"Land & Learning" for Indigenous Kids
Meg Mooney
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Biologist Educator, Tangentyere Council, Alice Springs,
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Meg works as one of the biologist educators on the Land & Learning program run by Tangentyere Council. She is also a published poet and writer.
Tangentyere is an Aboriginal organisation which mainly services the town leases in Alice Springs, but also supports anti-petrol sniffing programs, night patrols and landcare activities in remote indigenous communities of central Australia.
I started off with Tangentyere Landcare about six years ago, setting up a seedbank and helping with tree-planting projects. The last few years I’ve been working on Land & Learning, a landcare education program for kids in remote communities. This program supports the teaching of local indigenous knowledge as well as promoting western science. We do activities like small animal trapping, tracking, netting waterholes and collecting plants with the kids and old people, and produce lots of resources to help teachers put landcare education on the agenda.
How did I get here? By a long and winding path. I started off as a geologist, then did a professional writing diploma. I’ve meandered back and forth between the natural sciences and writing since then. When I first came up here, in the late 1980s, I worked at a remote community school, supporting the production of language resources for a bilingual program.
Now I work at Tangentyere Landcare four days a week and have a day off to write. I’ve had lots of poems published and am now putting together a book with my poems and drawings by a local artist.
