Defined by contradiction: the social construction of joint management in Kakadu National Park Christopher David Haynes, B.Sc (For) School for Social and Policy Research Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Charles Darwin University July 2009 Title page: Digital camera case in one hand and mobile phone (it did not work) in the other, the author ponders the effects of globalisation to Kakadu’s ancient landscape and cultures at Twin Falls, one of Kakadu’s now-famous tourist icons, in a break during field work in 2005. (Photo: Liz Haynes). Abstract Born in the 1970s, a period when the Australian state needed to resolve land use conflicts in the then relatively remote Alligator Rivers region of Australia’s Northern Territory, Kakadu has become the nation’s largest and most famous national park. Aside from its worthy national park attributes and World Heritage status, it is also noted for its joint management, the sharing of management between the state and the traditional Aboriginal owners of the area. As an experienced park manager working in this park more than two decades after its declaration in 1979, I found joint management hard to comprehend and even harder to manage. In this thesis I explore this phenomenon as practice: how joint management works now, and how it came to be as it is. The work explains how the now accepted ‘best model’ for joint management – a legal arrangement based on land ownership by Aboriginal people, lease back to the state under negotiated conditions, a governing board of management with an Aboriginal majority, and regular consultation does not, on its own, satisfy either partner. Instead, I show that traditional owners and white actors representing the state must negotiate contradictions on many levels: between conservation and recreation; histories, race and world views of actors; state power fields and those derived from land ownership; and powerful social structures and forces that draw the partners together and push them apart. In revealing the forces that divide white and Aboriginal actors, and thus threaten the fragile edifice of joint management, I also show that there are structures and activities in place that can be boosted. Chief among these is the under-celebrated ‘joint discourse’ that derives from the two partner groups working together in Kakadu’s famous bush more closely as equals. Simple and humble measures might be taken to strengthen the structures around joint discourse and I suggest these should succeed where increasing bureaucracy has demonstrably failed. v Statement I hereby declare that the work herein, now submitted as a thesis for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy of the Charles Darwin University, is the result of my own investigations, and all references to ideas and work of other researchers have been specifically acknowledged. I hereby certify that the work embodied in this thesis has not already been accepted in substance for any degree, and is not being currently submitted in candidature for any other degree. Chris Haynes January 2010 vi Contents Abstract v Statement vi Contents vii Figures viii Tables ix Preface and acknowledgements x Glossary xix Chapter One: Actors and factors 1 Chapter Two: ‘What is it, this joint management thing?’ 39 Chapter Three: The Board of Management 79 Chapter Four: The quotidian of park life 111 Chapter Five: The space of reminiscence and nostalgia 149 Chapter Six: Centripetality 179 Chapter Seven: Major rupture 207 Chapter Eight: Centrifugality 241 Chapter Nine: What is it that’s going on here? 275 Appendix One: Definitions of joint management 293 Bibliography 297 vii Figures Figure 1.1: Location of Kakadu National Park within 4 Australia Figure 1.2: Details of boundaries, key features and 6 relevant mining locations within Kakadu Figure 1.3: Main groups of actors involved in Kakadu 26 Figure 2.1: Locations of traditional owners’ places of 46 living before Kakadu was proclaimed Figure 2.2: Traditional owners’ places of living in the 48 central part of the park Figure 2.3: Aboriginal Land Rights Royal Commissioner, 56 Sir Edward Woodward Figure 2.4: Development of Kakadu by stages 67 Figure 7.1: Buffalo effects on the floodplain 209 Figure 7.2: Buffalo effects on the woodland 210 Figure 7.3: The general area of the shooting operation on 213 7 November 1989, surrounding the confluence of Jim Jim Creek and the South Alligator River Figure 8.1: The Gundjeihmi seasonal calendar 262 Figure 9.1: National park success and traditional owner 283 satisfaction viii Tables Table 2.1 Major policy milestones in the life of Kakadu 44 Table 4.1 Record of consultation with traditional owners 144 ix Preface and acknowledgements The project that led to this thesis has its formal beginnings in May 2004, when I was accepted as a doctoral student at Charles Darwin University. Yet it had begun well before that, really in 1971, when as a young forestry officer I first drove through the enchanting landscape of this not-yet-but-will-be-someday national park, and fell in love with it. There were many other milestones along the way, like joining the staff of the then Australian National Parks and Wildlife Service as a project officer in 1978 and, later that year, being witness to the actual signing of the agreements that leased recently granted Aboriginal land for the purposes of a national park and a uranium mine. By the time I left the Northern Territory to take up a senior position in Western Australia, in 1985, seven years had passed and, exhausted by the experience of responsibility for this controversial area, I thought I would never return to it, except possibly as one of the millions of tourists who have marvelled at this place over the years. Yet I was to come back, out of retirement in Western Australia, as park manager between 2002 and 2004. By then Kakadu had become a world-famous icon, and it remains Australia’s best known national park. This is a story of this place, and more particularly of the way its management is shared between the Australian state and the park’s traditional Aboriginal owners. I tell its complicated history in a way that seeks to explain how I found Kakadu and its shared management, usually called ‘joint management’, on my return. The ‘past’, then, seems clear enough: everything from the time when Kakadu was just an idea through to 2002. Yet the apparent clarity of what is ‘the past’ created for me some difficulties in defining what anthropologist Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing (1993) briefly problematised as ‘the ethnographic present’. As she notes, it is ‘tied to a conceptualisation of culture as a coherent and persistent whole’ (1993:xiv). How does one deal with a clearly changing ‘culture’? My brief answer here is that the park underwent a number of significant changes between 1979 and about 2000, but that it has ‘stabilised’ since then, and although there have x been a number of changes in the last decade or so, they do not seem to have seriously affected the social structures and practices that determine ‘what happens’ now. My material, largely derived from ‘being there’ between 2002 and 2004 and later fieldwork (mostly in 2006), is thus applicable in 2009, as I complete this work. The choice to record what I knew, and what I wanted to find out, also involved the choice for the formality of academic discipline. Mistrustful of my own objectivity, but doubtful that the scientific discipline I knew and understood would provide adequate means to analyse what I had encountered, and would encounter again, I needed the guidance of a social scientist. Early in 2003, eight or nine months after I had begun managing the park again, my thoughts turned to formal enrolment in a doctoral program. I discussed the idea with a number of people during the remainder of that year, and am grateful for advice and encouragement from Professor Jon Altman, Dr Peter Carroll, Rob McKinnon, Peter McNab and Rev Dean Whittaker during this period. All of them continued to take an interest in my work, especially in the early stages of the formal project. In September 2003 an old colleague, Professor David Bowman, suggested that I might enrol at Charles Darwin University and introduced me to anthropologist Associate Professor Tess Lea, who subsequently agreed to become my principal supervisor. At this point I thank Professor Bowman and also Professor Syd Shea of the University of Notre Dame Australia, both of whom vouched for my capacity to undertake doctoral work when I formally applied for enrolment in February 2004. My enrolment accepted just after completion of my two-year contract as park manager, I began work as a student in July after my return to Perth – immediately plunging into a hitherto unknown world inhabited by the ghosts of G.W.F. Hegel, Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim, Max Weber and so many other strangers known to me only by name, while completing the necessary survey of the literature of joint management. xi I had specified to the university that I would need to live in Perth since most of our extended family was there, and my wife, Liz, and I had lived for so many years in other places. The university raised no objections to my proposed external status, and has continued to provide support through the Research Office and the University Library. Here I thank especially librarians Peta Kruse and Debbie Lewis for their unfailing attention to my requests for help. The academic staffs of the School for Social and Policy Research (SSPR) and School of Environmental Research (SER) were invariably welcoming. Early on, Professor Lesley Barclay (then of SSPR) and Dr Martin Young both took me under their wing while I was on campus between my periods of fieldwork.