Paper short abstract:

To many Cape York graziers, National Parks represents an unwanted incursion by the State and contributes to a sense of marginality. This paper examines how graziers shape narratives around land-use and environmental knowledge in contrast to Parks, to assert their right to belonging in the region.

Paper long abstract:

Across Cape York Peninsula, the cattle grazing industry has declined due to falling cattle prices, shorter wet seasons and land tenure changes. The Queensland government has purchased many cattle stations, which are now incorporated into Cape York Peninsula Aboriginal Land National Parks (CYPAL NP). Remaining graziers perceive their status in the region as increasingly marginal and explain this precarity with the "locking up" of Cape York by National Parks and Aboriginal interests. Based on 12 months of field research in south-east Cape York, I will examine the divergent ways in which graziers and Parks understand appropriate and inappropriate land-use, and how certain sets of values underpin their respective claims to the right to manage the land. While West (2016) investigates how institutionalised conservation draws local peoples into forms of engagement while simultaneously dispossessing them, the situation for graziers in Cape York differs. Rather than engagement, Parks' management strategies indicate that they want cattle and graziers off the Cape entirely. Graziers position themselves as those who "know the intimacies of the soil" due to multi-generational work on the land. They tend to sidestep the issue of prior Aboriginal occupation by claiming that local Aboriginal people have no interest in their particular piece of land. The paper aims to tease out inherent contradictions in CYPAL NP as a large-scale State actor seen by the graziers as an unwanted encroacher and an agency of dispossession, while it is the product of the Aboriginal land rights movement and State attempts to redress Aboriginal dispossession.