'We got our own management': local knowledge, government and development in Cape York Peninsula.

Smith, Benjamin Richard

Abstract: In examining the growing interrelationship of local knowledge and projects of government among Aboriginal Australians I draw on ethnographic material to reveal the tensions and complexities of land- and natural-resource management involving Aboriginal 'traditional owners'. I also analyse the ways in which the concept of management--a key term in local critiques of introduced forms of governance--itself reveals the growing interrelation of originally distinct indigenous and exogenous systems. This process of interrelation has affected not only the articulation of Aboriginal identities, but is also implicated in the current importance of local cosmological figures.

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In 1997 I attended a public meeting at the new culture centre in Coen, a small township in central Cape York Peninsula. The occasion of this meeting was a scare over an outbreak of Equine Morbillivirus (now called the Hendra virus), which was suspected of being transferred from flying foxes to horses and humans. (1) Red Flying Foxes (minh wuki in the Mungkanhu language, minya kampi in Kaanju) are one of the 'bush foods' (2) eaten by local Aborigines, who harvest them by knocking them from the trees in which they roost. There are several such colonies around Coen, including one close to the centre of town in trees beside a local creek. In response to concerns that those hunting flying foxes might be scratched and bitten by an infected bat, and to reassure those who might have been scared by media reports about the disease, the Queensland Parks and Wildlife Service (QPWS) sent a group of its employees to the Peninsula to explain the disease, its relationship to the bats, and what precautions should be taken. The QPWS employees took great pains to reassure the large audience that they could continue to eat the fruit bats, and that only simple precautions need be taken to prevent scratches or bites. During the course of his presentation, one of the QPWS scientists explained that the large colony of bats present in Coen had 'flown up from Ravenshoe' (a town several hundred kilometres to the south). The audience, as is typical of such meetings, sat quietly, although some amusement was apparent among the older men and women with whom I was sitting. After the meeting, one of these men came up to me to ask whether I thought he 'should've told 'em where flying foxes really come from'.

Several of my respondents had previously told me some of their knowledge pertaining to flying foxes, in particular that they came out from the mouth of the 'rainbow serpent', a powerful creator being still present and active in the region's landscape, particularly in its over-ground and subterranean watercourses. (3) One man, now in his fifties, recalled riding along the river as a young stockman and seeing bubbles bursting from under the water, releasing flying foxes which then flew away from the river. He recalled being dumbstruck and returning to the Aboriginal camp at the cattle station (ranch) to ask his mother about what he had seen. (4) His mother informed him (as I was similarly told during my fieldwork, although without ever seeing this phenomenon for myself) that this was a "rainbow" disgorging flying foxes from under the water.

While anthropologists have previously documented this relationship between flying foxes and 'rainbows' (McKnight 1975:94; Wagner 2001:132-5), (5) and although many of those working for organisations such as QPWS now have some interest in 'Indigenous knowledge', it is unlikely that such an account would meet with an enthusiastic reception from QPWS staff if presented to them at a meeting such as the one discussed above. In all likelihood it would provoke discomfort and a stumbling attempt to acknowledge the speaker politely, but without any substantive engagement, before hurrying on to another issue. Such a response was common from the experts and bureaucrats running the public meetings and consultations--which now take up a significant amount of Coen's Aboriginal residents' time---on the few occasions when they volunteered such knowledge. The man who asked me whether he should have provided this information knew this, of course, and was generous enough to treat me as being 'in on the joke' by raising the issue with me as we left the meeting.

The type of interaction apparent at this meeting was typical of the relationship between local Aborigines and various official representatives in the mid-to-late 1990s. It also typified the ways in which Indigenous knowledge was held back in such meetings. (6) Many older Aborigines remain reluctant to tell outsiders about their own understandings of the 'country' (7) in which they have been raised, and to which they have a series of substantial connections (see Rigsby 1999). This is true with regard to local non-Aborigines, whose families have held pastoral leases and run Coen's businesses for several generations, as well as the employees of various organisations who increasingly visit the Coen region to 'consult' with local Aboriginal families. Until recently, all of these relationships have been marked by an unwillingness of local Aborigines to demonstrate dissent with non-Aboriginal perspectives, as well as reticence in revealing their own world-views. This inevitably has ramifications for the consultation process employed by visiting agencies engaged in various development projects.

In recent years, however, some local Aborigines--in particular, those who have consolidated focal positions within their extended family groups or "mobs" through their brokering of relationships with government departments, regional Aboriginal organisations and other 'external' agencies--have begun to demonstrate dissent with non-Aboriginal perspectives. For these men and women, the articulation of Aboriginal world-views, including those closely tied to local cosmologies, has provided a key means of asserting not only what they regard as fundamental differences between Aboriginal life-worlds and those social and cultural fields to which these external agencies are fundamentally oriented, but also the necessary primacy of Aboriginal cosmologies and linked forms of social organisation in determining the character of local 'governance' projects and 'natural resource management'.

This paper presents an ethnographic account of a local project to re-assert 'Indigenous governance', 'cosmology' and 'management' in Aboriginal articulations with the 'mainstream'. But in analysing the articulations of the 'local Indigenous', asserted as being of a radically different character to exogenous forms of governance and management, I suggest that the nature of their articulation is, in fact, considerably more complex. In particular, while such local Aboriginal articulations are proving (at least partially) successful in transforming the ways in which external agencies deal with local Aborigines, it seems that local articulations of the 'Indigenous' are themselves deeply inflected by the growing saturation of originally-exogenous forms of knowledge, practice and values. Indeed, the current articulation of radical Aboriginal difference may itself be strongly influenced by (and indeed form part of) developments within the contemporary field of 'mainstream' governance.

Aborigines and governance in Cape York Peninsula

In common with much of northern Australia, central Cape York Peninsula is home to a large Aboriginal population that has suffered considerable sociocultural disruption through colonial interference. The region was initially settled by miners and pastoralists in the late nineteenth century, leading to a resident non-Aboriginal population in the region's townships and cattle stations. Local Aboriginal groups were initially displaced, and then drawn upon as an indentured labour force for the region's pastoral economy until the early 1970s, when the introduction of award wages, (8) Aboriginal citizenship and a fall in cattle prices served to make the employment of Aboriginal labour prohibitive (Smith 2003a:27-30). At this time, the region's Aboriginal population was centralised in places like Coen, a township with a population of around 300 persons, and began to rely on various welfare payments. This period saw the development of chronic social problems in these townships, exacerbated by ready access to alcohol (see Pearson 2000).

Despite the advent of what were supposedly equal rights with the local non-Aboriginal population, Coen's Aboriginal families remained politically and economically marginalised until the early 1990s. At this time, the development of local and regional Aboriginal organizations, and the enactment of state land rights legislation (and the Commonwealth's Native Title Act 1993), led to increased local influence for some Aboriginal families. One result was the development of an 'outstation' or homelands movement, which saw circular mobility between townships and homelands in an attempt to cope with township life (Smith 2004a). This push towards decentralisation involved small family groups establishing camps on their traditional lands in the township's hinterland (Figure 1). During the 1990s, these homelands, along with the Coen Regional Aboriginal Corporation, a local representative organisation established in 1993, became the focus for various socioeconomic development initiatives (Smith 2003b). (9) Similar initiatives have also been implemented by regional non-governmental organisations based in the city of Cairns, the regional centre of government and commerce located some 600 km south of Coen. These organisations include the Cape York Land Council, whose main purpose has been the pursuit of land rights on behalf of the region's Aborigines, and its sister organisation, the Balkanu Cape York Development Corporation.

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

The 1990s saw a transformation of the relationships between various government bodies and local Aborigines, but this did not reduce the role of formal government in Aboriginal lives. A key aspect of the changing forms of governance relating to Aborigines was the creation of local and regional 'Aboriginal organisations'. These bodies represent variously defined Aboriginal interests and are run by mostly non-Aboriginal professional staff, although they usually have Aboriginal committees or boards of directors. (10) This shift in governance has intensified the degree of control that some Aborigines have over their own affairs. It has also seen at least some of the Aboriginal population of the central Peninsula develop a fairly sophisticated grasp of the workings of government, at least in those areas of the bureaucracy concerned with socioeconomic development, land tenure and other issues of immediate concern. For many others, however, the administrative realm remains relatively opaque, and government remains a set of forces and institutions that impact on their lives with little or no control by those subject to its projects. In addition, there has been a recent turn away from policies of Aboriginal 'self-determination', and towards intervention in local problems, which has seen a combined push by government, non-government organisations and the media (Smith 2003c:96-9). This has further increased both the resources available to some Aboriginal groups on the Peninsula, and the levels of social control exerted by outsiders intent on resolving what many employees of state agencies and Aboriginal organisations (as well as many Aborigines living on the Peninsula) regard as the deepening problems of the Peninsula's Aboriginal communities.

The role of the Balkanu Cape York Development Corporation in attempting to foster local and regional development illustrates the shifting relationship between the formal organisations concerned with Aboriginal development and the life-worlds of the Peninsula's Aboriginal residents. Balkanu developed out of the Cape York Land Council in the mid-to late 1990s, and continues to operate from Cairns. Its projects include projects aimed at fostering sustainable forms of economic development in collaboration with Aboriginal groups across the Peninsula. These include the development of a native forest action plan with Wik and Kugu-speakers from the west of the Peninsula, a project managing fish stock in the Peninsula's north, and a project intended to identify small-scale sustainable enterprise opportunities based on native plant harvests (Balkanu 2004). This project is among those which involve groups from the central Peninsula.

The relationship between Balkanu (and other regional organisations) and the Aboriginal groups it works with is complex. Many local Aborigines, including those involved with Balkanu-sponsored projects, remain critical of the political implications of these projects and the forms of knowledge on which they are based. Despite stated intentions to ensure that projects of this kind are community-based initiatives, which place an emphasis on local control and Aboriginal cultural values, many among the Peninsula's Aboriginal population continue to see them as the projects of outside agencies, in particular the Cairns-based organisations, despite claims by these organisations that they represent Aboriginal interests. At best it seems that these projects accommodate Aboriginal cultural values within exogenously developed frameworks and project design (see Carter et al. 2004). Although few of the Peninsula's Aboriginal residents regard these projects as their own, it is not uncommon for Aboriginal participants to see the projects as potentially beneficial. In particular, projects which involve 'outside' experts with longstanding relationships to the Aboriginal groups have produced results seen as beneficial by all parties. (11)

The main points of tension in the relationship between regional Aboriginal organisations and their 'clients' centre on the presumption of representation by regional organisations, and the discrepancies between the forms of knowledge which characterise local Aboriginal life-worlds and in the projects fostered by these organisations (see Rowse 2001). (12) Both of these tensions draw on a deeply embedded emphasis on localisation that inheres in Aboriginal sociocultural production across the region (see Martin 1993). This sense of localisation insists on the necessity of Aboriginal people representing themselves and the 'country' with which they have personal ties. It further discriminates between forms of knowledge, decision making and practice held to be indigenous to a particular area and the people tied to that area under 'Murri [Aboriginal] law', and those forms regarded as exogenous.

This emphasis on localisation and Aboriginal cosmology recalls Wagner's (1977) analysis of Indigenous 'conceptualisations of the innate'. (13) Wagner argued that, in contrast to Western forms, Indigenous Melanesian sociocultural production locates human existence 'in a world of differentiated, though basically analogous, anthropomorphic entities'. This perspective--which is strongly reminiscent of the world-views of many of the Peninsula's Aboriginal peoples--involves the recognition of 'a kind of immanent human essence' as the object and sustaining force of mediation between these entities. This essence variously manifests itself as a 'moral soul' of the individual, the 'tradition' or 'sociality' of the community, and also the 'binding force of the cosmos' (Wagner 1977:404). Such a perspective understands indigenous bodies of knowledge to be emplaced within 'country', with innate ties to those persons who have a particular relationship with these areas, a relationship between people, land, 'law' and language, which Rumsey (1989, 1993) has also described in northern Australia. From such a perspective, only those bodies of knowledge--and those people linked to them by innate 'spiritual' or substantial ties--are properly relevant to 'country'. Other knowledge belongs elsewhere, and can never be the basis for sustainable engagement with an area (Smith & Claudie 2003:8; cf. DB Rose 1999:177-8). Similarly, it is only those persons who have such a substantive relationship with 'country', often based in having lived in a particular area, as well as being a member of a group whose forebears are from that area, who can 'talk for' the area in question. This emphasis on substantial ties to a particular locale is clearly at odds with the principles through which a regional organisation like Balkanu necessarily operates. Despite the presence of an Aboriginal governing committee, and Aboriginal employees, this kind of organisation is essentially built on a model alien to the local Aboriginal principles outlined above. For this reason, both the idea and practice of representation at a regional or sub-regional level becomes immensely problematic, such representation almost inevitably transferring the responsibility for speaking about a particular area to others, resulting in considerable distrust towards such organisations among those represented by them.

Related tensions have emerged through increasing Aboriginal involvement in 'natural resource management'. This recent trend towards greater Aboriginal inclusion in land and resource management is partly a function of the advent of native title claims in the early 1990s (Smith 2003a). Other forms of land rights legislation also influenced this trend, including Queensland's Aboriginal Land Act 1991, which legislated for the transfer of state land to Aboriginal groups and permitted claims to be made over a series of national parks across the Peninsula (Smith 2003d). But it also follows an increasing desire by government agencies to consult with Aboriginal peoples, and to incorporate them into a range of administrative arrangements. This shift has apparently developed in response to a growing government problematisation (14) of the exclusion of Aborigines from these arrangements, such exclusion increasingly seen as having impeded the socioeconomic development of remote and rural Aboriginal communities, as well as infringing a body of asserted and potential Aboriginal 'rights' (including the increasingly emphasised 'right to take responsibility'--Pearson 2000). This inclusive shift, in turn, appears to have fostered an increasing willingness among some Aborigines to engage with outsiders in intercultural forums. This has been accompanied by a growing willingness to assert 'local knowledge' against what are seen as exogenous and unsuitable ways of understanding or acting employed by those regarded as outsiders.

This shift towards Aboriginal inclusion in administrative processes has itself exacerbated tensions between what some Aborigines in the region describe as 'our management', and administrative arrangements, including local and regional Aboriginal organisations, established along 'mainstream' government lines. One illustration of these tensions occurred during the visit of a Brisbane-based botanist to the central Peninsula to conduct research on local plant communities. The botanist--who has maintained an interest in Aboriginal impacts on plant communities, and has worked with Aboriginal groups previously--had negotiated research permission to undertake this research with a 'sub-regional' (15) Aboriginal organisation prior to his arrival. This organisation had been incorporated about two years previously, following the transfer of lands formerly held 'in trust', under Queensland's Aboriginal Land Act 1991, on behalf of Aboriginal residents of a former mission settlement. The transfer of the land as freehold to its 'traditional owners'--a term which marks the incorporation of Aborigines into the logics of mainstream government, although it has become 'naturalised' as a descriptor for senior Aboriginal men and women, and is used as such by many Aborigines (see Keen 1984)--led to the formation of a 'Land Trust'. This body now administers financial and other administrative matters pertaining to these lands, in which Aboriginal language-named groups and smaller kin-based groupings assert interests. The government agencies which oversaw the 'hand-over' process seemed confident that these groups were properly represented on the Land Trust. The intention of the form of incorporation decided upon was that those groups with particular interests in any part of the land administered by the Trust would be consulted by the its governing committee where an issue arose in relation to that area.

Unfortunately, the representative mechanisms of the Land Trust are not regarded as appropriate by many of those whose interests it purportedly represents. Moreover, significant tensions exist between the chairman of the Trust's committee (a recently returned member of the 'stolen generations' (16) who himself asserts traditional connection to the area where the research was to take place, whose right to 'speak for country' is contested by many Aboriginal families living on the Peninsula, and who continues to live near Cairns) and a family who have continued to live on or near their clan estate, and who see themselves as being the senior authority for any decisions to be undertaken regarding that area. When members of the latter family found out that the botanist's research was being undertaken without their having been consulted, they became angry, and confronted him during his fieldwork. They informed him that he had not been given appropriate permission to undertake his research, and requested that he cease from further research until proper permission had been negotiated with them. This event further spurred this family, who were already in the process of developing alternative formal governance mechanisms for their traditional homelands, to develop their own ethics protocol for research on their country, and to control research undertaken through their own representative body which they had recently incorporated.

'Round' versus 'square' thinking: David Claudie's 'Indigenous governance'

Similar issues of the access of scientists to Aboriginal homelands, and the relationships between 'mainstream' governance structures and local Aboriginal peoples, have been the subject of comment by David Claudie, a Kaanju man from central Cape York Peninsula with whom I have worked since the mid-1990s (Figure 2). Claudie has developed his own oral and written critique of the involvement of non-Aboriginal persons, knowledge and practice on Kaanju homelands (Chuulangun Aboriginal Corporation 2004; Claudie 2004; see also Smith & Claudie 2003). This critique has formed part of a wider project to transform governance and land management practices into forms that Claudie views as appropriate to Aboriginal 'cultural values'. His project has involved the identification of what he regards as exogenous forms of knowledge which have inserted themselves into Kaanju homelands by force. In response, Claudie has sought to 'research the researchers', producing an Aboriginal response to forms of research (including scientific and anthropological work) undertaken on Kaanju country. He has likewise developed a critique of historical and contemporary forms of governance involving Kaanju homelands. This work has included a staunch critique of these forms of governance and their associated epistemologies (the 'ways of knowing' on which they are founded). Claudie's critique, and the wider project of which it forms a part, are based within a world-view that asserts a fundamental difference between local Aboriginal life-worlds and the 'mainstream' social and cultural field within which these life-worlds have become encapsulated as a result of Australia's colonial history.

[FIGURE 2 OMITTED]

A key distinction employed by Claudie is what he describes as the difference between 'round' and 'square' thinking, the former understood as typifying Indigenous knowledge, and the latter characteristic of Western governance. As Claudie puts it, 'round is where you start from small out. Square from outside in, put a shell, nothing inside. He close himself inside his own world ... pretend his shit don't stink' (pers. comm., March 2004). These comments echo common Aboriginal statements about people, in particular bureaucrats, of whom it is said that they 'can't listen', (17) and who are perceived to make themselves 'flash' (that is, they style themselves as better than others, particularly Aboriginal persons). But Claudie's comments also speak to a particular form of detachment from locality which he sees as inherent in Western forms of governance, which he describes as coming from 'outer space', in contrast to the localised or 'situated' knowledge (Haraway 1988) inherent in 'Indigenous governance'.

Claudie links this tendency towards 'square' thinking with the late-modern state, its geographical and interpersonal detachment from the objects of its governance (18) and its consequent dependence on what Scott (1998) has called 'thin simplifications', abstract formulations of rich local fields of interaction between people, and between people and country necessary for the functioning of bureaucratic administration. This particular 'way of knowing' is also seen (with some justification) as supporting a particularly environmentally and culturally disruptive relationship with 'country'. It involves the framing of land as a resource or alienable object for the use of the settler population, an approach to land which has led to considerable environmental degradation on Kaanju homelands. Unsurprisingly, given a widespread Aboriginal emphasis on interaction between (introduced) 'government' and (locally emplaced) 'Murri law' as one occurring between fundamentally different entities, Claudie identifies the 'square' thinking of mainstream governance, described as 'his [i.e. their] management', as radically removed from 'Indigenous governance' or 'our management'. Claudie, along with many other Aborigines from across the Peninsula, is increasingly driven to challenge mainstream governance on this basis, asserting that 'we got our own management' (that is, 'we have our own management in place already'). It is in this context that Claudie has established the Chuulangun Aboriginal Corporation (at Wenlock River), the stated purpose of which is to represent the interests of those persons tied, under Aboriginal law, to Kaanju ngaachi ('homelands') (Chuulangun Aboriginal Corporation 2004).

Claudie has chosen to represent these homelands though a depiction of the rainbow serpent (Payanamu) coiled into a spiral, a symbol which simultaneously 'tells how we are formed' and 'breaks that square one' (Figure 3). The representation of the rainbow serpent as a spiral is held to depict the 'roundness' of Indigenous management. Claudie suggests that roundness is linked to a quality of 'open-mindedness'; this roundness is taken to be inherently tied to the real nature of existence ('earth is round, universe is round ... the universe not square', pers. comm., March 2004). The rainbow serpent is also emblematic of the substantial relationship held to exist between the people of a particular homeland area, that 'country' itself, and its body of 'Murri law' or 'management'. This relationship is said to have been founded through the actions of Payanamu and other creator beings in the 'Story-time' which preceded (and made possible) local human existence (Rigsby 1999). Its use as a symbol of Kaanju autonomy may well also relate to the rainbow serpent's frequent appearance and aggressive intervention in response to the intrusion of outsiders or 'stranger people' onto 'country' with which they have no connection, the rainbow serpent recognising such strangers by their unfamiliar smell (Merlan 1998:70; Strang 2001:214).

[FIGURE 3 OMITTED]

It is not only government departments that are the subject of Claudie's critique. Along with many other Aborigines in the region, he sees most of the formally incorporated Aboriginal organisations across the region as belonging to 'his [i.e. 'mainstream'] management' or 'his governance'. This criticism is levelled both at organisations like the Coen Regional Aboriginal Corporation, and at Cairns-based Aboriginal organisations like Balkanu, Cape York Land Council and Cape York Partnerships (organisations that Claudie chooses to, or finds himself nonetheless compelled to, deal with). These organisations are all held to depend on a ways of doing things at odds with Aboriginal law. Further, in particular through their organisation in terms of regional and sub-regional divisions of the Peninsula, they are held to displace or overwrite the social and cultural logic at the heart of 'Aboriginal governance', the 'inside-out' emphasis on local country as the foundation for 'proper management', with an 'outside-in' or 'top-down' logic which is arguably essential for the functioning of a Western bureaucracy.

Management and eth(n)opolitics

My own analysis suggests that this situation is more complex than the local emphasis on 'Indigenous' versus 'exogenous' forms of governance and management might suggest. It is, of course, essential to listen to Aboriginal critiques of land management and governance in central Cape York Peninsula. However, as Ong (2001:9947) noted, an ethnographic engagement with novel forms of governmentality and governance which have evolved in relation to globalising forces must consider how they are 'dialectically linked to self-descriptions of alternative configurations of modernity'. An anthropologist cannot be content with validating local representations. Rather, as social analysts, we are obliged to raise difficult questions and what Weber called 'inconvenient facts' (Dean 1999:36), and attempt to make visible what we understand to be the tacit underpinnings of changing local and regional assemblages of language, practice and institution.

In Cape York Peninsula, the term 'management' has featured in two key areas of Aboriginal people's relationships to government. The first of these was through the activities of Queensland's Department of Aboriginal Affairs, the government agency responsible for Aboriginal welfare and development, and (until the 1970s) a body which exercised considerable control over Aboriginal lives during a period in which many Aboriginal Queenslanders were wards of the state rather than citizens (Kidd 1997). (19) In this regard, it seems noteworthy that local departmental representatives, who resided in Coen until the late 1980s, were referred to as 'managers'. The term has thus long been associated with Aboriginal people's encapsulation within a field of governance of originally exogenous provenance. The second aspect of their relationship to management has been through the state's management of national parks and other protected areas-that is, as 'natural resource management'. (20) As I have discussed elsewhere (Smith 2003a), the management of protected areas by government agencies has been the source of considerable frustration for the region's Aboriginal peoples, intensifying their sense of an oppositional relationship to government projects. (As such, the two aspects of 'management' are irrevocably linked in local Aboriginal perspectives.)

In Australia more generally, the term 'management' is now closely tied to recent transformations in the field of government; in particular, the term is linked to recent neo-liberal projects to transform bureaucracy (see Dodson & Pritchard 1998 on the shift from 'self-determination' to 'self-management' in Australia's Indigenous policy). These transformations involve a decentralisation of management responsibilities away from the institutions that have previously held primary responsibility for management of various aspects of public life. The logics of the bureaucratic system have become influenced by the logics of the market, with a strong governmental focus on accountability and audit, an emphasis on performance, and the 'desegregation of functions into corporatised units' with their own budgets, contracts and competition (N Rose 1999:150).

Elements of this transformation are clearly visible in the changing relationships between state agencies and Aboriginal organisations. This is certainly true of the recent development of 'partnership' arrangements between both the Queensland and Commonwealth governments, on the one hand, and Cairns-based Aboriginal organisations, on the other. But it is also occurring in relationships between local Aboriginal groups and state agencies. One example has been the development of an Indigenous Protected Area (IPA) agreement between Chuulangun Aboriginal Corporation and Environment Australia, a Commonwealth agency. Indigenous Protected Areas are voluntarily declared areas in which government and 'Indigenous land managers'--a term drawn from the IPA framework--act in partnership in land management activities. According to official accounts of the scheme, such partnerships are intended to integrate what is labelled 'Indigenous ecological and cultural knowledge' into contemporary protected area management, and to extend such management onto land now owned or controlled by Aboriginal groups (EA 2002:3).

Such arrangements indicate a deepening of the intercultural engagements between local Aboriginal groups and government agencies. This deepening engagement is marked by Aboriginal people's uptake of terms like 'management' or 'governance'. These terms are indicative of the changing administrative field in which Aboriginal interests are now (partly) situated. Although some Aborigines are using these terms to differentiate their 'own management' from 'his management', and while most Aborigines in the Coen region have maintained ways of knowing at odds with those of the Australian 'mainstream', it is increasingly apparent that a deepening interplay and syncretism is occurring between local Aboriginal knowledge, practices and values on the one hand, and the encapsulating field of government on the other. Indeed, the uptake of the term 'management' by Aboriginal peoples in asserting the ways in which they feel impelled to regain control of their traditional homelands seems to fall squarely (as well as 'roundly') within an intensifying field of intercultural and inter-ethnic articulation.

I use the term 'inter-ethnic' here to flag the fact that the inclusion of Aborigines in projects administered by 'mainstream' government agencies continues to depend on their being defined in terms of a distinct ethnic community (or communities). (21) This use of ethnic difference as a resource for government is clearly akin to the turn in late-modern practices of government identified by Nikolas Rose (1999, 2000) as 'ethopolitics', in which the modern state gives way to a new relationship between a fragmented citizenry and a (formally) receding 'enabling state'. For Rose, this governmental change includes a shift from 'society' to multiple and cross-cutting communities (as well as a series of individual roles). This centres on 'a double movement of autonomization and responsibilization' in which distinct communities become responsible for the conduct of their own government. Politics is 'returned to society itself, but no longer in social form: in the form of individual morality, organisational responsibility, and ethical community' (N Rose 2000:1400).

Ethno-cultural identity is one of the key resources through which such communities of government can now be emplaced. As such, ethopolitics in Aboriginal Australian contexts often takes the form of 'ethnopolitics'. In northern Queensland, the state is seeking to generate 'partnership' arrangements with Aboriginal people as an alternative to the now officially 'failed' project of self-determination which characterised government projects vis-a-vis Aborigines over the past three decades. (22) This now-thoroughly problematised project of government, along with the provision of welfare payments to Aboriginal persons (see Note 14), has been over-written by attempts to foster a 'responsibilisation' of Aboriginal Australians, construed as an ethnically and culturally autonomous part of the population. (In far north Queensland, such 'responsibilisation' has been driven by the work of the prominent Aboriginal commentator Noel Pearson (2000), whose interventions in the national policy debate have also profoundly affected Indigenous policy across Australia.) This eth(n)o-political turn has seen the Cairns-based 'Aboriginal organisations' (themselves closely associated with Pearson) step into a new role as the locus of Aboriginal relationships with the state, and the focus of new projects of 'self-government'. But despite the acceptability of this state-Aboriginal assemblage for many within the various government departments, and for the other organisations involved in these partnerships, many Aborigines see this as a further assumption of an unacceptable role by regional organisations, at odds with situated Aboriginal practices of governance (Smith & Claudie 2003:7).

Here we can better understand what is involved in an assertion of 'our management' with regard to traditional homelands by local Aboriginal groups. While these assertions draw on strongly felt cultural differences (and closely related understandings of autochthonous forms of governance), they are themselves embedded within a rapidly developing intercultural field of governance. As this field develops new ways to 'make governable' both natural resources and developing Aboriginal interests, it is inevitable that local knowledge will engage in 'productive structurings' within 'the webs of knowledge and power' (Haraway 1988:588). The assertion of a situated Aboriginal 'management' now occurs as an intervention within a shared field of discourse and resources, intended to transform this field to suit better the purposes of individuals and groups partly situated within it (N Rose 2000:1402). In this situation, what Payanamu is being called upon to break cannot be understood simply as exogenous government. Rather, the rainbow serpent is itself now being called upon to redress the displacement of local Aboriginal relationships of concern for "country" by other (apparently) Aboriginal representations better able to command a shared intercultural field.

Acknowledgments

The research on which this paper is based took place in northern Queensland between 1996 and 2004, supported in part by study abroad studentship from the Leverhulme Trust, a research grant from AIATSIS, the Emslie Horniman Fund of the Royal Anthropological Institute, the University of London Research Fund and a postdoctoral fellowship from the Australian Research Council. As ever, I am indebted to the people of the Coen region, in particular David Claudie, Robert Nelson, Phillip Port and Willie Lawrence. I also thank the participants of the Australian National University's anthropology seminar series, where a version of this paper was presented on 18 August 2004. In particular, I have benefited from the comments of Jon Altman, Francesca Merlan, Mark Mosko, Nic Peterson, Debbie Bird Rose and Tim Rowse. I am also grateful to Deirdre McKay, Paul Sillitoe, Jimmy Weiner and two anonymous referees for Australian Aboriginal Studies for their insightful comments on earlier drafts, and to Graeme Ward for his editorial assistance. Any errors remain my responsibility.

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NOTES

(1.) This virus was held responsible for the deaths of one person and 13 racehorses in Queensland in September 1994. Its current name comes from the suburb of the city of Brisbane in which the initial outbreak occurred. Two further incidents of the disease have occurred in Queensland, killing another person and three more horses (CSIRO 2004).

(2.) Here and elsewhere in this paper, terms and phrases drawn from the local variety of Aboriginal English are denoted by italics within inverted commas. Terms from (other) Aboriginal language varieties are simply italicised, with the language they are drawn from identified in the text.

(3.) Other anthropologists (Merlan 1998, 2000; Strang 2001) have placed the rainbow serpent at the centre of their analyses of interactions between Aboriginal people and the non-Aboriginal settler population, and their conflicting bodies of knowledge.

(4.) This process of raising an experience with one's seniors was a common way in which cosmological knowledge was elicited from the older generation.

(5.) Both McKnight and Wagner suggest that the knowledge that people have about flying foxes in Australia and New Guinea is linked to the animals' migratory patterns, and that their reproductive activities occur only in certain places on their migratory routes.

(6.) Sutton (1998:124) has discussed the 'undergrounding' of Aboriginal knowledge in Australia, a reflex of colonial attitudes towards Aborigines, among Aboriginal peoples in urban areas during the assimilation era. He also noted the 'renaissance of traditional forms of Aboriginal identity' that has followed this period of undergrounding.

(7.) In local Aboriginal English (Rigsby 1998), the term 'country' is used in a manner similar to a form appearing in all the region's Aboriginal languages. 'Camp', 'home', 'ground' and '(period of) time', as well as 'place', are among the senses of this lexeme (Rigsby 1992:354). These lexemes link place with a body of knowledge and practice held to be extant within it.

(8.) 'Award wages' refers to the payment of a set minimum wage for workers in particular industries. Prior to the extension of award wages to Aboriginal workers, they were paid a special wage, considerably lower than that paid to non-Aboriginal employees.

(9.) These initiatives were originally focused on the federal government's Community Development Employment Projects (CDEP) scheme, a voluntary work-for-the-dole program. CDEP continues to underwrite most of the socioeconomic development initiatives in the region, and remains a considerable component of the local economy.

(10.) Batty (2005) provides an insightful account of the relationships between staff and directors in Aboriginal organisations in Central Australia.

(11.) For example, one project in central Cape York Peninsula based on management of introduced weed species has led to funding for a local Aboriginal group to develop strategies for weed management. Such strategies are also recognised by other local stakeholders, and by government agencies, as being of benefit both environmentally and economically to the Peninsula more broadly. They also bolster the reputation of the Cairns-based 'Aboriginal organisation' that fostered the project, and allowed the consultant involved to develop his own professional and personal interest in weeds research and management.

(12.) As Tim Rowse (pers. comm., August 2004) rightly notes, the Aboriginal Australian distrust of representation also draws on a wider Australian dislike and distrust of political representation.

(13.) Although Wagner's work draws primarily on his work in Papua New Guinea (albeit partly from southern areas with historical and cultural ties to the Torres Strait and Cape York Peninsula), much of his discussion of 'conceptualisations of the innate' resonates strongly with the world-views of the Peninsula's Aboriginal population.

(14.) This includes a 'problematisation' in Foucault's sense of the term. As I have outlined elsewhere (Smith 2004b), 'problematisation', for Foucault, marks a point in which a social and cultural field shifts its general orientation to a particular 'ensemble of difficulties' (e.g. the 'Aboriginal problem' in Australia). Such shifts develop through the interplay between the located 'problem' and the range of responses that constitute this difficult situation as an 'object of thought'. In particular, 'problematisation' of this kind occurs in particular historical moments 'in which the activity of governing comes to be called into question' (Dean 1999:27). Problematisation occurs in those places and periods where current government approaches cease to be more-or-less taken as given, and become the focus of uncertainty, critique and a growing general sense of error. Such moments lead to the development of a general shift of (albeit marked by an ongoing diversity within) the field of ideas about the nature of the problem and the possible responses to it (Rabinow 2003:18-19). In Australia, the current radical shift in policy with regard to 'Aboriginal Australia' marks one such moment of problematisation, which involves the rejection of 'thirty years of self-determination', and a fundamental ground shift in the range of ways of thinking about, and dealing with, the 'Aboriginal problem' in which the previous policies are now widely held to have been not only unsuccessful, but also complicit.

(15.) The terms 'regional' and 'sub-regional' are now commonly used in the developing field of Aboriginal governance, the former often indicating Peninsula-wide organisational engagement (e.g. that of Balkanu), and the latter sub-regions of the Peninsula, shaped by regional cultural blocs and the historical presence of centralised settlements such as mission settlements and towns. Although it describes itself as a 'regional' organisation, the Coen Regional Aboriginal Corporation would be one example of a sub-regional body of this kind.

(16.) The term 'stolen generations' refers to Aboriginal people, in particular mixed-race children, removed from their homelands and families under government assimilation policies (HREOC 1997).

(17.) As one of the anonymous referees for Australian Aboriginal Studies rightly notes, there has been considerable discussion, across Australia, founded on the suggestion that non-Aboriginal people (in particular bureaucrats) 'can't listen' to Aboriginal people. See, for example, Anderson & Wright (1999) and Coombs (1978).

(18.) Claudie illustrates the 'squareness' of exogenous forms of governance through the constant reliance of administrators on 'boxes to tick', and by implication the predetermined and abstracted taxonomies that inhere in administrative knowledge, 'a box, with lots of small boxes inside'.

(19.) This period extends from the passing of Queensland's Aboriginals Protection and Restriction of the Sale of Opium Act 1897, until the national recognition of Aboriginal citizenship in 1967 and the introduction of award wages and freedom of movement to Aboriginal workers in Queensland in 1972.

(20.) As Marsden (1994:41) noted, the idea of 'management', commonly presumed to be value-neutral, has now saturated economics, and is concerned with 'increasing efficiency, economy, and effectiveness', as well as providing opportunities for the encouragement of entrepreneurial activity. In the context of 'natural resource management', we might add 'sustainability'.

(21.) Aboriginal peoples have, of course, long been treated differently within or excluded from wider Australian society. However, the ethopolitical shift outlined here has seen them move from objects of external governmental control to (increasingly, albeit only partially) 'self-managers' in the implementation of Aboriginal policy. Such self-management has certainly involved the formal incorporation of Aborigines and organisations into the field of Indigenous policy implementation, but it increasingly involves the informal incorporation of Indigenous peoples into projects of government. I intend to develop this observation further elsewhere.

(22.) As Dodson and Pritchard's (1998) article on developments in Australian Indigenous policy showed, the current Australian Government's Indigenous policies have, for some time, involved an attempt to 'abandon" the notion of 'self-determination', and move instead towards concepts of 'self-management'.

Benjamin Richard Smith is a Research Fellow at the Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research, Australian National University, Canberra. His recent publications include 'The social underpinnings of an "outstation movement" in Cape York Peninsula, Australia' (2004a) and '"All been washed away now"' (2003d). <benjamin.smith@anu.edu.au>