Table of Contents
Because the subjective necessity and self-evidence of the commonsense world are validated by the objective consensus of that world, what is essential goes without saying because it comes without saying: the tradition is silent, not least about itself as tradition; customary law is content to enumerate specific applications of principles which remain implicit and unformulated, because unquestioned …
(Bourdieu (1977: 167), original emphasis).
Since the advent of the Native Title Act 1993 (Cwlth) (NTA), Indigenous Australians have been able to make claims to their traditional lands. Patton (2000: 28) describes Aboriginal or native title as representing ‘an attempt to translate indigenous peoples’ spiritual and economic relation to their land into a form of property right recognisable by the common law’. One could argue that native title represents more a codification of some Aboriginal property rights than it does an attempted translation, given that native title is limited to only certain rights in lands and waters, and has not thus far included the recognition of incorporeal property rights (Glaskin 2003). Notwithstanding the limitations of native title and its capacity to recognise only certain Indigenous property rights, one consequence of the attempted ‘translation’ and subsequent codification of native title rights and interests through the native title process is a legal interrogation of certain aspects of Indigenous Australians’ relations to land. To gain recognition of their native title, Indigenous claimants are required to demonstrate continuity with the ‘traditional laws and customs’—those practiced by their antecedents at the time of the acquisition of sovereignty by the British Crown—from which their native title rights and interests are derived.
Property is inherently relational: it involves a person owning something as against other people, that is, in relation to them; or exercising rights and obligations with respect to the thing owned, as against others (Hallowell 1955: 238–9). A condition of demonstrating native title is that Indigenous claimants must articulate and objectify aspects of their property relations in response to the legislative requirements of the NTA. This objectification of relations to country occurs not only at a level that is in some sense external to Indigenous groups, in terms of a determination of native title (where a determination is ultimately made: not all claims result in determinations), but also occurs amongst and by Indigenous people themselves in response to various processes associated with making claims. These objectifications, I argue, have the potential to affect social relations within Indigenous groups, and hence their property relations.
This chapter examines some of the effects of participating in native title processes amongst Bardi and Jawi people, who live in the northwest Kimberley region of Western Australia. My focus here is on the native title processes they engaged in prior to the determination of their native title. Work on their combined native title claim first began in 1994, when the Native Title Act was quite new. The case was heard at various times between the years 2001 and 2004. In 2005, French J, the second trial judge to hear the case, made a determination,[1] and in February 2007 this determination was appealed before the Full Federal Court. At the time of writing the outcome from this appeal was pending. For Bardi and Jawi, the prolonged (and often onerous) process of claiming country has had a number of impacts, effects and consequences, apart from those arising from this determination and the appeal process. As they engaged with native title, some of the ‘compelling but largely implicit premises of [their] cultural practice’ (Scott 1993: 322) have been brought into the realm of discourse, objectifying aspects of their ‘traditional laws and customs’ and relations to country. Based on fieldwork carried out between 1994 and 2003, I argue that these objectifications, in turn, have had implications for the articulation and enactment of property relations amongst Bardi and Jawi peoples. By objectification, I follow Strathern (1999: 13) to mean ‘the way in which entities are made into objects through the relations which people have with one another’.
Thomason (1982: 124,126) describes objectification as ‘necessarily’ involving a ‘“distancing” of man from his products’, where these products become ‘objects’ or ‘things’, and ‘are taken to be, in some sense, “external”, “factual”, “independent of how we might think about them …”’. In the native title context, aspects of Indigenous culture such as ‘laws and customs’ and ‘rights and interests’ are made visible and conceptually divisible (sometimes extinguishable) by the political, economic and legislative circumstances in which such claims are and can be made. The articulation of native title rights and interests is an example of the way in which objectification can go, deriving from a set of relations to land a set of rights that may be apprehended as ‘things’, in some sense external from those relations from which they are sourced (Glaskin 2003).
In Wagner’s (1981 [1975]: 34) view, ‘when culture is assumed self-consciously’, identity must always be involved, although ‘identity by no means exhausts or explains the usage’. Roosens (1989: 150) argues that ‘in order to see and use one’s own culture as a right, one must first have gained distance from that culture’. Where indigenous claims are tested within legal contexts, the kinds of cultural characteristics indigenous groups are likely to ascribe to themselves and consider relevant highlight those aspects of their cultures that are elicited (and indeed required to prove their claims) within those contexts. As writers such as Barth (1970: 38) and Roosens (1989: 12) suggest, only some features of a particular culture become diacritic markers of social or cultural boundaries, and this phenomenon of cultural differentiation reflects on intercultural communication and social action across these ‘boundaries’. Objectification of certain cultural features over others becomes especially evident where indigenous peoples assert rights and the state seeks to recognise these, as in claims to native title. As I argue, the effects of these responses within indigenous groups is to foster self-conscious definitions of their culture at the least, and may also have an important role in internal group definition and reproduction, especially where such objectification becomes reified or codified in some form.
Like many Australian Indigenous peoples, Bardi and Jawi have long objectified certain facets of their culture, like the ancestral figures whose deeds and authority are inscribed in landscape and in ritual. The English word they typically use to encompass the kinds of notions that are embedded in the English word ‘Dreaming’ is ‘the Law’.[2] ‘The Law’ is distinct from ‘Law business’; the latter specifically refers to ritual activity which certain ancestral beings ‘gave’ them to follow, while implicit in the former is the totality of the ancestral beings’ activities and precepts; it encodes the entirety of their religious belief and mythopoeia.
Most Bardi and Jawi view ‘Law business’ (male ritual) as the foundation of other aspects of ‘culture’. The status accorded to male ritual in their society makes it one of the most significant and potent of the objectifications of the ancestral creative deeds. Most Bardi and Jawi who live in their country are involved in the practice of Law, which is a religious obligation of utmost importance to them. Many others who are resident in Broome or Derby travel up the peninsula to take part in ritual with those who are resident at communities in the peninsula. Young boys are ‘put through’ the Law every year. Women participate in many aspects of Law too, such as Anggwuy, the public ceremony before the boys are secluded for initiation, in Nguril, the public ceremony to welcome the boys out from the bush following Irrganj; and in a restricted way, in Ululung (Bagshaw 1999: 29). Men participate in all facets of Law business, and much of the Law is restricted and secret male-only business.
Bardi and Jawi consider their Law to be integral to their being-in-the-world, and consider it inalienable in the sense that, as one senior Jawi man described it, ‘we can’t stand, we belong to Law’.[3] Myers’ observations regarding ‘the Dreaming’ (which he equates with ‘the Law’) among the Pintupi are equally applicable to Bardi Law:
The Dreaming—‘the Law’—provides a moral authority lying outside the individual and outside human creation. It is not his idea or his will. Thus, although the Dreaming as an ordering of the cosmos is presumably a product of historical events, such an origin is denied. These human creations are objectified—thrust out—into principles or precedents for the immediate world (1986: 69).
As Myers suggests, Indigenous Australians have long possessed their own techniques of objectification, whereby their ‘culture’ has been revealed to them. Like other Australian Indigenous groups such as the Pintupi and Walbiri, Bardi and Jawi participate in these ‘objectifications already created by the ancestors, and are [consider themselves] bound to them’ (Munn 1970: 157). Thus their Law—the equivalent of Munn’s (1970: 157–8) ‘mode of orientation’—‘mystifies human agency in the construction of forms of sociality’ assimilating events ‘to a pre-existing order which is objectified in features of the local landscape’ (Rumsey 1994: 121; and see Merlan 1998: 215–16; Myers 1986: 286–8).
For Bardi and Jawi, like numerous other Kimberley peoples, the phrase ‘Law and culture’ is a shorthand way to emphasise the distinctiveness of their indigenous life-world.[4] Strathern’s (1999: 128) comments on ‘culture’ are appropriate to Kimberley Aboriginal usage of the term: ‘in borrowing the concept of “culture”, people appear to be doing what is done everywhere, fastening on to certain “customs” as diagnostic of their way of life … culture/kastom is also used to signify difference’. The ‘Law and culture’ linkage and word order emphasises that Law, in a primordial sense, comes before ‘culture’; Aborigines who have ‘no Law’ (who have ceased to practice Law) are often characterised by Bardi (at least) as having ‘no culture’. Conversely, Aborigines who practice Law are ‘culture people’. For Bardi and Jawi, humans are not the only beings with ‘Law and culture’; dugongs especially, but turtles and other marine species are conceptualised as possessing (‘they got’) ‘culture’, because they have ‘their own Law’ (and see Rouja 1998: 244). This characterisation of these species as having their ‘own Law’ is based on their observable traits, their interactions with other members of their species and their behaviour (seasonality, mobility and foraging habits) within their marine environment. The predictability and immutability of their conduct gives rise to these creatures as being considered Law-like, and hence possessing ‘culture’.
Bardi and Jawi are proud of their culture, and many people assiduously collect objects reflective of it. Traditionally, they traded objects such as boomerangs (irrgil), hairbelts (arnala), engraved pearlshells (riji), hairbelts attached to plain pearl shells (baali-guwarn) and mangrove log rafts (galwa in Bardi; biel-biel in Jawi). Natural resources like red ochre (bidimarr) and white ochre (maanga) were also traded. Such trade or exchange occurred amongst Bardi and Jawi, and with other neighbouring and more distant Aborigines. Some of these traditional objects of exchange appear in contemporary Bardi personal collections today.
Along with various artifacts, most Bardi houses contain prominent photographic displays of their kin painted up and dressed for ceremony, as well as photographs of the ‘old people’ from previous generations. Many people also collect taped recordings (both amateur and professional) of traditional songs, and published and unpublished material on Bardi and Jawi culture and history. Several people have told me of their desire to set up a cultural centre, either at One Arm Point, or smaller displays at their outstations, with a view to engaging in cultural tourism. This is one of the few avenues for developing Indigenous business enterprise in the area. Some Bardi people already engaged in small-scale tourism ventures see tourist interest as also providing some cultural recognition, given the evident expertise in their own culture that they can readily display in these contexts. Since the early 1990s, some Bardi have been making home videos of traditional methods of cutting up dugong and turtle, identification and use of bush foods, and public aspects of ritual, including preparations like the painting and adorning of initiates, hairbelt spinning, and boomerang and shield production. These videos have proved to be popular with other members of the Bardi and Jawi community, among whom they are widely disseminated. Many of the videos are used in classrooms at One Arm Point and Lombadina; both schools have Bardi language programs as well.[5]
Bardi collection and recording of cultural material reflects considerable pride in their culture. Such practices are also illustrative of a concern for cultural preservation and reproduction, as against an implicit—and frequently explicit—acknowledgment that the terms in which their culture is expressed is changing with increasing engagement with a modernising world. In this respect, native title is the latest in a series of legislative regimes which they have encountered, but is distinct from them, both because it is legislation aimed at recognising their traditional property entitlements, and correspondingly because of its emphasis on the ‘traditional laws and customs’ that give rise to these. Consequently, engagement with native title has quite different effects amongst Bardi and Jawi than those produced through previous historical and legislative encounters (which are more fully explored in Glaskin 2002). As I demonstrate briefly below, while certain aspects of their culture have been objects of interest historically, these are distinct from those aspects of their culture (in particular, of their property relations) that are central to their engagement with the native title process.