Conflicts between indigenous and non-indigenous claimants to land, and between competing groups of indigenous claimants, are both common scenarios in Australia. The Coronation Hill issue demonstrated another dimension of conflict. There, the registration of indigenous land interests under Federal and Territorian laws recognised different dimensions of land interest exercised by differently conceived groups of interest holders, one a subset of the other within the same language group and group territory. By vesting representation of each interest in different bureaucratic agencies, the registration process created one of the conditions for contest over how indigenous interests were to be represented and advanced when land management became a political question.

My exegesis of that theme in the external history of the Coronation Hill dispute has demonstrated a level of complexity in its management that arose from competing strategic imperatives at the organisational level. I examined the way political agency took advantage, or wrestled with the limits, of law, in a context of persistent uncertainty often arising from the difficulty in interpreting Jawoyn wishes. There were disagreements over how to proceed within both the ASSPA and the NLC, overlapping personal commitments to Aboriginal and environmental values, and competing assessments of attainable political outcomes. Finally, from above, there were the contingencies of Federal policy making: arbitrating between competing land-use values, shifting the legal ground on which the players stood, widening or narrowing the terms of debate, and playing for electoral advantage. In other words, no actor in this story was a simple reflection of any other actor, and the rules they played by were not fixed. In discussions of sacred site protection issues the roles of organisations representing Aboriginal interests are usually left opaque, with the implication that their actions are to be understood simply as directly guided by the instructions of their local-level Aboriginal constituents, or as the discharge of administrative obligations prescribed by their governing statutes. The roles of such organisations need to be made transparent in order that we invest them in our analyses with the significance they are widely understood to have, as separate loci of active political agency.

Significantly, the NLC operated throughout from a position of weakness relative to that which it usually occupied in mining issues under the ALRA, as the representative of traditional owners of freehold Aboriginal land. As early as 1986, NLC legal officers had pointed out the strategic importance of finalising a land claim and thereby fixing an Aboriginal property right over the area before decisions about mining were made. Throughout the Coronation Hill dispute, Gimbat was not, in a legal sense, Aboriginal land, and the NLC intervened in the affairs of the area more as an act of political volition to assert an Aboriginal stake than as an act of administration of an existing legal right.

That intervention was predicated upon a conception of the indigenous interest that was broad both structurally, residing in the Jawoyn language group, and politically, encompassing future land-use regimes. As the dispute intensified during 1988 and 1989, the NLC also emphasised Aboriginal concerns from beyond the Jawoyn, among neighbouring Arnhem Land groups. The ASSPA had similarly tried when possible to promote the legitimacy of a general Aboriginal interest in the area, but its management responsibilities required it to have resort to a more particularised niche of Aboriginal authority, in the individual senior custodians. As politics gave way to ethnography, analysis and modelling, first during the Resource Assessment Commission inquiry and then in the Gimbat Land Claim, the more discrete structural level of the clan was elevated to attention, and the Aboriginal interest, conceived in terms of the formal entitlements of traditional attachment, became vested in those more narrowly defined entities. As part of that process, local claimants took charge of the elucidation of the clan-based model of attachments to sites, revealing again an endogenous discourse of land interests that had been submerged beneath the imperatives of political lobbying about local rights carried out at a supra-local level.