paper presented to the Inaugural International Conference in Critical Geography, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada (August 10-13, 1997) (OHP#1)

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[OHP#2 - Structure]

If the notion of an applied critical geography (what David Harvey called an applied peoples’ geography) (Harvey 1984) is relevant anywhere, it is in the struggles of indigenous peoples to establish security, recognition and influence in their own countries.

One of British imperialism's legacies for indigenous peoples at the edges of empire is misunderstanding and misrepresentation of social relations within indigenous societies (people-people relations), and environmental relations between indigenous groups and their territories (people-country relations).1 At the contemporary interface between indigenous and industrial societies, the economic, political, social, cultural and ecological consequences of this legacy affect the ways that geographies are created, appropriated, exploited and nurtured.

Despite a dramatic imbalance of power between postcolonial provincial and national governments, private sector industrial interests (upto and including major transnational corporate interests), diffuse ideological interests within the dominant societies, and diverse indigenous groups, the institutions of law, politics and economy have become critical to indigenous groups’ challenge to the comfortable assumptions of postcolonial national unity [OHP#3]. In mounting such challenges indigenous groups are not seeking to return to a pre-colonial state (although both reactionary critics and New Age idealists often misrepresent indigenous challenges in this way). Rather, indigenous groups seek to establish new geographies in which indigenous social, environmental, cultural and legal relations are central rather than marginalised.

This paper argues that indigenous people involved in these struggles are, in fact, negotiating new geographies in which people-people and people-country relations might be decolonised [OHP#4]. These struggles are critical in efforts to establish new geographies founded upon humane values central to the vision of a critical or applied peoples' geography:

• social justice,
• ecological sustainability,
• economic equity, and
• cultural diversity.

This emancipatory process is, of course, fraught. It is highly contested from within, by competing visions of indigenous futures (and pasts); and from without, by misunderstanding, misinformation, resistance from those who are the privileged beneficiaries (and even many of the scapegoat-seeking ‘victims’) of the inequitable, unjust and unsustainable patterns of relations which characterise postcolonial relations between indigenous and non-indigenous sectors of these national social formations.

Aboriginal Australians use the word ‘country’ in a way which divorces it from the conventional discourses of postcolonial politics (see Rose, 1996: 7-15) [OHP#5]. Aboriginal people’s efforts to look after their country encapsulates many of the key issues of the struggles against colonialism and its legacies. To the extent that these struggles unsettle the assumptions of privilege, power and identity in postcolonial Australia, they involve a shift towards genuine decolonisation. In meeting and mounting these challenges, however, the indigenous rights movement faces a massive backlash of privilege, prejudice, poverty and myopia. With limited economic resources, negotiation and persuasion have been the preferred modes for tackling this work rather than direct confrontation.

In recent years, I have been privileged to work with Aboriginal organisations in many parts of Australia. I have principally been involved in social impact assessment of resource projects, but have also worked on issues of institutional development of Aboriginal organisations, enterprise development, education and training programs, environmental management and political lobbying. Most recently this work has included contributions to major regional impact studies related to mining on Cape York (bauxite) and Kakadu (uranium, also tourism and conservation), preliminary work on impacts of coal mining (Hunter Valley, NSW), contributions to an alternative national strategy for indigenous economic empowerment as part of the negotiations between Aboriginal leaders and the Federal government, and skills development workshops focusing on negotiating about native title in NSW and Western Australia.

I have also been involved in teaching a program in resource management which has involved moving students (from indigenous communities, as well as mainstream undergraduate and graduate programs) through a trajectory requiring them to develop ‘new ways of seeing’ and ‘new ways of thinking’, in order to foster new practical approaches to (‘new ways of doing’) resource and environmental management in multi-cultural environments which are consistent with four critical values [OHP#6]:

• social justice,
• ecological sustainability,
• economic equity and
• cultural diversity.

In both these spheres, the relevance of geography has been critical. Australian political debate has been increasingly polarised since the election of a conservative federal coalition government in 1996. The rapid emergence of organised anti-Aboriginal racist groups reflects and reinforces the deep fears and uncertainties that underpin white Australia’s national identity. The mainstream media's complicity in the escalation of confrontational politics (and inability to comprehend much of the indigenous critique of postcolonial social and environmental relations) similarly reflect structural tensions within the Australian political economy.

In many ways, the urgent practical challenge facing Australian politics is to develop ways of addressing the superficially contradictory forces of economic, cultural and environmental processes. In terms of just and sustainable outcomes, developing both visions and skills which practically assist in developing strategies which simultaneously engage with [OHP#7]:

• the identity politics of cultural diversity,
• the distributive politics of economic survival, and
• the environmental politics of sustainability

Nancy Fraser’s insightful analysis of two of these dimensions of justice (Fraser, 1995) provides a valuable framework for understanding the tension between economic and cultural dimensions of social justice. Incorporation of indigenous groups’ struggle for justice, which adds a critical third dimension to social justice - environmental justice - may contribute to a more operational (rather than solely analytical) framework built on Fraser’s paper.

It is possible to use recent debate and negotiations over a High Court decision which confirmed the possibility that colonial (and postcolonial) pastoral leases might co-exist with (rather than exitinguish) native title2 as a window to these wider issues. Despite the recognition of native title as a persisting element of Australian geographies in the 1992 Mabo decision3, there was a widespread belief that the grant of a pastoral lease effectively extinguished native title. The decision in Wik undermines this assumption. It reflects and reinforces the longstanding reality of co-existence (and inter-dependence of Aboriginal and pastoral groups). With large areas of Australia’s land tenure system dominated by pastoral leases, the prospect of co-existing rights for pastoralists and Aboriginal people is one which unsettles the previously unchallenged colonial narrative of progressive dispossession of Aboriginal people and incorporation of country into productive economic uses.

Without wanting to explore the legal minutiae of the Wik case and subsequent political argument, it is reasonable to say that the last major legislative initiative of the Keating Labor government (1992-1996) was the Native Title Act 1993.4 While this legislation faces criticism from Aboriginal interests and their supporters, it provided a system for dealing with native title claims and gave native title claimants a right to negotiate about development proposals that would affect them (‘future acts’). This concession was already under attack from the new conservative federal government when the Wik decision was announced in December 1996. Under a catch-cry of ‘workability’, the federal government proposed major amendments to the Act that would reduce the scope for Aboriginal groups to affect development outcomes.

In Australian federalism, relatively autonomous states maintain largely unfettered power over allocation and management of land and resources. The federal native title legislation and the High Court’s ‘interventionist’ orientation in Mabo and Wik, faced strong criticism from state governments which saw this an an erosion of states’ rights. Despite the decreasing economic importance and increasing environmental cost of pastoral production, the influence of the rural lobby remains strongly entrenched in Australian through the role of the ultra-conservative National Party. This influence has been made more complex recently by the emergence of shooters, land access (anti-wilderness), and racist lobbies with support from the traditional heartlands of both conservative and Labor parties. In the lead up to the 1996 federal election, for example, disendorsed candidates from both the Liberal (Pauline Hanson, now the Member for Oxley in Queensland) and Labor Parties (Graeme Campbell, re-elected as the Member for Kalgoorlie in Western Australia after being disendorsed by the ALP) were elected to the lower house of the federal parliament after racist campaigns.

When arguing the need for security (and exclusive possession), the National Farmers Federation and other industry groups (including representatives of the mining industry) advocated blanket extinguishment of native title, and upgrading of many leasehold interests to freehold. While blanket extinguishment was rejected as a viable option because of the cost of compensation, the Prime Minister proposed a ‘Ten Point Plan’ which would systematically remove the foundations on which native title claimants could seek to exercise their native title rights to secure influence over development processes. In other words, the ten point plan proposed effective extinguishment without the requirement to compensate for loss of a property right.

Proposals were floated to convert pastoral leases to freehold titles, and to validate mining and other titles created by some states in breach of the Native Title Act 1993. Such proposals reflect the extent to which native title remains a problematic element in Australia’s land and resource management systems. The vision behind the proposal reinscribes Australian landscapes as terra nullius - the legal notion that Australian territories were acquired as empty lands by the British Crown in its acts of settlement (rather than through conquest).

While the Mabo decision, the Native Title Act and even the Australian parliament itself have rejected the idea that terra nullius as a legal doctrine is an appropriate foundation for making just and sustainable decisions about land, there are many avenues for reasserting it as a reality. Extinguishment of native title, declaration of land areas as essential for some public use, upgrading competing land interests’ titles against native title claims and, perhaps most insidiously, the assertion of an idea of wilderness by environmental interests as exclusive of Aboriginal rights, all seek to bring Australian colonial geographies to a new climax. The progressive expansion of frontier settlement, the deep-seated imperative to exercise effective possession (against Aboriginal people, against Asian hordes who threaten to seep into north Australia as a result of cartographically-induced gravity; against emptiness), and the manic imperative to subdue and exploit the land are all images which remain influential in debates about national identity. These notions mitigate against recognition and reconciliation between indigenous and non-indigenous Australians, and against the vision of ‘caring for country’ that emerges from Rose’s extraordinary review of Aboriginal environmental values (Rose, 1996) [OHP#8].

However much conservative anti-Aboriginal developmentalist interests may seek to put the genie of native title back into its colonial bottle, the moral, political and legal landscape of Australia has been transformed by its recognition. Along with a conservative racist backlash, the recent debate has seen mobilisation of anti-racist forces, and wide expressions of popular support for reconciliation and recognition.5 There is also a rapidly growing acknowledgement among development interests (particularly mining companies, but also tourism operators, local government and others), that practices and procedures based on the idea of terra nullius are no longer a viable or defensible way to advance their interests.6

So, if Australia is no longer terra nullius, how might Aboriginal interests secure better outcomes from the belated recognition of their existence? How might we see a shift from a naive postcolonialism towards a deeper decolonisation as a result? To address these questions, it is helpful to review just what Aboriginal people mean by ‘better’, and what decolonisation might mean within Aboriginal communities.

Just before leaving to come to this conference, I traveled to the desert community of Warburton in Western Australia’s central desert reserves, 1000 km west of Alice Springs. I has been invited by the Ngaanyatjarra Council to run a workshop under the title ‘Negotiating with outsiders about country’. The Western Australian government is amongst the most conservative and pro-development of the states, and has been strongly antagonistic to the idea of native title. Ngaanyatjarra Council represents about 1600 people in 12 communities. A large proportion of their country is held under 99-year leases from the state (converted from Aboriginal Reserve status several years ago). The Council sees this as a secure and acceptable title that allows them to do most of the things they want to do at present. In addition, other areas of land are held under shorter, less secure leases, and other areas are listed as ‘Vacant Crown Land’ (terra nullius by another name?) and nature reserve (state-controlled lands on which people are not allowed to live, hunt or stay). Over more than a decade of great effort, the Council has

• secured separate local government authority status over most of Ngaanyatjarra country
• grown from a core of five foundation communities to a current coalition of twelve communities through development of new communities on people’s traditional country
• established its own airline servicing its dispersed communities
• established its own communal buying service and retail outlets
• increased its control of alcohol and petrol abuse
• established improved health and education programs
• developed an innovative and internationally acclaimed community arts movement involving painting and more recently glass production
• increased literacy in Ngaanyatjarra
• negotiated a number of mineral exploration agreements covering parts of the country.

Like Aboriginal groups in other parts of the continent, the Ngaanyatjarras have secured considerable improvements since the 1950s, when Warburton community (then a Christian mission settlement) was at the centre of controversy over ‘starvation’ (see eg Berndt, 1957; Berndt, 1959). However, the tension between the developmentalist vision of government and industry and their own goals, articulated in the recent workshop as [OHP#10]:

• moving back to country
• looking after the Law
• getting recognition
• security for the community’s future
• getting good services where people want to live.7

For the Ngaanyatjarra member communities ‘better’ development is ‘development’ that helps them to achieve these goals. At the workshop this was expressed as actions which make life better by bringing the people, the country and the culture together to be stronger. This was contrasted with the dominant culture’s way of seeing development as ‘using country to make money’. This often pushes Aboriginal people away from their land and their culture. This tension was represented graphically (see OHP: whose view of development?) and then explored for its implications for people seeking to (or forced to) negotiate with outside interests about their traditional country.

Similar exercises during social impact assessment for the western Cape York Peninsula economic and social impact study8 and in western Arnhem Land during the Kakadu Region Social Impact Study9 produced parallel efforts to identify mechanisms by which people could secure economic, social, cultural and environmental justice. Mapping the current institutional arrangements in terms of who is ‘looking after country’, who is ‘looking after people’, who is ‘looking after culture’ and who is ‘building our economy’, Aboriginal people have moved quickly to identify elements requiring change (see OHP: Mapping the institutional landscape) - usually involving a shift from fragmented to integrated approaches, and/or a shift from non-Aboriginal dominance to increased Aboriginal influence and benefit.

From this analytical effort to developing and implementing effective negotiation strategies to secure improved outcomes is, of course, hard work. It is often disputed within the Aboriginal community of interest, and opposed by those with whom Aboriginal people seek to negotiate.10 The point I want to make here, however, is the value of a critical geography in providing foundations on which to build.11 By building from Aboriginal people’s own sense of country, their own intimacy with their geographies, the approach reported here has put a different perspective on the negotiation process. It opens people to seeing opportunities to move beyond a consideration of what postcolonialist institutions may seek to offer Aboriginal groups as an enticement to join or create arrangements that are fundamentally flawed in terms of the criteria Aboriginal groups themselves prioritise, and towards an agenda in which decolonisation, in the sense of a shift towards indigenous sovereignty and reconciliation between equals, is a possibility.

Although there has been considerable discussion of the idea of ‘regional agreements’ in Australia as one way to address the recognition of native title, there has been little movement towards conclusion of comprehensive negotiations. There have been many project-specific negotiations, and the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies is currently undertaking a review of ‘regional agreements’ and related issues. In Canada, in the wake of the Calder case12, it has taken more than twenty years to reach the current diverse situation. Implementation of negotiated settlement of comprehensive claims remains problematic in Canada. It will also be difficult in Australia.

Substantial forces are marshaled against the transformation of Australian society and Australian landscapes implicit in a genuine recognition of the need to secure environmental, economic and social justice by caring for country, caring for people and caring for culture. The struggle to secure recognition, to reveal the inadequacies and injustices of existing arrangements, and to resist alternative racist, developmentalist trajectories, however, will inevitably produce new Australian geographies. The extent to which ‘negotiation’ occurs in this process will greatly influence the nature of postcolonial identities in Australia. The extent to which geographers play a role will also influence the nature of geography as a discipline in Australia.13

1. This very useful distinction is developed by anthropologist John von Sturmer in a powerful critique of a major environmental report in Australia (von Sturmer, 1984: 35-39). [return to text]
2. The decision is Wik Peoples and Thayorre Peoples v Queensland (1996) 141 ALR 129. See (Hiley, 1997) for a full text of the decision and a number of useful commentaries on it. [return to text]
3. Mabo and Others v Queensland (No 2) (1992) 107 ALR 1. See (Bartlett, 1993) for a full text of the decision plus Bartlett’s commentary. [return to text]
4. Mabo and Others v Queensland (No 2) (1992) 107 ALR 1. See (Bartlett, 1993) for a full text of the decision plus Bartlett’s commentary. [return to text]
5. I have discussed aspects of this in relation to the specific shifts in the culture, rhetoric and practice of the mining company Rio Tinto in a couple of recent papers which are available on request to people who are interested. [return to text]
6. It is also the case that the effects of the Bougainville rebellion (1989-1997) and the success of traditional landowners’ compensation claims against Australia’s largest corporation BHP Ltd over pollution from the Ok Tedi mine in Papua New Guinea, plus domestic disputes over asbestos-related disease compensation claims, environmental shifts in polticial and economic settings, and the prolonged negotiations over native title at the Rio Tinto Century Zinc mine in Queensland (1992-1997) have all exercised some influence in registering the need to address rather than avoid these sorts of problems in development planning in Australian corporations. [return to text]
7. From Ngaanyatjarra Council. 1997. Negotiating About Country: workshop summary, Warburton, July 1997. [return to text]
8. Reports from this study, which was completed in mid-1996 by myself, Annie Holden (ImpaxSIA Consulting) and Ciaran O’Faircheallaigh (Griffith University) remain confidential as negotiations between the Aboriginal groups affected by the bauxite mining operation and the mining company Comalco Ltd (part of the Rio Tinto group) are continuing. Background reading on the methodology and its implications can be found in (O'Faircheallaigh, 1996a; and 1996b). [return to text]
9. My critical review of social research in the Kakadu region undertaken for the Aboriginal Prject Committee of the Kakadu Region Social Impact Study and the Northern Land Council is under consideration for publication at the moment 3289 (Howitt, 1997). [return to text]
10. Nowhere is this clearer than in the national scale ‘negotiations’ between the National Indigenous Working Group (a prominent indigenous leadership group, consisting of key indigenous intellectuals, leaders of representative and grassroots bodies, and others) and the federal government in the wake of the Wik decision. The government refused to even acknowledge the possibilities of ‘negotiations’, because it did not want to establish a precedent of negotiating with constituents. [return to text]
11. For example, the issue of the appropriate scale(s) at which to act is a matter on which geographers have a lot to offer indigenous groups (see eg Howitt 1997b). [return to text]
12. Calder v Attorney General of British Columbia (1973) 34 DLR (3d) 145. [return to text]
13. For discussion of the need to decolonise the discipline in Australia, see Sue Jackson and Richie Howitt (1997, under review) Some things do change: indigenous rights, geographers and geography in Australia (School of Earth Sciences, Macquarie University, Sydney) (go to this paper). [return to text]

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