In the aftermath of the judgement, the pastoralist contingent shows signs of having begun to splinter again, reverting to its constituent social classes, while maintaining solidarity in regards to the control of keys to locked gates. Some of the battler pastoralists have also begun to rekindle relationships with select groups of ‘good blackfellas’.

The response of the European pastoralists suggests that they are undergoing a process of schismogenesis (Bateson 1935) both complementary (in regard to the claimants, and to their class counterparts) and symmetrical (in regard to each other). This movement parallels a similar trajectory which has long been emergent in the Ngarinyin community (Redmond 2006). For short periods of time, the two ethnic communities drew their various divergent interests together to partake in the adversarial litigation process. To sustain this unity of interests between their strongly autonomous fragments, two distinct notions of shared kinship, law and interests in land were pitted against each other, even to the extent that previous long-standing ideologies of some of the pastoralists being ‘family’ to Ngarinyin people (Redmond 2005) were put to a test—which they were seen to dismally fail by Ngarinyin people’s standards.

Post-determination, indications exist that both of these cultural or ethnic blocs are now beginning to seek out new alliances as well as implementing further internal differentiations and distinctions which may well open up pathways out of the almost hegemonic relationships of the past. I expect that as a result of the litigation process, change in the political culture of the Gibb River Road pastoral region will be accelerated at the same time as resistance to such change sporadically intensifies over issues such as locked gates. The ILC cattle properties have the potential to significantly shape the direction of this change by bridging black and whitefella interests within an expanded beef (and possibly tourist) economy of scale. The native title stakeholders with rights in these S.47 type tracts of land,^[16] now the most robust form of land tenure in the Kimberley, need to take a place at the centre of that process to create any possibility for future economic and political developments.