‘All mucked up’: sharing stories of Yolŋu–Macassan cultural heritage at Bawaka,north-east Arnhem Land

From the eighteenth-century Macassan traders from the Indonesian Island of Sulawesi made regular visits to northern Australia, where with the help of Yol?u, Indigenous Australians living in north-east Arnhem Land, they collected trepang (sea cucumber) for trade. Along with sharing language, technology and culture, the Macassans and Yol?u involved built relationships that are celebrated today in Yol?u art, songs and stories. While the trepang trade had officially stopped by 1906, resonances of this complex relationship continued and still continue today. This paper shares a number of stories told by one particular Yol?u family about this heritage and reflects on the ways in which for Yol?u, the tangible heritage (artefacts), intangible heritage (stories) and the land itself are locked in a symbiotic relationship where each depends on the others to define their existence. Looking after, or protecting this heritage, is therefore about attending to place, and the nature, storytellers, objects and stories contained within it.     

Martin Buber and Hannah Arendt: criticisms on the development of a German messianic

A discussion of the influence of Martin Buber is not easily limited to the philosophical anthropology he espoused. Nor is the political thinking of Hannah Arendt easily removed from criticism of the philosophies (and -phers) that informed her. Both Buber and Arendt attacked the beastly shoulders of a misapplied messianism as it emerged in modern Germany. Hegel, Heidegger, Marx and to some degree Nietzsche would affect this misplacement, and Arendt and Buber for their part would enter into a shared critique that is often neglected, despite promising attempts in a comparative direction made by Ellis, Engel and Riker. In this essay, I make the case that the contributions of Buber and Arendt – their shared assessments of the viability of the public realm, the need for common responsibility and the recurrent decision to engage with otherness in practical terms – point to an innovative critique of the forcible abstraction of a more traditional messianic made by German views of history. In the midst of the crises identified as correlates of a misapplied messianic, the hope as Buber and Arendt see it lies in the capacity for reflective and courageous identification and education between human individuals as they live towards one another.     

Approach to Trading Off Economic and Environmental Values in Industrial Land-Use Planning

Few contemporary issues have received as much sustained attention as the deterioration of the quality of our natural environment and, particularly, the need to manage the trade-off between economic growth and the quality of that environment. This paper discusses research currently under way to develop a land-use planning methodology that will help planners address the trade-offs between environmental quality and economic development. The methodology is used to evaluate the social, economic, and environmental impact of alternative land-use plans. The methodology consists of a regional analysis submodel and a site analysis submodel. The first component is based on an expanded input-output analysis incorporating land use, resource inputs, and waste-emission outputs. The second component is an empirical analysis based on the specific suitability and compatibility of proposed land-use development packages. The land-use planning model developed is applied to a case-study area centered on Charleston, South Carolina.