The Blue Mud Bay case: refractions through saltwater country

Development and Change, 2000

This article uses two case studies to illustrate the subjection of indigenous peoples' marine territories to a`double jeopardy' of exclusion Ð jurisdictional and proprietary Ð through the legal and administrative practices of Europeaǹ settler' states in Australia and Canada. While the fiction of terra nullius as a legal rationale for refuting indigenous rights of property and governance has steadily eroded in recent decades, its counterpart mare nullius has proven, so far, more resistant. The authors examine how state conceptions of jurisdiction, property and boundary-making in coastal areas accomplish the distortion and fragmentation of the coastal and marine spaces of Torres Strait Islanders in northern Queensland, Australia, and of the Cree and Inuit peoples of James and Hudson Bays in northern Que bec, Canada. Assumptions of land±sea continuity underlie these peoples' cultural constructions of coastal and marine environments. In examining the progress that each has made in reasserting ownership and control of coast and sea, it seems that recognition and reinforcement of their institutions for managing marine spaces and resources offer the best prospect for reconnecting fractured jurisdictional domains, and for bringing about social equity, environmental protection, and self-determined regional development.

Gulf Country Aboriginal people perceive water as an integral part of the broader cultural landscape rather than a conceptually distinct element. Customary connection to and ownership of water therefore intersects with links to contiguous areas known in the anthropological literature as ‘estates’ and in local parlance as ‘countries’. For many Aboriginal people into the present, the ‘law’ which underlies this system of ‘countries’ was laid down in the Dreaming and does not change. ‘Nothing never change’ is the local form articulating this conviction. While a powerful expression of traditionalism, the commitment to leaving everything ‘like it is now’, in our findings, in fact involves an acknowledgement of environmental changes resulting from introduced plants and animals along with Euro-Australian settlement. Notwithstanding determined traditionalism, Aboriginal law, like settler law, changes constantly, responding to new challenges by transforming continuing traditions and incorporating influences from the broader society which are genuinely new and different. Drawing on the results of ethnographic research during cultural mapping work in the Gulf, we address this theme particularly in the context of land rights and native title processes over recent decades.

2002

In this thesis I look at the work of managing Yol\u Aboriginal estates by the Dhimurru Land Management Aboriginal Corporation (Dhimurru) and Yol\u Aboriginal communities of NE Arnhem Land. I examine the practices of doing contemporary land and sea management at Dhimurru drawing on work I did at Dhimurru assisting in the development of a plan of management for the Yol\u place, }anydjaka (Cape Arnhem in English), and negotiating a curriculum/pedagogy for Dhimurru Yol\u Rangers. I examine the mobilisation strategies of the environmental sciences and Yol\u knowledges which together perform the 'object of management' in Dhimurru's practice, '}anydjaka/Cape Arnhem', as a multiplicity: a Yol\u-managed place. Showing '}anydjaka/Cape Arnhem' as a multiplicity (multiple but partially connected objects) allows us to understand place as multiple materialities performed through sets of routine, but quite often very different, sets of practices. The work of managing '}anydjaka/Cape Arnhem' is the work of managing multiple realities within which the object of management is continually performed as partial, messy, contingent and local. I contend that in order to take Yol\u understandings seriously in land and sea management we need to understand Dhimurru's unique ontology as a knowledge landscape characterised by an emergent methodology I call 'journeying-namingtracing'. I examine episodes in the training of Yol\u Aboriginal rangers through Dhimurru, Batchelor College and the Parks and Wildlife Commission of the Northern Territory. Comparing these different episodes we can see that they are an education/training in differing methodologies of knowledge making. The rangers were being sensitised to, and disciplined in working different 'ontological tensions' as they were trained to 'manage Nature/"the environment"' and to 'manage Yol\u places/people'. Through a critique of four episodes in ranger training, I suggest that an effective curriculum/pedagogy for trainee Yol\u rangers will make these ontological contrasts explicit and employ a methodology of 'journeying-namingtracing'.

k@ta

The dichotomic concept of space between white and Aboriginal Australians has been widely used in the colonial discourse. Through The Secret River, Grenville dismantles the binary oppositions that serves as the main strategy for colonization. We argue that space as a medium of negotiation is used as her strategy to involve in the national reconciliation movement. Postmemory is employed to explain the strategy of choosing spatial locations that links with Grenville’s intergenerational memories. The analysis reveals that the boundaries created by the settlers upon the disputed land cannot successfully cover the chaotic and heterogenous nature of the Aboriginal Dharug land. Instead, the previous characteristics of the land keep appearing as a form of resistance. During the attempt, the settlers slowly recognize the similar nature of the Dharug’s living space to theirs. The process represents the ongoing understanding between the two parties which signifies the spirit of the national rec...

Recent scholarly efforts to recognize water rights and water fights have been driven into being through various territorial disputes. In such work, water is usefully treated as a form of imagined soil that can be mapped, as a liquid habitat with nutrients to haul or as a mining site with resources to be extracted. This paper instead draws from the physics of water to reconceptualize policy's corrosions in everyday worlds, as an intervention into the human-centrism of conventional policy analyses, as part of an approach I am calling a policy ecology. Using case studies drawn from the largest Indigenous public housing and infrastructure program conducted in Australia to date, here I trace the path of water into the cracks of human-made forms. The scale of the Strategic Indigenous Housing and Infrastructure Program was unprecedented and its history has already been written as one of unintended consequences amid mostly welcome material benefits. In treating water as a body that acts, rather than a body that can be (re)territorialized through contest, this paper tries to erode analyses which approach Indigenous social policy as an equation of bureaucracy plus good and/or misdirected will, which soon routes the traffic of critical analysis toward case study evaluations of where and how implementation goes wrong and how it might be corrected. I call this policy teleology, in contrast with policy ecology, by which I mean both the ecology of the policy environments themselves and the variegated connections that stem from and flow through the alive, inhabited worlds that policy is entering into – the coalescences between humans and multiple other forces which help shape the policy category known as ‘Indigenous living conditions’. The tale of water as itself transformative and animate is an attempt to recover more porous images of self and nature that might feed into understandings of policy unfurling, without denying the naturalized images of improvable human processes through settler-colonial intervention that underlies such an ambition.

Resources, 2018

The passage of the Native Title Act 1993 (Cth) brought with it much anticipation—though in reality, quite limited means—for recognizing and protecting Aboriginal peoples' rights to land and water across Australia. A further decade passed before national and State water policy acknowledged Aboriginal water rights and interests. In 2015, the native title rights of the Barkandji Aboriginal People in the Australian State of New South Wales (NSW) were recognized after an eighteen-year legal case. This legal recognition represents a significant outcome for the Barkandji People because water and, more specifically, the Darling River, or Barka, is central to their existence. However, the Barkandji confront ongoing struggles to have their common law rights recognized and accommodated within Australian water governance regimes. Informed by literature relating to the politics of recognition, we examine the outcomes of government attempts at Indigenous recognition through four Australian water regimes: national water policy; native title law; NSW water legislation; and NSW water allocation planning. Drawing from the Barkandji's experiences in engaging with water regimes, we analyze and characterize the outcomes of these recognition attempts broadly as 'misrecognition' and 'non-recognition', and describe the associated implications for Aboriginal peoples. These manifestations of colonial power relations, whether intended or not, undermine the legitimacy of state water regimes because they fail to generate recognition of, and respect for, Aboriginal water rights and to redress historical legacies of exclusion and discrimination in access to water.

2020

As an Opposition member of parliament in the 1950s and 1960s, Gough Whitlam took a keen interest in Australia's responsibilities, under the United Nations' mandate, to develop the Territory of Papua New Guinea until it became a self-determining nation. In a chapter titled 'International Affairs', Whitlam proudly recalled his government's steps towards Papua New Guinea's independence (declared and recognised on 16 September 1975). 2 However, Australia's relationship with Papua New Guinea in the 1970s could also have been discussed by Whitlam under the heading 'Indigenous Affairs' because from 1973 Torres Strait Islanders demanded (and were accorded) a voice in designing the border between Australia and Papua New Guinea. Whitlam's framing of the border issue as 'international', to the neglect of its domestic Indigenous dimension, is an instance of history being written in what Tracey Banivanua-Mar has called an 'imperial' mode. Historians, she argues, should ask to what extent decolonisation was merely an 'imperial' project: did 'decolonisation' not also enable the mobilisation of Indigenous 'peoples' to become self-determining in their relationships with other Indigenous

Routledge eBooks, 2018

This article addresses Indigenous Australian claims to water resources and how they inform and relate to current Australian law and contemporary legal thinking about future possibilities. It adopts a multidisciplinary approach, drawing from historical records, previous ethnographic investigation with Indigenous Australians, current legal scholarship, and social anthropological theory. In doing so, it analyses Indigenous dependencies on water, the history of settler colonial orientations to water bodies, the evolution of settler colonial-Indigenous relations to natural resources, and the development of the Australian legal system's regulation of water. This provides foundations for a discussion of the limitations of settler colonial notions of property and the failure of settler colonial law to understand and incorporate the dynamism of Indigenous relationships to water, particularly the meaning and productive capacity of water flows within Indigenous cosmologies and sociocultural and ecological systems. Calling for a decolonial turn in legal approaches to Indigenous access and water resource determination, the authors explore the ways in which Australian law may need to 'unthink' settler colonial notions of resource ownership as a prerequisite for reformulating future water policy and planning. This reformulation relies on a more extensive legal philosophical engagement with the concept of 'flow', a concept that already exists in both water law and planning, but which has not been adequately theorised and enacted. A more comprehensive legal understanding of flow in the context of Indigenous understandings of, and claims to, water provides more sustainable and equitable legal and analytical foundations for managing future water resources issues. The article creates the space for a more culturally relevant notion of 'Indigenous water rights' and for new ways of honouring the interrelationship between water flows, meaning-making practices, and cultural continuity.

The paper presents original material drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in a conflict situation over the construction of a AUD $45 billion liquefied natural gas facility on top of an Indigenous heritage site: Walmadany / James Price Point, at the Indian Ocean coast of Northwest Australia. It discusses, from an emic point of view, the inadequacy of western science terminology to represent Indigenous knowledge about the environment in question. To overcome related shortcomings in assessment processes of natural and cultural values, the paper argues for ways in which western law und science can be better equipped first to recognize Indigenous knowledge as ontologically different but equal, and second to overcome the impossible task of expressing Indigenous world(view)s in modernist terms.