In late 2005, the then Minister for Indigenous Affairs, Amanda Vanstone, characterised small homelands communities as ‘cultural museums’ (Vanstone 2005). This trope designates Indigenous worlds as static repositories—they cannot, in this view, be a valid field of social action and value. In such a view, the Laynha homelands are merely a particular kind of (remote, expensive, ‘dysfunctional’) service population encompassed within the state, and Laynha is their service provider. If the ongoing existence of the ‘other culture’ as a system of action and value is denied, then so too, by definition, is the intercultural nature of Indigenous organisations. In Fig. 5.6, then, Laynha is shown as fully incorporated in a state system that is arranged in a vertical hierarchy.

The Howard Government did not have a coherent view of remote homelands as functioning communities, and indeed, as Fig. 5.7 suggests, it did not have a coherent view of organisations like Laynha. Following the demise of ATSIC, funding for programs had been increasingly provided by a series of mainstream departmental silos; Yolngu individuals were perceived as partible—as consumers of health care, CDEP participants, units requiring housing, and so on. Laynha is also partible, viewed by one government department as an Indigenous Housing Organisation, by another as a CDEP provider under contract, by another as a local heath service provider, and by yet another as the management support for an IPA. This is not a particularly unusual circumstance in the government machinery of large nation-states like Australia. Settler Australian citizens are accustomed to such partibility and compartmentalisation, viewing them as ‘normal’ (if sometimes regrettable) features of governance arrangements. The failure to recognise the Yolngu ‘world’ as an encapsulated social field, and the failure to see that Laynha is a complex organisation with multiple functions that interrelate to support its material base, is what is at issue here.^[28]

Theoretically, in such a model accountability goes both ways, but in practice there is a great deal of upward accountability and very little in the other direction. This is a function of the power relations that obtain between the small, local, funding-dependent organisation and the national state as paymaster. Upward accountability is especially burdensome because of the fractured way in which funding is delivered. Because government has no coherent overview of the local organisation, it fails to acknowledge the level of the burdens that it imposes, and fails to understand, or is indifferent to, the consequences for the organisation of abrupt and unsignalled changes in policy.^[29]

Because government has no clear view of the Yolngu system and of accountability structures within that system, and no clear view of the organisation as an intercultural institution where different systems of accountability have to be reconciled, it also has no clear view of the burdens of downward accountability that the organisation sustains with respect to its constituency. When ‘training’ for governance is provided to Yolngu board members it is mostly about helping them to be upwardly accountable within the framework of government requirements (F. Morphy 2007c). To government, a ‘good’ organisation is a compliant organisation that delivers programs according to government guidelines on budget and on time. To the extent that the intercultural nature of the organisation is recognised at all, it is perceived as a problem, as bits of ‘museum culture’ that keep getting in the way of ‘good’ governance.

The first point of contrast between the Yolngu view and that of the government and its agencies, a point not captured in Fig. 5.7, is that for the Yolngu, Laynha has a history, and it is part of their history. It has been a constant in their institutional landscape for over 20 years.^[30] In the years of ‘self-determination’, Laynha was felt to be unambiguously a Yolngu organisation. As well as having a Yolngu council, there was a tradition of having a Yolngu manager. There was usually a non-Yolngu second-in-command who managed day-to-day business and also the interface with funding agencies. In Fig. 5.7, the state is represented as a black box to reflect the general level of Laynha members’ knowledge about and interest in the sources of Laynha funding. The ‘upwards accountability’ arrow is much less prominent than in Fig. 5.6, and originates in an underspecified zone of the oval representing the organisation, signalling that the Yolngu membership, including the council members, did not have a clear view of the burden of accountability demanded by the state, nor of the mechanisms of accountability.

In the post ATSIC period, the membership of the organisation, including its council, continued to hold the view of Laynha as ‘their’ organisation, even as the policy ground began to shift under their feet. This is represented in Fig. 5.7 by the lack of overlap between the state and Laynha. The question is, why had they not noticed or understood the implications of ‘grant creep’, whereby Laynha now depended for its continuing existence on the state?

By and large in this period, particularly in the days of ATSIC, government was broadly supportive of the aims of organisations like Laynha, and the homelands communities that they represented and serviced. The membership could take for granted the continuing existence of their homelands, Laynha, and CDEP, and they did. One might think at first glance that in its governance arrangements Laynha achieved a kind of cultural match in this period. It complied with the conditions of its funding to the extent that it did not attract unfavourable attention to itself in the relatively benign wider governance environment. It grew and developed in a relatively organic way, with response to contingencies rather than long-term planning as the main driver of change. It did not have a linear hierarchy of management or tightly demarcated areas of responsibility (with certain exceptions—health and Laynha Air were clearly separated from the rest of the functions of the organisation), and the decision-making processes of the council (and later the board) were characterised by fluidity and open-endedness. These characteristics are represented in Fig. 5.7 by a set of overlapping ovals (the board, and the Yolngu and non-Yolngu staff of the organisation) that are in no clear structural relationship to one another with respect to the governance of the organisation. In one sense, this is not surprising, because they do not represent its governance structure per se, but rather the Yolngu ‘two worlds’ view of Laynha as an intercultural space. Laynha is conceptualised as a zone between the two ‘worlds’, with different sets of actors positioned along a continuum of inclusion and exclusion. The board, and the Yolngu staff members overlap with the Yolngu ‘world’ (and with each other), and the non-Yolngu staff sit between the periphery of that world and the state.

In such a conceptualisation there is an implicit general principle of governance: it is the role of Yolngu to manage relations with the Yolngu world and the role of non-Yolngu staff to manage relations with the state, for the benefit of Yolngu. While the state holds a partible view of the organisation’s functions, the Yolngu view is holistic. Yolngu living on the homelands do not have a clear appreciation of funding streams and their associated conditions and constraints. In the past, Laynha has frequently used its income from kava to supplement government programs, for instance by providing assistance to members to act as escorts for sick relatives, and by contributions to the funding of capital projects such as the building of the ranger station at Yilpara. It has also initiated its own projects, such as building and equipping offices on the homelands. The power and water systems on the homelands have also been substantially funded from kava income. Laynha’s contributions from kava income to the expenses of funerals and other ceremonies have had a significant impact on the trajectory of Yolngu ceremonial life, and on the process of intergenerational cultural transmission.^[31] Such aspects of the organisation’s role are not given any kind of official recognition by the state.

In 2005, at the beginning of the research period, the differences between these two conceptualisations of the organisation were taking their toll on the governance of the organisation and on the morale of its staff. Council was not truly in control. The locus of power and decision-making was with certain non-Yolngu members of staff who mediated the flow of information between the organisation and its members (as represented by the council), and between the organisation and the state. Other non-Yolngu staff members were uneasy about the lack of hierarchy and the lack of defined areas of delegated responsibility, and the ad hoc nature of much decision-making. There were chronic points of tension between non-Yolngu staff and both Yolngu staff and members—over the ‘proper’ use of Laynha vehicles and perceived inequities in the distribution of staff time and Laynha resources, to name but two. It was an organisation not fully attuned to the wider governance environment and how its role was viewed in that environment, and it was ill-prepared for the neo-assimilationist turn in government policy.