Sonya Jeffrey, Ernie Grant and Caroline Grant on country in the Davidson Valley.

On the banks of Davidson Creek in tropical north Queensland, local Jirrbal woman Caroline Grant has selected three coloured stones from the shallow water. Scraping away at the surface of each, and using a piece of wood as her palette, she has produced red, yellow and white ochres that we’re applying to our faces and arms. While we paint, Caroline shares a Dreamtime story of how water first came to her land. She sways slightly as she speaks, passing a stone between her hands in a manner that is as hypnotic as the story she tells. Already soaked to our waists after wading up the creek, we sit in increasingly heavy rain, covered in sand, dirt and ochre–blissfully chilled out.

This 2½ hour Down River Tour is typical of the no-frills, utterly authentic experience offered by the Grant family on traditional country near Tully.

Ordinarily tour participants would now grab a tyre tube for a relaxing float back down the creek. Today, however, we’re joined by Caroline’s grandfather, Jirrbal elder Ernie Grant and his daughter Sonya Jeffrey. As the three directors of a newly formed company, the Grants are eager to talk about the business venture that will assist them to share and preserve their traditional land and culture.

Before getting down to business, Ernie points out an abundance of native medicinal plants and food growing in the trees 30 feet above our heads. Caught in those trees are dozens of plastic banana bags carried downstream in the wall of water that barrelled through the Davidson Valley when Cyclone Yasi made its direct hit on the region in February 2011.

That event has been a catalyst for many of the challenges and opportunities the Grant family now face.

For thousands of years the Jirrbal people of tropical north Queensland used a vast, sophisticated network of walking trails to collect food, attend ceremonial and social gatherings, and interact with the more than 20 groups that made up the Rainforest Aboriginal people of the wet tropics. The walking trails governed every aspect of Jirrbal society, with specific laws dictating trail use according to purpose and season.

It was along those trails–during another cyclone in 1918–that Ernie Grant’s mother Chloe Grant travelled when she escaped from a coastal mission back to her home in the Davidson Valley. Determined to preserve her culture and lifestyle, Chloe lived in the rainforest, and a young Ernie spent the formative years of his life at her side observing and absorbing language and culture.

In the 1990s Ernie distilled a lifetime of both formal and informal education into his Holistic Planning and Teaching Framework: My Land, My Tracks, an educational tool for examining the interconnected relationships Aboriginal people have with land, language and culture. At the same time, Ernie set about re-establishing one of the Jirrbal walking trails with the aim of using the framework to share his knowledge.

It is Ernie’s holistic framework that sits at the heart of the award-winning Spirit of the Rainforest Tour. Travelling through pristine World Heritage listed rainforest to the beautiful Echo Creek Falls, visitors are given a unique insight into the sacred values and ancestral knowledge of the Jirrbal people.

At least they were, until Cyclone Yasi hit. A massive landslide just short of the waterfall has forced a temporary suspension of the tour while workers cut an alternative trail through the rainforest.

A Down River Tour participant cooling off at Davidson Creek.

However, living and working in a region and industry subject to both weather and dollar fluctuations, the Grants know that their survival in the tourism sector depends on an ability to adapt and diversify. ‘There’s still a lot of special places around here we can take people’, said Ernie, who with Caroline and Sonya has temporarily expanded their shorter Down River Tour, attracting the attention of large tourism operators including Contiki.

As members of the Indigenous Tourism Champions Program (ITCP)–a joint venture between IBA and Tourism Australia–the Grants have been receiving mentoring in marketing and distribution specific to Indigenous owned tourism operations. Two months after Yasi, Sonya was invited to attend the Australian Tourism Exchange (ATE) in Sydney: ‘Our ITCP mentor helped us identify our target market’, she said, ‘and attending ATE enabled us to showcase our products to an international market, and build strong networks within the tourism industry’.

The opportunities available through the ITCP coupled with a strong desire for economic independence encouraged Ernie, Sonya and Caroline to start their own business, with the aim of developing and delivering a new range of tourism and educational services throughout the region. After applying for business support through IBA, Sonya and Caroline were invited to attend three one-day Into Business™ workshops to assess their preparedness for business ownership.

On successful completion of the workshops the Grants engaged business consultant John Felan of Felan Consulting through IBA to mentor them during the start-up phase of the business. This included the incorporation of their new company, Ingan Pty Ltd, and associated strategic planning. A local lawyer Stephen Devenish has also assisted with succession planning and intellectual copyright issues. Of all of the economic opportunities that formation of their own company offers, John said: ‘From the big picture point of view, the most exciting aspect is that now that their own company Ingan Pty Ltd has been incorporated, with Ernie, Sonya and Caroline as Directors and equal shareholders, they have the mechanism and entity to control their own destiny’.

Sonya concurs: ‘It’s always been our plan that we would eventually be 100 per cent Aboriginal owned… So we’ve now reached that stage where we’ve really proven our worth in the tourism industry. We’ve built our reputation up that we’re very reliable, we’re professional…a tourism company that can deliver… And I think, from my perspective, that (autonomy) is really important because dad’s built up something wonderful and it’s a legacy that needs to be maintained’.

With such a vast understanding and passion for their culture, and a wealth of tourism and educational activities available to tap into, it is perhaps surprising that one challenge facing the Grants is product development. For every potential tour or activity, they will need to identify exactly what the product is, drilling down to the specifics of delivery and how to reach that product’s target market.

To this end, John Felan ensures the Grants remain closely involved in all aspects of business planning and product development for Ingan. ‘This is one of the real strengths of the IBA model’, he said. ‘In any situation, it is always better for the entity or individual being mentored to ‘discover’ their own solutions for their particular business needs in accordance with standard business practice concepts introduced by the mentor’.

Caroline Grant sharing a Dreamtime story at Davidson Creek.

Despite both the challenges and opportunities ahead, John believes much of the new company’s potential lies in the individual strengths of its three directors. He said: ‘Ernie Grant is the eminent living repository of the culture and heritage of the Jirrbal people. He also has the skills and experience to present this knowledge in an educational and entertaining way… Caroline epitomises characteristics of intrinsic Australian Aboriginality. As the senior tour guide she brings deep knowledge of her country and people and shares this inclusively and warmly with her visitors… And Sonya is an enthusiastic, dedicated and accomplished natural communicator on any level. She has an infectious spirit and an agile mind, which encourages people to want to work with her and want to see her succeed’.

The Grants are excited about the journey ahead and the opportunities they will have to learn, although Sonya and Caroline both say it is the time spent with Ernie that provides the most valuable education of all. Sonya said: ‘For me, being brought up in a Western society, having a Western education and not really understanding that holistic perspective as an Aboriginal person, it’s only since I started working with dad and Caroline that I’m really starting to understand as an Aboriginal person what it means to be Aboriginal… And it’s always been there in me, but it’s been about connecting again. All that time I was going the way everyone else was going in a Western context… Until one day I woke up and thought, I have got such a beautiful identity here, and I am not learning what I need to be learning, and the importance of that. And now I’m like a sponge, you can’t stop me–every minute I get I want to be out learning about country with dad’.

Ernie Grant’s own satisfaction comes from witnessing the transfer and preservation of Jirrbal culture and knowledge, and the economic opportunities which Ingan Pty Ltd may provide for current and future generations.

Read more about the Indigenous Tourism Champions Program.