The BHP project team delayed negotiations, and instead moved to a new stage in the process of gaining Aboriginal approval for the project. Development approvals to date had covered test drillings and local road works, but there had so far been no use of explosives. The BHP team and the ASSPA arranged a consultation for 18 August 1987 at which the use of small quantities of explosives at Coronation Hill would be demonstrated for the Jawoyn.^[17] About 18 Jawoyn were in attendance, including the three senior site custodians. The NLC seized the opportunity of this meeting to radically assert its standing in the issue.

Before the meeting began, two NLC officers arrived and handed to the Coronation Hill project manager a letter drafted the previous day by their senior legal officer. It referred to the NLC’s frustration over having ‘our clients complain to us about direct approaches by your company’, reasserted the privileged nature of its relationship with the Jawoyn, and objected to the company’s failure to advise of this meeting and the matters to be discussed.^[18] The group then moved to Coronation Hill to observe three successively larger detonations, culminating in a line of four half-sticks of gelignite on a hill-side drilling bench. Before the meeting reassembled for discussion, an NLC officer privately explained to the Jawoyn that the NLC now had the legal power to negotiate a comprehensive agreement with BHP, including exploration works and site protection, and suggested that they should withhold a decision about blasting until after the first of these discussions in a few days time. When, after retiring to consider the matter alone, the Jawoyn announced that their decision would be delayed until the NLC reported to them on the outcome of the proposed discussions, the tensions already evident at this meeting manifested themselves as a direct challenge by the NLC to the positions of both the BHP project team and the ASSPA.

The decision to delay had two implications for the management of the issue. It meant that the progress of the mining project was now contingent upon the BHP team’s dealings with the NLC instead of its dealings with the Jawoyn. The project manager attempted to reassert the priority of his team’s direct relationship with the Jawoyn, describing it as one of trust that should not be undermined by the imposition of outsiders. He tried to re-establish what he had previously understood to be a separation between the questions of blasting and of dealings with the NLC, arguing that any negotiations with the latter would be directed only towards a final terms-and-conditions agreement for mining and would not cover the exploration stages. Finally, he pronounced a caveat upon any negotiations at all, that they would only happen if the BHP team could be satisfied that the Jawoyn genuinely wished to be represented by the NLC.

Maintaining a separation between the immediate question of whether blasting at the scale demonstrated was an acceptable level of disturbance within the registered site, and the later question of the conditions under which a mining project might eventuate, was equally urgent for the director of the ASSPA. He attempted to impress upon the Jawoyn the legal and functional distinction between what he needed to know — whether the custodians of the site would authorise further exploration works involving explosives — and the larger matter that the NLC wanted to argue out — the material relationship that might finally emerge between the mining company and the prospective Aboriginal landowners. A Jawoyn spokesperson replied that the senior custodians of the site would accept blasting at the level demonstrated but no greater. An NLC officer again tried to dissolve that separation, explaining that the NLC could negotiate everything with BHP, and protect the site better than the ASSPA. When the tenor of the discussion then shifted to adverse reflections on the NLC’s past record in local Jawoyn affairs, the ASSPA director concluded the meeting by stating that he would issue a permit for works involving blasting, but would delay it until after the proposed initial discussions between the NLC and the BHP team.^[19]

Over the following weeks there ensued a contest between the NLC and the ASSPA over the issuing of the authorisation to the company. The contest turned ultimately on yet another distinction, discussed earlier, that was fundamental to the legitimacy of the ASSPA’s claim to an independent role in the issue. That is, whereas the NLC claimed to represent the interests of the Jawoyn people as a whole, the ASSPA was responsible only to the custodians of the sacred site. This distinction between the Jawoyn collectivity and the small group of senior custodians of Bula sites in Gimbat reflected both the contrasting statutory charters of the NLC and the ASSPA, and also the recent land claim history in which the NLC had argued that the entire Jawoyn language group was a single local descent group that satisfied the definition of traditional owners.

In the wake of the consultation of 18 August 1987, this disagreement came to a head in a remarkable scuffle between the two organisations. The ASSPA director began by attempting to re-institute a clear demarcation between their respective roles and responsibilities. He wrote a conciliatory letter to the NLC a few days after the meeting at Coronation Hill in which he offered to discuss a cooperative and coordinated approach to the representation of Aboriginal interests, but also made plain that the ASSPA could receive instructions only from the custodians of the site, not from the Jawoyn Association or from the NLC acting as the Association’s representative.^[20] The NLC responded by having the three senior custodians of the site sign a letter instructing the ASSPA not to issue a permit for blasting pending the outcome of discussions, now postponed, between the NLC and the BHP team.^[21] This was an attempt to rescue the position which the NLC had advocated at the blasting consultation, to make progress of development works dependent on progress towards an overall negotiated package. It furthermore positioned the NLC as the channel through which custodians’ instructions were communicated to the ASSPA. The ASSPA director advised the NLC that he considered himself bound by the decision of the custodians at the time of the consultation that the blasting was acceptable, and proceeded to issue an authorisation to the project team.

The NLC considered that the ASSPA had again failed to act in accordance with Jawoyn wishes. A meeting of the Jawoyn Association on 1 September was told that the NLC now had the same power as the ASSPA to protect sacred sites. NLC officers took the three senior custodians to one side to explain and have them sign another letter to the ASSPA, this time advising that the Jawoyn Association should henceforth be the source of the ASSPA’s instructions. It said in part:

In response the ASSPA at its next meeting formally noted ‘the request of the Jawoyn custodians that future consultation be conducted with the assistance of the Jawoyn Association’.^[23]

The ASSPA’s legitimacy as a manager of the Coronation Hill issue rested then on its specific responsibility for approving works on a registered sacred site and its obligation to seek instructions from the site custodians. In August and September 1987 the NLC sought to subvert the ASSPA’s independence, firstly by trying to subsume sacred site approvals within a general package to be negotiated over all development works at Coronation Hill, and then by trying to subsume the source of the ASSPA’s instructions, the site custodians, within the source of its own instructions, the Jawoyn Association. This attempt to assert hegemonic representation of Aboriginal interests was based on a number of perceptions within the NLC: that proper protection of Aboriginal interests in the upper South Alligator valley required comprehensive negotiations over all aspects of BHP’s activities, and that removing exploration from the purview of those negotiations constrained real Aboriginal options; that the ASSPA was neither competent nor authorised to handle such negotiations; and that the ASSPA’s effectiveness was in any event subject to a political calculus that balanced the protection of Aboriginal interests against the need to demonstrate to its political masters that protection of those interests could be managed in a manner consistent with economic development of the Northern Territory. These perceptions underlay a tactical imperative for the NLC to neutralise the independent role of the ASSPA in the Coronation Hill project. For its part, the ASSPA maintained its concern, first expressed during the contradictory episodes of July 1986, that approvals for works on a registered site should be decided according to the views of the site custodians as bearers of the relevant tradition, and were not properly treated as a negotiating instrument.