We’ve been to a lot of places, but nothing had quite prepared us for the Kimberley. Last week, we flew into Western Australia for the first time, and the scale of the landscape hit us: the light on the water, birds of prey circling the Broome skies and ecosystems operating on timescales we couldn’t quite get our heads around. Beautiful and overwhelming.

What grounded us was the people. Martin, Liam, and the rest of the Environs Kimberley (EK) team are more than a direct action organisation focusing on campaigning and advocacy. They’re closer to connective tissue working alongside Traditional Owners with programs that protect nature and move toward sustainable economic change. They build long-term relationships, show up repeatedly, and listen before they speak. You don’t try to impose your will on that Country. You try to learn from it.

The framing for the week came standing on the tallest hill in Broome with Bart Pigram, on an ancient midden: layers of shell and bone and compressed time under our feet. He talked us through what he calls the three legs of the stool: Country, Community, Culture. Take any one away and none survive. You can’t protect Country without the people and knowledge that have cared for it for sixty-five thousand years. You can’t sustain Community without the Culture that keeps it strong. And Culture is deeply tied to place: it’s the language Country understands.

EK are rightly proud of a great victory, the protection of Walmadany / James Price Point from becoming a Browse LNG terminal. In 2013, after five years of sustained resistance by EK, Traditional Owners and many other groups working together, Woodside abandoned their plans to dig and dredge and destroy. As we drove up the dirt road to visit the unspoilt beach that is the fruit of that victory, Martin shared stories of daring guerrilla action and the practical support the people of Broome provided.

Photo: Bandilngan (Windjana Gorge)

Our first evening ended on Minyirr Beach. Sun going down, fire going, drinks flowing, EK staff sitting around us like an extended family. And then Albert Wiggan spoke, and the circle went quiet. He pulled threads together: the sky, the water, the sand, the stories, the young people needing to know there is a future for them on Country. As he spoke, we could see how a community preserving its culture is also protecting its Country, and how protecting Country is an act of cultural survival.

The next day we travelled to June Oscar’s property on Bunuba Country, and after the sun went down, we listened to June’s wisdom around the campfire. She talked about Country as kin. The sky, the water, the plants, the animals, the soil. Family. And when she said mob, she meant all of it. The whole living system. We’d heard Aboriginal people talk about mob before and only understood it to mean “people.” June corrected us. Mob includes what we’d call nature. She challenged us to see the trees and animals around us as more than human kin. Family that provides for us. Relatives to check in on.

And she asked us two questions.

What is your love of Country? What will it take to build peace?

We don’t have good answers yet but they’ve been turning over ever since.

Photo: Adansonia gregorii, Boab tree on Bunuba Country

There were smaller moments, too. Boab trees in their native habitat, silver trunks growing out of red earth. A freshwater crocodile across a creek flowing gently through a cave. Swimming in a spring-fed waterhole after introducing ourselves to the place and becoming part of the family.

Learning about EK’s economic work under the Cable Beach ghost gum beside their office brought things full circle. The Wattleseed Collective, a social enterprise working with Kimberley Aboriginal people to sustainably wild-harvest wattleseed, builds livelihoods using cultural knowledge. The understanding of when and how to harvest is an economic pathway. Caring for Country can earn an income for the community. The Conservation Economy project, building grassroots economies so communities can thrive, is the same principle at a structural level. These are alternatives to mining, to extraction that leaves poisoned water tables and a community scattered. And EK hold all of it together — the campaign against fracking, the advocacy, the direct action, the wattleseed, the elder-led cultural programs, the quiet year-after-year work of being on the same journey with the same people.

What stayed with us most wasn’t any single action or policy position. It was the wholeness. EK don’t treat the climate crisis, the mining industry, the erosion of Indigenous sovereignty, and the economic desperation of remote communities as separate problems. They see that fracking a river system is violence against Country, which fractures Community, which severs Culture, which leaves divided people to accept the extractive logic destroying their home. The response has to be just as whole. Fixing one leg of the stool isn’t enough.

We left the Kimberley still processing. Country, Community, Culture. What is your love of Country? What will it take to build peace?

Photo: Roebuck Bay, Nyamba Buru Yawuru (Broome)