Paper short abstract:

A key recommendation of Scientific Enquiry into Hydraulic Fracturing in the NT is to recognise and protect subsurface features of Aboriginal sacred sites. Here scientific, resource and environmental values of 'the underground' converge or discord with Aboriginal narratives of what is known below.

Paper long abstract:

This paper considers 'the underground' in the context of the recent Scientific Enquiry into Hydraulic Fracturing in the Northern Territory (March 2018). What lies beneath the earth's surface has been calculated and documented from a scientific, resource and environmental perspective using many new technologies. For anthropologists working with Aboriginal people of the Northern Territory to protect cultural heritage, including sacred sites, understanding what lies beneath the earth's surface entails learning from Aboriginal custodians of the land, the information maintained in the contemporary telling of ancestral narratives in accordance with Aboriginal tradition. Such narratives, and associated songs and paintings recount the submerging and emerging creative forces in subterranean and surface adventures and misadventures of the ancestral figures who created the earth, its people and the laws that govern the relationship between kin groups and the land. The convergence of Aboriginal knowledge of sacred site features, such as ochre, mineral deposits, water bodies and the resource targets in the Territory is considered by some to be uncanny. This paper will consider convergence and discord in subterranean narratives and will consider how Aboriginal knowledge of the underground invites alternate ways of understanding what lies beneath in the context of sacred site protection and resource extraction and other development in the Northern Territory.