The Wilding of Cape York Peninsula

In Chapter 1, I argue that ‘wildness’ is a product settler attempts to understand and thereby spatially remake the Northern Australia since the first colonial encounters in the 17th Century. For European explorers, a region like Cape York Peninsula was a wilderness to be surveyed, and through the misadventures and conflicts of inland expeditions it came to be understood as ‘wretched’ country populated with ‘treacherous’ peoples. Surveying subsequent uses of ‘the wild’ in this region, this chapter shows that if, on the one hand, part of the settler project has been to discursively and materially dictate the shape and texture of the region through such forms of wildness – ‘wilderness,’ ‘wild time,’ ‘wild blacks’ and ‘wild whites’ – then, on the other, the contemporary ‘wilderness’ should be understood not only as a product of the resistance and resilience of its Indigenous peoples, but also as the partial failure of this project.

Wild Presents and Emergent Futures

This chapter examines the three federal parliamentary inquiries into the Act in 2010-2011, prompted by the attempts of federal Opposition leader (and later Prime Minister) Tony Abbott to ‘overturn’ the legislation. In this context, specific evidence of forestalled development was scarce and it soon emerged that much resistance stemmed either from misinformation or poor consultation. Drawing on interviews with stakeholders, I argue that the Act’s most powerful effect was to bring different understandings of the Northern Australia’s future into contact. Offering a novel venue for stakeholders to elucidate and interrogate ‘sustainable’ economic futures, the inquiries elicited responses of two kinds: ‘hybrid futures’ of incremental changes and ‘bright futures’ of radical transformation. But if, as this chapter shows, any immediate expansion of the region’s different commercial sectors is unlikely, how should we address the present breach between expectations and experiences of commercial development? In a country where ‘Indigenous development’ has become synonymous with wage labour in the mainstream economy, the contemporary fixations of government policy continue to undermine considerations of such region’s as, in Arturo Escobar’s terms, a ‘territory of difference’ where market activity will never be dominant.

Introduction

The introduction establishes the terms of reference for the book, by first explaining the context of the Wild Rivers Act and land rights in Australia before then examining the history of concepts of ‘the wild’ and wilderness. As this shows, ‘the wild’ has long been a concept open to both positive and negative evaluations, evaluations that have frequently flipped in the service of power and government. The introduction closes with a summary of the book’s arguments and of the chapters that follow.

Afterword

The afterword reflects on the events that followed the end of the controversy in 2012-2013, considering how these events retrospectively inform the issues addressed in this book. These events include, for example, the election of Tony Abbott as, in his own words, a ‘Prime Minister for Indigenous Affairs’ and the downturn in the mining sector in Australia. As this afterword shows, several of the major non-Indigenous figures that had campaigned against the Wild Rivers Act soon abandoned their promises to Indigenous people. Relations between Indigenous representatives, the state, and the private sector are characterised, this afterword suggests, by an instrumentality that undermines any potential for significant change.

Assembling Peninsula Politics

In interpreting the legislation, journalists and other third parties typically recycled rather than interrogated the historical contexts brought to bear by stakeholders. Reading this coverage, the controversy seemed to be the product of a singularly capable actor – the Act – rather than the renewal of existing conflicts. In fact, a mix of interests have contested the region’s future since the first grants of Indigenous land title in the mid-1980s. Chapter 3 presents a deeper understanding of the controversy’s legal and political conditions-of-possibility by examining the two histories consistently cited by stakeholders. Examining these events and their concurrent legal reforms, Chapter 3 shows that the controversy is the product of previous uncoordinated attempts to ‘settle’ Indigenous political concerns, both progressively and regressively, through contracts. As contractualism has become the naturalized mode of recognizing Indigenous land interests, agreements have themselves given Indigenous groups greater political influence while failing to resolve questions regarding the rights of governments and others to intervene in the governance and exploitation of country.

Cosmopolitics on the Wenlock River

Chapter 6 focuses on the most controversial of the Wild Rivers Act declarations: the Wenlock River area. The Wenlock spans almost the entire breadth of the region and includes a diverse but discrete assembly of stakeholders: three Indigenous local government areas and three separate native title claimant groups; an Indigenous Protected Area, a national park, a privately managed nature refuge and a wildlife reserve dedicated to the late television conservationist Steve Irwin; a bauxite mining project; and, finally, an array of nonhuman actors such as estuarine crocodiles, spotted cuscuses, orchids, aquifers and water flows themselves. Adopting philosopher Isabelle Stengers’ ‘cosmopolitical proposal’, this chapter proposes that we might think of a ‘wild river’ not only as a legal object or waterway but also as a network that intimately links the specific worlds of diverse knowledges and practices accumulating around it. The Act forced the matter of how these worlds are rendered quantifiable and comparable today. How are we to adjudicate their relative existence? The future of these rivers is a matter of realizing the relations of allegiance and incompatibility between these worlds.

Rearticulating Indigeneity after Mabo

The split between some traditional owners and the Northern Australia’s ostensible ‘leaders’ was one of the most remarkable features of the Actcontroversy. Following Beckett’s observation that Indigenous groups ‘cannot be understood apart from their relationship with the state,’ this chapter analyzes the two dominant forms of contemporary political authority – the traditional owner and the executive advocate – as articulated in relation to changing government policies and one another. Given the fundamental inconsistency between the executive advocate and the traditional owner as forms of Indigenous political authority, how have these positions been articulated together in Northern Australia after the foundational 1992 Mabo decision? This chapter argues that as Indigenous people have been ‘recognized’ by the state these two figures have negotiated specific balances between engaging with state power and symbolic or rhetorical performances of differences; balances best understood as a political dynamic between legibility and illegibility.

Reading the Wild Rivers Act Controversy

Today, there is a shift in the representations of Northern Australia and its environments. While Indigenous stakeholders have come to the forefront of debates, and the existence of ‘natural values’ and Indigenous ownership have become relatively uncontroversial, environmentalists and environmental regulation have been widely criticized. Chapter 2 surveys media coverage of the controversyin order to better understand these and other recent trends in environmental politics both nationally and internationally. In surveying media narratives, I show how the controversy provides an opportune moment to audit media coverage of Indigenous issues and its decisions regarding who was able to speak authoritatively for and about Northern Australia and its rivers. What remained consistent was the presentation of the region as both a remote and pristine environment and an essentially Indigenous domain, underdeveloped due to ‘meddling greenies’. If these were, as stakeholders largely agreed, ‘wild rivers,’ then what does their wildness now count for and for whom?