Caring for
the land

Kevin Hingston from Crow Downs is going
to make a model of appropriate land
management and alternative energy.
Here is his account of where he's at ..

This was an old pistol club and has been here since about 1959 up until 1992. The Pistol Club shifted to the Warrego Road site and this was taken up by land claim, by the N.T. government and the Federal government. My wife, born and bred in all this area, put in for it and we decided to redevelop it.
We want to put a lot of native trees in and to grow bush tucker trees. There's actually a market for bush tucker down south and in the eastern states - all sorts of berries and all sorts of fruit and the like - people use it for herbal medicine.
We've taken about four years to develop the place and clean it up. Our idea is to completely rehabilitate the area with native trees. Others parts will have our bush tucker trees once we get it developed.
We had Wilson Tuckey, the Minister for Land and Environment and all his crew last month, he stayed for about 10 or 15 minutes, had a look around the place and he liked what he saw.
We have a dam and our intention is to make the dam a lot deeper and then we'll pump water from the dam to feed all our bush tucker trees and all our native trees, the whole lot, once we get it underway. It is a fairly big dam and it's going to take a while to get all this done. It's about a metre and half deep at the moment but we want to try and get it down to about two or three metres and once we do that we can feed all our trees on a drip system from the dam on a pump. It should work out alright.
We've just completed a big shed here where I train a few boys in boxing and weightlifting. We've got about twelve boys that come out at the moment at various times of the evening. We've just finished setting it up. It keeps them off the street and later on we'll be getting a few more I suppose. The kids come out on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday nights for a few hours.
By the time they go home, they're too tired to roam around the street, so they go home straight to bed! They're exhausted more or less!
Our power is supplied by a diesel generator but next year we'll be looking at all solar power and wind power. That's our main aim, to run the whole place on solar power. I have a friend at Adelaide University and he's right into solar and wind power and I want to try and get him up here around May if I can, to set up the wind power.
They have done it in Central NSW and it works fantastically so I've heard and it's so cheap, clean and effective. We want to use this place as an experiment for power and try the solar power, wind generated power, the wind mills, the whole lot and see how we go.
With the dam, once we get the dam up and ready with the right trees out there, it will attract all sorts of bird life, all species of birds. It's just a matter of putting the trees that they'll eat there, so if we can do that, that'd be great.
To the west we have a rock, that's the sacred crow rock. It was used for sacred ceremonies years and years ago - for corroborees and things like that.
It's a very special place for the Waramungu people and they've been visiting this area for thousands of years. It was a lot bigger up until when we had the big tremors in 1988. That brought some of it down.
The Army actually used this place around 1943 or 1944. They'd stop here for a few days on their way to Darwin but they'd also practise over here when it was an actual range. You can still pick up the old army shells from the 1940s.