The Wet: Shifting Seasons, Climate Change and Natural Cycles in Cape York Peninsula, Queensland

Abstract

Land managers in Cape York Peninsula, far northeast Australia, hold different ideas around the causes of climate variability. Understandings of changes in climate are underpinned by particular environmental knowledges, values, and practices. These understandings are articulated in the context of the wet season, when land managers must adapt to the changing duration and intensity of the rainfall each year. The wet and dry seasons function as cyclical agents that precipitate different modes of living and working among different groups of people in Cape York. Where settler‐descended cattle graziers tend to frame climate variability as ‘natural cycles’, Aboriginal rangers link climate variability to anthropogenic climate change. The tendency among Aboriginal rangers to link these changes to anthropogenic climate change is a result of the interpenetration of a Western scientific land management model with an Aboriginal land management model in the formal co‐management of protected areas. From this context, a ‘spatial vernacular’ of interculturally produced climate‐related knowledge emerges. The explanatory models different land managers draw on to understand climate variation in relation to seasonal water, changes to the wet season, and the increased frequency of extreme weather events are linked to their livelihoods, lifeways, and the forms of environmental knowledge they value.