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War sparks search for answers

James Salerno discusses cattle work with son James Jr at El Questro Station. Picture: James Grant Photography

Surrounded by death and destruction as a soldier in the Vietnam War, James Salerno decided there could not possibly be a worse environment for humans.

It was that experience that ignited a four-decade-long research project to discover a set of rules that could be employed to create a conflict-free ideal human environment.

"I started that almost straight away when I got back from Vietnam," Mr Salerno said over a cup of tea at his Packsaddle Road property near Kununurra.

"When I was in the war it occurred to me that you can't really get a worse environment for humans to be in than to resolve their conflicts by killing each other.

"That's when I started to wonder, if this is the worst that we've been in, is there such a thing as the ideal human environment?

"And I've been on that ever since."

Born in Italy but raised in South Australia, Mr Salerno returned to Australia after the war and set about establishing a research team of everyday people, studying how they interacted in different situations.

In 1983, he moved his research to the Kimberley, purchasing El Questro Station and setting up a cattle business as a base for the study.

"I have a rural background and someone showed me a piece of paper that said there was a property for sale up here and that's how I got interested," he said.

"Regardless of what we do, our primary function is to find the ideal human environment."

"We might be running a cattle station or building roads, but they are all secondary to what we are really doing."

Mr Salerno said most of the current research team, including many of his immediate family, had been together in the study for almost four decades.

He said the close-knit team played a key role as both focus group and researchers.

"I wasn't thinking I could do this all on my own because one of the things we've discovered is people's perceptions are different," he said.

"What we are doing is not trying to discover a new religion or set of morals, it's actually about discovering the nature of humans so that we can make laws about that.

"We're trying to discover what laws we can implement to create the ideal human environment."

"The more different things the research team can do, the better we are for the experiences and we have found many things."

Mr Salerno lives with up to 30 other researchers, some only infants, at his Packsaddle Road property and he said the housing arrangements were part of the broader study.

"If you and I were trying to get to know each other and you lived in Antarctica and I lived at the other end, we could communicate and do all sorts of things but we would never get in each other's way," he said.

"We're never going to know how we really perform under these conditions.

"If you have a research team to discover how people interact, you want them working together and it is much easier to have people in one area as much as possible so they get in each other's way.

"We are trying to find what creates conflict and all the research people are like guinea pigs; in a way we are in it but we are the researchers as well."

Mr Salerno said the laws employed were vital to the research team's continued co-operative existence.

"Naturally you've got to have laws," he said.

"What we do is find laws and implement them and if it works it creates harmony and we think 'this is a good law', and keep it.

"Over the thousands of hours and decades we have solved conflict.

"Like any organisation, we have a rank structure and that eliminates a lot of misunderstanding about who should say who starts (talking) and who doesn't start and that that sort of thing.

"Everyone has a rank and all of the children have a rank."

One such law Mr Salerno said was a key to their success was 'red means stop'.

He said this was used when two people had a disagreement and were about to launch into an argument and worked as a diffuser where someone would say "red light" and the issue would then be sorted in a calm way with mediation from other members of the research team.

"What we need is people who can consistently do research, like for example if they have an argument they don't just walk away and say 'see you later, I can't get on with you', they think 'why can't I get on with that person?'

"We've done programs all over Australia and often we get people sent here to us when they can't find any other resolution and we have the laws here."

In 1999, Mr Salerno led an expedition of people into the bush 70km from Kununurra to road test some of the laws the research team believed worked well.

They had signed up to be part of the research, having not previously been involved.

"When you build a vehicle you go out and test it on rough terrain - this was very much the same," he said.

"We thought we had the ideal human environment, so we took random people from around Australia and overseas out and tried out these laws.

"That was really interesting because people had to get used to all sorts of things.

"We wanted to make it as rough as possible because we didn't just want people in an air-conditioned hotel room."

Late last year, the research team published an open letter as an advertisement in The Kimberley Echo setting out some of what they did as part of the research.

Mr Salerno said they chose to open up to the public to end ongoing speculation and innuendo about what they did.

"People were obviously asking, and it is unusual for a group of people to be co-operating so closely together," he said.

"Is it religious, are you a cult, are you just a big family or whatever?"

"It was just a general overview just to let the community know."

Mr Salerno said the research, which had now expanded to include participants from Australia, Germany, India, China and the US, among other countries, would always be an ongoing project.

"Over four decades we've tried lots and lots of things but we are always open to ideas," he said.

"As long as people are doing things, it stimulates more conflict and you can see if certain laws work. The ideal human environment can't end until humans end."