G’day everyone,
I am a non-Aborignal person fom Australia working in Aboriginal cultural heritage in the NSW government, Australia. My background is in archaeology: predictive modelling of site locations. However, I wouldn’t call myself an archaeologist anymore, as for the previous five years I have worked with GIS and decision support tools for conservation ecology. Recently I have moved back to cultural heritage, where my work is now focused on applying conservation planning princples to getting better conservation outcomes for Aboriginal comunities. Part of this is using predictive modelling to quantify accumulated impacts on Aboriginal heritage, but the other part is combining that ‘archaeological’ view, with the cultural landscape view obtained through community mapping- hence my interest in your fantastic website. There are a handful of people over here who are encouraging Aboriginal communities to follow your lead with cultural mapping, but it is very new to many of them. So I hope through this web site I can make some contacts and learn of your experiences in order to bring that knowledge to improving conservation outcomes for Aboriginal people over here.
Hope to hear from some of you.
Cheers,
Mal Ridges.
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Dr. Malcolm Ridges
Regional Assessment Unit
Cultural Heritage Division
Dept. Environment and Climate Change
, Armidale, NSW, 2350
(w) 02 67760040
(m) 0423014155
(f) 0267722424
(e) mal.ridges@environment.nsw.gov.au
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