Click the star to add/remove an item to/from your individual schedule.
You need to be logged in to avail of this functionality.
Log in
- Convenor:
-
Pamela McGrath
(ANU)
Send message to Convenor
- Stream:
- Landscapes, resources and value
- Location:
- Old Arts-124 (Theatre C)
- Start time:
- 4 December, 2015 at
Time zone: Australia/Melbourne
- Session slots:
- 1
Short Abstract:
This panel invites papers that investigate contemporary engagements between policies, bureaucracies, commercial entities and Indigenous interests with a view to stimulating discussion about the social intents and impacts of the government regulation of Indigenous place-based heritage.
Long Abstract:
Every year thousands of places of significance to Indigenous Australians are threatened by development, their fates negotiated within a complex array of policy assemblages. In a regulatory environment characterised by poor accountability and uneven power relationships, many newly identified Indigenous heritage places are subsequently legally impacted shortly after documentation in order to make way for other interests. The level of authorised destruction of heritage sites is such that it has been identified as one of the leading threats currently facing Australia's Indigenous heritage estate (Schnierer et. al. 2011). Conflict between those who consent to development and those who don't is increasingly reported, exacerbated by the 'all-or-nothing' choice facing traditional owners in the absence of a right to veto development projects, even on native title lands. The sense of an impending cultural crisis palpable as traditional owners around the country express anxieties about the social consequences of mining and exploration projects and the extent to which they are contributing to an erasure of the historical presence of Indigenous people from the landscape. Contributions to this panel examine the social intents and impacts of Indigenous heritage management regimes and other policy work in which traditional owner groups and their advocates are embedded and the burdens these place on them, and explores how they are strategically responding to them in order to leverage local social and economic objectives.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Daniel Leo
Paper short abstract:
Over the last five decades Queensland has had three successive pieces of legislation for the purpose of protecting and managing Aboriginal cultural heritage.
Paper long abstract:
Over the last five decades Queensland has had three successive pieces of legislation for the purpose of protecting and managing Aboriginal cultural heritage. The first in 1967 employed a Relics paradigm to empower both amateur and professional archaeologists. The next in 1987 was an EIS paradigm enshrining assessment processes and the pre-eminence of professional archaeologists. Since 2003 the most recent Act has used a Native Title paradigm to empower select Aboriginal people. How governments have created authority and authoritativeness to determine the existence and significance of Aboriginal cultural heritage is central to understanding this history, and to critiquing the current regime. The most recent legislation, the Aboriginal Cultural Heritage Act 2003, is intertwined with the Native Title Act 1993 in a way that has considerable implications, not least in terms how native title claims are progressed, and if the Aboriginal Party is indeed the right person for the right heritage.
Gareth Lewis (GL Anthropology)
Paper short abstract:
TBD
Paper long abstract:
Aboriginal sacred site protection in Australia’s Northern Territory (‘NT’) has been based around the objective stated in the preamble to the Northern Territory Aboriginal Sacred Sites Act (‘NTASSA’) of achieving a practical balance between sacred site protection and economic development. For thirty years the Aboriginal Areas Protection Authority (‘AAPA’) has administered the NTASSA, broadly considered to be the best practice site protection legislation in Australia. In more recent years and the NTASSA was used as a benchmark in the consideration of national standards for indigenous heritage laws in Australia. Given the current climate of actual, potential and threatened changes to such laws, most notably in Western Australia, we present two complimentary papers which reflect on aspects of the NT experience of protecting scared sites.
Firstly Dr Ben Scambary considers sacred site protection in the NT in light of the recent White Paper on Developing Northern Australia and the strategic manner in which the AAPA has and can address development issues with Aboriginal people.
Secondly Gareth Lewis reflects on the impacts of past and recent cases of damage to scared sites on Aboriginal people in the NT to reinforce why protection remains vital both to the cultural survival of Aboriginal people and to the goal of socially and culturally sustainable development in and beyond the NT.
We consider that NT experience demonstrates AAPA’s unrivalled success in fields of applied anthropology and, often contested, social policy. The insights gained over thirty years represent an invaluable resource that should inform the positive shaping of indigenous sacred site and heritage protection laws in other jurisdictions and warn against the long term socioeconomic, cultural, and moral costs posed by the absence or denigration of such laws.
Thomas Michel (University of Sydney)
Paper short abstract:
Morality is a key element in definitions of accountability and corruption in the Indigenous affairs policymaking arena. Yet moral-based policy in this sphere is marked by contradictions and expressions of hegemonic normativity, as ethnographic research in rural Northern Territory demonstrates.
Paper long abstract:
Amidst the dramatic public spectacle of the Northern Territory Emergency Response (aka the Intervention), another normalisation policy fuelled by moral principles was being implemented in the Northern Territory's (NT's) rural local government sector. In 2008 a major regionalisation reform occurred, in which 53 mainly rural and majority Indigenous community councils were forcibly amalgamated into eight regional shires. The new shires have remained trenchantly unpopular, and have been criticised for having undermined local control over government service delivery, employment and local governance practices in Indigenous communities. Yet policymakers have used a mix of administrative expertise and moral righteousness to justify the reform: as a necessary change to curb corruption and instil good governance into the sector. This mode of argumentation thus allowed for popular opposition to be effectively marginalised, by removing any moral alternative to the new shires.
This paper focuses on the Roper Gulf Shire region and the operations of the multi-billion dollar McArthur River Mine near Borroloola in order to explore moral-based policy definitions of accountability, corruption and the heterotopic overlaps in between. Why, for example, does government fund costly management structures to strictly monitor council vehicle use, but largely overlooks tax avoidance and environmental pollution by the mining industry? The deployment of morality as a justification for policy is interpreted here within a political context, as an expression of shifting normativity that serves hegemonic ends.
Pamela McGrath (ANU)
Paper short abstract:
Every year thousands of heritage surveys occur on native title lands. Yet little is known about how they are conducted or the number of the sites they record. The information captured by such surveys potentially holds huge cultural and economic value for traditional owners but is often inaccessible.
Paper long abstract:
The Native Title Act provides traditional owners with a right to negotiate the terms on which they will consent to development on their lands. With more than 60 per cent of the Australian land mass now subject to this right, the management of Indigenous place-based heritage is increasingly occurring via opaque processes negotiated under confidential agreements with the proponents of resource extraction projects (O'Faircheallaigh 2008). Little information is publicly available about the conditions under which heritage surveys are being carried out under native title agreements, how many sites they record, or the number of sites that are subsequently impacted. By bringing together what little is known, this paper illustrates the extraordinary size and potential value of the place-based heritage documented as a result of future acts on native title lands, and the extent to which the resulting information assets (reports, photographs, maps, GIS databases) remain under the control of proponents. In the hands of traditional owners, the accumulated information legacies of future act heritage processes could be powerful tools that individuals, families and local corporations might use for a range of social and economic development initiatives, such as cultural education, language revitalisation, social mapping, tourism ventures and land use planning. But there are a number of significant corporate, cultural, legal and commercial impediments to the repatriation of these legacies, not least of which is the capacity of chronically under-resourced native title organisations to receive, secure and manage such assets into the future.