Rowse’s discussion of general principles underlying the incorporation of Aboriginal groups is equally apposite to a consideration of PBCs under the NTA.
As a strategy of reform, incorporation assumed an indigenous willingness to change, just as assimilation programs assumed, solicited and even coerced change in their clients. Incorporation must therefore be seen as an instance of continuity between assimilation and self-determination. Corporations, councils and associations are thoroughly ‘Western’ modes of collective action … ‘Self-determination’ begs the question: what self or selves? (Rowse 2000: 132).
Fingleton says that, since native title is a communal title, the rationale underlying the PBC includes it being the ‘“contact point” for dealings between the native title holders and outsiders’, so that:
The need for bodies corporate is explained partly by legal reasons — the need for a legal entity with its own separate existence — and also by practical reasons (to facilitate dealings), and by a desire to protect the interests of individual members of the native title-holding group (1994: 3).
As Fingleton indicates, PBCs are designed, in large part, to facilitate external dealings between governments (and other interests) and native title-holding groups. Sansom (in Rowse 1993: 54) describes this succinctly: ‘Leviathan addresses not Aborigines, but Aborigines Inc.’ But, as Rowse says, ‘mobs are not “corporations” whose anatomy can be given in terms of a series of offices and functions’ (ibid: 55). Aboriginal social formations are not correlates of Western-style corporations. Political life within Aboriginal domains is characteristically dynamic, not particularly commensurate with the static corporate entity they are being asked to maintain.
The relationship between multiple incorporated outstation groups and a larger PBC (as a native title-holding body) is unlikely to emerge without some difficulty. While the outstation movement in this region can be seen, on the one hand, as both an exercise of people’s native title and reflective of their traditional attachments to country, on the other hand, the implications of such incorporation in this area have been considerable. Relationships within communities have been impacted significantly as groups vie for allocation of resources, draw artificial boundaries around their incorporated groups, and use ‘traditional’ concepts to validate particular positions. Since the politics over land have become exacerbated in this context, the incorporation of the wider native title group as a PBC is likely to prove politically difficult, as I briefly describe below.