3 Baron-Hay Court, South Perth Western Australia 6151Telephone: +61 (0)8 9368 3333 Fax: +61 (0)8 9474 2405Email: enquiries@dpird.wa.gov.au

In the audio are:Rhys Bonshore, Manager, Dowrene Farm

Maude Bonshore, Chairperson, Dowrene Farm Aboriginal Corporation

Perry Dolling, Research Officer, Department of Primary Industries and Regional Development (DPIRD)

Ian Walsh, farmer, Merildin Farms

TranscriptRhys: The corporation was started in 1999.This is 2017 and in 2018 we’re

starting so that's 19 years of struggle to get to this point.

Maude: But from 2018 we're going ahead to set up a sheep enterprise.

Rhys: It's very important that we prove to the ILC and ourselves that we can run the sheep enterprise.

Maude: Welcome to country, traditional homelands of the Minang, Goreng and Kaniyang people. This farm virtually sit on the boundary of those three borders. Back in the 1940s, my parents cleared land. In those days they never had bulldozers or tractors.

Rhys: This is my mother Maude Bonshore. My name is Rhys Bonshore. I'm the manager of Dowrene Farm. My mother is the chairperson of Dowrene Farm Aboriginal Corporation. This is a property of 720 hectares, or 1,800 acres, in excellent area between Franklin River and Cranbrook.

Maude: We've leased the land for the last 11 years.

Rhys: There's an opportunity for us to change the lease situation so that half the property will be leased, and the other half will be run as a sheep enterprise which we will be running as the, as a corporation. We're one of the very few properties where they're going to release

Transcript

all the caveats on the property for the first time. We're sort of the tip of the sphere in that regard that's why we're only going into it 60/40. We’ll have 60% leased which will give us some stability of income and then the other 40% we can run our own sheep enterprise, which will be based on Merinos crossbred with White Suffolks to have prime lambs for sale. There's a lot of argument and debate in this very hall trying to explain to the membership what the process was for us to get divestment. So it's been a struggle, every part of this journey has been a struggle, but now we're seeing the positive benefits.

Maude: So since 2005 our corporation’s now the owners of Dowrene Farm. If you're the chairperson and the directors on the aboriginal corporations, you need to stand up make a stand what doesn't work make it work. And the clear message you give to your members: you work with us not against us and if you can't work with us then you need to move on or, through the rules in your constitution, you vote them off. If you're having trouble with your governance nobody will look at you and help you until you get your governance right. You've got to help yourself first so the big message is get the government, get your membership right, your governance right and then everything will fall into place. Very important to get that, work through those: membership, governance and divest. Once the property is divested you get all the titles to that land and it gives you a feeling of ownership.

Rhys: I started thinking while I'm living on this property I better get myself educated, particularly because we didn't know what the leassee was doing. So I said well look I need to know about farming so I know what's going on. So I started learning about sheep. I did a course on the economics of farming through UWA. I did a Certificate IV in Conservation Land Management with four units dealing with agriculture, cropping and livestock and SIBI was part of the assistance to get me funded to do that program. And the real big change was when I started doing the Lifetime Ewe Management Course. SIBI was able to secure funding so that I could attend that course. Perry Dolling from Department of Agriculture was the consultant who was running the course.

Perry: First time I got involved with the Bonshores and Dowrene Farm was when we were planning Lifetime Ewe Management. SIBI has a role of getting indigenous people involved in the sheep industry and so Lifetime Ewe Management was a great course to involve a number of indigenous groups. Lifetime Ewe Management is a course that runs for 12 months and it's an initiative of the Australian Wool Innovation and it's being managed by RIST. It involves six sessions over 12 months and we look at the life cycle of the ewe over that year. We had three groups involved in the course. All of the participants embraced the concepts of sheep farming even though many of them had no contact with sheep before. I think Rhys is a

perfect example of where someone who's got the passion and enthusiasm to learn about a subject can pick it up quite readily and I think that's applicable to any person. All the participants at the end of the program I'd be extremely confident that they could run a sheep enterprise on their own.

Rhys: We've had a lot of research and evaluation, business planning, financial planning, training done for us, with us, and a lot of research that the Department of Primary Industries and Regional Development have provided to us. So we're as ready as we can be and I was sort of a fresh plate to work on. I was, I didn't have a background in farming. One farmer Ian Walsh is going to be my mentor and it's people like that where I can pick up the phone and say look I've noticed a few problems with my sheep, can you come over and have a look.

Ian: We've been farming here since 1957 and over that time we've gradually expanded the farming enterprise and gone into different aspects of farming, in particular saltland revegetation. We've learned a lot about running livestock, hopefully we can help Dowrene to run a profitable enterprise. We've developed a relationship which has grown into quite a good working relationship and actually quite a good friendship. A lot can be learned from other Noongar enterprises simply because you know they care, care for the land so they're going to look after that well so with Dowrene as an example of their drive and enthusiasm, if that rubs off onto other enterprises I think they're a very good model to follow.

Rhys: Noongar culture is all about environmental sustainability. On this property we've done kilometres of fencing of creeks and reserves, planted thousands, tens of thousands of trees and native vegetation. Over the years it's all sort of been pointing towards the sheep enterprise because now paddocks are very protected. It's a cultural thing for me and getting back to country is extremely important to me. We've got another family living on the property here Aunty Glenys’s two grandchildren. She became their guardian for various reasons. One of those children have just graduated from Denmark Agricultural College; the other child she has got herself a scholarship at Great Southern Grammar. We're very proud of both these these kids and what they've achieved. The farm has been paying for some of the schooling costs and the most important thing the farm’s done is given them a stable environment. The future of our sheep enterprise is to employ these members and have them working initially on a casual basis. But we're all about giving a hand up to our own family. The government has given us a hand up to get ourselves free of any future support and we're doing the same for our own family. Instead of just leasing all the time we’ve become a commercial entity and y’know we can feel like we’re really amongst the other farmers now, so that that's what it's all about.

Maude: To achieve this goal we've got to take out a loan. So we're going to borrow money to set ourselves up. So it's not a given thing by the government and this is what the NLE is all about with our farms, helping people get started. The land to everyone is a mother and it's, it's there to provide everything for you but you've got to make it work for you.

Rhys: We will be having a full sheep enterprise here and running up to three and a half thousand ewes. When we reach that, that goal it would be the end of a nearly 26 year struggle to get to that point. And from that point on, Mother would have reached her goal and seen her vision come to fruition.

End of transcript