RAP Cultural Values Management Plan - Final draft

The Wet Tropics biocultural region is home for Rainforest Aboriginal Peoples. It encompasses the Wet Tropics of Queensland World Heritage Area (WTQHA) and surrounding land and sea Country including the Great Barrier Reef World Heritage Area and adjacent islands and waters. Rainforest Aboriginal People have continuing cultural rights and obligations across the whole of this cultural landscape.This is a place like no other. Considered to be the second most irreplaceable world heritage area on the planet, the WTQWHA is one of the few places listed for all four of the criteria for its outstanding universal value. Values maintained, shaped and managed for millennia by Rainforest Aboriginal Peoples.Although its outstanding Indigenous cultural values were not considered when the area was World Heritage listed in 1988, Rainforest Aboriginal Peoples advocated for and ultimately achieved recognition of those values. In 2012 the area was nationally listed for its Indigenous Cultural Values. It remains an aspiration to achieve World Heritage listing for both the landscape’s natural and cultural values, and for recognition that these values are inseparable and inexorably intertwined.The Wet Tropics was deemed of outstanding heritage value to the nation for its importance in the course of Australia’s cultural history. It is the only place in Australia where Aboriginal people permanently inhabited a rainforest prior to European arrival, and with a unique material culture for processing toxic and other plants that made it possible to live in the rainforest year-round. These cultural traditions, established by creation beings, are inscribed in the landscape, and underpin Traditional law.This plan sets out a management framework for protecting and managing the cultural values of the region. It combines management strategy, planning, policies, protocols and actions into one management plan to identify, protect, conserve, present and transmit, to all generations, the National Heritage values of the landscape. While it scopes a wider range of actions than what might be considered for the direct management of cultural values, the protection and management of Indigenous cultural values captures both tangible and intangible values, and is caught up in social justice, capacity, governance and legislative constraint that need to be addressed if enduring protection and management of cultural values to be achieved.