Table of Contents
- Introduction
- A colonial history?
- The Yolngu ‘world’
- Laynha as an intercultural zone
- Power, accountability and value
- Two contrasting conceptualisations of Laynha as an organisation
- Meeting the neo-assimilationist challenge, 2005–07
- Conclusion: towards a negotiated and empowering system of governance in the intercultural space
- Acknowledgements
- References
Originally, I set out to understand why the state has always seemed to be the enemy of ‘people who move around’ … Efforts to permanently settle these mobile peoples … seemed to be a perennial state project—perennial, in part, because it so seldom succeeded (Scott 1998:1).
The Laynhapuy Homelands Association Incorporated (Laynha for short) is an Indigenous organisation that was incorporated under the Northern Territory’s (NT) Associations Incorporation Act 1963 in 1984.[1] Its headquarters are at Yirrkala in northeast Arnhem Land, from where it acts as the resource centre for a group of nearly 20 surrounding outstations or homeland settlements across a region of some 6500km2 in extent.[2] Yirrkala and the Laynha homelands are in the most easterly area of the Yolngu-speaking bloc (see Fig. 5.1), where varieties of Yolngu-matha are still the first languages of close to 100 per cent of the Aboriginal population.[3] The 2006 Census recorded just under 6300 Indigenous people in discrete Indigenous communities in the Yolngu region of northeast Arnhem Land, and Laynha itself services a fluctuating population of between 600 and 800 people. The majority of the Laynha homeland settlements are on or near the coast. Inland, they tend to be near large rivers. They vary from large, permanently occupied settlements of well over 100 people to those that are only intermittently occupied and/or have small populations (fewer than 20 people). Several are inaccessible by road during the wet season, and all are inaccessible at the height of a ‘big’ wet. The most distant homelands are about three hours’ drive from Yirrkala (during the dry). They mostly have all-year airstrips, although one or two do not.
Over the years since its incorporation, Laynha has become increasingly dependent on government—largely Commonwealth Government—grant funding. In 2006, some 87 per cent of its income was derived from government grants and one-quarter of its income from the Community Development Employment Projects (CDEP) program alone (including CDEP wages and associated costs) (Tallegalla Consultants 2006). Grant funding fuels its core service delivery functions of housing (building and maintenance), infrastructure and health, and its large CDEP program of around 300 participants. The Yirralka Rangers program, with over 40 rangers employed on CDEP wages, is also part of the organisation. It operates in the Laynhapuy Indigenous Protected Area (IPA) which was officially established in 2006 after several years of preparatory planning (Fig. 5.2). Until kava importation was summarily banned in June 2007 by government fiat, Laynha’s major source of discretionary income was kava wholesaling and distribution.[4] It also derived some income from civil works contracts such as road grading undertaken by its operations department, and from a small proportion of the royalty equivalents from the Alcan (now Rio Tinto) bauxite mining operation on the Gove Peninsula near Yirrkala. The separately incorporated air service, Layhna Air (or more formally Balamumu Mungurru Aviation Pty Ltd), runs a break-even charter service between Gove airport and the Laynha homelands.
But Laynha did not start out that way. Its origins were in the Yolngu homelands movement of the 1970s, and it is necessary to understand these origins in order to understand certain characteristics of the contemporary organisation. The title of this chapter alludes to its major structuring theme: who ‘owns’ the organisation—its Yolngu members or its government paymasters? It will be argued that until recently it was not necessary for Yolngu to confront this question directly, and this had certain consequences for the way in which the governance of the organisation developed over the years.
There is currently abroad a mythical but influential view (epitomised in Hughes 2007) of ‘homelands’ people as passive victims of the misguided and failed policies of past governments. It is arguably true that Yolngu and other Indigenous Australians have been victimised through state neglect, but this does not automatically make them victims in any simple way. On the contrary, the Yolngu of the Laynha homelands have been able to maintain and elaborate a locally distinct domain of action and value precisely because the state’s gaze was intermittent and largely directed elsewhere. Among those values are ones relating to governance—values that Yolngu bring with them into the organisation as members of its board and its staff.
[1] This Act was superceded in 2004 by a new Associations Act (NT). Laynha is now incorporated under the new Act.
[2] The terms ‘outstation’ and ‘homeland’, which are interchangeable in this context, are both problematic for different reasons. ‘Outstation’ carries the connotation that such places are peripheral to neighbouring larger settlements, which does not reflect the perspective of their inhabitants. ‘Homeland’ has become problematic because of a recent book (Hughes 2007) that deliberately conflates the meaning of this term in the Australian context with its meaning in the South African context, to support the spurious argument that Australian ‘separatism’ (to use the author’s terminology) is analogous to the former apartheid regime in South Africa. The area given is the estimated extent of the Laynhapuy Indigenous Protected Area, the boundaries of which are not precisely coterminous with those of the Laynha service area (see Fig. 5.2).
[3] Yolngu is the term for (Aboriginal) person in the majority of Yolngu-matha dialects. Since the 1970s, it has become the most commonly used term to refer to the Yolngu-speaking peoples as a whole, but did not originally have that meaning. In the earlier anthropological literature the most well known alternatives are Murngin (Warner 1958), Wulamba (Berndt 1951, 1952, 1962) and Miwuyt (Shapiro 1981). The Yolngu-speaking people of northeast Arnhem Land are one of the most intensively studied Aboriginal societies in Australia. Roughly in chronological order according to when the authors undertook their fieldwork, major studies include: Warner (1958), Thomson (1949, 2006), Berndt (1951, 1952, 1962), Shapiro (1981), Peterson (1986), Williams (1986, 1987), Reid (1983), H. Morphy (1984, 1991, 2007), Keen (1994, 2003) and Macgowan (2007). The complex, asymmetrical Yolngu kinship system was the subject of the ‘Murngin controversy’ that occupied much space in anthropological journals in the 1960s (see Barnes 1967; Maddock 1970).
[4] The term ‘discretionary’ is applied here to income derived from other than government grant funding. This is the only portion of the organisation’s funds that it is at liberty to spend or distribute entirely according to its members’ priorities.