Denise Lawungkurr Goodfellow is a birdwatching/natural history guide, environmental/Indigenous tourism consultant and writer. She began guiding in 1983. Most of her clientele are well-educated, well-travelled Americans who hear of her by word of mouth. As a biological consultant she has conducted fauna surveys in the remote Top End, often solo. In 1981 she stood for Council to save mangrove habitat. Denise is a published author of books including “Birds of Australia’s Top End” - described as winning ‘top honors’ by American Birdwatcher’s Digest), and ‘impressive’ by the American Birding Association’s Winging It) - her autobiographical Quiet Snake Dreaming and Fauna of Kakadu and The Top End, which has been used as a “core text” of the University of NSW’s summer school since 2000.
This information resource is published to provide you with an insight into life in Australia's Top End - in the Northern Territory - including information about how to defeat infestations of gamba grass and how to create hand sanitiser from common household ingredients.
Gamba grass (Andropogon gayanus) is a tall (4 metres high), multi-stemmed plant introduced to Australia in the 1930s as cattle fodder (Csurhes, 2005). The potential danger this grass posed was recognised early on, but despite assurances that it could be...
Black wattle (Acacia auriculiformis) - ‘soap’ plants that have been long-used by Bininj
A few months ago, a message appeared on Facebook. Posted by a family member living in Arnhem Land it told of the electrocution of a child. The women...
A calendar depicting Australian birds from which are endangered by increasingly ferocious bushfires is helping to raise funds to support a volunteer brigade which battles these blazes near Darwin River.
Designed by bird photographer and ecotourism expert Denise Lawungkurr Goodfellow, the...
Denise GoodfellowNT residents are calling for urgent action to fight a fire-prone grass introduced to Australia as cattle food that’s devastating native plants and animals in the Top End and threatening the lives of locals and tourists this Dry Season.
Gamba...
By Denise Goodfellow
When I first received the invitation to speak at the Bird Festival, I thought it was to be held in Columbia, USA. After all, who in their right mind would run such an event in Colombia, South America?
North...
Several American airlines now have a policy of charging for checked luggage. And so many passengers take extra luggage into the cabin. This means that unless one is on the plane first, locker space is often already taken. This meant that on the flight to Omaha, Nebraska, our hand luggage had to be stored in a locker away from us. This worried me as we had all our camera and recording gear as well as my PhD questionnaires in our bags.
On April 14 we flew back to California to deliver two more lectures. Again we stayed at Muriel?s house in La Canada. The first was to the Pasadena Audubon Society. As before, some previous clients who had become friends joined us there, and it was a very convivial meeting. As in my other lectures to Audubon societies I covered some of the other fauna and flora of the Top End, some of my background and that of my family, both Aboriginal and otherwise.
Sky and Anne Hilts picked us up at the Tucson Airport and we headed for their home below the Tucson mountains. Tucson is surrounded by mountains with Mt Lemmon being the highest at nearly 9000 feet. Their home, like most we saw, is a flat-roofed pueblo-type building. The many nooks and crannies are filled with family photos, family trees (Anne can trace her family back to Charlemagne), shells, Sky’s medals (he was a navy doctor during the Vietnam war) and books.
