David Trigger

Mining, landscape and the culture of development ideology in Australia

proved so far, given the range of copper, gold and uranium discoveries during the past two decades. While it may be true, as suggested by some writers, that mineral exploration is exciting and intriguing for many AustralianS,2 for the industry professionals who actually culminate what is often years of effort with a proven substantial discovery, it can be a highly significant personal experience. The geologist at Kintyre attempted to communicate such feelings recalled from the period when the scale and location of the orebody were being confirmed :

Revelatory moments in fieldwork

This essay prefaces a collection on revelatory moments of fieldwork engagement. Drawing upon brief vignettes from our own research experiences, we argue for the methodological significance of memorable events encountered in ethnographic studies. In addressing this relational production of knowledge, we are particularly interested in the role of emotion, discomfort and surprise in ‘fieldwork’ as understood in anthropology. The case materials illustrate moments of experience drawn from three studies conducted in different decades between 1980 and 2011, thereby marking important shifts in the methods and aims of the discipline, conceptions of where fieldwork is appropriately done, and the role of self-knowledge on the part of the researcher. We make the case for the value of revelatory moments and the epistemological approach that enables their apprehension.

Negotiating Indigeneity: Culture, Identity, and Politics

Defining “indigeneity” has recently been approached with renewed vigor. While the field can involve quite passionate commitment to advocacy among scholars, theoretical clarity is needed in understanding just who might be thought of as indigenous, and the reasons why this is so. Does “indigeneity” make sense only if it is understood in relation to the “non-indigenous,” and if so, how useful is the latter category across societies and nations with very different cultural histories? Two edited volumes, one which addresses this question in global perspective and another focused exclusively on Australia, are reviewed and contextualized within broader debates.

Anthropology Pure and Profane: The Politics of Applied Research in Aboriginal Australia

Is there a view that academic anthropology operates or belongs in a ‘sacred’ space that is distinguishable from applied research occupying a less pure, intellectually inferior and more morally profane domain? Certainly, in my experience of some thirty plus years of work in Australian Aboriginal studies, such a distinction has at times been both promoted and contested vigorously. I outline my reading of the recent debate focusing particularly on writings from those concerned about the moral and political standing of applied anthropology. I also address the proposition that applied work is intellectually inadequate, particularly in being incapable of analysis of cultural change. Prompted by the critiques of applied anthropology, I reflect upon my own research careers blending of both academic and applied work. The paper addresses some case material enabling presentation of my perspective on the positive contribution of engagement beyond the academy in Australian Aboriginal anthropology.Is there a view that academic anthropology operates or belongs in a ‘sacred’ space that is distinguishable from applied research occupying a less pure, intellectually inferior and more morally profane domain? Certainly, in my experience of some thirty plus years of work in Australian Aboriginal studies, such a distinction has at times been both promoted and contested vigorously. I outline my reading of the recent debate focusing particularly on writings from those concerned about the moral and political standing of applied anthropology. I also address the proposition that applied work is intellectually inadequate, particularly in being incapable of analysis of cultural change. Prompted by the critiques of applied anthropology, I reflect upon my own research careers blending of both academic and applied work. The paper addresses some case material enabling presentation of my perspective on the positive contribution of engagement beyond the academy in Australian Aboriginal anthropology.

Native vs exotic: Cultural discourses about flora, fauna and belonging in Australia

Environmental debates about which plant and animal species ‘belong’ in particular locations have a growing significance around the world. We argue that ideas about which species constitute weeds or pests and how those species should be managed can be strongly grounded in cultural values and beliefs. Such beliefs are often linked, directly and indirectly, to everyday assumptions about national, regional, local and personal identities. Strong emotional attachments to particular species or landscapes can shape individual and community responses to flora and fauna with implications for issues of sustainable development and planning. This paper focuses on beliefs and practices that are thereby of relevance to urban environmental management.

‘Nothing never change’: mapping land, water and Aboriginal identity in the changing environments of northern Australia's Gulf Country

Gulf Country Aboriginal people perceive water as an integral part of the broader cultural landscape rather than a conceptually distinct element. Customary connection to and ownership of water therefore intersects with links to contiguous areas known in the anthropological literature as ‘estates’ and in local parlance as ‘countries’. For many Aboriginal people into the present, the ‘law’ which underlies this system of ‘countries’ was laid down in the Dreaming and does not change. ‘Nothing never change’ is the local form articulating this conviction. While a powerful expression of traditionalism, the commitment to leaving everything ‘like it is now’, in our findings, in fact involves an acknowledgement of environmental changes resulting from introduced plants and animals along with Euro-Australian settlement. Notwithstanding determined traditionalism, Aboriginal law, like settler law, changes constantly, responding to new challenges by transforming continuing traditions and incorporating influences from the broader society which are genuinely new and different. Drawing on the results of ethnographic research during cultural mapping work in the Gulf, we address this theme particularly in the context of land rights and native title processes over recent decades.

Tourism as theatre: performing and consuming indigeneity in an Australian wildlife sanctuary

This article explores the social and cultural production of indigeneity in a wildlife sanctuary on the Australian Gold Coast. We note that the human and animal characters that form the displays of the sanctuary work towards the assemblage of a largely consistent underlying theme. The latter reproduces commensurability between two main figures associated with Australian settler history, namely the countrys pre-colonial indigenous species of animals and plants and the human Aboriginal population. We argue that the theatre produced in the parks highly sanitized visitor contact zone has wider social and political ramifications for Australian society and modern society in general. By ceremonially re-enacting the historical myth of separation between modern civilization and primordial indigeneity, through a tourist enterprise, the sanctuary produces ambivalent meanings about the relation between ‘nativeness’ in nature and society. Our analysis addresses the simultaneous emancipation of contemporary human indigeneity as a revitalized cultural value together with the social distancing of Aboriginal people as one-dimensional caricatures of primordial nature.

Australian Cultural Studies: radical critique or vacuous posturing

Dark Side of the Dream: Australian Literature and the Postcolonial Mind (Australian Cultural Studies), by Bob Hodge and Vijay Mishra. Allen & Unwin, North Sydney, 1991. xxi, 253 pp., illustrations, notes, references, index.

The politics of indigeneity, identity and representation in literature from north Australia's Gulf Country

22.95 (paperback). ISBN 0–04–442346–2.

Native Title Research in Australian Anthropology

The Aboriginal author Alexis Wrights novels Plains of Promise, Carpentaria and The Swan Book have prompted scholars and critics towards enthusiastic comparisons with the ground-breaking work of a range of international writers. With her novels all set partly in the remote Gulf Country of north Australia, Wrights work arises from intellectual and political commitment to Indigenous people, and aspires to the idea of a distinctive ‘Aboriginal sovereignty of the mind’. Much less known yet, we argue, of complementary significance, are a broader suite of writings about this region, and we address representations of cultural identity and connections to place by authors with both Aboriginal and European ancestries. With our interest in a deliberately cross-disciplinary methodology, ethnographic research complements our focus on texts to facilitate analysis of diverse identities in a setting produced through both the resilience of Indigenous cultural traditions and the legacies of European settler colonialism. We argue that the range of authorial representations arising from this sector of Australian society provides a focus for understanding shared and contested postcolonial imaginaries about place, culture and identity.