S5, E54: A Marine Biologist, a Kuku Yalanji Guide, and the Real Story Behind Two UNESCO Sites in North Queensland

In the first episode of a new Unpacked series asking “What is a UNESCO site, really?”, host Aislyn Greene visits 2 World Heritage sites side by side in Far North Queensland, Australia: the Great Barrier Reef and the Daintree rainforest. Marine biologist Dr. Eric Fisher of GBR Biology explains how the reef earned its listing in 1981 and why climate change keeps the “in danger” debate alive. Then Juan Walker of Walkabout Cultural Adventures shares what joint management of Kuku Yalanji country means, and how his tours teach visitors to see the land differently.

Topics discussed in this episode

• How the Great Barrier Reef went from oil-drilling plans to the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park and a World Heritage listing in 1981
• What UNESCO World Heritage status does, and doesn’t do, for day-to-day protection
• Climate change, coral bleaching, crown of thorns starfish, and the debate over listing the reef as “in danger”
• Guided snorkel tours and conservation projects that let travelers help the reef, plus Dr. Fisher’s favorite coral, the plate coral
• The Daintree rainforest, the Wet Tropics of Queensland World Heritage Area, and the protests that helped win its listing in 1988
• The 2021 handback of the Daintree National Park to the Kuku Yalanji people, and what joint management really means
• A Walkabout Cultural Adventures tour: Dreamtime stories, mudflats, spears, and taking only what you can carry

Frequently asked questions

What is the Great Barrier Reef, and why is it a UNESCO World Heritage site?

The Great Barrier Reef is made up of more than 3,000 individual reefs along 2,300 kilometers of the Queensland coast. It was inscribed on the World Heritage List in 1981, a step that means the host country pledges protection and conservation. A site must meet at least one of 10 criteria to be listed, and the reef met all 4 of the natural criteria.

Is the Great Barrier Reef listed as “in danger”?

No. The debate over whether it should be has gone on for roughly 13 to 15 years. According to the episode, UNESCO released a draft decision in July 2026 to maintain the reef’s current World Heritage status while expressing concern about coral bleaching events.

What is the biggest threat to the Great Barrier Reef?

Dr. Eric Fisher says climate change is the most significant pressure, increasing the frequency of tropical cyclones, marine heatwaves, bleaching, and crown of thorns starfish outbreaks. He notes the reef has not lost its ecosystem function and can still recover, but more frequent disturbances make recovery harder.

How can travelers help the reef?

Guided snorkel tours led by marine biologists with GBR Biology combine education, research, and First Nations understanding, and some tours let guests help attach coral to restoration structures. Dr. Fisher recommends spending as much time on the reef as you can, since it changes with the tides, moon, and seasons.

What does joint management of the Daintree mean?

In 2021, the Queensland government handed back more than 160,000 hectares, including Daintree National Park, to the eastern Kuku Yalanji people under joint management. Juan Walker explains it as a way for Traditional Owners to have more say in managing country, though he hopes it will lead to more rights to access the land and practice culture.

People, places, and resources in this episode

• GBR Biology—guided snorkel tours led by marine biologists
• Meet the GBR Biology team, including Dr. Eric Fisher
• Walkabout Cultural Adventures—Juan Walker’s Kuku Yalanji tours
• Great Barrier Reef—UNESCO World Heritage listing
• Wet Tropics of Queensland—UNESCO World Heritage listing
• Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority
• What’s Actually Happening to the Great Barrier Reef?—Afar
• The Future of the Great Barrier Reef Depends On Us—Afar
• The Best New Ways to See the Great Barrier Reef—Afar
• Meet the Indigenous Women Who Are Saving Australia’s Great Barrier Reef—Afar
• How to Explore the World’s Oldest Rainforest—Afar
• Top Attractions Along the Great Barrier Reef—Afar

Full transcript

Dr. Eric Fisher: I remember the first time I think I was 6, 5 or 6 when I saw a coral reef. And what got me blown away the first time was like the color like, like this surrounding blue water. And then all of a sudden you’re attracted to this like different shades of turquoise or green. And then the water’s so clear and you can actually see structures on the bottom and things moving between it. And I remember I caught my first ever coral trout that day, and I watched this bright orange fish with blue spots, blue rings around its eyes come up and go, well, I’m like, man, what a fantastic place. How does something like this exist?

Aislyn Greene: I’m Aislyn Greene and this is Unpacked by Afar and that is Dr. Fisher, a marine biologist who has spent much of his life on the Great Barrier Reef. And of course, that is one of the world’s great natural heritage sites. In a new ongoing series, we are asking, what is a UNESCO site really? We’ll surface. Not just the answer you might find on a plaque, but also what the designation does, what and who it protects, and how those decisions are made. We’re going to start in Australia with 2 UNESCO sites that sit side by side in the northeastern region of north Queensland. There is the world’s largest coral reef and a rainforest that in 2021 came under joint management with the land’s traditional owners. We’re going to get you into the water and into the trees after this break. The Great Barrier Reef isn’t just one reef. It’s more than 3,000 of them strung along 2,300 kilometers of the Queensland coast. It is so large it’s visible from space and the stats don’t stop there. It’s home to more than 600 kinds of coral. Six of the world’s 7 sea turtle species, 30 species of whales and dolphins, and more than 1,500 species of fish. And that is where Dr. Eric Fisher comes in. Eric, one of the things that I realized yesterday, and I’m sure I am not the first nor the last person to point this out, but that your name is actually an aptronym, your Dr. Fisher, and you specialize in coral reef fish. So I just think that’s very cool.

Dr. Fisher: Yeah, it’s. It’s really cool. Yeah, yeah, my PhD was in fish aggregations, but generally I work in more a coral reef. Ecologists work across all coral reef systems and, and in tourism, which is really nice.

Aislyn: Eric has spent most of his life and career in this part of the world. Lucky guy.

Dr. Fisher: So I grew up with this kind of nice ecosystem. Like a lot of us in far North Queensland grew up like, you know, running around mangroves. There’s rainforests right down the mangroves, of course. And then you’ve got, you know, the estuaries, inshore islands, outer reefs. So that was kind of my playground a bit as a kid. So it thought about other things but just kept getting drawn back to biology and yeah, love for those natural spaces.

Aislyn: And now he helps travelers like us fall in love with this part of the world. We’re going to get more into how you can snorkel with him in a bit, because you most definitely should. But the Great Barrier Reef was inscribed in 1981, meaning that it was added to UNESCO’s World Heritage List. It’s an act that, among other things, means a host country pledges both protection and conservation. Prior to that, the reef’s future wasn’t so certain.

Dr. Fisher: At one time, you know, they were talking about mining the reef for oil, right? So they’re talking about mining the reef back in like, oh God, it was late ‘60s, early ‘70s, you know, because a lot of oil under there and there was government plans. And that’s kind of how that original campaign come out about like Save the Reef, things like that. A lot of protests, a lot of people deeply connected to the reef. Like if you grew up next to it, like I did, you had this like care for it. And that led to the act back in 1975, which led to the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park. Right.

Aislyn: Eric tells me that this led to the formation of the Reef Authority, which has now managed the reef for almost 50 years. So I asked him to connect the dots for me between the creation of the national park and the UNESCO listing, which came just a handful of years later.

Dr. Fisher: The only way to say that listing is huge, right? And it was due to the fact that quite a few people in the Reef Authority at that time were pushing to have it as a listing. And you’ve got to remember, like the way World Heritage kind of kind of initiated was more about the protection of like man made heritage structures, like the pyramids, like, like ruins and things. But there was this push, you know, to like, hey, we got to start looking at some of the really big natural ecosystems. Well, they should be World Heritage listed, right?

Aislyn: To get on the list, a site has to meet at least one of 10 criteria. 4 are about nature, and surprise, surprise, the Great Barrier Reef checked all 4. If you really want to nerd out on the full list, check out the show notes. But what I really appreciate about Dr. Fisher is that he never loses sight of the people part of the equation.

Dr. Fisher: The reefs need people. People need reefs, right? First Nations people have understood that in Australia for over like, you know, 60,000 years. You know, so you’ve got like 70 First Nation groups that have like deep connections to the Great Barrier Reef. So that’s why we love the fact that we were lucky enough to have people that were invested to bring in that act in 1975, being backed by governments to go down the World Heritage Road is an incredible listing. There’s nothing else like it on the planet.

Aislyn: The listing and resulting tourism has kept the reef at the top of travelers mind for decades, but it hasn’t been free from debate. And that debate, as you may guess, centers around whether or not the reef or really any reef should be listed as endangered.

Dr. Fisher: It’s been going on for like easily 13, maybe 15 years now. The Great Barrier Reef, whether it should be endangered or not. And there’s good reasons for that. I mean, climate change is the most significant pressure on the Great Barrier Reef, right? Not just the Great Barrier Reef, all coral reefs around the world, but it is the most significant pressure, right? What we’re seeing, what climate change is doing is increasing the frequency of disturbances. So we’re seeing more severe tropical cyclones, more frequent marine heatwaves, marine warming waters, warm water. So like warm water events. So it’s like a heat wave event. And that triggers like, you know, a stress response, which is like bleaching and things like that. And although you can get recovery from bleaching, you can get mortality too. And then you’ve got reoccurring crown of thorns starfish outbreaks. There are starfish, okay, like a normal starfish. They’re covered in spines. And the thing about crown of thorns starfish is there a coral predator. So they actually eat live hard coral. They have this kind of innate ability where they can go from a very low density to tens of thousands. So almost like a plague. And that’s been referred to. And so climate change is, is an incredible pressure. But what we’re seeing is the Great Barrier Reef has not lost its ecosystem function, right. It can actually still recover from these events. But because they’re getting more and more frequent, you’re kind of tying the hand behind the back of the Great Barrier Reef. It’s starting. To get. Harder and harder. You know.

Aislyn: The debate hasn’t ended. But in July 2026, UNESCO released a draft decision to maintain the reef’s current World Heritage status. It praised Australia’s efforts to preserve and protect the reef, while also expressing some concerns about coral bleaching events. So I asked Dr. Fisher whether the designation does anything in terms of day to day protection, funding or research.

Dr. Fisher: This is like where the Great Barrier Reef becomes a symbol for, you know, trying to to get change, which what it should be, it should be a symbol for change to get change. I, I totally agree with that. It’s hard to keep politics out, but it needs to be that symbol for change. And I love the fact that we all acknowledge that climate change is happening. It’s the greatest pressure. We need action. And the most significant action is reduction of emissions. And there’s a few ways that can be done. What I think it also does is it kind of brings the fact that, yes, we know they’re in danger. We know we need reduction on emissions and things like that. But going back to where I kind of started this interview saying it’s about people’s and reefs. It’s about uniting people, uniting their love affair for reefs, and that’s bringing in all stakeholders, whether you’re tourism researchers, traditional owners, you know, big industry, how do we all kind of work together to understand that resilience and also where we can assist get action on reef, that’s not going to be the holy Grail and fix the big problem that we need. Reduction in emissions. But it can start to unite to the bigger problem.

Aislyn: And that’s where he transitions into Eric, the tour guide, and Eric, the tour guide wants you to have the same personal connection with the reef that he’s had since he was a little kid.

Dr. Fisher: I remember the first time I think I was 6, 5 or 6 when I saw a coral reef. And what got me blown away the first time was like the color. Yeah, like like the surrounding blue water. And then all of a sudden you’re attracted to this, like kind of different shades of turquoise or green. And then the water’s so clear and you can actually see structures on the bottom and things moving between it. I’m like, man, what a fantastic place. How does something like this exist? And I think that’s the thing. It’s that color, it’s that movement. It’s that so many different types of life in such a small place. And people are just like, wow, this thing’s living. It’s alive. It stops you in your tracks talking about the role that we play in tourism and trying to, you know, tell some of those stories and form that deeper connection to reef. And one of the biggest ways that from a biology side that we do it is through guided snorkel tours.

Aislyn: Eric started guiding with a company called Reef Magic, which was then acquired by a tourism company called Experience Co, and they have 5 tourism businesses in the Cairns Port Douglas area. Now, at the time, Eric was building a small team of marine biologists on Reef Magic to do guided snorkel tours and interpret that world for guests combining education, research and First Nations understanding. And like me, Experience Co was a fan.

Dr. Fisher: So when we became this bigger beast Experience Co Reef Unlimited with all the other businesses, everyone’s like we love what you do. Yeah. Can we do it everywhere? On all of them on all our bit. And I’m like, oh, this is this is exciting. Yeah. Because all of a sudden. We’ve got yeah, we’ve got a diversity of reef tourism businesses. We’ve got 5 businesses. We’ve got a diversity of habitats for going to inshore islands, continental islands for going to coral cays, for going to outer reefs. We’ve got roaming operations, we’ve got pontoon operations. I’m like, this is the most exciting thing ever. Let’s, let’s, let’s do it. And and so that that was the formation of GBR Biology where I built this whole team. And so I designed GBR Biology to push not just the biology story, but also the First Nations story. All my staff are either university trained marine biologists or local First Nation culture guides.

Aislyn: Eric says it doesn’t really matter where you go within the Great Barrier Reef, because the point is to a get out there as much as you can, and b to try to wrap your head around the fact that the reef offers a different experience every day and even every hour.

Dr. Fisher: The reef is constantly changing. It literally changes in front of your eyes. So like, the more you can spend on a reef looking, more reefs, you could actually kind of see you’re going to get an enriching experience, a bit more of an understanding. You’ve got a tidal change, right? You’ve got a lunar change, you’ve got a seasonal change, then you’ve got an annual change, and then you’ve even seen where now we’re starting to get our head around it a bit more decadal changes.

Aislyn: Eric’s team also works on reef conservation projects, of course, and many of them are ones that travelers can join.

Dr. Fisher: We help our guests participate as well. Like you can help us attach the coral to the structures.

Aislyn: And remember that there are more than 600 types of coral in the reef. So I had to ask him the million dollar question. So is there one that you have a particular affinity for? Has an interesting story to tell about the reef?

Dr. Fisher: No. Like my PhD, I’ve always called myself a a traditional kind of fishbowl or just fish ecologist. And people always over the years say, tell me your favorite fish. And I’m like, I can get it down to 5 families. And then it come up the other day about corals. What’s your favorite? You know, I said, look, I can bring it down to a subgroup of corals. I said, look, at the end of the day. I said, my favorites are probably the plate corals.

Aislyn: Yes. He said, plate as in dinner plate.

Dr. Fisher: The member of the branching coral family. But they grow in like a like a table, a table shaped, self-supporting. When you think of all corals just grow from one coral polyp, and then they grow their little stem, and then they grow this big table that can be like 4 or 5 meters in diameter.

Aislyn: Right?

Dr. Fisher: Yeah. And they’re incredibly fast growing. There’s some of the fastest growing things on the reef. They are very, um, fragile in terms of physical disturbance, of course, because they grow in a 3D shape. But they’re they can be very prolific, not just because they can attribute to the overall coral reef like, because a reef is just a thin veneer of life on a big concrete block, right? They contribute a high amount to that concrete, right? But they’re also a keystone species in the other life that kind of rely on them, like so a lot of the bigger fish, the things that I like, like to hide under there or shelter under there, or even ambush prey under there. A lot of fish that’s, um, that are active at night will sleep under there in the daytime, you know, and so you’ve got that real fish connection, which I love. I love the fact that they do something different from other corals. It doesn’t seem like it should support itself, but it does. Having a 4 or 5 meter table made out of tiny little animals.

Aislyn: But oh my gosh.

Dr. Fisher: And they’re contributing to the overall growth of the reef and they look fantastic.

Aislyn: You know, I’ve worked as a journalist for many years, and some of my favorite people are those who work in and educate others about nature because they just have these very real, very passionate daily relationships with the places they love. And so I wanted to understand more about how that’s played out for Eric over the years. When was the last time you were out on the reef? When was your last day?

Dr. Fisher: Yeah. My last my last day was actually a week ago last Thursday. I overnighted on the reef. Wednesday, Thursday. Last week I was out there for 2 days on Reef Magic Pontoon, which I’ve also set up with this new pontoon set up as Reef Magic Research Station.

Aislyn: He hopes that we as travelers, can also build that kind of regular relationship with a reef or reefs. So go whenever you can and go frequently. It sounds like. Oh, that would me. I mean.

Dr. Fisher: You’re talking to a guy trying to restrict my days down to 50 days on a reef. Yeah, I used to normally do. I normally used to do about 240 a year now, like last few years, around 80, 100. I’ve been trying to get down to 50 with everything going on.

Aislyn: How is that. Going for you?

Dr. Fisher: You miss the reef.

Aislyn: Next, we’re going to head to our second UNESCO site, the world’s oldest surviving tropical rainforest. That’s after the break. North of Cairns, the Daintree rainforest runs almost to the water with the reef just offshore. And this is where the second half of our story starts on Kuku Yalanji country with Juan Walker, the owner and head guide for Walkabout Cultural Adventures.

Juan Walker: Yeah. So I was born up here in Mossman, little town called Mossman, and my heritage is Aboriginal on my father’s side and on my mother’s side part Torres Strait Islander as well. But Kuku Yalanji country, the local group here where I was born, is a land areas from just south of Port Douglas. So the river is a geographical boundary that we sort of use today. And then our country runs north along the coast through to the Annan River, which is just south of Cooktown. So it’s about a 400 kilometer stretch along the eastern coastline in the Daintree region. And yeah, we’re very lucky people here. We have beautiful old Daintree rainforest at our back door, which runs up into the mountain ranges. So lots of water, greenery and a majorly diverse ecosystem up here. And then we have beaches, river systems, estuaries, and we can walk to Great Barrier Reef. So we have.

Aislyn: That is amazing.

Juan: An amazing, amazing bunch of different habitats and ecosystems all coming together.

Aislyn: First, he helped me learn how to pronounce his homeland, which I’m still working on. Can you help me understand how to pronounce it so I don’t butcher it for the rest of the interview?

Juan: That’s okay. So it’s very confusing because of the way it was spelled. So our language was phonetically documented by the Lutheran missionaries. And so when they wrote it, they spelled it with Ks. So it’s spelled K-U-K-U. But the Ks are pronounced like Gs, so you actually pronounce it. Google.

Aislyn: Google.

Juan: Google.

Aislyn: Perfect.

Juan: And then the second second word is Y-A-L-A-N-J-I. And that is pronounced Yalanji, Yalanji.

Aislyn: Okay, so the emphasis Yalanji, Yalanji. Thank you. Juan, as you can hear, is an excellent teacher. And that makes sense because he also works to keep the language alive in local schools.

Juan: So a local Indigenous language program was developed in Mossman about 7 years ago. And I’ve been teaching at the school for about 4, nearly 5 years now. Yeah.

Aislyn: What have you found during those 4 years?

Juan: It’s quite interesting. The local non-Indigenous kids are gaining a much higher respect for local Aboriginal knowledge. And of course, the language and understanding because language is connected to everything. So it gives the kids an understanding of region, of place of where they live. So they, you know, they respect the place a bit better as well. And for the local Indigenous kids, it’s given them a little more like ownership and a little more belonging into the school system. And so, you know, we found that the kids attendance rates have jumped up quite a lot. So when we first started language program, the Aboriginal kids attendance rates were around 30 percent, 40 percent. And now they’re sitting at about 80, 85 percent.

Aislyn: Now to the Daintree. It’s part of the Wet Tropics of Queensland, which was inscribed in 1988 because the Daintree is extraordinary. One common estimate puts the rainforest at 180 million years old. It’s about 1,200 kilometers, 4 times the size of Malta, to give you some perspective. And it’s home to 35 percent of Australia’s frog, marsupial and reptile species, 65 percent of its butterflies and bats. And it’s one of the places where Juan’s ancestors once lived a traditional hunter gatherer lifestyle. But the Wet Tropics path to the World Heritage List was not smooth. In the early 1980s, a bulldozer started pushing a road through the forest north of Cape Tribulation. Protesters blockaded it, but the road was finished in 1984 anyhow. The protest did help fuel a campaign to protect the area, which ultimately led to the UNESCO inscription. So I asked Juan if he remembered that moment in 1988.

Juan: I was a very, very young fellow. I was only 8 years old, 7 or 8 years old.

Aislyn: Yeah. So maybe not.

Juan: I didn’t really have too much to do with it, but I feel that it was very important that that did happen because, you know, people started again to come to the area and treat the place a little bit differently. It’s one of those things, once you lose it, you never get it back again.

Aislyn: In 2021, the Queensland government announced it was handing back more than 160,000 hectares to the eastern Kuku Yalanji people. That includes Daintree National Park, which is now under joint management. But land back can be a complicated term, as Juan shared.

Juan: And with that, um, handover I felt, you know, it was a I was feeling a bit cynical about it because it’s more of a manager program, not really a giving. This land is back for the Aboriginal people again. So I went up to the parks office and I had a chat with some of the rangers up there and said, look, so does this mean that I can go back out camping in a bush again, take my old man back into the forest and set up like an old camp again up in the forest. They said, no, no, no, no, no, no, you can’t do that. This is a way for our people to be able to manage the place again and have a more say in what happens to country, which is a good thing. But, you know, I also feel some of those old people in our communities want to be able to get back into these areas, to be able to teach, educate and pass on stories that, um, that right was taken away from them.

Aislyn: Absolutely. So land back is not the right way to refer to this because it’s really just a yeah. Okay.

Juan: A joint management program. Yeah. Well, hopefully down the track, if we get the right people into the positions that need, you know, they need to be in that they will make the change for, you know, the local people and local Aboriginal people from their traditional homelands will have more, say, more rights to access and practice culture in these areas, and also opportunities to create more economic incomes from these places as well. You know, because our aim is not to is to, you know, survive like everyone else, but we want to be able to do it the way that we were taught how to do it our way, but also in a way that doesn’t affect and damage those resources.

Aislyn: Given that the rainforest and the reef are so connected, I asked Juan whether it makes sense that the UNESCO treats the reef and the rainforest as 2 separate places.

Juan: I believe it’s better to be managed in that way. You know, you can get different pools of funding to be able to, you know, land based management and then sea based management. But for us, we don’t see it differently. It’s all we say. It’s all country for us. They are different in the fact that we have to move through them at different times of the year to find different things for survival and for cultural practices.

Aislyn: Those cultural practices and their connection to land are the foundation of Juan’s company, Walkabout Cultural Adventures, which he founded in 2008 after years of guiding for other organizations. So I asked him to paint a picture of one of his tours.

Juan: First of all, I like to stop in a bit further north and teach him a Dreamtime story, and that sort of gives him a creation story, which gives him a basic connection to place. So we stop at the beach and there’s a couple of islands out in front and you can see the ocean. So we tell them this creation story about how the sea levels rose and about how these islands were created.

Aislyn: Then there’s a stop for fruit at a local orchard and a stop at Juan’s parents’ house to connect the land to the people who call it home for thousands of years.

Juan: We go through some maps and posters and explain a bit about the transition, the stolen generations, and that the terrible period in Aboriginal Australian history. Um, after we’ve done that, we also, um, what we’re doing that, so we also talk a bit about traditional life, um, and how, how recent it was. So I explained to people about my grandmother. So she was born up in the forest up here at the Mossman Gorge. And so she lived a semi traditional life. When she was born, the people were up there still running around with no clothes on, semi, you know, hunting and gathering lifestyle. Um, and then you know, about the missions coming in, how the people moved to these reserves and then that big change in lifestyle, how they were made to wear clothes, go to church, stop speaking language, the harsh disciplinaries that were put upon them when they did try and practice culture and, and pass culture on. But we talk about that and then we get into the fun stuff after that, we then head down to the beach and we get people out on the coast and give them some spears.

So we do a bit of a safety talk first with some spears, showing them how to use them, how to carry them safely. And then we get down onto the flats and we walk out along the coast of mudflats, which is a very different ecosystem for people. Beautiful, big open space. But then when you first step off the sand into the mud, you get the squishy, mushy feeling between your toes. Um, so it’s really a really different experience. Some sometimes you get some big screams and some people stepping in and then jumping back out. Um, but we try to push them along and get them out onto the flats, and then we show them how to look for the different food sources out there. So how to spot the different fish. Sometimes if it’s a higher tide, we can find stingrays. But then of course, trying to catch a mud crab and showing how to get up close to them, how to find him, how to spear him with that, um, you know, ruining all the meat inside. Most of the times that I take people out. I don’t like taking a bucket because when you have a bucket or a basket, you tend to take more than you actually need. So I show them that, you know, the reason I don’t take a bucket is because I only take what I can actually carry in my hands, and that’s pretty much all you’re going to eat anyways.

So rather than taking more than you need. It’s a way. Just look at looking at it differently, you know, rather than trying to take it home to freeze it and eat it later, we just take what we need at the time. So you guys get a taste. If you can’t eat it, I’ll finish it. Or I’ve got a big family around, I’ll drop off or drop off what’s whatever’s left over to a family member down the road or a family member in town if you if you run into them. So yeah, it’s just a way of looking at how you’re how you’re taking differently. But then also when you take something, there’s, you know, you’ve always got to try and make sure you put something back in its place.

Aislyn: While the UNESCO listing for Daintree primarily highlights the natural resources that are protected. I asked Juan to tell me more about the cultural practices he’s protecting and sharing.

Juan: Well, the main aim is to give people a basic insight into Aboriginal cultures in history, but also that not all Aboriginal people are the same. Even still today, there are over 250 languages still actively used around the country. Before European arrival, over 800 Aboriginal languages spoken across the continent. So not just the language is different, but cultural practices are different. Land management, social structures, kin structures, rituals. They’re all very diverse. So to show people that, you know, we’re not all the same, don’t put us all into one basket. And the stuff that you see on the news about Aboriginal people, you know, the bad stuff. That’s because many of our people are still dealing with trauma.

So I try to teach people that, you know, our history is a very recent history. Australia is a very young country. And, you know, the things that happen to our people, you know, the settlement, colonization, stolen generation. I try and teach people about the trauma that our people are still dealing with and that, you know, we are building from the ground up. We are starting with nothing. So it takes a long time for, you know, for the wider Aboriginal community to be able to get on their feet and get the capital behind ourselves, to be able to, to build more businesses and to become independent and self empowering.

But then also to look at our natural environment differently as well, because to most Aboriginal people around us, you know, around the world, really indigenous peoples around the world, the biggest thing is family then the country that you live on. So they’re the 2 biggest things that we have to look after because both of those things, if you lose them, you never get them back. If we can start by just treating each other with a little more respect and treating land, animals, plants and our natural resources with a little more respect, it’ll go a long way.

Aislyn: So what does UNESCO status actually do? Well, for these 2 Natural World Heritage sites, that designation was a direct link to protection conservation and has made both a symbol for change. Join us in 2027 for the next episode in our series. Until then, you can find links to both Eric and Juan’s tours in the show notes. I’m Aislyn Greene. Thanks so much for listening to Unpacked. We’ll see you next time.