Carol Pettersen was a small child when her family moved deep into the bush around the Fitzgerald river, on Western Australia’s south coast. It was the 1940s, and her white father and Aboriginal mother had broken the law simply by being together. So the bush became their refuge.

In that country of mallee heath, banksias and low coastal scrub, dingoes were part of the family’s hidden world. At night, Pettersen could hear them calling through the dark; by day, she glimpsed them moving through the bush – a flicker of red fur among the trees.

“The bush was home,” says Pettersen, a Menang and Nadju Noongar elder who now lives in Albany. “And you know when people long for home, they sing songs, songs that take them back there? That’s what the dingo howl sounds like to me.”

But the animal that once moved through Pettersen’s childhood has almost vanished from the south-west of Australia. She has not seen a dingo in the wild since she was a girl – “70, 80 years ago,” she says.

Across Australia, dingoes were once widespread. Since colonisation, they have been shot, trapped, poisoned and fenced out of pastoral regions, most visibly by the 5,614km dingo fence running through Queensland, New South Wales and South Australia. Many Aboriginal communities say the loss is cultural as well as ecological: the disappearance of an animal held in stories, totems and songlines.

For most of her life, Pettersen thought she was alone in that grief. “I thought I was just a lone cry for something we lost,” she says. Then a chance encounter brought her into a documentary project that gave shape to what she had carried for decades.

That project was Moort: Calling Dingo Back to Country, a short documentary by Defend the Wild and Dingo Culture featuring Pettersen and other custodians. Moort means family in Noongar – a title that points to the film’s central argument. Taking place in the south-west, where dingoes have been eradicated, it asks what has been lost by treating a culturally significant apex predator as a pest.

The story behind Moort begins on the other side of the continent, in far north Queensland, where dingoes still move through rainforest and cane country.

Sonya Takau, a Jirrbal woman who grew up near Tully, is the founder of advocacy group Dingo Culture and the National First Nations Dingo Coordinator. Her advocacy began about 15 years ago, when she saw two dingoes standing on a railway line at sunrise. Worried they would be harmed, she rang Queensland Parks and Wildlife to ask if they could be relocated. Instead, she was told they would have to be euthanised. “I said, ‘That’s not going to happen on my watch,’” she says.

As Takau began looking into dingo laws, she says she found that policy was shaped largely by livestock interests, with little regard for First Nations cultural authority. “There were no Aboriginal people having a say in this animal,” she says.

In many parts of Australia, dingoes are grouped with “wild dogs” under biosecurity laws and treated as pests or invasive animals, allowing – and in some places requiring – landholders to kill or exclude them to protect livestock.

But Takau argues that framing ignores both their cultural significance and their ecological role. “Dingoes keep Country healthy,” she says; they can control overgrazing by animals like goats and kangaroos, and reduce pressure from feral cats and foxes, which prey on native wildlife.

Through her advocacy, Takau met Alix Livingstone, founder of Defend the Wild, and the two began working to centre Aboriginal voices in dingo conservation. That work led west, through a cultural exchange that brought rangers from Queensland and northern NSW together with Aboriginal corporations on WA’s south coast to share dingo monitoring knowledge and cultural stories.

The film and campaign grew out of that exchange. In February, Moort was screened at WA parliament, where custodians called on the state government to remove dingoes from pest classifications in biosecurity law and phase out 1080 baiting and strychnine-laced foothold traps, which can cause prolonged, painful deaths.

Livingstone says the campaign is not about pitting Aboriginal people against farmers but shifting support from killing programs to coexistence measures such as better fencing, guardian animals and practical help for landholders. “It’s about finding solutions for farmers that protect their interests but also maintain dingoes in the environment,” she says.

Zac Webb, a Wadandi conservationist who appears in Moort, grew up in WA’s south-west. He only knew dingoes through absence: family stories and memories passed down by elders who heard them howling around Busselton and Dunsborough.

In the documentary, Webb describes how early-settler dingo culling became almost a sport: people collected pelts and posed with skins of animals deemed a threat to farming. His own great-grandfather was paid to shoot wildlife for farmers – dingoes, wedge-tailed eagles, foxes – because, he says, it was one of the few ways Aboriginal people could make money and remain off missions. The work “used to break his heart”.

As a conservationist, Webb is interested in how we can move towards coexistence. He points to Wooleen Station, a cattle station in WA’s Murchison region, where dingoes were allowed to return as part of a broader shift in land management. Their presence helped keep kangaroos, goats and rabbits in check, allowing vegetation to recover. “The whole station came back to life,” Webb says: water ran clearer, erosion slowed and trees regenerated. At screenings, Moort is shown alongside a Landholders for Dingoes film about Wooleen, showing what’s possible when dingo eradication stops.

“It’s something we hold dear nationally,” he says, “as Aboriginal people across Australia. It is family. It’s our kinship.”

• Moort: Calling Dingo Back to Country and Wooleen: Utilising Dingoes as a Management Tool are screening together at Brunswick Picture House, NSW, on 17 May and Evans Head, NSW, on 13 June. More screenings around Australia to come