Prudence

PRUDENCE

A destination in desperate need of a world-class protection, from a world-class rehabilitation, requires a peerless and inimitable identity. From the vernacular of the original human inhabitants, Maja-Jalunji identifies the all-encompassing occupancy of this contiguous rainforest, mangrove-community and sea-country estate and is hereby proposed as both honourable and fit-for-purpose.

Cultural conflict

The Australian collision between the two major cultural currents was tumultuous and continues to be so, with Sovereignty demanding Indigenous compliance, just as the natural environment makes its own demands upon Sovereignty. As these complex dynamics coalesce, so too does that unique quality of nationhood, which differentiates from the rest of the world, Australia. After all, who we are and how we distinguish ourselves amongst a world of nations, is expressed most fundamentally by our relationship with our natural environments and all their wild and wonderful inhabitants. Such a concept holds true to members of the oldest surviving human cultures in the world and also to the broad polity of the Australian nation-state.

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Within a human biological framework, the character of Indigenous culture was forged by the requirements of successful environmental fit and sculptured into distinction by the dictates of time. The contrasting character of the colonising culture subserves its originating Sovereign by consolidating the assertion that might has right, within a worldly respectability of enduring democracy.

“Such cultural distinctions produce contentions as variably stark as light and dark, good and bad, right and wrong.”

Neil Hewett

“Virtues of truth, justice and morality often reciprocate; what is primitive and spiritually incomprehensible to one, is incomprehensible and spiritually primitive to the other.”

Neil Hewett

“The very meaning of concepts and words misalign. Possessory entitlement is as interpretively contentious as Australiana.”

Neil Hewett

Relative order of expertise

On 9 December 1988, almost nine-thousand square-kilometres of predominantly tropical rainforest between Townsville and Cooktown, was inscribed onto the prestigious World Heritage List. Australia’s unprecedented decision to compulsorily inscribe a modicum of freehold-land into its nominated area, led to my own Daintree Rainforest inhabitancy, through a chosen profession in outdoor-education and a succession of postings within some of Australia’s most remote and traditional Indigenous homelands.

World Heritage inhabitancy 24 - years

Indigenous Homeland inhabitancy 7 - years

Outdoor Education 31 - years

Rainforest Ecology 24 - years

“As a long-term human inhabitant, I confirm that rainforest life conveys aspirational qualities through its countless expressions of vitality.”

NEIL HEWETT

“Recognising cautious provision within successful design cultivates decision-making towards progressive refinement and nurtures environmental wisdom.”

NEIL HEWETT