Cape York Peninsula - Aboriginal Land
Cape York Peninsula is an Aboriginal domain - a vast, encompassing cultural landscape. This remarkable place is replete with Aboriginal heritage and comprises the homelands of the region’s many Indigenous Traditional Owners.
The Indigenous people of Cape York Peninsula are the owners and custodians of this extraordinary and globally-unique heritage. And under contemporary arrangements, there are extensive Aboriginal landholdings, and native title interests in other land holdings and protected areas.
Many Traditional Owners retain an active role in contemporary society closely associated with their law and traditional way of life, and cultural and social development is still in progress.
The Traditional Owners of Cape York hold unique connections to Country and have a depth of ecological knowledge and management expertise that is vital to its protection. The region exhibits outstanding features of its natural and cultural evolution over time, expressing the long and intimate relationship between the Indigenous people and their environment.
Much of the management and protection of the World Heritage values of Cape York Peninsula will be in the hands of its Traditional Owners and other Aboriginal landholders, and a nomination to the World Heritage list will require their prior informed consent.
Central to the future of the region will be recognition of the cultural landscape as the living heritage of its Traditional owners and the basis of their contemporary way of life. Aboriginal land titles, Indigenous rights in natural resources and conservation, and an active and ongoing role in environmental management are the inheritance of the Cape’s Indigenous people.
Conservation groups in Queensland have jointly developed policy on Native Title and Conservation.
Read the report here
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