The fundamental Indigenous concept of manauoomillyan—“taking care”—aligns with sustainability’s core intent while extending it to relationships among people, plants, waters, and Country. Building on our previously published study that modelled two hypothetical research pathways with the same Australian native plant (“Plant A”), we show how a both-ways approach can generate richer, more reliable evidence for drug discovery. In the first vignette, non-codified knowledge shared by an Indigenous community guided a context-specific preparation—steeping Plant A in running water before ethanol extraction. This fidelity to Country, method, and meaning produced an extract that progressed as a viable lead, illustrating how manauoomillyan operationalises sustainability and safety at bench scale. In the second vignette, researchers relied on codified historical texts and applied ethanol extraction alone. Despite using the same species, omission of the community method yielded a toxic outcome, exposing risks when provenance is unclear, and techniques are de-contextualised.
Together, the vignettes demonstrate that combining Indigenous knowledge systems with modern analytics expands the evidence base beyond compartmentalised variables to relational qualities—seasonality, water movement, and culturally grounded preparation. Modern techniques can still characterise active constituents and mechanisms; however, they are most powerful when nested within Indigenous Cultural and Intellectual Property (ICIP) principles, Free, Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC), and transparent benefit-sharing. By centring Indigenous sovereignty and method fidelity, R&D becomes not only more ethical but also more efficient, focusing efforts on candidates already filtered by generations of safe use.
Framed through manauoomillyan, our findings re-position Australian native plants as medicines derived from living systems, not just chemical inventories. This integrated pathway offers a pragmatic route for discovering alternatives that are safer, more sustainable, and ultimately available to all Australians—now and into the future—while taking care of the knowledge holders, ecologies, and relationships that make such discovery possible.