Table of Contents
Aborigines in central Cape York Peninsula have lived alongside non-Indigenous pastoralists from the late-nineteenth century onwards. Despite a fraught and violent history, strong social ties developed between Aborigines and settlers during this period of coexistence. But in recent years these ties have become strained following a decline in Aboriginal employment on stations, the arrival of a number of new station owners and the passing of Queensland’s Aboriginal Land Act 1991 and the Native Title Act 1993 (Cwlth). The success of the Wik and Wik Way People’s native title claim—which determined that native title could coexist with pastoralists’ rights on the central Peninsula’s pastoral leases—has been particularly detrimental to social ties between Aboriginal people and settler pastoralists.[1]
In this paper I take up the theme of ‘pathways out of the near-hegemonic relations of the past’ (Redmond, Chapter 4), revisiting my earlier work on native title, certainty, and the coexistence of Aborigines and settler pastoralists in central Cape York Peninsula (Smith 2003). In considering such pathways, I also build on Patton’s (1995) call for a more ‘open’ response to the possibilities offered by native title following the initial impetus of the Mabo No.2 decision and the NTA.
Writing shortly after the NTA’s passage into law, Patton suggested that a more open response would be more likely to lead to progress towards social justice for Australia’s Indigenous peoples. This progress would result from processual approaches to native title that would maximise rather than restrict:
options for Aboriginal communities … to take a stand against forms of closure, in favour of openness or the continuous play of possibilities … [this] amounts to demanding alegally and politically open-ended space of possibilities for action, a space of becoming that allows for the non-self-identical character of individual and collective agents (Patton 1995: 161-2).
Such approaches would seek to enable ‘openness’ in relation to the outcomes of native title and the resulting possibilities for social justice and Indigenous futures. However, such openness can only hope to exist ‘on the basis of specific mechanisms for identifying and dealing with native title’ (Patton 1995: 162).
In this paper I seek to extend Patton’s arguments through an anthropological consideration of the relation between ‘openness’ and social justice in the context of native title claims in central Cape York Peninsula. But rather than focusing only on the ways in which native title affects Indigenous Australians, I instead recast Patton’s approach, conceptualising social justice in relation to a broader local or regional community affected by native title. As a ‘total social fact’ (Weiner 2003), native title affects not only Indigenous Australians but also the broader local communities associated with any given area for which native title is claimed or determined. Anthropological consideration of these communities, and the social fields (Gluckman 1949; Sullivan 2005) through which they are constituted, can shed light on the social effects of native title within a given locale. An anthropological engagement of this kind both points towards the ways in which some measure of social justice might be achieved within such fields, and indicates what forms social justice might take. A useful starting point for such an engagement is to consider the ways in which recognition and coexistence already take place within a particular social field and may thus be extended from existing foundations.