Kurungal Inc is an organisation situated around a group of communities, which are located about 120km to the southeast of Fitzroy Crossing in the central west Kimberley, northwest Western Australia (WA). The organisation is based in a reasonably remote part of Australia and provides specific government funded services to surrounding Indigenous communities. These incorporate the communities of Wangkatjungka, Kupartiya, Ngumpan, Gilly Sharpe, and a seasonally inhabited outstation, Ngarantjadu (see Fig. 13.1).[4]
Kurungal Inc is an umbrella organisation, that is, it has five subsidiary organisations associated with each of these five communities as its members (see Fig. 13.2). The term ‘kurungal’ itself refers to the country adjacent to Christmas Creek, and incorporates Christmas Creek Station. It was also how the group of people who lived and worked on Christmas Creek Station, prior to the Pastoral Award decision of 1968, became known—the ‘kurungal mob’.[5]
The five subsidiaries all predate Kurungal Inc, and one of them, Wangkatjungka Community Inc, was one of the earliest organisations to be established in the area. It was set up in 1975 by the Wangkatjungka people who were camping in Fitzroy Crossing at the time, having recently been forced off Christmas Creek Station following the Pastoral Award decision.[6] Wangkatjungka is also by far the largest subsidiary organisation in terms of membership, having around 200 members. The majority of these reside in the community of Wangkatjungka, which is situated on an Aboriginal Lands Trust lease on the boundary fence of Christmas Creek Station. The other four subsidiaries are all substantially smaller. Kupartiya and Ngumpan both have a similar number of members, between 30 and 50, while Gilly Sharpe and Ngarantjadu are much smaller outstations with between 10 and 30 members.
Many of the residents of Wangkatjungka in particular are members of the Wangkatjungka language group, who began moving out of the Great Sandy Desert along the Canning Stock Route around the time of World War Two (Bolger 1987).[7] Some were still moving into the area from the Great Sandy Desert as late as the 1950s and 1960s. Consequently, they are not in the strict sense ‘traditional owners’, although some of their descendants have been given, or have acquired, responsibilities relating to the surrounding country. Intermarriage has further blurred the distinctions between language groups. There is a handful of resident people who have a stronger claim to traditional owner status—that is, those of Walmajerri/Gooniyandi[8] heritage (see McGregor 1988; Thieberger 1993). For the vast majority of Kurungal Inc members, English is their second or third language, after Wangkatjungka, Walmajerri and often others.
Kurungal Inc was established in 2001 under the Associations Incorporation Act 1987 (WA), at the instigation of Derby-based officers of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC), through which Wangkatjungka Inc had previously received funding. They had a number of motivations for initiating this shift. Foremost, there had allegedly been ongoing problems with non-Indigenous staff residing in Wangkatjungka and being subject to violent acts or assault; the community office had also been vandalised on more than one occasion. The ‘problem’ as ATSIC saw it was a lack of leadership in Wangkatjungka at the time, which meant that there was little sanction of aberrant behaviour. Strong leadership, however, was evident on the surrounding much smaller communities, including Kupartiya on Bohemia Downs station, which local ATSIC staff at the time considered a much ‘quieter’ place. There had also been a number of breaches by Wangkatjungka Inc of its funding agreements, although whether these were trivial or not was not made clear to me.[9]
Prior to the creation of Kurungal Inc, the communities of Kupartiya on Bohemia Downs Station and Wangkatjungka had no administrative connection, although they did have strong cultural and historic ties. Prior to 2001, Wangkatjungka Inc had itself been an umbrella, managing the Community Development Employment Projects (CDEP)[10] of Ngumpan and Ngarantjadu, as well as the larger Wangkatjungka community.
The creation of Kurungal Inc saw an important shift occur in the dynamics amongst these geographic and political communities. In particular, the administrative centre (the office) and its associated resources, moved from Wangkatjungka to newly built premises at Kupartiya, some 60km distant on Bohemia Downs Station. The initiation of a new umbrella—Kurungal Inc—represented a significant shift in the balance of power and access to resources between the communities of Wangkatjungka and the much smaller Kupartiya.
The vast majority of Kurungal Inc’s business, since its inception in 2001, has related to either managing government monies and providing related services, or attempting to draw in new sources of government funding. At the time of my fieldwork, there was one full-time non-Indigenous staff member, a ‘CDEP coordinator’; his partner worked part-time for the organisation between her stints away in New South Wales. They were assisted in the office at Kupartiya by one or two local residents on CDEP ‘top-up’,[11] performing tasks such as answering phones and cleaning. Part of the role of the coordinator, and a requirement of the funding agreements, was to hold regular meetings of the Kurungal Council, which is the governing body of Kurungal Inc. While the communities of Kupartiya and Ngumpan had shared ownership of a cattle station, Bohemia Downs, and Wangkatjungka had a community store, the organisation of Kurungal Inc did not have any business interests beyond managing funds allocated by government agencies. Its major concern was running a CDEP program for around 80 participants across the five membership groups. However, it also received funding to maintain housing stock, deliver municipal services, and to provide a meals-on-wheels service and other aged care help in Wangkatjungka.
In the context of this discussion around a review of governance, there are a few important things to note:
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the organisation had in-built, imposed tensions and imbalances;
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its only concern was managing government money, so it had limited scope in addressing community priorities beyond those deemed worthy by government;
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the coordinator, apart from the shopkeeper and his wife in Wangkatjungka, was for the most part the only whitefella working directly for these communities;[12]
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the ‘office’ was 60km away from the ‘main’ community; this resulted in a limited sense of ownership by that community, and inter-community problems of trust and jealousy; and
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there was an uneven claim across groups to traditional owner status. The majority of members were of ‘historical’ status,[13] although in this context the distinction was not always totally clear or uncontested.
It is my contention that these historically evolved tensions, which are inherent to this organisation and many others, are crucial to the way in which their governance functions. Gaining an understanding of these historical dynamics can be very difficult, especially when there are shameful ‘failures’ of previous ventures or entities, which people may not wish to discuss. In the case of Kurungal Inc, a pre-existing subsidiary organisation had been investigated and its assets liquidated by the Office of the Register of Aboriginal Corporations (ORAC) in 2003. This entity was reconstituted under the WA legislation. Such a negative experience may have contributed to the reluctance of certain authority figures to become closely involved in the formal governance structure of Kurungal Inc.
[4] The organisational membership at this subsidiary level, however, is not strictly based on geographical residency. These groupings relate more to historical and kin connections, with the geographical location being a kind of marker.
[5] Indeed, the community now named Wangkatjungka was originally named ‘Kurungal’; see for example, Davey (1979). See Bunburry (2002) for discussion of the impacts of the Pastoral Award decision throughout the Kimberley and the NT, which meant that Aboriginal station workers had to be paid the same as non-Indigenous workers. In the case of Christmas Creek station, this meant that the station management moved off over 200 people (Commissioner of Native Welfare 1969). The majority moved back over time, to land adjacent to the station boundary.
[6] While the decision itself was taken in 1968, pastoralists in the Kimberley did not have to start enacting it until the following year, and some stations retained significant populations until well into the mid 1970s.
[7] For Wangkatjungka language, see Thieberger (1993), McGregor (1988) and Tindale (1974: 43).
[8] Davey (1979) noted that many of the original people from around Christmas Creek had moved east to GoGo Station and Bayulu community.
[9] Organisations such as these can be breached by their government funders for a variety of misdemeanors ranging from the serious to the arguably insignificant.
[10] CDEP monies were the main source of government funding for Kurungal Inc, representing almost 75 per cent in 2005. There was also funding available for a housing officer to manage the maintenance of housing across the communities.
[11] The work requirements under CDEP were 16 hours per week—generally four hours per day. However, participants could earn more money, known as ‘top-up’, if they chose to work longer hours.
[12] Sanders (2006: 14–17) has developed the concept of ‘isolated managerialism’, which was clearly at play at Kurungal Inc.
[13] By ‘historical status’ I mean that the majority were not people, or descendants of people, who would be clearly considered traditional owners.