16 Sustainability and Systems Engineering

Sustainable practice by First Nations in Australia are often viewed through a lens of providing low tech systems. This assumes a certain approach to how to make improvements in our present engineering development projects.

People often do not see bark canoes made from bark harvested from living trees or cycad nuts soaked for hours to remove poison are inspirations in an age of air conditioned dwellings (mobile and fixed) and homes controlled by interlinked devices on voice command. 

However it is the process of design and knowledge sharing of the technology that makes First Nations technology sustainable, not just the materials used. It is these processes that Aboriginal people wish to share before our earth is totally destroyed.

From Walking on Country with Spirits – Wagul Wagul. From A. Ramos Castillo and United Nations University, 2009. Licensed for adaption and re-use under CC BY-NC-SA) 3.0 Unported License.

When we tell you our Dreaming Stories we invite you into our culture and values. We provide you the framework of our Country, how to navigate it, what you can eat (such as our totems) and how to survive. We also tell you our values and how to negotiate our social systems. All these are combined in one story that grows with you as you learn more about the aspect of Country that relates to where you want to build, or engineer and what that will impact.

First we will look at some key aspects of First Nations knowledge processes that may apply in the area you are working:

Oral Knowledge

1. Knowledge is shared by referring to the dreamtime stories that children grow up with.

2. These stories increase in depth and link to other sub-stories about more deep knowledge.

3. To hear these stories, a person talks to the different holders of each different component.

4. When people tell their part of the story, there will often be other people there to confirm or correct them.

5. New elements to the story are created as times change, climate changes, and people experience new things, but only those with authority over the story can tell new parts, and they will again check this with others before they do.

6. When telling a story, the person with authority over the story is always acknowledged, as Europeans do in peer reviews.

Knowledge is located

1. Stories are usually told on Country as the Country will remind the storyteller of key features to cover, such as the animals and plants in that area and the seasons.

2. The stories are about how the animals and plants live together in that Country, how the rocks were formed, where the water is, and so on.

3. While many people have died these stories come back as our people settle back on our Country, they say the story remains in the Country, and by developing a relationship with Country you find the stories again.

Systems approach

1. Instead of breaking knowledge down into parts, the knowledge is presented as a whole story.

2. The listener will not understand all the parts at once, but over time, the depth and interconnectedness will be learnt.

3. Learning is both conceptual through the stories, and practical through the hunting and gathering along the storylines which link the places that are important in the life of that Country, the animals and plants.

Listening and learning

To understand your environment, the animals, plants and landscape, you need a holistic approach to the system. You will learn about Country while at all times understanding how the features interconnect, interact and adapt to changes. For Aboriginal people, all the land, plants and animals have spirits, they are living beings. Only what is created by humans is not animate.

Then you need a method that helps you to remember and share this oral knowledge. A way that people can recall the history of the place and share patterns that re-occur over time, in the weather and in the inter-relation of the local features. This is done through storytelling.

There are different ways that cultures create knowledge and share our understanding. If you come into a community, you need to understand and engage in that system of knowledge management and listen to the stories. For Aboriginal people ‘gut feelings’ are often as important as visual observation, for these come from long experience. However no one individual will create knowledge, the stories need to be reinforced by others who have a role in the development of that knowledge.

From UTS Kangaroo Story – Tacit Knowledge Sharing. From C. Kutay and University Technology Sydney, 2017. LLicensed for adaption and re-use under CC BY-NC 4.0.. Used with permission of authors.

If you want to understand the situation in the community, you too will need to hear different viewpoints, and understand how these all form part of the community reality.

Then if you are planning change, a new design, you will need to introduce that slowly. When discussing a project it takes a long time for a group of people to reach agreement, so it is important that the community is allowed time to do this, rather than enforcing a design or solution that is not suitable to some. The idea of “settlement politics” has grown from the understanding that people can come to the same conclusion or settlement from very different standpoints. We just need time to reach that agreement.

So when people come to community and propose a project, you may hear a respected person stand up and praise the project. Then another speaker may get up and say “I agree” but then continue to propose an entirely different approach. If the project group only stays for a few speeches, they will miss what is the real solution or collaboration. It takes time to reach a real settlement.

Systems Thinking

Modelling systems is an important part of project design and planning. Two different approaches to system modelling are a western and First Nations approach. The western approach uses an interdisciplinary approach integrating aspect of different field of engineering and engineering management and focuses on how to design, integrate, and manage complex systems over their life cycles. That is, the approach looks at the components that are well modelled and attempts to reconstruct the whole from these parts.

The First Nations approach to systems engineering avoids breaking a system into components by retaining the whole picture of the physical environment, as well as its value, in the engineering mind. The Dreaming stories are a way to remember all the components of this model. Imagery and symbols can be used to present these components and their inter-relation. A narrator may break the story into sections such as locations in time or place, but that part of the story will be a coherent or complete representation of that aspect.