The tools and concepts employed by the state to construct the new local government ‘region’ diverged greatly from those of Bininj. The NT Government emphasised the need for an ‘efficient’ scale of population for local government and to have boundaries precisely mapped:

Rather than employing the cultural-community blocs recommended by the WCARA Interim Council, voters were to be congregated by requiring them to officially register against their place of residence as the basis for voting in particular wards. In the early phase of the BSRSF policy framework, Bininj leaders employed a ‘cultural geography’ in their construction of the new region. Their primary criteria for creating the external regional boundary was about ‘who’ should be included and excluded from the new region, on the basis of dense layers of traditional land-owning relationships and networks. In other words, the region and its boundary was, first and foremost, a negotiated interpretation by leaders of who legitimately constitutes the regional Bininj ‘self’.

In the second policy phase of regionalisation, this internal reading of the cultural boundaries of relatedness was forced to expand as a result of the above-mentioned mandatory inclusion of the Maningrida and Jabiru communities—neither of whom was initially included under Bininj criteria for the proposed region.

To this extent, the new, larger shire boundary has been an evolving compromise between Bininj concepts of what is the culturally relevant geography for the region, and the NT Government’s consideration of what constitutes the best scale to secure its goal of greater cost and service delivery efficiency. In this instance, the legal and policy powers of the state enforced a major constraint on the re-imagined Bininj regional ‘self’.

Nevertheless, throughout the process, Bininj leaders continued to generate a correlation between their core cultural metaphor of ‘one family’ and the proposed region:

The overarching Bininj metaphor of ‘one family’ denotes a core institution that underlies individual and kin-group identity. It has been used frequently by members of both the WCARA and WASTC to invoke the values of mutual support and reciprocity, loyalty, and shared work efforts that are seen to lie at the heart of Indigenous ‘family’ life. Its use in the regional context seeks to imbue the proposed shire and its governance arrangements with the cultural legitimacy derived from the concept of ‘family’.

This metaphor also has a domesticating power. The leaders on the earlier WCARA Interim Council have continued to invoke it during WASTC meetings in order to extend the ‘ties that bind’ to the newly included communities of Maningrida and Jabiru. Their purpose has been to ease the transition of the new committee members from the status of ‘strangers’ or ‘outsiders’ to being part of the close family that is forming a new ‘collective self’ for regional local government.

At every point of engagement in this convoluted and complicated process, the Bininj leaders have denied the ordering power of the NT Government’s approach to creating boundaries for the region and its composite wards. During a discussion about the newly imposed external boundaries, one leader succinctly expressed an opinion that was common within the earlier Interim Council:

The Bininj members of the Council/Committee are themselves traditional owners and have consistently argued that regionalised local government should not impinge on their cultural and legal rights under the ALRA. From the start, they have been keen to ensure their decisions do not undermine those primary rights, or exacerbate tensions over land ownership. For that reason, they initially decided there should be no mapped internal boundaries for the proposed electoral wards. These were to be kept deliberately invisible so that they could continue to be managed under the Bininj system of knowledge and control of country. However, the current policy requires that all shire internal ward and external regional boundaries be mapped and made visible.

In the Bininj-government interplay that continues over the issue of boundaries, the Bininj representatives continue to reinforce the importance of locally relevant cultural geographies as the foundation for their governance solutions. They strategically use this ordering mode to resist the externally imposed institutions of government, which work to re-group and re-order Bininj people into neatly bounded geographies:

The pattern of traditional Bininj governance, visually reproduced in much of their art, ceremony and ritual can be understood as a ‘nodal network’. This type of network is formed by the interconnectedness and interdependence of essentially autonomous units and actors (each constituting ‘nodes’), where the constituent linkages can facilitate or inhibit the functioning of the overall system. A ‘governance network’ then refers to the interconnected distribution and exercise of a group’s decision making and leadership to achieve their collective goals.

Bininj governance networks in West Arnhem Land comprise clan groups, inter-related by complex webs of kinship, land-ownership identities, marriage systems, historical alliances and ceremonies (see Kesteven and Smith 1984; Smith 2007). In these networks there are ‘nodes’ or points of individual agency and decision making, where particular male and female leaders who have respect and influence are able to mobilise people and resources to create order and collectively get things done. In highly decentralised systems of social organisation like those in West Arnhem Land, governance nodes such as leaders and organisations enable decision making to coalesce and be implemented. In this system, nodal leaders constitute the circuitry of governing order and authority that enables things to be achieved over time.

Bininj networked governance in West Arnhem can be deciphered, although it is often invisible to outsiders. It has its own culture or world view—a way of thinking about the matters that need to be governed, and ways of reproducing the patterns of interconnectedness that underlie the networks needed for governance. It has a set of technologies, powers and processes for exerting influence and power, and for prompting action amongst people. It is able to marshal resources via nodal leaders and organisations. And it employs a set of institutions, or rules, which enable nodal leaders to legitimately activate governance networks.

The Bininj members of the WASTC are part of nodal leadership networks that stretch across West Arnhem and well beyond. They have striven to create a representative structure for the regional authority, and now the shire, that is based on their governance culture of nodal networks. Much of their effort and motivation has not been immediately intelligible to Balanda in the region, or to government officers. And when they have become intelligible, Bininj proposals are not always acceptable to Balanda, who have different ideas of what constitutes ‘good’, ‘effective’ and ‘legitimate’ governance.

The NT Government and its departmental officers insist that a democratic standard be applied to the future number and election of shire representatives. Representation, they assert, should properly be based on the total population of each constituent ward in the region: ‘Under New Local Government, councils will be democratically elected by the people, just like everywhere else in Australia’.^[12]

As one NT Government officer stated at a WASTC meeting:

Bininj members of the committee see this interpretation of democracy as being fundamentally at odds with their own governance institutions. They feel it to be unfair and unequal. From their perspective, representatives are seen as:

The Bininj view of ‘equal’ is based on each main cultural-community bloc having an equal number of representatives for each ward, irrespective of the population or geographic size of the ward:

There is disquiet about this view of equality amongst some Balanda CEOs on the WASTC who work for councils in the communities that have a large population. They too stress the democratic benchmark of ‘one person, one vote’. But at several committee meetings about the issue, the Bininj members—including those from the communities with large populations—reconfirmed their strong preference for having an equal number of representatives for each ward. They also pointed out to government officers that the Bininj approach was in fact similar to that of the Australian Senate in its representative arrangements.

Bininj leaders continued to apply the same logic of ‘all equal’ to representation for the proposed shire; that is, each major community with its participating council and outstation organisation would have an equal number of representatives regardless of population size (see Fig. 4.4).

Negotiations about this are continuing between committee members and departmental officers. The Advisory Board is attempting to operate as a go-between for the WASTC, putting their views forward to the Minister and supporting the value of their cultural logic.

This is an important issue for committee members who are attempting to reconcile the two different cultures of governance operating in the process, at the same time as striving to arrive at a culturally legitimate solution that will gain the backing of their community members. Bininj members prefer to take major governance issues back to their communities for further consideration. This has meant considerable discussion and negotiation within the committee and the participating organisations.

An early activity of the Bininj committee was to design a logo^[13] for the WCARA. The logo is a visual map of the regional Bininj ‘self’ (see Fig. 4.5). It depicts two turtles—one saltwater, the other freshwater—to indicate the inclusion of people from the coastal and island communities, as well as the inland communities of West Arnhem. The turtles allude to the ancient interaction between two mythological creatures, and ‘the two coming together’ to resolve their differences. The logo also depicts Bininj and Balanda hands clasped together, to symbolise the two collaborating for the benefit of all residents of the region. This vision was expressed by one committee member as ‘working two-ways’.

The WASTC readily adopted the logo as being a positive symbol of how Bininj and Balanda could work together as a shire. As one senior member of the committee explained:

The WCARA constitutional preamble drafted by the Interim Council also embedded this ‘two-way’ approach, stating that:

The WASTC adopted the preamble, confirming their intention to continue to use Bininj traditional systems of culture and governance in order to:

The logo and preamble subsequently became important devices for positively accommodating Jabiru Town Council and its largely Balanda population. As one committee member noted: ‘It’s [the logo] a good one because the handshaking now takes in Jabiru as well. It includes Balanda as well’.

The principle of ‘working two ways’ to develop governance solutions for the new shire has, at its core, a Bininj process of innovation and active adaptation. A consistent benchmark has been the Bininj committee members’ need to ensure that the process has internal cultural legitimacy.

This process was contested by government. For example, a component of the new policy was the NT Government’s requirement that all shires adopt a single common constitution. This effectively meant that the WCARA preamble and constitution were no longer relevant. Over several meetings, however, the newly formed WASTC Council negotiated through the Advisory Board that the preamble could become part of the shire’s business plans (which were being developed by departmental officers). They also began compiling a Governance Reference Manual of their draft policies and decisions to guide future elected shire representatives and managers. They subsequently gained departmental agreement to have the preamble and governance manual included as an official document in the shire’s strategic development plan. These were significant breakthroughs.

Over the four-and-a-half years of their operation, a number of formal and informal governance institutions (rules) have been generated by the Interim Council and Transitional Committee. This ‘rule innovation’ often occurred in the course of their meetings. It was there that members attempted to create workable solutions to some of the challenging problems caused by the disjunctions that kept arising between the two cultures of governance.

The litmus test at meetings was that Bininj-generated rules needed not only to be seen as culturally legitimate, but to be immediately useful. If they were, then committee members adopted them quickly. For example, in the middle of one committee meeting when new members had arrived, the chairperson announced to all participants:

The chairperson effectively resolved what might otherwise have been an awkward situation for himself by designing an impromptu procedural rule that enabled him to continue directing the passage of resolutions in the formal Balanda style, without having to forgo his observance of an important Bininj etiquette rule that restricted his public use of people’s personal names. The new rule was immediately acted upon as everyone could see its practical benefits for themselves as well as for the chairperson.

At the beginning of another meeting, before the commencement of business, a committee member made an announcement:

In response to this statement, the other committee members at the meeting (both Bininj and Balanda) made supportive comments and agreed to the new rule.

In this instance, a senior leader and his close relative had designed a new rule that had the hallmarks of the cognitive tool of compartmentalisation. This process enables people to organise things (ideas, events, relationships) into discrete units or categories, each of which has its own properties of boundedness and isolation, at the same time as having some form of limited or controlled relation with the other parts (see Spiro and Jehng 1991; Strauss and Quinn 1997). Cognitive compartmentalisation is a particularly useful tool in intercultural contexts. It means that seemingly contradictory ideas or behaviours can be observed and held, without either being undermined or elevated over the other.

In the example above, a new rule was created for a specific context, which addressed a widely recognised kin-based behaviour that required certain kinds of avoidance and deferential behaviour to be observed between two classes of relatives. Failure to observe the avoidance rule would incur family and public censure, and perhaps, retribution. The new rule enabled the WASTC members who stood in such a kin relationship to each other to effectively suspend the accepted customary rule of kin avoidance and so behave differently in the meeting. Outside the room, at breaks in the meeting, the norm of avoidance behaviour quietly reasserted itself.

By compartmentalising this ‘meeting behaviour’ under a new rule, the potentially negative consequences were not only ameliorated for the individuals concerned, the new behaviour was also disambiguated. That is, it was made collectively comprehensible to all the other members of the committee, and able to be assessed by them as being culturally legitimate owing to the fact that it was a derivative of the more fundamental customary norm. This became an accepted process of rule transformation at the meetings.

An important effect of this process of cognitive compartmentalisation is that the cultural authority of underlying customary institutions is buffered from the potentially negative impacts of contradictory new rules by those contradictions being contained and nullified. Compartmentalisation also enables the Bininj worldview of the continuity and inalienability of their laws to be maintained, at the same time as allowing condoned institutional innovation to occur.

Other examples of rule innovation have occurred at meetings in the more formal context of governance capacity development and training sessions. These sessions have been conducted with Bininj representatives from the very beginnings of the regional initiative, and have been provided by the same male and female team of CDOs from the DLGHS, with personal input from my governance research (see Evans, Appo and Smith 2006; Smith 2007).

The training sessions focused on a wide range of governance issues including governing roles and responsibilities, the concept of separation of powers, systems of representation, organisational models to support regionalisation, policies for codes of conduct and conflict of interest, meeting procedures, human resource management and employment contract conditions, communication with community residents, and so on.

In each session, the Bininj committee members discussed the non-Indigenous concepts and values, alongside their own. They raised a range of cultural issues that might potentially undermine the legitimacy and enforcement of new governance rules. They tested proposed rules against potential community and cultural scenarios, and revised them to enhance their workability and legitimacy.

Members often shared ideas about how they might collectively and individually enforce their governance policies and rules. Each session culminated in the committee drafting new governing institutions, for example, in the form of written policies, agreed procedures and resolutions. Through this process, the Bininj leaders on the committee steadily developed a growing confidence in their capacity to work together as a team, and to make and enforce collective decisions, policies and other rules.

In these situations, committee members have been creating shared meanings about their expected and actual behaviour, roles and responsibilities, which then provide the groundwork for forming new governing rules. The rules that work most effectively are those which appear to fit four fundamental criteria.

First, they give priority to people’s pre-existing cultural knowledge, norms, systems of authority, and experiences. Second, they have been designed collectively and in a practical governance context. Third, they can be put to immediate practical use; and fourth, they can continue to be adapted to suit changing governance needs.

As Spiro and Jehng (1991: 163–205) have noted, this calls for considerable cognitive flexibility at both an intra- and inter-personal level. It suggests that a Bininj culture of governance is created and maintained through interaction and practice. This enables nodal leaders to act as instigators of new and old meanings, and to mobilise consensus and action around those. That is, nodal leaders are able to tailor concepts and social value to create new institutions in ways that have legitimacy in the eyes of the rest of the network. Importantly though, Bininj innovation and practice are firmly located within an intercultural frame. Legitimacy and effectiveness are judged and shaped as much by the concepts and institutions of the state as those of Bininj people.

Conversely, when governance institutions are imposed from the outside and have no grounding in the pre-existing meanings and experience of Bininj culture, those rules have a weak hold on people’s values and behaviour. Such externally generated rules cannot be easily compartmentalised and so can undermine existing cultural institutions of governance. They also tend to have less cognitive flexibility and therefore cannot easily be customised or reassembled by Bininj to meet changed circumstances.