How we see governance makes a difference. As the commentators above suggest, from colonial settlement through to today, Indigenous governance has often seemed invisible, unknowable, and underdeveloped to non-Indigenous Australians. It has been treated as a kind of ‘gubernare nullius’,^[2] a tabula rasa onto which could be written the language, norms and institutions of western liberal statecraft and control.

In Seeing Like a State, James Scott (1998: 3) argues that efforts to permanently settle highly mobile sub-populations like nomads, gypsies, vagrants, and hunter-gatherers has been a perennial project of the modern state, underwritten by strategies to standardise and simplify ‘what was a social hieroglyph into a legible and administratively more convenient format’. In Australia, British colonists similarly went to considerable lengths to make the alien social and institutional ‘hieroglyph’ of Indigenous governance and leadership legible to themselves.

In the early days of the colony, Indigenous groups were perceived to be acephalous, lawless and unruly. Metal ‘kingplates’ and ‘queenplates’ were bestowed on favoured elders—hung around their necks to make them visible to the British authorities. People were often forcibly relocated from their lands and centralised into artificial communities where ‘councils of elders’, ‘chiefs’, ‘kings’ and ‘queens’, ‘princes’ and ‘headmen’ were created by missionaries and government reserve managers as part of an arsenal of techniques to govern and immobilise people. This naming of Indigenous governance was about state surveillance and control.

Today, western democratic concepts, structures and governance institutions continue to be imposed through such devices as legislative and policy frameworks that require the incorporation of social groups into organisations; the ordering concepts of democratic elections and voting systems; the asserted primacy of individual citizenship over collective rights; and via the statutory naming of newly-created categories of people on whom are bestowed specified decision-making rights, responsibilities and authority by the state.

The allocated mark of condoned authority is still used by governments. There are now legal categories of people—such as ‘traditional owners’, ‘authorised claimants’ and ‘native title holders’— who have to be registered and certified, and ‘councillors’, ‘chairpersons’, ‘bodies corporate’ and ‘governing boards’ who are required to operate under legal and constitutional guidelines.^[3]

Government’s own ‘culture of governance’ in Indigenous affairs is based on institutionalised forms of policy, program and grant funding that are supported by the tools of financial compliance and accountability, service delivery outcomes, administrative review, and technical audits. These tools are activated by the ever-changing face of government departments, agencies and committees, which work to defend their relative influence, functional ‘territories’ and budgetary power.

Aligned to departmental territories are vast bureaucratic networks where influential senior officers formulate policy frameworks and devise implementation strategies for government consideration. In doing so, they create their own internal language for the operation of Indigenous affairs.^[4]

For most public servants, the face of Indigenous governance is incorporated community organisations, of which there are an estimated 5000 across Australia. Even in the most well-intentioned policy approaches, the governance of Indigenous organisations is invariably made subservient and overwhelmed by the workload of mundane bureaucratic procedures and financial reporting that they are required to undertake.

As public servants are increasingly centralised and work behind the key-coded locked doors of departmental offices, they become further distanced from the practical realities of Indigenous community governance. The overall effect has been a growing field-based disengagement of bureaucrats from Indigenous communities, and a widening misalignment between government policy and departmental practice.

For Indigenous communities and their organisations, the state does not exist ‘up there’, at a disembodied remove from them. The sovereign governing power of the state is plain for Indigenous people to see on a daily basis. They experience it in the form of visiting public servants, the ever-changing rules of service delivery and funding, the deluge of information gathering by governments, and the burdensome routine of meetings and consultations.

In the local interaction between the state and Indigenous people, there are mutual blind spots where government policy rationales and decision-making processes are just as opaque and confounding to Indigenous people, as Indigenous governance processes and institutions are to governments and their officers.

But amongst the spaces of mutual unintelligibility of each other’s ‘social hieroglyphs’ (cf. Scott 1998), some individual government field officers do make the room to develop personal relationships of trust with leaders and organisations, and so are better able to negotiate with them, provide credible advice, and undertake community development work. Similarly, some Indigenous leaders and organisations look for room to build relationships with particular public servants and, through them negotiate the conditions under which they can better exercise their own authority, make decisions and mobilise action. They do so, however, in an environment of seemingly constant policy change and containment by the state. In the process they occasionally transform aspects of their own governance cultures, and subvert the techniques and institutions by which the state seeks to govern their culture and deny their self-governance.

This institutional interplay between ‘cultures of governance’ and the state’s goal of ‘governing Indigenous culture’ is fully evident in the West Arnhem Land process of regionalising local government.