Table of Contents
Currently, in the Tanami Desert of Australia’s Northern Territory, in excess of seven million dollars in mineral royalties may be distributed to Aboriginal communities and individual Aboriginal people each year. This royalty money can fluctuate markedly from year to year depending on variables such as the success of exploration, the price of gold, mining company expenditure, and the rates of production in terms of mass and quality of ore from both the pits and the mining plants themselves. The money, commonly referred to simply as ‘royalties’, is primarily paid out by mining companies and is subject to legal agreements made with traditional landowners through their representative body, the Central Land Council (CLC). Sections 35 and 64 of the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act 1976 (ALRA) provide for financial payments to be made to the ‘traditional owners’ of areas associated with, or affected by, mining and exploration.
The advent of the ALRA and the land claim process represented a significant shift in the objective relations of Warlpiri cultural conceptions of place. Land claims and the statutory requirements of the ALRA combined to place an emphasis on the relationships of Aboriginal people to their land in a new manner. The land claim process required people to articulate and objectify their relationships to place in a tribunal setting that required the definition of which people owned which land in relation to membership of descent groups and the boundaries of their ‘estates’. In essence, the ALRA signaled a reification of cultural forms that would underscore the fundamental tenets of Aboriginal society, history and culture which were so clearly different from those of Euro-Australians.
In the Tanami Desert, the CLC, as instructed by Warlpiri and landowners from other linguistic groups, has entered into agreements with a large number of companies. These agreements allow for exploration and mining on Aboriginal land. The two most important features of these agreements, as far as Warlpiri people are concerned, centre on the protection of their places of significance and the payment of royalties to the relevant traditional owners of the land affected by either mining leases or exploration licences. The developments associated with the exigencies of mineral exploration on Aboriginal land have forced, and are continuing to force, traditional owners to make many decisions about their land, such as about the relative importance of places and the bases for membership of royalty receiving associations. The objectification of Warlpiri knowledge of place and people’s relationships to place is extremely significant. It is at the centre of tensions and politicking between people to identify who is eligible to receive money from specific tracts of land, and the criteria upon which such eligibility is based, contested and upheld.
In the year 2000, an area of 85,250 km2 in the central Tanami Desert was covered by seven mining leases, more than 160 exploration licences within 53 separate agreements, with a further 100 applications awaiting consideration. Extensive consultations, beginning with seeking consent from the appropriate traditional owners, are necessary before any work by mining companies or other external development interests can take place on Aboriginal land. Then follows the project of mapping places and identifying those to be protected and avoided during exploration and mining work, which is usually carried out by an anthropologist working with the appropriate Warlpiri people. As a result of these activities and other factors, Warlpiri relations to the lands from which they now derive financial benefits have changed greatly since the arrival of land rights. This chapter will specifically address the demarcation of space and place and the ways in which the Warlpiri landscape is dissected by gold exploration and mining, a complicated development that dominates the current modelling of relationships between people and place in the Tanami Desert.
The CLC’s submission to the Reeves Review noted that the ALRA reversed a long process that had denied recognition of Aboriginal owners’ rights and responsibilities for their land, and that as a result, ‘for the first time since contact between Aboriginal people and non-Aboriginal people, the balance of power between Aboriginal landowners and mining interests has shifted’ (Reeves 1998: 519). The ALRA has afforded the greatest opportunity for Warlpiri, who became sedentarised in missions and reserves following the establishment of such settlements,[1] to once more access their places in the Tanami Desert. These opportunities to access remote country have resulted, firstly from the land claim process, and secondly as a consequence of the processes arising from the mining provisions of the ALRA (especially Section 42), which vests traditional owners with a decision-making role over access to place. These provisions have given Warlpiri people control of their places in the face of the intense pressure for economic development in the form of gold exploration and mining in the Tanami Desert. The provisions were vigorously contested in some of the submissions to the Reeves Review, and the debate revolved around the extent to which Aboriginal people will be able to have a meaningful say in the development of economic interests over their land and places (Reeves 1998: 520).
The competition for the right to control access to Aboriginal land is one that is now familiar in recent Australian history. In the context of the two most famous cases of disputes between government, the mining industry and Aborigines — Noonkanbah (Hawke and Gallagher 1989) and Coronation Hill (Merlan 1991; Keen 1992; Brunton 1992) — Merlan (1991: 341) has made the observation that:
Such disputes highlight the problems which arise from contradiction between direct governmental support for Aborigines as a traditional and socio-culturally distinctive ‘type’, and support from the private sector (thus also indirectly, from government) for them to become and to see themselves as modernizing facilitators of economic development. Conflict between these two paths realizes itself partly in conflict over space, and its material and symbolic definition.
How the conflict over the production of space has been manifested in the Tanami Desert is of direct concern. Elsewhere I have considered Warlpiri places as natural, material phenomena that are imbued with symbolic and practical characteristics that demarcate and orientate social space, to which myths and stories are attached (Elias 2001a: 103–16, 2001b). Particularly important here is the concept of jukurrpa, which is a term Walpiri use to refer to the creative epoch often referred to as ‘the dreaming’. But it is also used to refer to the ancestral beings who formed the country and to their activities or ‘dreamings’.[2] One way places are culturally ordered by Warlpiri is in terms of the way that they restrict access to certain people. Such restrictions are based primarily on categories of age, gender and knowledge, and with respect to the different bases upon which people could claim identity with them as both individuals and social groups.
At the present time Warlpiri places are at the centre of interests that seek to determine their location and physical boundaries. This determination is of great significance for mining companies and governments who want to maximise their ability to access space in order to ascertain the extent of mineral reserves. The ALRA legislation recognises the Warlpiri right to exercise a considerable amount of power over access to their land. Here is the source of conflict over the material and symbolic definition of place that Merlan referred to earlier, which is most simply explained by the fact that boundaries have different meanings in different societies (Lefebvre 1991). The process of mapping in the Tanami Desert will be shown to have had profound effects on the definition of place and space, and on Warlpiri conceptions of them both physically and socially in terms of the imposition of boundaries between people and place.
Land claim hearings in the Tanami Desert commenced with the Warlpiri and Kartangarurru-Kurintji claim (Peterson et al. 1978). Lodged in 1978, it was the first claim heard by the Aboriginal Land Commissioner in the Central Australian region. The claim itself involved a huge area of land that encompassed a number of ‘tribal’/linguistic groups, including the Gurindji, Kartangarurru, Pirlingarna, Kukatja, Ngardi, Nyininy, and all of the Warlpiri subgroups — Warnayaka, Manyangarnpa (Yalpiri), Ngalia and the Warrmarla. From the outset, discussion of landownership was based on the model of the patrilineal clan that involved the identification of people’s association with corresponding groups of places related to jukurrpa. The presentation of evidence for the early land claims placed greater emphasis upon social affiliation stemming from relations coded within the land than with respect to places within the land itself. The authors of the claim book explained some of the more practical reasons for this situation:
The least satisfactory aspect is the accuracy of place location on the maps. The principal reasons for this are the extent of the area involved, the lack of roads in the area, the general difficulties of travel and the fact that we have not visited the remoter parts of the Tanami Desert. We have, however, surveyed the area from a light plane in company with a small group of traditional owners. Even where places have been visited the practical difficulties of accurately locating a soakage or other place in an undulating plain or thick stand of mulga are considerable. In consequence only the major places have been shown on the maps where the location has been visited or can be confidently located. This means that many hundreds of names are not included although they are well known to the people and their order along the song lines is known to us (Peterson et al. 1978: 2).
Clearly, when the Central Desert Land Trust was granted very little was known about the location of most major places of significance except those that were easily identified as topographical features. These places were discussed through the claim hearings but the establishment of a successful claim was not reliant on the demonstration of knowledge of the location of places of significance, but rather on the links of traditional owners to the land. This situation was repeated in the Warlpiri, Kukatja and Ngarti claim (Myers and Clark 1983), where hardly any evidence was heard on the claim area at all and the mapping and presentation of located places was virtually non-existent.
Beginning with the Chilla Well claim, the Land Commissioners (under considerable political pressure) increased the demand for the accurate location and identification of place, which then continued in subsequent land claims (Stead 1985). The first reason for this was that accurate mapping of places was facilitated through a combination of factors, including the availability of more financial and logistical support for research, the fact that a shorter time had elapsed since yapa (as Warlpiri people refer to themselves) had worked and lived on the land, and the political climate of the time. This climate was created by the establishment of self-government in the Northern Territory in 1978, and most notably the subsequent development of gold exploration and mining in the Tanami Desert. The combination of these influences placed a pronounced emphasis on the importance of identifying Warlpiri places of significance. There continues to be enormous pressure applied to Aboriginal landowners and the Land Councils by industry and government not to hinder economic development by ‘locking’ up land. These interests have identified the sacred site or place as a ‘bogey man’; its mythical status is argued to be a hindrance to a modern, economically responsible country.
The preparation of the Western Desert and Tanami Downs land claims witnessed the injection of more funds for research by the CLC and involved numerous trips undertaken to identify the location of places. These necessitated taking traditional owners on extended country visits mapping different dreaming tracks. During such research the knowledge of senior people, who had walked through these areas before being moved to settlements, was crucial to the authoritative identification of these places. Maps were produced that accurately recorded locations of places to illustrate how claimed areas of land were ‘full’ of places that were of significance to yapa.
The development of the Northern Territory’s mineral base has long been identified as a key priority of the Country Liberal Party which held power from the time of self-government in 1978 until 2001. The Northern Territory Government’s opposition to land claims by Aboriginal people was a stance taken in order to remove what was perceived as an unnecessary obstacle to the development of economic infrastructure: the defeat of Aboriginal land claims would have allowed mining and exploration to go ahead unimpeded. Not only did the government fail in this respect; its vehement contest of land claims actually assisted yapa to rediscover places of significance, thus strengthening the Warlpiri position. Warlpiri, through the CLC, quickly established a number of agreements with mining companies, and through the procedures of exploration and contingent ‘site clearances’ provided for in these agreements, people were rediscovering and locating many of their places. As more exploration tracks were made in remote areas they provided the means for people to more easily access their places. This process facilitated the preparation of subsequent land claims as people travelled through country more frequently. However, there is a critical distinction to be drawn between the mapping and recording of place data for a land claim and the mapping and recording of place data for mineral exploration. The exigencies of gold exploration and mining require that boundaries be allocated to located places in order for development to proceed with surety. This situation introduced a new dimension to place that had not previously been conceived by Warlpiri or institutional anthropology.