It's the Lungfish,stupid: knowledge fights,activism, and the science–policy interface

Since the post‐positivist turn in the 20th century, many scholars and philosophers have argued for the importance of Other Ways Of Knowing – including local, embodied, situated, partial, and indigenous knowledges – in developing a better understanding of the world. This argument has been further stressed by a large subset of scholars working in the fields of geography, policy, planning, natural resource management, and community development, yet in practice, positivism retains its epistemological dominance. Drawing from a case study of a dam proposal at Traveston Crossing, Queensland, Australia, this paper will explore these epistemological tensions from the perspective of those whose first/primary ways of knowing about the issue were marginalised, namely the local activists who opposed the proposal. Using data gathered from document analysis and interviews, the paper will explore how these activists implicitly understood this epistemological marginalisation, how they adopted and employed positivist knowledge and language to further the exposure and credibility of their campaign, how this credibility was mediated by their identities, how they strategically deployed different forms of knowledge at local, national, and international scales, and how their successful navigation of these epistemological tensions was critical to the ultimate success of their campaign.     

What Remains? Reconciling Repatriation,Aboriginal Culture,Representation and the Past

ABSTRACT This paper uses the repatriation and ceremonial reburial of Indigenous remains to La Perouse, an Indigenous community in Sydney, as a lens through which to examine the cultural politics of representation and recognition that are central to contemporary Aboriginal identity construction. The return of the skeletal remains of 21 individuals highlights the role that representative bodies — past and present, individual and organizational — play in engagements between the State and Aboriginal people. Heralded by some as a sincere sign of reconciliation and treated as suspect and misguided by others, the reburial produced diverse responses from both Aboriginal and non‐Aboriginal people alike. Speakers at the repatriation focused on righting the wrongs of the past, reconciliation, and moving forward in cooperation, suggesting the redemptive significance of these events. Among Kooris at La Perouse, debates about community, representation, and belonging expose the ways that Aboriginal people and communities operate through, against, and beyond ‘whitefella’ structures of recognition to define who they are and what their culture is.     

Citizenship as Non‐Discrimination: Acceptance or Assimilationism? Political Logic and Emotional Investment in Campaigns for Aboriginal Rights in Australia, 1940 to 1970

This article explores the relationship between the United Nations sponsored principle of non‐discrimination and the policy of assimilation in the context of campaigns for Aboriginal rights in Australia in the 1950s and 1960s. The principle of non‐discrimination was important to the elaboration of the goal of an equal citizenship, to the fight against the practice of segregation and as a basis for political organisation. The campaign for the 1967 referendum on Aboriginal citizenship was led by an inter‐racial, cross‐class alliance of women, whose common commitments were, however, shaped by different emotional and historical investments and different logics of pain. Hence, the large ‘Yes’ vote was an ambiguous triumph: from an Aboriginal point of view full acceptance into the nation‐state could also mean their ultimate assimilation as a people. Moreover, in allowing for the leadership of women, coalitional politics could lead to the political domination of women and thus exacerbate the emasculation of Aboriginal men. This article focuses on the emotional structure of political subjectivities and the gendered and racialised dynamics of their formation.     

Photos in Wiradjuri Biscuit Tins: Negotiating Relatedness and Validating Colonial Histories

Tins, cardboard boxes and albums hold one of the most prized and jealously guarded of all Wiradjuri Aboriginal ‘material’ possessions, the family photos. They are used to tell and recall stories, introduce people to kin, as items of exchange and as important statements of identity and belonging in the spatial and temporal politics of kinship. In this ethnographic study of Indigenous photo collections in south‐east Australia, I argue that photos have the capacity to extend the face‐to‐face nature of kin‐relatedness through time and space; they are important in negotiations of sociality; and they validate the past in contexts in which recourse to both myth and history have been constrained.     

You gotta throw away culture once you become Christian: How ‘culture’ is Redefined among Aboriginal Pentecostal Christians in Rural New South Wales

ABSTRACT This paper is an ethnographic and historical exploration of Aboriginal Pentecostalism, which permeated quickly into the Aboriginal community in rural New South Wales in Australia during the early twentieth century. Today the Aboriginal Pentecostal Christians in this region renounce Aboriginal ‘culture’. This, however, does not mean they reject Aboriginality. By examining Malcolm Calley's ethnography on the mid‐twentieth century Pentecostal movement in this region and drawing upon my own fieldwork data, I show the way in which this group of Aboriginal Christians of mixed descent in a ‘settled’ part of Australia have maintained Aboriginality and reinforced attachment to the community through faith in the Christian God, whilst, paradoxically, developing strong anti‐culture and anti‐tradition discourses. This paper advocates shifting the study of social change from a dichotomised model that opposes invading moral orders against resisting traditional cultures, to one that examines the processual manifestations of the historical development of vernacular realities.     

Redfern as the Heart(h): Living (Black) in Inner Sydney

Before the arrival of the ‘white fella’ over 200 years ago, the Gadigal people and others of the Eora Darug occupied the place where the city of Sydney now stands. At the heart of this second tier global city, the inner‐city suburb of Redfern has become a mainstay of urban Aboriginal identity. Yet, this troubled and stigmatised focal point of populist media representations and government policy does not reflect the diversity of urban Aboriginal life in inner Sydney. This paper draws on a range of sources about living in Redfern, from the difficult politics of establishing and retaining an Aboriginal urban space and place in the contemporary gentrifying city – achieved in large part through the establishment of now long‐standing service provision – through to the rise of alternate visions and lives and many more ‘ordinary’ ways of living in the city. This paper seeks to highlight that Aboriginal people variously inhabit, occupy, and sometimes thrive in Australia's first colonial city and the site of invasion. It also provides several of the author's personal experiences of engagement with some of these processes.     

Getting yourself out of the way: Aboriginal people listening and belonging in the city

Much is known about the meaning of Country to Aboriginal people living in northern Australia. Discourse abounds in various disciplines about how Country provides people in remote locations with a sense of belonging and place. Yet little is known about what Country means to Aboriginal people living in large urban locations such as Sydney, Australia. The two authors conducted a series of interviews with nine Aboriginal people about what Country and belonging mean for them in the city. A methodological relation between the two authors is explored as a means of reflecting on the role of mentoring in a research partnership, and on the transferal of research capacity through that collaboration. Older participants identify how listening and belonging are each governed by the other to the extent that there can be no belonging without listening. We draw on the frames of both human geography and philosophy to argue that listening depends on an ability to get yourself out of the way.     

Letting Indigenous People Talk About Their Country: a Case Study of Cross‐Cultural (Mis)communication in an Environmental Management Planning Process

This paper presents a case study, based on the experiences of two senior Aboriginal traditional owners who were engaged in negotiations surrounding the establishment of a Regional Forest Agreement (RFA) in southeast Queensland. This case is notable as an illustration of the capacity of natural resource management planning, through negotiation within a formal process, to extinguish native title. Importantly, the personal experiences of two senior Aboriginal people provide an insight into a situation designed to enhance interactions between government and community, with the overt intention of improving natural resource management. However, the record of this personal experience indicates that the communication was less than satisfactory and that the outcomes, at least in terms of the experiences recorded here, of the individual senior Aboriginal community members, was less than satisfactory. We conclude that, despite best intentions, there is an important lack of provision for community influence or power, including any legal or administrative institutional framework. We also conclude that there are important institutional and social processes of engagement still to be developed, including ways of engaging the community more widely that has conventionally been the case.     

Recognise what? The limitations of settler colonial constitutional reform

In settler colonial societies such as Australia, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous people have turned to constitutional reform as a means of addressing historical exclusions and colonial injustice. In practice, however, the promise of constitutionalism has revealed clear limits. This article explores these limits in the context of the current Australian campaign for the constitutional ‘recognition’ of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, where the loudest dissenting voices have come from Indigenous people themselves. In light of this, this article proposes a more agonistic engagement of diverse and dissenting opinions, with a view to opening up a more radical, decolonising space for constitutional politics.     

Circulating Stories: East Timorese in Australia and Questions of Post‐Independence Identity

During the Indonesian occupation of East Timor, diasporic groups played a central role in the campaign for self‐determination. Throughout the occupation, East Timorese in Australia maintained a strong sense of long‐distance nationalism, which drove, directly or indirectly, communal and social activities. The fight to free East Timor was at the core of the exiles' collective imagination, defining them as a largely homeland‐focused community. However, in the aftermath of the independence, the role and position of the diaspora have been less clear and the exiles have struggled to redefine their relationship with their home country. Personal experiences upon return and perceptions of political, cultural, economic, and social development (or lack thereof) have led to renewed questioning of identity and belonging. This article explores the renewed questioning of identity and belonging embedded in people's ‘circulating stories’ of change, sacrifice and return.     

Kinship,Organisations and ‘wannabes’: Aboriginal Identity Negotiation in South‐western Sydney

ABSTRACT This paper explores the ambiguous and dynamic nature of Aboriginal identity in south‐western Sydney. While for most of the Aboriginal people in rural and remote areas, identity has been primarily a matter of kinship ties associated with their perceived place of origin, Aboriginal people often recognize each other as Aboriginal by sharing and recognizing certain ‘Aboriginal’ cultural mores and traits. These two principles of identity are flexible enough to be extended to those who are not raised in an Aboriginal family environment; one meeting with their Aboriginal family is a minimum requirement. In south‐western Sydney, where organizations dealing with Aboriginal issues provide ways of connecting Aboriginal people from various backgrounds, in line with the government's homogenized notion of Aboriginality, Aboriginal people from Aboriginal family environments encounter those who cannot even meet this compromised criterion. Their presence gives rise to tension and conflict revolving around the concept of Aboriginality. Aboriginal cultural values that emphasize actual engagement provide ways of overcoming such dilemmas. Through common participation in the activities of the aforesaid organisations, Aboriginal people in south‐western Sydney develop a new sense of ‘Aboriginality’, which embraces those who cannot claim kinship ties.     

Palawa Kani and the Value of Language in Aboriginal Tasmania

Over the past forty years the Tasmanian Aboriginal people, long marked as an iconic case of extinction, have revitalized many elements of their ‘lost’ culture. Palawa kani, the constructed Tasmanian Aboriginal language, is an example of such efforts. The construction and utilization of palawa kani is one element of a broader Tasmanian Aboriginal cultural politics working to strengthen the Indigenous status, authenticity, and presence in Tasmania specifically and Australia more generally. In this article I recount the historical documentation of Tasmanian Aboriginal languages and analyze the process through which multiple historical languages were utilized in the construction and consecration of a single ‘official’ Tasmanian Aboriginal language. Rather than existing strictly as a tool for communication, I argue palawa kani is a cultural artifact that, like an emblem, works to distinguish the Tasmanian Aboriginal community, one that lacks many of the stereotypical components of Australian Aboriginality, within Tasmanian society. As such, it is best understood in relation to Clifford's ‘indigenous articulations’ (2001) and Cowlishaw's mythopoeia of Aboriginality in Australia (2010, 2011). I examine what palawa kani does for, and what it represents to, the larger Tasmanian Aboriginal community.     

Identity Politics: The Elephant in the Room at the Cape York Institute's Inaugural Conference

The Cape York Institute for Policy and Leadership is dedicated to research and policy advice relevant to the remote Aboriginal communities of Cape York Peninsula, Queensland. Its inaugural conference, entitled ‘Strong Foundations: Rebuilding Social Norms in Indigenous Communities’, addressed widespread problems of social dysfunction that manifest in failure to attend school, substance abuse and sexual violence. Keynote addresses explained the dysfunction as an outcome of dependency on welfare, disincentives to work, poor governance and dispossession. They made a number of worthwhile proposals, including governmental intervention, recognition of shared Australian-ness and humanity, abandonment of victimhood and cultural security. However, they made only tangential allusion to Aboriginal identity politics, which I argue play a crucial role in constituting the dysfunction and, if understood, open new avenues to Aboriginal development. This essay constitutes a plea for more rigorous examination of the politics that present such a barrier to Aboriginal development.     

An unlikely alliance: the 1907 Ukrainian–Jewish electoral coalition

This paper contextualises a political alliance between Ukrainian and Jewish national activists in Austrian Galicia during the 1907 parliamentary elections, Austria's first elections with universal manhood suffrage. This alliance represented a milestone in the making of a new paradigm of Ukrainian–Jewish relations. Ironically, the Ukrainian and Jewish nationalists, portrayed elsewhere as staunch enemies, were uniquely able to overcome the profound social, religious, political, and cultural barriers separating the two communities. Ukrainian nationalists recognised the potential of a nationalised Jewish community to undermine Polish hegemony in Galicia, while some Zionists saw the potential to elect Jewish parliamentary representatives in rural Ukrainian districts where Poles and Jews competed for the districts' second mandate. The alliance mobilised the Ukrainian and Jewish electorate around shared slogans and goals. It was a qualified success, leading to a more powerful national Ukrainian faction as well as the first Zionist faction in any European parliament. Although the two sides failed to repeat the alliance in the subsequent elections in 1911, the coalition sparked a new sense of history for both communities. It created a pro‐Ukrainian discourse in Jewish politics, and a pro‐Zionist one in Ukrainian politics. The alliance also exposes Zionism as a response to the European‐wide nationalist revivalism rather than a reaction to rampant turn‐of‐the‐century racial anti‐Semitism.     

Going for Wombat — Transformations in Wirangu and the Scotdesco Community on the Far West Coast of South Australia

ABSTRACT Becoming an object of touristic interest is only one of a series of ways that Aboriginality is being transformed in contemporary Australia, as the space opens up for individuals and groups to reposition themselves as Aborigines within the nation, with a distinctive culture in various forms. The nation's appetite for Aboriginal ‘culture’, within desirable limits (Povinelli 2002) and energised by a sentimental politics (Cowlishaw 2010), continues to grow. There is, however, a destructive flip side to the politics of difference being played out within Aboriginal societies. This is evidenced by the many battles for access to or control of ‘cultural’ resources for their commercial benefits or collective survival value. In many places communities or groups are faced with the terrible choice of distinction or extinction (Comaroff & Comaroff 2009). That is, they must find, and make alienable, something distinctive about themselves or face collective extinction. How one Aboriginal community is responding to these threats and challenges is the subject of this paper. This paper also adds to the growing literature on ethno‐commercialisation by focusing on the central role of language in these processes.     

Building More Inclusive Solidarities for Socio‐Environmental Change: Lessons in Resistance from Southern Appalachia

It is increasingly recognized that socio‐environmental justice will not be achieved through liberal and cosmopolitical forms of activism alone. Instead, more diverse and inclusive solidarities must be achieved across political ideologies for transformative change. By engaging with one constituency often overlooked by mainstream environmentalists—rural, conservative Americans—we argue for a situated solidarity that can be forged among people whose views of nature, community, and politics differ significantly. This framework rejects totalizing expressions of global ambition that erase important place‐based differences. To explore this ethic, we examine a localized anti‐fracking campaign in western North Carolina to determine how place‐based forms of environmental resistance can be brought in closer connection with the cosmopolitical movement for climate and energy justice. This requires that cosmopolitical movements make room for more customary forms of cultural politics, while conservative movements look beyond their own place‐based struggles to resist mutually experienced forms of oppression.     

Managing ‘Aboriginal selves’ in South‐Western Sydney1

ABSTRACT This paper explores Aboriginal people's multiple sense of selves in suburban situations. While the Aboriginal self has been usually conceived as forged through relationships with kin, in the contemporary world, Aboriginal lives are constrained by a genealogical understanding of Aboriginality, that is, one based on descent. This understanding is endorsed by the state system, by Aboriginal and non‐Aboriginal organisations, and by non‐Aboriginal people. In the suburbs there are different ways in which people come to understand and identify their Aboriginalty. Drawing on ethnographic field‐work in south‐west Sydney, this paper explores these forms of identity, how they are perceived, and the effects this has on their sense of self. The focus is on two individuals with different backgrounds and understandings of what it is to be Aboriginal. The increasing role of Aboriginal organisations to offer new forms of relatedness is also discussed.     

Truth-Telling in the Wake of European Contact: Historical Investigation of Aboriginal Skeletal Remains from Normanton

This study heeds the call for a ‘truth-telling’ of injustices carried out on Aboriginal communities during the colonial acquisition of Australia as stated in the Uluru Statement from the Heart 2017. Here, we discuss the lives of eight Indigenous people buried in Normanton in north-west Queensland (QLD) who died and had their remains collected in the late 1890s as scientific specimens. The remains were later repatriated to the community before being further exposed by erosion in 2015. With the consent and participation of local traditional owners—the Gkuthaarn and Kukatj people—this assessment utilised bioarchaeological, historical and anthropological methodologies to gain a better understanding of Indigenous life and health on the Australian colonial frontier. Gkuthaarn and Kukatj people were engaged throughout the investigation, and statements throughout this piece made by them illustrate how bioarchaeology can inform on past injustices in Australia’s history, bringing them into the public consciousness and aiding the transition to reconciliation through ‘truth-telling’.     

Narratives of Community and Change in a Contemporary Rural Setting: The Case of Duaringa,Queensland

Contemporary rural communities are being affected by a range of changes and processes in Australia, including major changes in demographic patterns; the organisation and performance of primary industries; levels of government support for economic and social infrastructure; and wider developments in technology and changing socio‐cultural values. The impact of these processes has been felt unequally and small communities which have had a traditionally close relationship with agricultural industries are particularly challenged. The current paper reports on one such community and provides the opportunity to analyse both the the substance and cultural understandings of such forms of rural change/uncoupling. The paper presents local narratives of community and change in Duaringa, Central Queensland and responds to recent international literature suggesting that the meanings and politics of rural change are as significant as the economic trends that are occurring. The Duaringa narratives demonstrate both the substance and dynamics of expressions of community (and loss). And the paper concludes that these meanings are also influenced by wider processes including consumption‐oriented lifestyles and national interests in South East Asian relations.