Fishing for Fish and for Jaminyjarti in Northern Aboriginal Australia

Socio‐cultural and ecological literature about Australian Indigenous groups reveal that fishing is a vital part of everyday life for many groups who have customary and recreational fresh and salt‐water affiliations. This vitality exists and has meaning for families and communities in the Kimberley's Fitzroy Valley region of Northern Aboriginal Australia. Less well known, however, is the central part that fishing plays in jaminyjarti, a ritual that relies on close kin regularly catching, cooking and sharing fish for bereaved family members during the ‘sorry business’ time that emerges after the death of a loved one. What becomes evident is that while fishing is undoubtedly intertwined in the everydayness and sociality of life, it is also central to comforting the bereaved during and after the grieving process that accompanies death.     

Land Use in Western Australia: the Need for Change

The need for changes in land use has become more evident from analysis of continued declining trends in land and water resource quality. Land use change in this sense refers to changing existing resource management techniques towards ecologically sustainable development. For example, planting cleared areas towards natural water balance, creating better microclimates and improving soil stability. This paper examines existing land and water legislation and the role and scope of government and the community in achieving changes to traditional resource management including reference to economic and biophysical aspects.     

An Independent Confirmation of the 4 ka Antiquity of a Beeswax Figure in Western Arnhem Land,Northern Australia

Critical to any chronology is reliability in the determination of age for a distinctive artefact that is related to other components in a series. Therefore, the independent testing and verification of the antiquity of an apparent anomalous measurement for an old beeswax figure in northern Australia is of fundamental interest in rock art studies. Replication of the radiocarbon dating process has confirmed that one exceptional figure in early X‐ray style at the Gunbilngmurrung site in western Arnhem Land is indeed c. 4–4.5 ka. The result also confirms the great antiquity of paintings over which the beeswax was applied.     

Estimation of Soil Erosion Using Field and Modelling Approaches in an Undisturbed Arnhem Land Catchment,Northern Territory,Australia

An assessment of slope erosion at Tin Camp Creek catchment, Arnhem Land, Northern Territory, Australia, was carried out using the fallout environmental radioisotope caesium‐137 (¹³⁷Cs) as an indicator of soil erosion status, two numerical models (SIBERIA and the Revised Universal Soil Loss Equation (RUSLE)) and erosion pins. This undisturbed drainage basin is situated in the seasonally wet‐dry tropics, with high energy storms and a mean annual rainfall of 1389 mm. Tin Camp Creek catchment is unaffected by European agriculture or pastoral activities, but often experiences fire during the dry season. Two transects were sampled for ¹³⁷Cs in 2002 and 2004, and two models were used to convert ¹³⁷Cs measurements into soil loss estimates. Two methods using the theoretical Profile Distribution Model (PDM) gave net soil redistribution rates between +2.72 and –22.19 t ha^?1 yr^?1 and +2.95 and –24.06 t ha^?1 yr^?1, respectively, while an Australian empirical model (AEM) for uncultivated soils produced estimates between +1.84 and –7.00 t ha^?1 yr^?1 (negative values indicate soil erosion, positive, deposition). The RUSLE gave estimated soil losses for the two transects of approximately 10 t ha^?1 yr^?1, while the SIBERIA model produced values between 0.5 and 2 t ha^?1 yr^?1 for the transects and between 3.5 and 11 t ha^?1 yr^?1 for the total catchment. Average net soil losses of 14 and 15 t ha^?1 yr^?1 for the total catchment and slopes, respectively, were measured by erosion pins. The soil losses in the catchment are similar to those for some other transects in the Northern Territory and the Kimberley region of Western Australia (measured by the ¹³⁷Cs AEM), even though these areas are affected by pastoral activities. This may be at least partly explained by erosion in Tin Camp Creek catchment during high intensity rainstorms at the commencement of the wet season, especially if the slopes have been affected by fire during the previous dry season.     

Reciprocal Repossession: Property as Land in Urban Australia

Repossession of land by Indigenous people is commonly understood as a legal act that unfolds within the confines of state apparatuses. But for many Indigenous urbanites, legal repossession is both impossible and irrelevant due to their histories of dispossession and dislocation. Moreover, while land repossession in Australia is predominantly non‐urban, I demonstrate that land is also reclaimed within cities. Urban repossession of land, considered here as reciprocal rather than legal, challenges the model of private ownership by asserting a territorially transferable relationship to property as land. The order of property entrenches Indigenous people's dispossession by demanding immobility as precondition to ownership and rendering Indigenous urbanites all “too mobile”. Against this framing and the liquidation of their lands as capital, Indigenous people practice reciprocal forms of repossession that challenge both liberal and traditional meanings of ownership. This helps retrieve urban Indigenous subjectivities while compelling partial relinquishment of non‐Indigenous properties.     

Of Human Bondage: The Breaking In of Stockmen in Northern Australia

This article examines the cultural forms through which the young European‐Australian stockmen who work on the cattle stations of north Queensland are socialised. Exploring their interactions with a social and physical landscape and their rites of passage, as manifested in everyday actions, performance and material culture, it reveals how – and why – they are given little choice in acquiring values which are intensely adversarial to the land and to the indigenous people of Australia. It also explores the relationship between the transmission of particular values to these young men and the wider political and hegemonic role of the pastoral sub‐culture in defining Australian national identity. 1 1 It has take me a while to lasso and subdue this ethnographic beast, and in the course of the struggle I have benefited greatly from the advice of colleagues at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology in Oxford, the Pitt Rivers Museum, the University of Wales, Lampeter and fellow Australianists at the Centre for Australian Studies in Wales and at the Menzies Centre in London. I am also most grateful to Neil Maclean and his anonymous referees for their many helpful suggestions and comments. I would like to pay an affectionate tribute to the young stockmen on the cattle properties of Cape York's western coast: at Rutland Plains, Koolatah, Highbury, Drumduff, Sefton and the other stations where I was invited to ‘sling my swag’. Behind the sabre‐rattling that I have quoted, most of these young men were good folk: they were largely tolerant of have a female (and a bloody pom too!) in their midst, generously sharing stories, explaining their lives, making hat‐catchers and belts for me, and showing me how to break horses and the occasional bone. I have had a little feminist fun in considering their performances of Masculinity, but I haven't forgotten that what they do often requires real courage and determination. Though I have tried here to point to the political hegemony of their role and its potentially bleak consequences, I hope that an understanding of their sub‐culture and its pressures will assist the resolution of some of the conflicts in which they find themselves entangled.
     

Global heritage: perspectives from the Northern Territory,Australia

This article examines the way in which selected cultural institutions, government and non‐government organisations and individuals in Australia’s Northern Territory have responded to globalising influences on the preservation, interpretation and public face of its history and heritage. It draws upon a number of interviews with local practitioners and professionals in the field to explore the multiple understandings of cultural heritage, history and identity in the Territory, to investigate how competing interests and expectations are managed at the state and local level, and to address issues of sovereignty in the context of global heritage. Respondents indicate that, despite a strong resurgence of local cultural identities, without people on the ground who care about their heritage, efforts by international bodies will have little effect. There has been increasing concern about the protection of local cultures in the face of globalisation, and research such as this is critical in providing feedback to international heritage organisations. Without strong local support for cultural heritage and identities, they can become increasingly vulnerable in a rapidly globalising world. In Australia’s Northern Territory, however, there seems little indication of this happening.     

Science,Badgers, Politics: Advocacy Coalitions and Policy Change in Bovine Tuberculosis Policy in Britain

Badgers represent one of the most controversial and hotly debated environmental issues in modern Britain. This paper advances the study of the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) by examining the limited extent to which extensive scientific research over a 15‐year period changed the basic composition and argumentation of different advocacy coalitions in a highly adversarial setting. Based on coding of the media coverage over the period 1986–2013, this paper analyzes the composition of the advocacy coalitions, their stability over time, and the limited extent to which learning took place in response to scientific disputes. It also highlights how coalitions between actors with similar policy beliefs did not form, highlighting the importance of the ACF and other policy processes to consider dynamics that go beyond the individual subsystem under investigation.     

北魏的农田水利建设

北魏农田水利建设是伴随着鲜卑族由游牧生活向定居生活的转变而出现和发展的,并形成了薄骨律镇地区、幽燕地区、徐淮地区、河洛地区等几大灌溉区。其发展与政府的重视是密不可分的,旱涝灾害的频仍发生使政府对农田水利事业关注有加,并积极进行农田水利建设。     

Some Prerequisites for Calculations of an Economic Land Evaluation

An indicator relating crop yields to labor and capital inputs is suggested as a measure of the relative natural fertility of land, and thus as a criterion for economic land evaluation. For mathematical convenience, crops are reduced to a standard product, and the cost of producing a unit of standard product is then taken as the basic criterion of natural soil fertility.     

Kimberley Friction: Complex Attachments to Water‐Places in Northern Australia

ABSTRACT Water, in all its physical, symbolic and metaphorical guises, has an obvious interconnection with people. Without water, human and other life forms cannot (and do not) exist. Less obvious is water's potential as a site of anthropological investigation to explore attachments to place. Such attachments, as Arturo Escobar observes, facilitate a multiplicity of place‐based cultures, and emerge when ‘connectivity, interactivity and positionality’ are present. His observation makes epistemological room for what Anna Tsing conceptualises as the ‘friction’ that permeates environmental and indigenous projects. Via Australian‐based Kimberley ethnographic insights, this article examines people's attachments to place‐based cultures when they become meaningful through multi‐layered tensions about water.     

Boats on Bark: an Analysis of Groote Eylandt Aboriginal Bark-Paintings featuring Macassan Praus from the 1948 Arnhem Land Expedition, Northern Territory, Australia

This paper examines a group of Aboriginal bark-paintings featuring Macassan prau s that were collected in 1948 during the American-Australian Scientific Expedition to Arnhem Land. These paintings were studied in an effort to understand issues related to Aboriginal and Macassan cross-cultural interaction, stylistic adaptation and change, and maritime technologies. Furthermore it is one example in which the collaborative efforts of maritime and Indigenous archaeologies can achieve a more holistic technological and stylistic cross-analysis of watercraft imagery.
© 2009 The Authors     

Late Holocene Changes in Shellfishing Behaviors From the Gulf of Carpentaria,Northern Australia

ABSTRACT

Dramatic changes in shellfishing behaviors occur across northern Australia during the late Holocene, marked most conspicuously by the cessation of large shell mound construction in some areas, and the reorganization of shellfishing behaviors towards more intensive production in the last 1,000 years. Excavations reveal rapid and widespread changes within coastal sites, an increasing diversification in overall subsistence resources, and patterns of increase in site establishment and use. Some of these changes have been argued to be associated with increasing climate variability and a trend towards increasing aridity during the late Holocene, thought to have transformed coastal ecosystems and mollusc availability. However, when these hypotheses are tested at the local level, more nuanced patterns of human-environment interaction emerge, which call into question interpretations based on broad-scale climate records. We suggest that disjunctions in the timing of the cessation of shell mound construction noted between the west and east Gulf of Carpentaria may be related, at least in part, to the timing and intensity of external cultural contacts with Macassan seafarers, associated with reorganization of mobility and production strategies, rather than as yet undemonstrated environmental changes impacting on shellfish availability.     

Kincentric Ecology,Species Maintenance and the Relational Power of Place in Northern Australia

This paper considers themes of species maintenance and place engagement in Yanyuwa country, northern Australia. It traces the complexity of interpretations and relational contexts involved in places that are commonly – and we argue – misleadingly, referred to as increase and magic sites. Examining one specific place, at which people carry out maintenance rituals, we explore the complex bonds that unite Yanyuwa with the geography that is the Ancestral Hill Kangaroo. Not content with the classificatory habit of declaring actions either increase oriented or hunting magic, this research more fully explicates the relational substance of places that play a key role in ecological health. This is achieved by asking how might the profundity of a place of relational importance, such as a maintenance site, be better understood and written of in ways that convey an Indigenous ontology and epistemology?     

Land Transport Reforms and the Economic Geography of the Northern Territory

Agreements at the special Premiers' Conferences in October 1990 and July 1991 removed Northern Territory Government control over the setting of heavy vehicle registration charges and arrangements for local roads funding on Aboriginal land. In relating the way in which the Northern Territory Government has traditionally administered these policy areas and reacted to the Premiers' Conference agreements, it is shown how land transport policy has been used to facilitate a preferred direction for development of the Territory's economic geography, namely, one in which costs to the private sector are subsidised and activities on privately-owned Aboriginal land are controlled. The agreements should result in a more equitable administration of land transport pol icy in the Territory. Changes to the administration of land transport reflect a broader shift in Australian Federal relations, in which the Commonwealth has sought greater national uniformity of transport policy. This has major implications for the future economic geography of the Northern Territory.     

Land Evaluation and Regional Pricing in the Soviet Union

The author examines the use of the Lorenz curve and the Florence method for measuring the degree of spatial concentration of industry in a given area, and then develops an index of his own, based on ratio of the industrial output, value of plant, and industrial employment per unit area in a region to the industrial output, value of plant, and industrial employment per unit area in the country (or larger regional entity) as a whole. Findings for the major economic regions and middle-level regions (oblasts, krays, ASSRs) of the RSFSR are shown in the form of tables, graphs and map. A pronounced spread in levels of concentration is found between the European and Asian portions of the RSFSR, with concentration levels in the Central Russian region (at one extreme) and the Soviet Far East (at the other extreme) differing by a factor of 56.     

Applying a Systematic Review to Land Use Land Cover Change in Northern Upland Vietnam: The Missing Case of the Borderlands

As Vietnam embraces the market economy, and a number of state policies promote reforestation and rural market integration, land use and land cover (LULC) changes are occurring in the country's northern uplands in increasingly complex and fragmented ways. Yet understandings of the degree and consequences of LULC changes in this diverse agro‐ecological region are incomplete. We conduct a systematic literature review of research reported in academic articles tracing and analysing LULC change in Vietnam's northern regions. We find that these studies have tended to take place away from the most mountainous, northern borderlands. The studies nonetheless highlight a diversity of land use land cover changes caused by numerous causes, making the distinction of overall trends difficult. To complement and extend this body of research, we introduce recent LULC change research we have completed in the mountainous border districts of Lào Cai province, on the Sino‐Vietnamese border. The heterogeneity of causes of LULC change in both the review articles and our case study points to the importance of adapting land use policies to local agro‐ecological and socio‐economic conditions and ethnic diversity, taking into account state–farmer relations, household livelihood decision‐making, and policy implementation at the commune and district levels.     

First fossil pollen record of the Northern Hemisphere species Aglaoreidia cyclops Erdtman, 1960 in Australia

Sánchez Botero, C.A., Oboh-Ikuenobe, F.E. & Macphail, M.K., 2013. First fossil pollen record of the Northern Hemisphere species Aglaoreidia cyclops Erdtman, 1960 in Australia. Alcheringa 37, 1–5. ISSN 0311-5518.

Aglaoreidia cyclops Erdtman, 1960 is a fossil pollen species associated with upper Eocene to lower Oligocene freshwater deposits in Europe and North America. Specimens preserved in upper Eocene lignites near Norseman, Western Australia, are the first record of this Northern Hemisphere species both in Australia and the Southern Hemisphere. This new report widens the biogeographic distribution originally considered for this species. The stratigraphical and environmental characteristics of A. cyclops also make it an excellent stratigraphic indicator of upper Eocene freshwater deposits in Western Australia.

Carlos A. Sánchez Botero [casmwc@mail.mst.edu], Francisca E. Oboh-Ikuenobe [ikuenobe@mst.edu] Department of Geological Sciences and Engineering, Missouri University of Science and Technology, 129 McNutt Hall, Rolla, MO 65409, USA; Mike Macphail [mike.macphail@anu.edu.au] Department of Archaeology and Natural History, College of Asia and the Pacific, Australian National University Canberra, ACT 0200, Australia. Received 12.10.2012; revised 6.3.2013; accepted 7.3.2013.     

Sediment Loss from a Waste Rock Dump,ERA Ranger Mine,Northern Australia

During the 1994/95 wet season, runoff, suspended load and bedload loss from large scale erosion plots under natural rainfall events were measured at three sites with different treatments on the Energy Resources of Australia Ranger waste rock dump (cap, soil, fire). The fire site has well established trees, the soil site smaller shrubs and the cap site minimal vegetation. All three sites are located on the flat areas of the waste rock dump with similar slopes and cap, fire and soil are local names for the sites. The quantity of bedload eroded from the soil and fire sites decreased during the monitoring period, however, the same trend was not observed on the cap site. Bedload loss from the fire and soil sites is significantly log‐linear with time and reduces at a decreasing rate until becoming statistically constant toward the later part of the first half of the wet season. For corresponding storms at each site, bedload erosion was highest from the unvegetated and unripped cap site and lowest from the well vegetated fire site. Site specific linear relationships between bedload and total sediment load have been derived and can be used to derive total sediment load in the absence of measured suspended load.