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Both the colonial encapsulation and post-colonial recognition of North Queensland's Aboriginal population have been achieved through legislative demarcation. This paper explores the way such demarcation has extended the influence of the state within local Aboriginal life-worlds, focusing on the State of Queensland's Aboriginals Protection and Restriction of the Sale of Opium Act 1897 and the Commonwealth's Native Title Act 1993. Drawing on ethnographic and historical material from Central Cape York Peninsula, and recent anthropological theorization of the state, I argue that anthropologists need to seriously consider Aboriginal claims about what Michel-Roiph Trouillot calls 'state effects'. But careful examination of these claims suggests that the state no longer simply imposes its projects on fundamentally distinct Aboriginal life-worlds. Not only is the state now deeply engaged within these life-worlds, it is also deeply interwoven into post-colonial Aboriginal subjectivities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Petaurus gracilis (De Vis, 1883) is a gliding possum commonly known as the mahogany glider. This species is endemic to open sclerophyll woodland between Tully and Ingham in North Queensland, Australia. Within its distribution P. gracilis occurs in forests dominated by trees of the genera Eucalyptus, Corymbia, Melaleuca, and Acacia. This species is recognized as an endangered species because of habitat loss, high degree of fragmentation of the remaining habitat, its naturally limited distribution, lack of habitat protected within national parks, and the degradation of its habitat from the transition to rain forest and thickening of sclerophyllous vegetation in much of its habitat. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]