ABSTRACT
This chapter explores Australia's First People's understandings of, and ways of living with, Country. It juxtaposes Australia's First People's and other Australians approaches to the environment and environmental planning. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander People's resistance to dispossession of their land since the outset of colonisation has been well documented. Christie asserts that: Aboriginal science is a mode of knowledge production which has evolved to allow human beings to fit into, rather than outside of, the ecology. The knowledge systems from Western science, which underwrite contemporary Australian environmental planning, have improved our ability to exploit land and natural resources for our own comfort and wealth, rather than living within our ecological bounds. The term 'Indigenous estate' is used by Altman to describe land under Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander ownership or management in Australia. Environmental planners, and indeed all Australians, have much to learn from Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.
