In an agreement years in the making, the traditional owners of the southern Snowy Mountains will formally be involved in the conservation of Kosciuszko National Park.
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On Saturday the NSW government signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with the Monaro Ngarigo people, officially including the community's role in preserving the national park’s cultural value.
A number of Ngarigo people residing in the Bega Valley made the trip to Jindabyne for the handover, including Bega’s David Dixon.
"The Ngarigo is the sacred ancestral lands of my grandfather and the Djiringanj is my grandmother’s," Mr Dixon said this week.
"Our elders have lead the way for us over the past 10 years, always standing strong and attending the talks and gatherings negotiating the MOU for our people.
"It has been too long that the Ngarigo peoples have been denied a say over the Kosciuszko National Park with so much of our lands stolen by the Crown without redress."
Mr Dixon said the vision of many in the community for the future of the park will include the construction of a Ngarigo cultural centre within the park and an alternate Ngarigo name for both the park and the mountain, much like how Uluru is also known as Ayers Rock.
The area covered by the historic agreement covers from the Lake Eucumbene area to the north and the Victorian border to the south.
"Kosciuszko National Park is a unique Australian national park because it is a private playground of privileged and in peak winter periods can bring in up to 20,000 people per day,” Mr Dixon said.
“Many of those people have no understanding or knowledge of the Ngarigo people and our culture and our story.
"We are hoping that that will now change.”
Mount Kosciuszko is the highest point in Australia and was named by Polish explorer Sir Paweł Edmund Strzelecki in 1840 after American Revolutionary War General Tadeusz Kosciuszko.
Until it was changed in 1997, the park and mountain were known by the Anglicised version, Kosciusko.