3. Constraints on researchers acting as change agents

The Ti Tree fringe camp came to the attention of the then Minister for Central Australia, Peter Toyne, who wrote to the ACGC in 2002 expressing concern about the lack of servicing and encouraging the council to do something about it. By any standards, the living conditions there are not ideal. Will Sanders and I were requested by the council to assist them in developing a strategy through which they could then respond to the NT Government. Thus, the impetus for the research into the Creek Camp issue was not initiated by the ACGC, but was prompted externally, and we happened to be available to undertake it.

In three reports to the ACGC, produced over a period of a year and a half, we documented the history, mobility patterns and aspirations of the Creek Camp residents, as well as canvassing other Ti Tree residents’ perspectives of the place and the possibilities for NT Government action. However, a year and a half since the last of these three reports was delivered there has not been any significant change in the conditions of the place for its residents. Was our work ‘rendered invisible’ at ‘the official and political level?’ (Sutton 2001: 142). And how does this official and political level intersect with the level at which the Aboriginal people in this story are operating? Indeed, examining the intersection of our research with these two layers or sites of governance draws out the tensions between them. The contention is that the Aboriginal silence or ambivalence on the issue is, partly, a symptom of powerlessness; silence as ‘passive condition’ (cf. Rose 2001: 92) as the violent history of the pastoral frontier is recalled. More recently, this history of marginality is reinforced by NT Government policy, as the policy at issue was found to be underpinning the current status quo of Creek Camp. Examining how this policy became manifest as a government rationality was revealed as the research sought out possibilities for change, and in the process realised that these were limited by the policy. This NT Government policy was to the effect that no further Aboriginal urban living areas were to be established within townships.

By examining what has happened to the knowledge produced in the context of the Creek Camp research, the tensions between advocacy, development and research leading to change can be explored. At the risk of sounding ‘postmodern’, this reflexive gaze can also begin to unpack my own expectations about the outcomes of the research process, in an attempt to consider my own positionality as an anthropologist. The debate between Sutton (2005) and Cowlishaw (2003) on the role of anthropology in policy making and public debate highlights a number of the tensions in the discipline, which are brought to the fore as one engages with the diverse non-Aboriginal ideologically driven interests in the field. Although I do not view ‘anthropology … primarily as a wing or instrument of political activism’ (Sutton 2005: 40), as Sutton has suggested Cowlishaw does, it seems to me that solid anthropological research can and should influence policy. The challenge is facilitating and enabling this uptake, as an integral element in the research process. To this end, this research also benefited from an interdisciplinary approach, with Will Sanders as political scientist teaming with myself, as social anthropologist. The different approaches to knowledge construction that both disciplines brought to the enterprise have been valuable for the research and will be considered below.

A reflexive examination of the research method is a key to interrogating knowledge construction. In the case of this project this included realising the value of longitudinal research and relationship building with the research hosts. In our case, as mentioned above, the research hosts and collaborators were the ACGC.^[1] And, as will be discussed, each stage of the research into the Creek Camp issue and its potential development was a test of this relationship. It was not to be taken for granted; after all, we as researchers presented ourselves to the council as having something to offer. Thus, we had to show that what we were offering was of some value. Unpacking how this research engagement was negotiated offers a window into the governance of research, as much as the governance processes within this all-Aboriginal council and their engagement with the NT Government over the Creek Camp issue.

When we approached the ACGC in 2004 to ascertain their interest in having us, as researchers, working with them on governance issues, it coincided with the arrival of a new Chief Executive Officer (CEO), who was about to begin a three year tenure. This fortunate timing meant that he was open to our involvement and not at all protective about sharing his new understandings of the current council situation. Ironically, although his initial and ongoing support was in many ways crucial to the development of our research project, his conservative perspective concerning the maintenance of the status quo of the Creek Camp could also, arguably, be perceived as constraining the uptake of the research findings. Yet, as will be examined, the role of the CEO in relation to this issue was only one element in a complex multi-sited government rationality (a concept borrowed from Foucault, discussed below).

As I will elucidate, the value of long term research in one place, allowing ongoing reflection on the research, also enables exploration of the ways in which policy unfolds as truth and tends to reaffirm the status quo. Thus, as this paper revisits the Creek Camp issue, it can continue to explore the dynamics of NT Government agency in terms of a governmental rationality and the ways in which this plays out in policy practice. In my attempt to answer the question ‘what is “policy” and where is it located?’ I have drawn inspiration from Foucault’s (1991) concept of ‘governmentality’ (or government rationality) and more latterly Rose’s (1999) interrogation of this concept. My perhaps simplistic reading of the governmentality concept understands it as a concern with the practices of governing, rather than the structures or institutions of government. How these practices gain legitimation and become mobilised, as they define the parameters of possible conduct and how the truths about these parameters are developed and circulated as discourse, drive a governmentality approach. In this reading, policy is understood as a core device or instrument of the governing rationality. Realising the intimate relationship between knowledge construction and power also permeates this approach to interrogating the governing process.

I suggest in this chapter that if we, as researchers, cannot change the status quo we can at least expose the opaque structural relations of power and the historical legacies that express themselves among the Aboriginal councillors in their ambivalence and division over the future of the Creek Camp. However, before discussing this issue, I will briefly overview the research findings.