Search

The article present an conversation between Aboriginal fire practitioners, Mick Bourke and Amos Atkinson and non-Indigenous researcher, Timothy Neale who discusses about issues of cultural fire management; conduct burns on public land; and wildfires.

Science and Technology Studies (STS) scholarship has often been suspicious of the role of scientific knowledge and scientists in environmental governance, notably through paying critical attention to the workings of calculative rationalities and techniques. However, recent reforms within certain extractivist regions and nations such as the United States of America and Australia suggest that calculative management and the environmental data on which it is based is no longer a given. Arguably, the politics of rendering the ecologies around us legible through measures and values has changed. This is apparent by examining the case of Gamba grass (Andropogon gayanus), an invasive and fire-promoting 'weed' which is threatening the lives and futures of humans and nonhumans alike in Australia's Northern Territory. After becoming a target of environmental regulation in 2008, the plant has continued to thrive and expand its reach. Interviews and fieldwork with a range of practitioners engaged in bushfire and weed management show that there are many challenges to interceding in forms of environmental harm when we are governed by a politics of environmental illegibility. Pragmatic empirical engagements by STS scholars and others are necessary if these intercessions are to succeed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay narrates the 'slow violence', or creeping environmental harms taking place within contemporary environmental governance. It centres on a tall, dense and highly flammable introduced pasture species Gamba grass (Andropogon gayanus), which was listed as a weed across north Australian jurisdictions in 2008. Since this time, it has continued to expand its reach across the Northern Territory (NT). With a potential invasion range of over 380,000 sqkm2, this grass is a serious threat to many more-than-human worlds in the north, including Indigenous-led and Indigenous-owned environmental service economies and multimillion-dollar projects engaged in savanna fire management for carbon credits. Drawing upon fieldwork and interviews with a range of public servants, landholders and researchers in the NT between 2015 and 2018, this essay demonstrates how environmental governance is being undermined through specific institutions and practices. Through an ethnographic reading of weed management documents, including several legal permits to grow Gamba grass within the NT's 'eradication zone', this essay narrates the diverse threads of a pressing 'slow' disaster. The unfolding story of Gamba grass, we suggest, is instructive for those seeking to understand the present and future of resource extraction or 'extractivism' in Australia and elsewhere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Humans are ‘fire creatures’ that have used fire for millennia to shape local environments to diverse purposes. Our capacity for combustion has also forced global climatic changes and rendered the planet increasingly flammable, creating the conditions for progressively higher impact bushfires now and into the future. Meanwhile, governments in fire-prone countries such as Australia have continued to allow settlements to be established (and re-established) in wildland-urban interfaces. Like other ‘natural hazards’, bushfire is thereby a social phenomenon bound up with human values, practices and decisions. But, while studies of the social dimensions of ‘natural hazards’ are steadily rising, this scholarship has rarely addressed natural hazard management practitioners directly, precisely those authorised and entrusted to intervene in the distribution of hazard probabilities and consequences. This paper seeks to help remediate this research gap, illustrating how cultural, ecological, economic and political factors thoroughly condition hazard management and modes of intervention. Drawing on a case study in the Northern Territory’s Greater Darwin region, this paper suggests not only that examining such sociocultural realities provides new insights into hazards and their distribution, but also that attention to such issues is crucial to understanding our flammable future in the Anthropocene. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this special issue on ‘extraction’, we think critically about two urgent and entangled questions, examining the political economy of mining and Indigenous interests in Australia, and the moral economy of Indigenous cultural difference within Cultural Studies and Anthropology. In settler colonial states such as Australia, Indigenous cultural difference is now routinely presented as commensurate with, rather than obstructive of, extractive industry activity. Meanwhile, the renewed interest in ‘radical alterity’ across these disciplines has seen a movement away from regarding authoritative claims about ‘others’ as morally suspect – as only extracting from or mining Indigenous worlds for insights and academic prestige. The ‘ontological turn’, however, leads us to question the empirical status of the ontologies circulating through academic discussions. What happens when Indigenous people disappoint, in their embrace of environmentally destructive industries such as mining, for example? We argue that in cases where ‘they’ are not as different as ‘we’ might hope them to be, scholars should be concerned to foreground the potential role of colonial history and processes of domination in the production and reduction of ontological difference. Second, we call for critical assessment of the political, epistemological, and social effects of both academic and societal evaluations of difference. We conclude by urging for a scholarship that does not pick and choose between agreeable and less agreeable forms of cultural difference. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I focus upon the recent Wild Rivers Act controversy in Queensland, Australia, as an ‘experimental event’ that drew together a diverse cast of actors – including Indigenous traditional owners, state politicians, bureaucrats, environmentalists, mining companies, the late Steve Irwin, and waterways – to contest the future of a region historically (over)coded as ‘wild’. In attending to these actors, and the discourses and arguments mobilised, I argue that this controversy reveals emergent trends in the imaginaries of wildness and indigeneity surrounding indigenous lands and waters in contemporary settler colonial nations. Critical insight into such issues, I show, requires reconceptualising the static ‘matters of being’ through which indigenous territory is often captured – such as tradition and development – as contingent and contested ‘matters of becoming’. It is precisely in events such as the Act controversy that the contemporary politics of indigenous territory, and its contingent and contested foundations, becomes visible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The recent focus on the category of ‘culture’ provoked by Peter Sutton'sThe Politics of Suffering(2009) has revived questions of the meaning and utility of indigenous alterity in Australia. The ‘end of the liberal consensus’, contemporary with a declared ‘end of ideology’ in Australian Indigenous† public policy, has been doubled in ‘post-ethnic’ academic work harbouring a renewed suspicion of what Dombrowski (2010, 21: 129–140) has called indigeneity's ‘distinctive sympathy’. Within a cultural economy of commensurability, the fact that political claims are often ‘contingent on the indigenous people themselves maintaining sufficient alterity to warrant the special treatment afforded them’ is taken by some as proof of voluntarism and bad faith. In order to gauge this immanent reorientation of indigeneity in Australia, this paper surveys the works of two prominent figures in policy debates – the anthropologist Peter Sutton and indigenous public intellectual Noel Pearson – who have both argued that remote Indigenous communities suffer from a ‘cultural pathology’. This paper presents a conceptual critique of their popular press works between 2000 and 2011. Within the context of ‘post-ethnic’ government policy ‘after self-determination’ and scholarship ‘after identity’, this paper contends that we are witnessing the (re)appearance of an equalitarian humanism which proposes, following Esposito [2008 (Orig. pub. 2004)], to immunize indigenous polities and the settler-colonial state against the historical frames and alterity of indigeneity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers the 'duplicitous' functions of the word 'wild' in the arguments over the Queensland's Wild Rivers Act 2005. Certain traditional owners, environmentalist and state groups have deployed the term pragmatically, simultaneously endorsing its usage (through repetition) and disavowing its colonial associations (through explanation) against protestations by Indigenous and non-Indigenous stakeholders. In a sense, this ambivalent 'duplicity' is entirely consistent with relations between the settler-colonial nation state and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander polities - relations aptly characterised by Povinelli as shaped by 'the cunning of recognition' - which stratify relations between groups through the endorsing of 'tradition'. Thus 'the Indigenous' can be posited both as one political minority amidst a multicultural polity and as a pre-modern and endemic precursor of the settler-colonial nation, constitutively conservationist 'first Australians'. Arguably, in the legislation's 'recognition' of the 'wild' past, Indigenous peoples - who were known in nineteenth century Queensland as 'wild blacks' or 'myalls' (meaning those who resisted leaving their lands - and 'could be shot with impunity')1 are recouped as the nation's first caretakers of 'pristine' waterways. However, this article regards the current use of this ambivalent word as also potentially authorising those recognised through this mythic form, providing a limited and uncertain opportunity for traditional owners to ground a form of sovereign right in lands and waterways. Against totalising settler-colonial critiques of hegemony, this article argues that the Wild Rivers legislation does not forget indigeneity, but rather relies on indigeneity. While much research concerning 'natural' ideologies such as 'the noble savage' has worked to show that faith in a belated era of historical fullness or presence can serve to evacuate the present of material details, it may also be that the 'wild' can also offer Indigenous peoples a valuable political authority to, in the words of Courtney Jung, 'contest the exclusions through which it has been constituted'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]