Bardi and Jawi share a system of local organisation comprised of estate groups centred on freshwater sources on the mainland coast or islands. The interior of the Dampierland Peninsula, which lies between Bardi estate groups, does not contain permanent water and is characterised as nimidiman (shared) country, or nimidiman jugara buru (‘together possessing country’) (Bagshaw 1999: 48), analogous to the notion of shared commons (see Burton, this volume). Bardi and Jawi are primarily affiliated with estates through patrifiliation: paternal adoption (andala) can similarly confer primary estate affiliation (Bagshaw 1999: 58). An individual’s ‘own’ country (their buru) is therefore considered to be the buru of their father (and father’s father). Individuals also have significant rights in their maternal estate (ningarlm) and in their spouse’s estate (gurirriny). However:

Effectively, rights in mother’s country (ningarlm) and spouse’s country (gurirriny) are not considered to be of the same primary order as those in father’s country (buru). Bagshaw writes that while the land component of estates ‘is typically quite small’ (around 6 and 4.5 km² in two mapped examples), ‘the offshore areas of a bur may … be quite extensive’ (ibid: 49). Tidally exposed areas contiguous with the land are considered part of an estate, as are nearby offshore features such as islands, rocks, sandbanks, reefs and shallow waters (Bagshaw and Glaskin 2000: 5). Bagshaw (1999, 2001a, 2001b) identifies 21 extant Bardi buru, four extant Jawi buru, and six deceased estates within the Bardi and Jawi claim area. The deceased estates are in various stages of succession. The general locations of these buru are represented in Figure 10-2.

Hiatt (1996: 13–35) summarises the anthropological arguments that have historically occurred regarding the concept of clan, horde and band. Clan groups are not the same as residential groups; the latter consist of people related to each other by various means, and common descent in the male line, the criterion of estate (clan) affiliation, is only one of these. Bardi outstation groups frequently reflect and are premised on estate ownership, but similarly, the residential groups formed at outstations do not correlate entirely with them.

Bardi and Jawi consider the main requisite criteria of a person’s ability to establish an outstation in a particular location within the terms of their own system of land tenure. Patrifiliates are considered to have every right to build an outstation in their own country, although senior patrifiliates are the people having greatest authority (or ‘say’) over that country and other members of the estate group should, in principle, defer to them. Outstations within the Bardi and Jawi claim area have largely (though not entirely) been established by estate affiliates within their own buru, and consequently some estate affiliates have begun to use the terms referring to their estate (buru) and to their outstation (‘block’) interchangeably.^[25] Since there are very few people in the Bardi and Jawi claim area with ‘historical’ rather than traditional associations to country, historical attachment (as opposed to traditional affiliation) has not been a significant issue in the allocation of land for outstations to date. Some Aborigines who were neither Bardi nor Jawi grew up at either Sunday Island or Lombadina, but these cases are few. Typically, where these cases do occur, the family or person with the historical attachment has approached patrifiliates from the estate where they would like to build their outstation for permission to do so.

Where individuals have a non-Bardi or non-Jawi father, and have not been ‘grown up’ by a Bardi or Jawi father, they often emphasise other lines of descent in order to reckon their connection to country.^[26] Some individuals with Bardi mothers and non-Bardi fathers (who are therefore unable to reckon country through their father) have instead ‘followed’ their maternal grandfather (nyami) ‘for country’ — in other words, in reckoning matters of descent, and consequently in articulating rights in country. This sometimes produces considerable friction between people claiming rights to the same area through different mechanisms. Where estate affiliates are unable to form an outstation within their own country because the land is alienated, they too have sought to emphasise other means of connection to country in order to make claims within other buru. These strategies have implications for the politics of land tenure among Bardi and Jawi peoples, and these politics have become especially apparent within the context of the outstation movement.

Source: Bagshaw 1999, 2001b, 2001c.

When estate affiliates grant nimalj, it confers particular rights within a specified area of country to a person (the grantee) for the duration of their life.^[27] These rights may be as narrowly defined as the right to harvest bush fruit from a particular tree, or to mine ochre or fish at a certain location. As discussed, Bardi have a strongly held view regarding the primacy of the rights of estate affiliates within buru, and this is reflected in normative statements regarding principles of land tenure. Giving permission to others to set up an outstation is a contemporary corollary to giving nimalj to camp within that buru on an ongoing basis. Reflecting modern alterations of indigenous custom, verbal permission is in some instances replaced by written permission. Difficulties arising between the respective parties — the grantor and the grantee — have increased the tendency towards written agreements, since conflict can arise when the individuals making the initial agreement pass away and these issues have to be negotiated by their descendants.

Sutton (1978: 125) describes the formation of outstations in the Cape Keerweer region as ‘providing a source for an emerging group structure of a corporate type at a higher order of generality than was previously feasible’. Within the outstation movement, traditional land tenure is being articulated within a new political economy, one that involves aspects of ‘intercultural production’ (Merlan 1998). The nexus between the politics of land tenure and resource acquisition in this area is accentuated by the structural location of these matters within a ‘whitefella’ domain, involving various government agencies, programs, bureaucratic requirements in relation to procedure and expenditure, accountability measures, spot-checks on outstation groups, and so on. Such mechanisms pit outstation groups within the same region against one another symbolically, and in many instances materially as well. Claims to country in the context of the outstation movement, have, in my view, consolidated notions of the autonomy of these contemporary land-using groups. While there is a broad correlation between these outstations and buru (estate groups), that is, between some of the land users and the landowners (estate affiliates), this correlation is not complete; but where the correlation occurs, outstations are, in some cases at least, conflated with buru. These transitions could be considered ‘a regenerated Aboriginal system of local tenure … embedded within a different mode of material production’, but which demonstrate ‘strong continuities of the social and cultural modes of Aboriginal life including its political and territorial aspects’ (Smith 2000: 442). Nevertheless, these transformations have implications for the emergence of new property relationships amongst Bardi in general, and within the context of a communal claim to native title.