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.