and rhythm of their cultural dynamics so you don't come in as a foreigner and try to insert yourself, but instead you try to understand there is a rhythm of behaviour. Even France has it, they make you do courses on the history of France so you really understand it and how they treat their colonies still.

What's interesting to me in Australia is that people are operating businesses in Australia on Aboriginal land knowing the brutal history, but they may not know the excellence within Aboriginal philosophy or its ontological position and the genuine culture of the continent and how to relate to it. They don't know how to take the journey of being serviced to the culture they want to see grow. If I was to say a purpose-led entrepreneur is a person who's ignited by being dynamic and impactful globally, I would encourage people who consider themselves to be entrepreneurs in purpose-led or social impact to think genuinely about their relationship to the First Nations continent they operate in. What is their position? How do they position themselves and how do you grow a future together? I don't want the listeners to be confused at all. I know my salvation and liberation is wrapped up in educating everybody who lives in my nation. But non-Indigenous people need to appreciate that their liberation, freedom, and continuation as a human species is reliant on First Nations knowledges.

The knowledge system we all work under now, which is where we take what we need, we have no consideration for anything else except that technology will save us in the end and open up another planet, is not going to work.

We need to take advice from a culture that's been sustainable for 60,000 years, versus the King who has imploded 1000 years down the track and can't even get the support of Australia to remain their King; people aren't that interested. Even if we just contrast those two systems, there's something on the ledger for the group that's been around for 60,000 years. Aboriginal culture is so sophisticated and was necessary to keep human beings alive. Even when the small number of clans encountered a disagreement and ruptured, it wasn't to death. When there was a death, there was a process of coronial inquiry which is well researched, where Aboriginal people would get an independent person to observe the body for a period of time to determine whether the death was deliberate or natural. Those who were scientists would know you can observe a body and work out what killed the body by observation. The fact is that concept is built into our culture, and then bodies were buried with reverence. We have examples in Lismore and where I live where there were first world conflicts. We wrapped and treated non-Indigenous bodies like heroes. We wrapped them as you would a warrior. When non-Indigenous people buried our bodies, they normally decapitated us and left us on a pile or threw us over a cliff. With both of these cultures (and this is not to make people feel bad about who they are), you're looking at different ways to live a life. Reverence in death, reverence for your enemy, reverence for mistake is a part of living like a human. There's something deep about that. I would ask purpose-led entrepreneurs who are on this continent to get serious about making this relationship genuine, and be bold enough to lead. I can lead so much, but non-Indigenous people need leaders in their space as well.

What inspiring projects or initiatives have you come across that are creating a positive social change?

There are quite a lot around now, and I think it's sad people don't get their projects amplified. There are a couple I think are amazing, and those are what I am seeing in cultural fire burning. That as a concerted effort for land management and inclusive land management has taken off since the last bushfire catastrophe. There is interest in that and people are engaging with that. People generally are inspiring to me, because if you think about it, it's a land management movement that's tactile and available. The interest shows we will grow a generation of people who will be more active as environmental stewards. When I look at cultural fire burning and how that's used, it's inspiring to me.

The other inspiring initiatives, which I'm super keen on now and think are doing amazing stuff are in the carbon crediting market. Obviously, if people don't know, the Australian government generally provides legal services for Papua New Guine. Australia has an active role over there. You can offset carbon in the Amazon or PNG, but it has no effect here.

If we want better corporate entities and greener people, the connection between First Nations activities to offset carbon activities are exciting. Not enough people are in tune with that, but what you will see is that with big business (if it's done well), their offsetting will start looking like rapid river repair in the back of New South Wales, Queensland, or along the coast. You're driving that offset to direct change and community, that is the nirvana I see. I've seen some of that happen up in the Northern Territory and WA, where mining has to offset a lot. They've started to actually offset and regenerate the lands they're exploiting. That's positive to me.

If you're a leader in the entrepreneurial space wanting to be purpose-led, looking for opportunities to act in a strong fashion to direct environmental regeneration on this continent should be one of your goals for the next 5-10 years.

I'm seeing regeneration programs of the environment around marine corridors also. I'm seeing more greening of rivers, river work, and people being conscious and asking, "what did Aboriginal people say about this river?" In the history, Ballina means full belly, so Aboriginal people have known forever that river was going to swell. Now people are being mindful and saying, "what do Aboriginal people say about this or the history of this area? Let me make a decision about my business, home or where I want to live based on that." That's an interesting and inspiring way I'm seeing people consider how they live. That tells me they're open to accepting that Aboriginal people can offer something, and that the sciences, history and art which informs those stories of continental shifts and changes are being accepted by people in their fullness for being legitimate. It is quite remarkable in my lifetime to see that shift.

To finish off then, what books or resources would you recommend to our listeners?

If you don't know who Professor Gary Foley is, I totally recommend you have a look at his website called Gooriweb. He's an amazing thinker, activist and academic, not so much in the environmental space, but he addresses questions like treaty in the referendum and what are the debates? He has great material, he's a professor out of Melbourne who does great work.

Another Day in The Colony by Chelsea Watego I'm reading now. If you want to know about First Nations people all through Oceania I recommend Pacifica Black. I don't know if your listeners know this, but when you get terms like Micronesia, Melanesia, and Indonesia, those are race categories. Historically they are cut up areas of the world based on colour definitions of skin. First Nations people globally prefer the term Oceania, because we belong to the sea, not to the land. The carving up was done through exploitation and colonial movement.

Pacifica Black by Quito Swan, a wonderful academic out of the United States. I would also recommend a book by Professor Davarian Baldwin called In the Shadows of the Ivory Towers about universities role in wealth creation, social good, social value and social impact. This is important work because it speaks of land rights and land justice as well as the role of institutions in changes needed.

Mark Bittman's book Animal, Vegetable, Junk: A History of Food, From Sustainable to Suicidal is great also. For those interested in First Nations thinking, race and class I have a recommendation. I have an Arts degree as well, a double major in Theology and Aboriginal studies. If you're interested in race and class, I recommend Angela Davis' book, Women, Race & Class. If you're journeying into that area, the Chelsea Bond book I just recommended is great as well. The Great Estate is fantastic, and the other book I would recommend is The Secret Life of Trees, which is fascinating. I totally recommend that book to understand how the ecosystem works in our favour to make us thrive, and it's got no other purpose than supporting our thriving. That intimacy is what we need to seek in all aspects, including finding information, working out problems in life, and allowing your body to respond to the environment in a way that helps lead you.