As the political dispute over Coronation Hill intensified during the next two years, public statements from the Jawoyn Association, the Jawoyn Working Group and the NLC repeatedly represented the Jawoyn collectively as the group responsible for the Conservation Zone area in Gimbat (for example, JWP 1989). The Josif Report of June 1988 established the terms of their argument against development: that it was the Jawoyn community that bore the stress and social detriment attendant upon any inappropriate interference in the vicinity of the Bula sites. The three senior custodians were accorded distinctive status for their special knowledge of Jawoyn traditions and sites in the area.
When in 1990 the Federal Government referred the issue to the Resource Assessment Commission for inquiry and advice, it created a space for a return to ethnography and analysis. A large, predominantly Jawoyn meeting at Gunlom in Kakadu Stage III told the commissioners that the three senior men had the primary right to speak about Bula sites and mining in the Conservation Zone (RAC 1991a: 176). The Commission accepted anthropological findings that this status was a function not only of age and knowledge, but of clan membership, and that both their Wurrkbarbar clan and another, Jawoyn Bolmo, maintained primary responsibility for sites in the Gimbat area (Keen and Merlan 1990: 12, 35, 41–3; Levitus 1990: 21–3; RAC 1991b: 285–6). These clan identifications marked a reversion to a more discrete level of structural affiliation between people and country within the Jawoyn language group. During the Katherine Area Land Claim hearings, with respect to the Gimbat sections of the claim, the clan level of social organisation had been argued as a modification of the unitary language group model of traditional ownership, but had disappeared from currency in the lobbying over Jawoyn interests in the intervening years.
In 1989 the Federal Government had radically reduced the Conservation Zone to a remnant 47 km2 area around Coronation Hill and a neighbouring prospect as a pre-election appeal to the environmental vote. In June 1991, following the Resource Assessment Commission inquiry, the government ended the Coronation Hill dispute by prohibiting mining and incorporating the remnant Conservation Zone into Kakadu National Park. An endogenous discourse of traditional ownership with respect to Gimbat soon reasserted itself during the subsequent preparation of the Jawoyn (Gimbat Area) Land Claim. As anthropologist for the claim, Merlan initially advised the NLC that, consistent with the position recognised by the Resource Assessment Commission inquiry, the strongest model of traditional ownership would be clan-based. This occasioned some concern within the NLC over the task of satisfying the Aboriginal Land Commissioner that the single language group model presented during the Katherine Area Claim was not appropriate for this section of Jawoyn country, and over the political implications of abandoning that model at a time when feelings about Coronation Hill were still strong.
The question of which of these models of landownership should be used was put to a meeting of prospective claimants, including the three seniors, other Wurrkbarbar and Bolmo and other Jawoyn, in April 1992 at Barunga. The meeting told the advisors that the claim should be run primarily on a clan model, and that other Jawoyn would provide evidence as people interested in the land with separate representation. The meeting further instructed that the claim should be extended in two ways, firstly with respect to area, by applying for a repeat claim over the northeastern corner of Gimbat that had been lost in the Katherine Area claim, and secondly with respect to claimants, by including Matjpa as a third clan with localised attachments to Gimbat. The lawyers for the claim had misgivings about the first and were taken unawares by the second.
Merlan thus argued to the Aboriginal Land Commissioner that Aboriginal identification with Gimbat operates simultaneously at two structural levels. The Jawoyn as a collective language group are affiliated with Gimbat because it is Jawoyn country and recognised to be so by other Aboriginal groups, while the members of three particular clans — Wurrkbarbar, Jawoyn Bolmo, Matjba — ‘have historically special and continuous relationships to this area’ (Merlan 1992: 7). She ascribed to Wurrkbarbar a general attachment across all of Gimbat, recorded a close attachment of Jawoyn Bolmo to north-eastern Gimbat as well as responsibility for the more dispersed Bula sites, and, on the basis of recent research findings (ibid: 65), reported a particular attachment of Matjba to the Katherine River around where it enters Gimbat from the east. These two levels of affiliation, of language group and clan, produced respectively larger and smaller claimant groups, the latter a subset of the former, and these two groups were argued in the alternative to satisfy the statutory definition of traditional ownership, with the clan group model given the primary running (ibid: 62–9). The claim was accepted by the Land Commissioner on that latter basis (ALC 1996: 16–21, 38–9). The three senior custodians played a leading role in both preparing and proving the claim during site visits on Gimbat, and by their success reasserted a local-level agency for discriminating relevant dimensions of attachment between subgroups within the Jawoyn.