Hey Hulafish,
HAPPY NEW YEAR! Can we still say that in March?
Here at Moonrise HQ we finally have some BIG news to share, that has been in the pipeline for a very long time.
Since mid 2023 we’ve been putting together a project with our colleagues at Flinders University, the Marine Bioproducts CRC and the Fisheries Research and Development Council, and as of this week that project is approved!
This project seeks to reduce barriers for Indigenous communities to enter the seaweed industry
and to establish a First Nations seaweed aquaculture enterprise and nursery in South Australia,
from a unique standpoint anchored in two-way knowledge sharing - all the stuff we’ve been working towards with Moonrise since the beginning.
We will be working with Professor Jian Qin and his team at the aquaculture program at Flinders to:
Identify key seaweed species of interest (both to Moonrise and to First Nations Community locally);
Undertake research to establish accessible, low-tech cultivation protocols for targeted species;
Investigate applications and economic outcomes for targeted species within a framework of First Nations rights to biocultural resources;
Disseminate this information via open-source/copyleft principles - allowing sharing amongst those that will reciprocally share, and excluding those that seek to monopolise;
Produce an industry guide that outlines the process to ensure the rights of Traditional Owners to biocultural resources and appropriate consultation processes; and
Identify barriers for Traditional Owners to both Care for Country and protect ICIP from corporate appropriation via Brad’s PhD research, focussed on international and national First Nations connections to Sea Country and their engagement in the seaweed and blue carbon industries.
Just so you know we aren’t going too corporate on you all, here’s a little excerpt from our project proposal:
We embrace the common values of global First Nations peoples and open-source pioneers -
specifically those of reciprocity, sovereignty, creativity and distributed innovation. We will
address the asymmetry of information that underlies the sidelining of First Nations communities
from their own seaweed resources to make way for the hegemony of capital and technology.
…maybe not that surprising that it took a while to get this one through the bureaucratic pipeline?
However we’ve been working with some amazing allies to get this one over the line, including Jian (who has a seriously incredible wealth of aquaculture knowledge that he generously shares), Professor Catriona Macleod (who has helped shape this project from inception and been our biggest supporter - thank you Catriona, you bloody legend!), Dr Simon Odell (research program manager at the MB-CRC and tireless insider advocate for the project), MB-CRC CEO Daniel Abrahams (who took a chance on us two scrappy little radicals, and intuitively understood the vision of the project and how it fits into the industry more broadly), Jane Keane for the administrative support (no small thing), Josh Fielding at the FRDC (who has been supporting Moonrise for a long time, including helping us get to industry conferences and events so we can expand our network), Lukina Lukin (for being a sounding board/trusted advisor about working with the CRC), Steven Clarke for connecting us with the MB-CRC at the ground level (and being our very first friend and mentor in the world of seaweed way back in the day), and of course Uncle Jeffrey Newchurch, Aunty Lynette Crocker and Aunty Merle Simpson for their ongoing guidance (we’d be nowhere without you!), and other elders that supported our vision prior to the launch of Moonrise including Uncle Lewis O’Brien and the late Aunty Buster Turner (we miss you). Thanks also to Associate Professor Ali Baker for convincing Brad to turn his seaweed research into a PhD project. There are of course countless others who have helped and supported us in getting this project off the ground (you know who you are!) from our Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign back at the start of 2022, right up to 2025 with all you newsletter reading seastars!
After a (very) long season of visioning, designing, collaborating, proposing, refining and, to be honest, waiting, we’re so thrilled to be able to come back to all you long time supporters with this news. We are very, very ready to get cracking and deliver some outcomes to the small-scale, First Nations and regenerative seaweed community.
Alongside (and complementary to) this project, we are still working towards establishing our very own pilot-scaled cultivation facility here on Kaurna yarta. More on this soon (or maybe not so soon… every timeline we’ve been working on has proven to be wildly unrealistic, but we’re optimists I guess).
This is only the beginning!
Keep frothing,
Chloe & Brad
(video of Gynburra taken at Myponga Beach)