Yuin elder Guboo Ted Thomas heavily influenced Sean Burke

The first time the Canberra public servant saw Gulaga he felt he had come home.

Mr Burke and his family moved to the area in 1982 and soon met Mr Thomas who lived at Wallaga Lake.

"Since then I have been learning about the significance of Gulaga to the Aboriginal people," he said.

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He joined Mr Thomas on the Mount Dromedary Flora Reserve Advisory Committee, representing conservationists.

While the eastern side of Gulaga was in a flora reserve the western side was in Bodalla State Forest and open to logging.

In 1988 he saw a logging truck at Dignams Creek and discovered it had been coming from Gulaga for a week or two.

He alerted the Wallaga Lake Aboriginal community and a small group, including Merv Penrith, went to Gulaga to check things out.

"It was shocking," Mr Burke said.

He borrowed a huge Panasonic video camera from Central Tilba Public School and made a video that captured the site's spirituality.

Mr Penrith took the video to Canberra the following week.

"Merv was grabbing people by their shirts and saying they are logging our mountain," Mr Burke said.

They took him to Minister for Resources Peter Cook.

Meanwhile Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people formed the Gulaga (Mount Dromedary) Protection Group.

Mr Burke ran a media campaign from his office at Bega Valley Shire Council.

After work when everyone had left he wrote press releases and faxed them to media outlets.

Three weeks later, in December 1988, the regional head of the Forestry Commission Graham Gray, appeared on WIN television and said "a white conservationist has stirred up the Aboriginal people and convinced them that the mountain is sacred to them", Mr Burke said.

Mr Penrith's visit to Canberra led the Forestry Commission and National Parks and Wildlife Service to jointly commission and fund a study into the significance of Gulaga to contemporary Aboriginal people.

Dr Deborah Bird Rose's report, released in 1990, made three recommendations that were implemented in the following year or two.

She recommended that the flora reserve was extended to cover the entire mountain, the mountain was gazetted as an Aboriginal place under NSW Heritage legislation and its name changed to Gulaga Flora Reserve.

"All that culminated in the hand back of 2006," Mr Burke said.

However Mr Burke's fight to protect Gulaga was not over. (To be continued).

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