Marcus Barber

Recognition of indigenous water values in Australia's Northern Territory: current progress and ongoing challenges for social justice in water planning

This paper details indigenous Australian water values and interests, highlights progress towards improved distributive outcomes from water planning and analyses the remaining challenges in meeting indigenous aspirations for cultural recognition. It describes the significance of water to indigenous people living in the Roper River area of Australias Northern Territory, reports on innovations in water allocation planning processes aimed at accommodating that significance, and analyses the implications of this case study for water planning generally. We describe rich cultural and historical connections with water places, protocols governing human conduct towards water, custodial assertions regarding the need for “water for the country”, distinctive values relating to riparian vegetation, and claims of ownership and economic rights in contemporary water allocations. Current water planning objectives such as sustainable development, protection for groundwater-dependent ecosystems, and protection of indigenous values accord with contemporary indigenous perspectives in the Roper, and in a national first, the local water plan specifically proposes reserving a significant water allocation for commercial use by indigenous people. Yet that allocation is seen as unjust from a local perspective, and further analysis demonstrates a range of other limitations: the scale and boundedness of the demarcated plan area, the neglect of riparian vegetation management, insufficient resourcing of local indigenous capacity, mismatches in planning and local governance structures, and the broader question of whether a rationalist planning process can simultaneously advance indigenous claims for recognition, equity in distributions and parity in participation.

Operationalising the ecosystem services approach in water planning: a case study of indigenous cultural values from the Murray–Darling Basin, Australia

Cultural ecosystem services (ES) are particularly challenging to value as well as to subsequently incorporate in scientific assessments and environmental management actions and programmes. In this paper, we apply a cultural ES typology to an Australian water resources case at a location of major indigenous cultural significance, the Brewarrina Aboriginal fish traps, and consider the potential implications for water planning. Data from qualitative interviews with indigenous custodians demonstrates diverse cultural values and associated benefits with respect to the fish traps themselves and to their connectivity with another key water site, an upstream lagoon. Supported by additional analyses of water planning legislation, flow requirements, and non-indigenous tourist values, we analyse the applicability of the typology and the implications for water planning. Key issues include: the distinction between values and benefits; whose values and which cultural ES benefits are identified and managed; the challenges of categorising indigenous aspirations within cultural ES frameworks; and the implications for water planning of indigenous perspectives on connectivity. Case studies of culturally specific minorities are useful for testing cultural ES frameworks because they posit conceptual and categorisation challenges. In addition, ‘culture’ is often of strategic and symbolic value for such minorities, representing the key means by which they gain access to, and traction within, natural resource planning and prioritisation processes.

Working Knowledge: characterising collective indigenous, scientific, and local knowledge about the ecology, hydrology and geomorphology of Oriners Station, Cape York Peninsula, Australia

The term, Working Knowledge, is introduced to describe the content of a local cross-cultural knowledge recovery and integration project focussed on the indigenous-owned Oriners pastoral lease near Kowanyama on the Cape York Peninsula, Queensland. Social and biophysical scientific researchers collaborated with indigenous people, non-indigenous pastoralists, and an indigenous natural resource management (NRM) agency to record key ecological, hydrological and geomorphological features of this intermittently occupied and environmentally valuable ‘flooded forest’ country. Working Knowledge was developed in preference to ‘local’ and/or ‘indigenous’ knowledge because it collectively describes the contexts in which the knowledge was obtained (through pastoral, indigenous, NRM, and scientific labour), the diverse backgrounds of the project participants, the provisional and utilitarian quality of the collated knowledge, and the focus on aiding adaptive management. Key examples and epistemological themes emerging from the knowledge recovery research, as well as preliminary integrative models of important hydro-ecological processes, are presented. Changing land tenure and economic regimes on surrounding cattle stations make this study regionally significant but the Working Knowledge concept is also useful in analysing the knowledge base used by the wider contemporary indigenous land management sector. Employees in this expanding, largely externally funded, and increasingly formalised sector draw on a range of knowledge in making operational decisions – indigenous, scientific, NRM, bureaucratic and knowledge learned in pastoral and other enterprises. Although this shared base is often a source of strength, important aspects or precepts of particular component knowledges must necessarily be deprioritised, compromised, or even elided in everyday NRM operations constrained by particular management logics, priorities and funding sources. Working Knowledge accurately characterised a local case study, but also invites further analysis of the contemporary indigenous NRM knowledge base and its relationship to the individual precepts and requirements of the indigenous, scientific, local and other knowledges which respectively inform it.

Identifying and categorizing cobenefits in state-supported Australian indigenous environmental management programs: international research implications

Significant natural resource management investment is flowing to bioculturally diverse areas occupied by indigenous and other socioeconomically and politically marginalized groups. Such investment focuses on environmental benefit but may also generate ancillary economic, social, and other cobenefits. Increased investor interest in such cobenefits is driving the emerging research literature on cobenefit identification, categorization, and assessment. For local people undertaking community-based natural resource management, this emerging cobenefit discourse creates opportunities for more holistic program assessments that better reflect local perspectives, but it also contains risks of increased reporting burdens and institutional capture. Here, we synthesize and critically review the cobenefit literature arising from Australian indigenous cultural and natural resource management programs, a context in which there is a strong investor interest in cobenefits, particularly from government. We identify a wide suite of cobenefits in the existing literature and highlight previously unrecognized conceptual gaps and elisions in cobenefit categorization, including inconsistencies in category definition, the underanalysis of key categories, and a lack of systematic attention to beneficiaries as well as benefits. We propose a clarified and expanded conceptual framework to identify consistently the full suite of benefits, thereby enabling further assessment, valuation, and development of incentive mechanisms, standards, and guidelines. Our analysis has implications for community-based natural resource management assessment in a wide range of international contexts.

The persistence of subsistence: qualitative social-ecological modeling of indigenous aquatic hunting and gathering in tropical Australia

Subsistence remains critical to indigenous people in settler-colonial states such as Australia, providing key foundations for indigenous identities and for wider state recognition. However, the drivers of contemporary subsistence are rarely fully articulated and analyzed in terms of likely changing conditions. Our interdisciplinary team combined past research experience gained from multiple sites with published literature to create two generalized qualitative models of the socio-cultural and environmental influences on indigenous aquatic subsistence in northern Australia. One model focused on the longer term (inter-year to generational) persistence of subsistence at the community scale, the other model on shorter term (day to season) drivers of effort by active individuals. The specification of driver definitions and relationships demonstrates the complexities of even generalized and materialist models of contemporary subsistence practices. The qualitative models were analyzed for emergent properties and for responses to plausible changes in key variables: access, habitat degradation, social security availability, and community dysfunction. Positive human community condition is shown to be critical to the long-term persistence of subsistence, but complex interactions of negative and positive drivers shape subsistence effort expended at the individual scale and within shorter time frames. Such models enable motivations, complexities, and the potential management and policy levers of significance to be identified, defined, causally related, and debated. The models can be used to augment future models of human-natural systems, be tested against case-specific field conditions and/or indigenous perspectives, and aid preliminary assessments of the effects on subsistence of changes in social and environmental conditions, including policy settings.

Autonomy and the intercultural: interpreting the history of Australian Aboriginal water management in the Roper River catchment, Northern Territory

Integrated discussions of the multi-valency of objects and the use and appropriation of natural resources in colonial contexts are uncommon. By combining previously scattered historical, legal, and ethnographic sources, this article examines Australian Aboriginal dam and weir construction along the Roper River, focusing on the repeated re-purposing, re-contextualization and reinterpretation of the structures over time by both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal protagonists. Through that process, it contributes to contemporary theoretical debates about intercultural colonial relations and about the relative autonomy of indigenous peoples within colonizing societies. In particular, the article highlights the historical evolution of constraints on local autonomy in colonial contexts and the role of individual agency in constituting and/or reconfiguring intercultural relations. Previously little known, these temporary water regulation structures are now the best historically documented instance of Aboriginal water management in Australia, enabling a diverse array of interpretations and the critical evaluation of key contemporary social-theoretical concepts.

Autonomy and the intercultural: historical interpretations of Australian Aboriginal water management in the Roper River catchment, Northern Territory

Integrated discussions of the multi-valency of objects and the use and appropriation of natural resources in colonial contexts are uncommon. By combining previously scattered historical, legal, and ethnographic sources, this article examines Australian Aboriginal dam and weir construction along the Roper River, focusing on the repeated re-purposing, re-contextualization and reinterpretation of the structures over time by both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal protagonists. Through that process, it contributes to contemporary theoretical debates about intercultural colonial relations and about the relative autonomy of indigenous peoples within colonizing societies. In particular, the article highlights the historical evolution of constraints on local autonomy in colonial contexts and the role of individual agency in constituting and/or reconfiguring intercultural relations. Previously little known, these temporary water regulation structures are now the best historically documented instance of Aboriginal water management in Australia, enabling a diverse array of interpretations and the critical evaluation of key contemporary social-theoretical concepts.

Remembering ‘the blackfellows’ dam': Australian Aboriginal water management and settler colonial riparian law in the upper Roper River, Northern Territory

Using newly recovered and collated sources, we investigate the extent of pre-colonial and colonial Aboriginal weir construction in the upper Roper River, and we analyse a 1946 court case which considered the practice in the context of colonial pastoralism. Aboriginal people have built these temporary weirs at key locations since pre-colonial times to dam and divert the river flow, creating shallow lagoons that attract and retain key food species. The area subsequently became Elsey Station, the setting for the famous Australian novel, We of the Never Never. This embedded the area and its inhabitants in the national consciousness and Aboriginal people provided crucial pastoral labour for the station. Station management encouraged weir construction from the 1920s as the structures reduced cattle losses in the dry season, but a downstream pastoralist complained of inhibited water flow and took legal action. The resulting case is probably the first legal engagement with Aboriginal water and riparian management in Australia and the judgment overtly acknowledged weir construction as an Aboriginal practice that ‘had been in existence from time immemorial’. However, non-Aboriginal pastoralists’ role in enabling and amplifying weir construction saw the case listed and classified as a pastoral riparian dispute – effectively as an issue of non-Aboriginal settler colonial law – rather than as an Aboriginal, colonial and/or intercultural practice. As a result, the weirs were outlawed as a riparian law violation and the case has therefore remained largely unreferenced in the subsequent literature on Aboriginal resource rights. In this paper, we detail the historical circumstances of the case, Aboriginal involvement in it, and how it has been recollected and interpreted in subsequent local and oral historical accounts. We highlight the importance of local agency, local resistance, and Aboriginal political priorities in Aboriginal accounts, as well as broader processes of historical suppression and memorialization.

Settling for dams?: planning for sustainable Indigenous livelihoods within large-scale irrigated agricultural development in north Queensland, Australia

Large-scale irrigated production of food, fuel and fibre has received new impetus from rising population and consumption levels and from structural changes in agribusiness, notably financialisation and vertical and horizontal consolidation. In Australia, these trends have provided new justifications for pre-existing economic and nationalist aspirations for water and irrigated agricultural development in the pastoral-dominated tropical north. Indigenous Australians have the longest history of past attachment to northern land and waterscapes, the highest degree of current socioeconomic marginalisation, and the strongest focus on the intergenerational equity and sustainability of development. This qualitative study undertaken with senior Indigenous custodians in two North Queensland catchments identified that major irrigation development posed significant risks, but may also contribute to diversified local Indigenous livelihoods. In particular, well structured development may enable the employment-related resettlement of depopulated traditional lands in the upper catchments, inverting the more commonly reported relationship between dam development and local residence. Yet the catchment-scale impacts from such development means that any complementarity between local Indigenous and developer aspirations in the immediate development zone does not necessarily entail complementarity with downstream Indigenous livelihood needs and aspirations. Regional coordination of Indigenous livelihood plans is required to establish effective baselines for negotiating sustainable development outcomes.

Decolonising Indigenous Water ‘Rights’ in Australia: Flow, Difference, and the Limits of Law

This article addresses Indigenous Australian claims to water resources and how they inform and relate to current Australian law and contemporary legal thinking about future possibilities. It adopts a multidisciplinary approach, drawing from historical records, previous ethnographic investigation with Indigenous Australians, current legal scholarship, and social anthropological theory. In doing so, it analyses Indigenous dependencies on water, the history of settler colonial orientations to water bodies, the evolution of settler colonial–Indigenous relations to natural resources, and the development of the Australian legal systems regulation of water. This provides foundations for a discussion of the limitations of settler colonial notions of property and the failure of settler colonial law to understand and incorporate the dynamism of Indigenous relationships to water, particularly the meaning and productive capacity of water flows within Indigenous cosmologies and sociocultural and ecological systems. Calling for a decolonial turn in legal approaches to Indigenous access and water resource determination, the authors explore the ways in which Australian law may need to ‘unthink’ settler colonial notions of resource ownership as a prerequisite for reformulating future water policy and planning. This reformulation relies on a more extensive legal philosophical engagement with the concept of ‘flow’, a concept that already exists in both water law and planning, but which has not been adequately theorised and enacted. A more comprehensive legal understanding of flow in the context of Indigenous understandings of, and claims to, water provides more sustainable and equitable legal and analytical foundations for managing future water resources issues. The article creates the space for a more culturally relevant notion of ‘Indigenous water rights’ and for new ways of honouring the interrelationship between water flows, meaning-making practices, and cultural continuity.