KUNINJKU PEOPLE, BUFFALO, and CONSERVATION in ARNHEM LAND: ‘IT’S a CONTRADICTION THAT FRUSTRATES US’ Jon Altman

3 KUNINJKU PEOPLE, BUFFALO, AND CONSERVATION IN ARNHEM LAND: ‘IT’S A CONTRADICTION THAT FRUSTRATES US’ Jon Altman On Tuesday 20 May 2014 I was escorting two philanthropists to rock art galleries at Dukaladjarranj on the edge of the Arnhem Land escarpment. I was there in a corporate capacity, as a direc- tor of the Karrkad-Kanjdji Trust, seeking to raise funds to assist the Djelk and Warddeken Indigenous Protected Areas (IPAs) in their work tackling the conservation challenges of maintain- ing the environmental and cultural values of 20,000 square kilometres of western Arnhem Land. We were flying low in a Robinson R44 helicopter over the Tomkinson River flood plains – Bulkay – wetlands renowned for their biodiversity. The experienced pilot, nicknamed ‘Batman’, flew very low, pointing out to my guests herds of wild buffalo and their highly visible criss-cross tracks etched in the landscape. He remarked over the intercom: ‘This is supposed to be an IPA but those feral buffalo are trashing this country, they should be eliminated, shot out like up at Warddeken’. His remarks were hardly helpful to me, but he had a point that I could not easily challenge mid-air; buffalo damage in an iconic wetland within an IPA looked bad. Later I tried to explain to the guests in a quieter setting that this was precisely why the Djelk Rangers needed the extra philanthropic support that the Karrkad-Kanjdji Trust was seeking to raise. * * * 3093 Unstable Relations.indd 54 5/10/2016 5:40 PM Kuninjku People, Buffalo, and Conservation in Arnhem Land This opening vignette highlights a contradiction that I want to explore from a variety of perspectives in this chapter – abundant populations of environmentally destructive wild buffalo roam widely in an Indigenous Protected Area (IPA) declared for its natural and cultural values of global significance, according to International Union for the Conservation of Nature criteria. The buffalo has been very effectively incorporated into the transform- ing domestic economy of the Kuninjku-speaking people with whom I work, and yet it is also causing environmental damage and impacting significantly on biodiversity.1 I set out here to explore the tensions created by this contradiction for a number of key stakeholders in the Djelk IPA, which covers much of the Maningrida region in Arnhem Land: land owners (including conservation rangers who are also land owners), regional organisations, the Australian government and environmental philanthropies. I begin by providing some background and an historical account of the rapid growth in the number of buffalo in the IPA. I then share my observations of conservation planning meet- ings, aimed to develop a strategy to deal with this environmental threat, held in early 2015. Using the idiom of ‘unstable relations’, I then analyse some of the political contestations that emerge in competing proposals to cull buffalo numbers at the regional scale; and, at a broader scale, consider some of the emerging tensions in north Australia in attempting to reconcile sustainable use of resources with conservation objectives in an IPA. I end with some broader reflections about livelihood opportunity for Indigenous people seeking to negotiate a pathway through the complexities generated by entanglements with the customary, the market and the state in remote Australia. 55 3093 Unstable Relations.indd 55 5/10/2016 5:40 PM Unstable Relations Kuninjku Country and the Beginning of the Djelk Rangers I have worked in the Maningrida region as an academic researcher since 1979 and using the analytic lenses of economics and anthropology I have documented economic transformations in the region, especially among members of the Kuninjku community. I have also politically championed the rights of Kuninjku people to pursue their chosen way of life, one which has evolved into a hybrid form of economy informed by a complex mix of Kuninjku and Balanda (their term for European or Western) values.2 This championing has involved representing Kuninjku perspectives, as I understand them, to politicians and officials as well as wider publics. In more recent times, I have become conscious of my deep emotional entanglements both with my Kuninjku friends – who actively adopted me into their relational world decades ago – and with particular meaningful places on Kuninjku country that I have frequently visited, with Bulkay being one. I am also conscious of my changing perspectives on buffalo, who I once viewed simply as game to be hunted and consumed when I lived with Kuninjku people. Now I see buffalo more sympathetically as a majestic animal that has adapted very successfully to the tropical savanna of northern Australia. Reading Hage’s Alter-Politics has assisted me to recognise and come to terms with the tensions of being an academic researcher and a political advocate for both Bininj (the Kuninjku term for themselves as black people in contrast to Balanda) and the environ- ment.3 As a personal friend of many Kuninjku people, I have been deeply moved by their current precarious circumstances which, as I argue elsewhere, have resulted from thoughtless policy shifts and changes in global circumstances.4 By my observations, Kuninjku 56 3093 Unstable Relations.indd 56 5/10/2016 5:40 PM Kuninjku People, Buffalo, and Conservation in Arnhem Land people are currently more impoverished and, at times, hungrier than at any other time over the last 37 years. I sense a growing nostalgia amongst Kuninjku people for earlier, better times that I also share. These emotional entanglements extend, as will become apparent, to the buffalo; like my interlocutors, I have a growing antipathy towards culling due to its wastefulness. When, in the 1980s, I first camped out on the Bulkay flood plains with Kuninjku at a seasonal camp called Mankodbe Kayo – or, the place where the bush potato rests – there were few buffalo. There were also no feral pigs or cane toads on these resource-rich wetlands where Kuninjku people gathered regularly to feast on seasonal surpluses of game, aquatic birdlife, barramundi, catfish, goannas and wallabies. We drank fresh water from the clear billabongs and waded in creeks relatively free of estuarine crocodiles to fish with spears for barramundi. When I flew low over Bulkay in a light plane for the first time in May 1980 there were no herds of buffalo to be seen, no wallows in billabongs, no pugmarks in the black soil plains, no criss-crossing trails etched into the landscape. In 1979 and 1980, when I resided at Mumeka outstation (see Figure 3.1 for location) and a number of related seasonal camps, I described Kuninjku as ‘hunter-gatherers today’.5 I did not think of them as environmentalists or conservationists, but rather as people who hunted and fished and gathered, managed the landscape with fire, and produced art for sale, while belatedly, from 1980, gaining access to their welfare entitlements as Australian citizens. At that time the relatively sparse buffalo population on Kuninjku country was eagerly exploited as a source of protein super-abundance. Buffalo did not then constitute what is now regarded as an environmental threat. 57 3093 Unstable Relations.indd 57 5/10/2016 5:40 PM Unstable Relations Figure 3.1: Map of the Maningrida region: Jon Altman and CartoGIS, ANU College of Asia and the Pacific In 1981, in one of my early acts of advocacy for Kuninjku people I defended their right to harvest buffalo to an Inquiry by the Feral Animals Committee Buffalo Working Party; during my time living with a group at Mumeka outstation buffalo meat was an important part of our dietary intake.6 I was concerned that the federal government’s Brucellosis and Tuberculosis Eradication Campaign (BTEC) to eliminate wild buffalo and feral cattle, regarded as a threat to the export trade, might extend into Arnhem Land. I recently found my submission from that time in the archives of the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies. I am sure it made little impact on the Inquiry, as finan- cial costs and political complexities were likely higher order 58 3093 Unstable Relations.indd 58 5/10/2016 5:40 PM Kuninjku People, Buffalo, and Conservation in Arnhem Land considerations than the rights of Aboriginal people to buffalo as hunted game. Nevertheless, parts of my submission remain apposite today. I noted that Aboriginal people in western Arnhem Land were unconcerned about the environmental impact of buffalo regarded by them as posing a low-grade environmental threat mainly to bush roads; they believed that their utilisation of buffalo as a source of food kept numbers under control and constituted an effective land management strategy. I recommended that if an eradication program was needed in Arnhem Land, then the people living at outstations could be mobilised to participate more actively in culling, including as professional shooters on their own lands. Owing to the significance of buffalo as a source of meat in the contemporary economy, I was sceptical that an eradication program would be acceptable to land owners. It eventuated that the BTEC did not extend into Arnhem Land for a variety of reasons, but mainly because some early culling and testing indicated that the herds there were almost entirely disease-free. Hence, there was no need to undertake the expensive and politically complex task of buffalo eradication throughout this region. A decade later, in 1993, ‘conservation’ in a Western sense emerged with the formal establishment of a community-based conservation group called the Djelk Rangers. In the 1980s, a mis- sionary in Maningrida had released some domesticated pigs into Barlparnarra swamp to the east of the township. At about the same time, a renowned Kuninjku man – the late Jerry Jirriminmin – released some pigs brought from the township of Gunbalanya to the west.

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