4. Cultures of governance and the governance of culture: transforming and containing Indigenous institutions in West Arnhem Land

In the 40 years since the 1967 referendum^[1] in Australia, governments have developed legislation, policies, and a multitude of institutional mechanisms in their attempts to govern the Indigenous population and address its entrenched socioeconomic disadvantage. These interventions into Indigenous lives by the state have been primarily predicated on western values, institutions and beliefs about what constitutes ‘good governance’ and, accordingly, what Indigenous Australians should do to develop it.

Implicit in these government strategies has been a deep-seated lack of confidence in Indigenous ‘culture’ itself, exacerbated by contradictory underlying assumptions. On the one hand, the hope of policy makers is that if they can only unlock the ‘da Vinci Code’ of Indigenous culture they will somehow be able to design more ‘culturally appropriate’ government programs and service delivery, thereby more effectively securing government policy objectives. On the other hand, Indigenous culture is often pathologised by politicians, bureaucrats, the public, and the media. It is viewed as a form of inherited virus that will inevitably contaminate and undermine western standards of ‘good governance’. So, ‘Acts of Parliament’ and the often unilateral imposition of the state’s sovereign powers are deemed to be necessary to ‘protect’ Indigenous people from the governance disabilities of their own culture. At such times, the Australian state reasserts its own ‘culture of governance’—that is, the set of shared values, government institutions, powers, laws, modes of behaviour and norms—in an attempt to direct and mould Indigenous cultures and their systems of governance into its own democratic likeness.

This chapter poses two symbiotic concepts—the ‘governance of culture’ and ‘cultures of governance’—as tools to analyse the nature of the tangled engagement between contemporary Indigenous and non-Indigenous ‘cultures of governance’ in Australia. Points of interaction focus on the institutional and practice level of governments, and Indigenous communities, their leaders and organisations.

Institutions are the glue of governance; they are the ‘rules of the game’, the formal and informal ways in which things get done. As such, institutions are pre-eminently about power and who gets to exercise it. In the intercultural context of post-colonial governance in Australia, institutions represent a rich site of visible interaction and contestation between the Australian state and Indigenous peoples.

Employing these two concepts, this chapter first examines how the Australian state attempts, through its policy, statutory and bureaucratic institutions, to govern contemporary Indigenous cultures and their different systems of governance. The same concepts are then used to explore the ways in which Indigenous people use their culturally-based institutions to buffer and reassert the legitimacy of their governance arrangements and decision-making authority. In doing so, Indigenous governance institutions are being re-imagined, recreated, transformed and constrained—both from within and without. But the institutions of the Australian state, in the arena of policy and implementation, are also being affected. Both sets of mutual transformation and containment are investigated.

The analysis focuses specifically on a case study conducted over the last five years in West Arnhem Land. There, Indigenous people (referred to as Bininj in the local Kunwinjku language) and the Northern Territory (NT) Government have been involved in planning the establishment of a regionalised form of local government, for the purposes of delivering essential municipal services and infrastructure to the region as a whole. Some of the Bininj leaders involved are relatives of families with whom I worked over 25 years ago when employed by the Northern Land Council to map land-tenure systems in West Arnhem Land.

In the course of working towards their goal of a strong regional organisation, several Bininj community organisations and their elected leaders have attempted to build elements of a new ‘culture of governance’. To do so, they have used a range of techniques and tools to design innovative governance institutions and structures, and to imbue them with practical capability and legitimacy.

In this chapter I examine the design techniques and their points of intersection with government processes, and consider the implications for both the Bininj and government parties. Not all the initiatives and solutions are seen as legitimate or effective by the state, or by some Indigenous community members. How the disjunctions between the two cultures of governance are contested and negotiated forms a large part of the analysis. Whether the process has led to the desired (and different) practical outcomes sought by the Indigenous and non-Indigenous (or Balanda in Kunwinjku language) participants involved, and whether there has been any growth in their mutual comprehension are considered by way of conclusion.