The satellites are located throughout the south-west of Victoria, and their relationship to the central office is important to the overall picture. The satellites are pre-existing Aboriginal co-operatives or trusts which have used CDEP wages to fund their administrative functions and maintenance work. Some also send workers out on work sites with Worn Gundidj workers. A brief word on Victoria co-operatives might be useful here. Across the State of Victoria there exists a regime of Aboriginal co-operatives dedicated to delivering Aboriginal-specific services through health workers, drug and alcohol workers, housing programs, cultural heritage officers, and so on. These co-operatives are funded by a mixture of ATSIC and State government dollars, the mix depending on the service provided.

In recent years the co-operative system has experienced funding reductions and a rationalisation of such things, for example, as the number of cultural heritage officers and the number of cultural heritage zones (in other words, fewer officers with bigger areas to look after). These funding reductions led to a loss of administrative positions in these co-operatives, not just in south-west Victoria, but across the State. These changes affected their ability to deliver the services they are charged with providing (see also Bartlett, Ch. 20, this volume). Some went very close to shutting their doors altogether, and some relied on volunteer administrative staff to keep operating. The integration of a cluster of south-west Victorian Aboriginal co-operatives into the Worn Gundidj satellite system, with the purpose of accessing CDEP wages to fund administrative positions, means that those co-operatives now rely on State, ATSIC and CDEP dollars to deliver a full suite of services.^[52] I return to the theme of organisational integration below.

The satellites remain, on a day-to-day working basis, independent of Worn Gundidj with respect to their work program tasks. The satellites receive an on-cost component with their wages, and Worn Gundidj extracts an administrative component from the overall on-costs and administrative stream. This degree of local autonomy, coupled with regional co-operation, suits both the satellites and Worn Gundidj and accords with local political and cultural units of power and territoriality. But as all the satellites operate under the one grantee, they can provide staff for Worn Gundidj contracts without having the trouble of changing schemes, or notifying Centrelink. This arrangement has been in force recently with a revegetation contract in Portland and Heywood, an hour's drive to the west of Warrnambool. In this case the contract was secured by Worn Gundidj from Warrnambool, but as it is in another mob's country, according to local reckoning of territory, they regularly use Portland or Heywood labour on these jobs. This is put forward as the culturally appropriate approach to dealing with contracts in the country of satellites. Thus labour pooling is one aspect of the relationship between the satellites and Worn Gundidj in addition to the administrative linkages.

Flexibility of staff movement between the satellites, when the need arises, and the localised autonomy over the day-to-day work as exercised by the satellites, provide an effective structure which can accommodate the economic reality of the need for short bursts of intensive labour on some jobs, and having workers based around their local CDEP satellite co-operative at other times.