Wild Articulations

This book examines issues of environmentalism and indigeneity in Northern Australia through the controversy surrounding the Wild Rivers Act 2005 (Qld). Like much of the north, one terrain of the Act – the massive Cape York Peninsula – has long been constructed as a ‘wild’ space, whether as terra nullius, a zone of legal exception or a biodiverse wilderness region in need of conservation. The past two decades, however, have seen two major changes in the political and social composition of the region, the first being the legal recognition of geographically extensive Indigenous land rights and the creation of a corporate infrastructure to govern them. The second is that the peninsula has been the centre of national debates regarding the market integration and social normalisation of Indigenous people, becoming the locale for intensive reform of some ‘Indigenous’ policy. Ironically, the Queensland government’s own attempts to ‘settle’ land use through the Actbrought out the tensions within the region’s present political formation. This book takes an interdisciplinary approach to the examination of how and why the controversy occurred and what it indicates about present imaginaries of the governance and potentiality of Indigenous lands and waters. It shows that historically embedded forms of ‘wildness’ continue to shape debates about Northern Australia’s future, debates in which economic and social development are often confused and conceptualised as beneficent transformations. Ultimately, Wild Articulations contends that close consideration of this event provides insights into the future dilemmas of development and conservation in remote Australia.