Indigenous Desert Alliance Conference 2024

The Indigenous Desert Alliance (IDA) held a significant conference of Elders, rangers, community leaders at Uluru, with over 400 attendees making their way to the biannual event. The conference celebrated “A Decade of Connection” in reference to the IDA’s past ten years of coordinating these events, with the three-day event running between November 11-14 and containing full-day rosters of workshops. The IDA was established to facilitate the sharing of lived experience from the vast network of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander rangers across the desert regions of Australia. The desert area covered by IDA groups spans over 2,730,000 square kilometres, containing 25 Indigenous Protected Areas, 65 ranger teams and over 78 threatened species. AW spoke with Arabana head ranger, Zaheer McKenzie, about the conference and several of the important projects that the Arabana ranger program is involved with more widely.