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Sustainability science research conducted with Indigenous collaborators must be Indigenous-led and achieve impacts that are grounded in local values and priorities, both for ethical reasons and to achieve more robust outcomes. However, there has been limited focus on determining how best to evaluate the way research is used, shared and created to adaptively solve complex sustainable issues facing Indigenous lands. In this paper, we outline a collaborative and adaptive approach for conducting Indigenous-led evaluations of sustainability research and show how this approach was applied to evaluate cross-cultural knowledge co-production practice and impact in Australia’s jointly managed and World Heritage-listed Kakadu National Park. As part of an Indigenous-led research project, indicators were co-developed by Indigenous and non-Indigenous research team members to monitor the health of the knowledge-sharing and co-production practices that underpinned the design, management and success of the project’s research activities. The evaluations focused on determining whether research activities were providing negotiated benefits for local Indigenous people; helping to restore and protect agreed values in priority areas; and supporting Indigenous-led collaborative knowledge sharing and research practices. In Kakadu, we show how the Indigenous-led design of the research evaluation empowered the usability and benefits of knowledge which was negotiated, shared and co-created. The approach shows how sustainability science can be evaluated by Indigenous leaders to test if and how research practice and impact is responding to their priorities for their traditional estates.

The introduction of new animals into huntergatherer societies produces a variety of cultural responses. This article explores the role of rock art in western Arnhem Land, Australia, in helping to mediate contact-period changes in Indigenous society in the nineteenth century. The authors explore etic and emic perspectives on the 're-emergence' of water buffalo into Aboriginal cultural life. Merging archaeological analysis, rock art and ethnographic accounts, the article demonstrates how such artworks were used as a tool for maintaining order in times of dramatic social change. The results of this research have significant implications for understanding how cultural groups and individuals worldwide used rock art during periods of upheaval.

The introduction of new animals into hunter-gatherer societies produces a variety of cultural responses. This article explores the role of rock art in western Arnhem Land, Australia, in helping to mediate contact-period changes in Indigenous society in the nineteenth century. The authors explore etic and emic perspectives on the ‘re-emergence’ of water buffalo into Aboriginal cultural life. Merging archaeological analysis, rock art and ethnographic accounts, the article demonstrates how such artworks were used as a tool for maintaining order in times of dramatic social change. The results of this research have significant implications for understanding how cultural groups and individuals worldwide used rock art during periods of upheaval.

First Nations peoples have lived in north Australia some 65,000 years at least, according to the archaeological evidence. [...]recently, though, academics deemed the pasts of Australian Indigenous people did not really count as history. [...]this division made sense, at least from the perspective of European scholars. The stunning galleries of art, curated and preserved in rock shelters or across plateaus, are therefore also archives. When the rock art is read alongside the colonial archive, with an attentiveness to the presence of horses in the artist’s life, we see a story emerge of Aboriginal people using the colonizers’ animals to carve out opportunities for themselves.