In July 2002 our family-based community living at Chuulangun incorporated under the Aboriginal Councils and Associations Act 1976 (Cwlth). Our organisation is localised and based on Kaanju governance structures. As for the Murray Lower Darling Rivers Indigenous Nations (MLDRIN) (Weir and Ross, Chapter 10), the Chuulangun Aboriginal Corporation is a modern-day extension of traditional governance structures. Our organisation’s founding principle is:
a person must live on their particular homeland in order to have a say in its management.
The main objectives of our organisation include:
representing the Kaanju people associated with the Wenlock and Pascoe Rivers on land tenure, land and resource management, economic and homelands development issues;
facilitating the practice and maintenance of the customary obligations of Kaanju people in regard to land and resource management for homelands;
promoting the wider recognition and support, particularly by government, of primary Kaanju management and decision-making for our homelands;
facilitating the reestablishment of permanent Kaanju communities on our homelands;
establishing homelands-based economic enterprises that will sustain or people and our homelands into the future; and
having greater access and control over the resources and funds available to help meet the above objectives.
Foremost, our incorporation was fuelled by our frustration at the inability of regional and sub-regional Aboriginal bodies (particularly our Native Title Representative Body) to help us meet our land and resource management, homelands development and economic development aspirations (see also Smith and Claudie 2003: 7–8). Incorporation was seen as a strategy for the wider recognition of Kaanju governance and assertion of the primacy of Indigenous land tenure and our authority as landowners and land and resource managers.
Chuulangun Aboriginal Corporation is undertaking a number of land and resource management, homelands and economic development activities on Ngaachi. Recently, focal Kaanju Traditional Owners living at Chuulangun (and native title claimants to Batavia Downs) have been investigating the establishment of an Indigenous Protected Area (IPA) over some 470 000 hectares of our homelands centred on the Wenlock and Pascoe Rivers. This area includes the Kaanju portion of the Batavia claim. Our aspiration is that the area be declared as an IPA and that it be managed in accordance with the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources’ Protected Area Category V: ‘Area of land and/or seascape protected mainly for conservation/recreation purposes’. It is not our intention to use the land for pastoral purposes as we are not pastoralists, and this land use would work against our conservation purposes for the land. It is however our intention to benefit from the land economically, mainly by way of the management of public use and access (e.g. establishment of designated campgrounds and low-key tourism), and other natural resource management based activities (e.g. feral animal control, sustainable use of plant products). These activities would generate opportunities for employment and training for our people on homelands as well as provide revenue to support the permanent reoccupation of homelands and help sustain viable homelands communities.[4]