Paper short abstract:

This paper aims to make visible Yuin people's contemporary engagements with their urban land and sea Country. It explores stewardship initiatives deployed by Yuin rangers over their territories and the challenges they face in enacting their responsibilities and values in this highly contested space.

Paper long abstract:

There is perhaps no better 'environment' than urban areas to explore the discordances between capitalist and indigenous relations with the natural environment. In settler states such as Australia, urban and peri-urban areas are strongly associated with processes of assimilation, loss of indigeneity and traditional knowledge, of disconnection from ancestral territories and customary practices. Yet, in spite of the intense and ongoing processes of dispossession at play in such contexts, Indigenous peoples have continued to perform, reconstruct and reassert their cultures, values, roles, rights and responsibilities over their unceded territories.

Across the South Coast region of New South Wales, which hosts the towns of Batemans Bay and Mogo, urban developments, commercial fisheries, oyster farms, the Batemans Marine Park, and the buzzing touristic industry have made significant impressions on the region's land, freshwater and sea territories and Yuin's lifeways. They have also impacted on the capacity of Yuin rangers and broader communities to access parts of these territories and use and protect the resources they encompass.

This paper aims to make visible Yuin's contemporary engagements with their coastal land and sea Country. We will discuss some of the strategies undertaken by the South Coast Yuin rangers and Local Aboriginal Land Councils to enact, assert and reclaim their stewardship rights and responsibilities over the region's beaches, estuaries, rivers and rolling hills based on their values and knowledge (both Yuin and scientific) and the challenges they face in performing their way of life, aspirations, responsibilities and values in this highly contested space.