Dynamics of Difference in Australia. Francesca Merlan

Figure 1. Katherine region and locations in Australia. CartoGis, Australian National university.

      Unknown to me, changes were being set in train in the relations between Aboriginal people and other Australians that were to shape much of my activity for years to come. The biggest was the Australian Parliament passing the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act in 1976, enabling Aboriginal people to claim traditional ownership of territory they regarded as theirs. This law was the product of years of activism by and on behalf of indigenous people, mainly taking place in Australia’s urban centers but imaginatively stimulated by remote Australia. Land rights were politically possible on a large scale only in the Northern Territory because as a territory rather than a state it was under the direct control and jurisdiction of the federal government. By the 1970s federal government endorsement of land rights was bipartisan (unlike in the Northern Territory itself, where there was widespread opposition among the non-Aboriginal people who by then composed a majority of the population there).

      From Katherine, I also became familiar and lived in some outlying indigenous communities, two of which especially figure in following chapters: Barunga, seventy kilometers southeast of Katherine on the Central Arnhem Road (then largely unpaved, now paved); and Jilgmirn.gan (locally usually spelled Jilkminggan) on Elsey Station about 114 kilometers south and east of Katherine on the Roper Highway. A range of other towns, town fringe camps, stations (ranches), and other locations interconnected with these were all places I spent time, partly because interlinked kindreds whom I came to know lived in a range of different places (see Figure 1). Communities like Barunga (and Beswick to the northeast) had been established or reconfigured in the postwar period, with the administrative intention that Aboriginal people could be contained there and kept away from town. Others like Jilgmirn.gan on Elsey were long-term station communities, places of settlement reconfigured on pastoral properties where Aboriginal people were living on small excision areas of the homelands of at least some members of the community. Many of these station communities had been much larger until around the time of implementation of the minimum wage, phased in from 1966 to 1968, when they were turned off many of those properties or discouraged from living there. The new conditions meant that pastoralists were unwilling to accept the continuing residence of numbers of indigenous people. Indigenous camps on some stations were now greatly reduced or only seasonally occupied. Others like Jilgmirn.gan on Elsey—not too far from the small town of Mataranka (about thirty kilometers), in the homeland of most camp residents and familiar to others married in or present for other reasons—continued to hold their populations.

      I received mixed but generally welcoming treatment from indigenous people in the various living situations I got to know, through links of kinship and shared experience among members of the various camps and settlements. My becoming “adopted” shortly after my arrival as a “granddaughter” to two principal women in two different camps in Katherine provided a framework and transferrable elements of recognizability for my receptions elsewhere; this, I came to understand, was the genius of indigenous regionalism, its network-like character and tensile strength (Chapter 5). These elements structured the kin identity I could be assigned in new locations and, on a personal level, my reception by particular people. My hosts and their families welcomed my interest in where they had come from, their languages, their connections to home territories. Many spent considerable time involving themselves in our shared travels, recordings of language, biographical, and story material of all kinds. In part, this was because some people (of those who had been displaced) harbored desires to return to where they had come from, but not all did. Nor did all see the recording of this material as something relevant to the future of their own families and people: “It will be good for white people, not for my family,” one man memorably said. Alongside these research concerns I became very involved with how indigenous people were managing in their present, and in this we made considerable common cause.

      I spent at least two years (1976–78) in the north before the Northern Land Council asked me to be involved in a land claim over a spectacular national park, the site of Katherine Gorge and River, considered by local (nonindigenous) townspeople to be the premier attraction of the Katherine region, and a centerpiece of the regional economy. I therefore had a clear idea how contentious this case would be. Nonindigenous townspeople were worried that indigenous ownership of the park would exclude them. They were worried about the effect on tourism. No favorable public view had yet formed concerning the possible tourist values of indigenous presence and ownership; that was to come only later.

      The people I was getting to know had been enormously changed by colonization, from around the 1880s, when gold mining began around Pine Creek (and with lesser intensity, near the growing town of Katherine) and pastoral properties (ranches) were taken up and stocked where environmental conditions seemed favorable (and even where they did not, leading to repeated failures).² Indigenous people had moved to these places of settler colonial occupation—mines, towns, pastoral stations. As well, they had been subject to large-scale exterminatory violence arising from settler occupation during what many older indigenous people recalled as “killing times,” or sometimes “wild times.”³ Indigenous people who “came in” to pastoral properties from the colonially appropriated bush remade their lives there but were affected by continuing violence, disease, and eventually, by concentration in army camps during the Second World War.

      These experiences gave rise to differences among indigenous people in their relations among themselves and in their relations to white people. Those who had lived as the labor force on (especially larger, continuous) pastoral properties tended to have a greater sense of cohesion among themselves (a context of parts of Chapters 5 and 6) and had found white bosses to whose predictable expectations they had learned to accommodate; while those who had lived in the mining fields tended to have experienced continuing exposure to volatile and changing work regimes, substance abuse (opium, methylated spirits, alcohol), and sexual exploitation (Chapter 6). Somewhat different kinds of personalities were to be found within these sets of people.

      After World War II, some resided in the government settlements or communities established to contain them, others returned to outlying pastoral properties whence they had come, and still others, often illicitly, lived on the fringes of regional towns. There was movement among all these locations in Aboriginal walkabouts, which became ever less common. Aboriginal presence around towns was prohibited to all but officially employed Aborigines until 1948. Alcohol was prohibited to them until 1964, and paternalistic employment situations of low or no wages, with some keep, were common until 1968. Their influx into regional towns began as nationwide union activism resulted in the implementation of a minimum wage. Pastoralists had warned that wage parity would result in Aboriginal people being turned off cattle stations. Exploitation of indigenous labor, according to Patrick Wolfe (1999:27), was a “contradiction, rather than an inherent component” of replacive and tendentially