Land and Sea Management History

The Yugul Mangi Land and Sea Management Corporation was established in 2008 to strengthen Aboriginal governance of the land and sea management over the nine clan estates. It grew out of earlier land and sea management activity focussed around the Ngukurr community.

Local interest in formalised land management developed in the late 1990s, when a group of landowners worked with the Indigenous Land Management Facilitator (Joe Morrison). They worked to control a Mimosa (a Weed of National Significance) outbreak on the Phelp floodplain and undertake early controlled burning.

In 2002, women from Ngukurr, after attending the Northern Land Council's Aboriginal Women's Land and Sea Management Conference at Gunlom, made a decision to establish a women's ranger group (the Yugul Mangi Women Rangers, funded under the Community Employment and Development Program (CDEP)) to work on land management issues in and around Ngukurr. The group focussed on eradicating big headed ants in Ngukurr, language and culture camps, river patrols and weed and fire management.

A local group of men who worked with the first Landcare group and continued to work occasionally with the women's ranger group became officially engaged in the caring for country CDEP program in 2007.

Currently, there are ten rangers and one coordinator position (job-shared) working for the Yugul Mangi Land and Sea Management Corporation. Recently, the Yugul Mangi Rangers secured funding from the Department of Environment, Water, Heritage and the Arts' (DEWHA) Working on Country (WOC) program. This means that now seven of the ten rangers will receive a fulltime salary with employment conditions that have not been available to Aboriginal land and sea managers in the past under CDEP such as superannuation and holiday pay.