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...
After Tennessee, Michael and I headed for Charlottesville, Virginia, where I was to give my next lecture. It would have been an uneventful trip, but for the hundreds of trucks that filled the highway. They were not as large or as long as the semi-trailers common to Northern Territory roads, but enough to make the trip hair-raising in parts. Lesley had warned us of this.
On arriving at Charlotte Airport, we had to retrieve our hand luggage from the back of the plane, as our locker space had been taken up by the belongings of other people. As a response to the introduction of checked luggage fees, people are taking quite large cases and bags onboard as hand luggage. And staff appear to be making little attempt to stop them, although signs at the boarding gate and elsewhere stipulate just how much can be taken into the body of the plane.
Meredith McGuire collected us at the San Antonio airport and drove us out the lovely home she shares with husband Jim Spickard. I had taken Meredith and Jim to Baby Dreaming, Arnhem Land some years before, and we'd stayed in touch. Now I was to lecture at Trinity University where Meredith was Professor of Sociology and Anthropology.
