If Laynha is to survive as an organisation, it is clear that it is going to have to change its roles and functions—yet again. Until the new shire arrangements are in place, it will be difficult to know precisely what the reactive changes will have to be. But organisations like Laynha ought to survive, for two reasons. First, they are a locus of representation for homelands Yolngu in the interface with the encapsulating society. Second, until governments can improve their own capacity, this is the only level in the governance structure of remote Australia where a view of Yolngu society as a complex, functioning whole is consistently maintained. Given the right assistance and support, organisations like Laynha can institute proactive change and become the drivers of sustainable economic development in their constituent communities—in an economy that envisions more options for Yolngu than migration to unskilled or semi-skilled jobs in towns and on mine sites (at best), or unemployment and fringe-camp dwelling (at worst).

The Yolngu people who are the constituents of Laynha, and for whose benefit the organisation exists, bring to their interactions with the Australian settler state a set of local and culturally distinctive ideas about what constitutes ‘good governance’ (F. Morphy 2007c). As an institution of the ‘intercultural space’ or ‘border zone’, Laynha is a site of contestation over value, where Yolngu and settler Australian (represented by state bureaucratic) ideas of ‘good governance’ presently meet head on. This is often an uncomfortable—and sometimes untenable—place to be, for both Yolngu and non-Yolngu staff of the organisation, and it is not conducive to effective governance arrangements. The way in which the settler state has recently sought to exercise power and authority over Aboriginal people and their organisations has exacerbated this struggle over value, and it is wasteful of time and energy, to the extent that ‘good’ governance is compromised—not only the governance of organisations but also of government itself.

Sidestepping the struggle over value—over what constitutes ‘good’ governance—involves two distinct steps. First, both the state and the Yolngu have to come to an understanding that there are two systems of value at play in the intercultural space, and that both systems are complex.

Yolngu principles of governance tend towards the production of fluid, open-ended situations. ‘Boundaries are to cross’ (Williams 1982), in that nearly everything is potentially negotiable and subject to iterative negotiation, so long as correct principles are followed and values adhered to. Although there are ascribed aspects to the creation of leaders, leadership is defined and maintained through process rather than fixed hierarchies of authority. There are separations of duties and responsibilities, as in the roles of wänga-watangu (‘land owner’) and djunggayarr (‘manager’) with respect to clan estates, but there is no absolute separation of powers. Actors are always socially positioned in a particular social context, even when taking mediating stances in a particular interaction (e.g. in dispute settlement). Indeed, not being so positioned is viewed negatively. One of the worst things a person can say of a fellow Yolngu is that they are gurrutumiriw (‘self-interested’, lit. ‘[behaving] without [regard to] kin’). All of these characteristics of the Yolngu polity and its principles of governance are antithetical to the western ideal of ‘good’ governance, with its emphasis on boundedness and closed categories, fixed hierarchies, planning, risk management, and ‘neutral’ professionalism.

The Yolngu system is founded in a view of the world that sees its ancestral underpinnings as eternal and unchanging, but life on the surface, in the everyday, as governed by contingency. In such a world planning happens, but more often than not contingencies will intervene to disrupt the plans. Adaptability, fluidity and creative negotiation are seen as valuable and necessary in such a world, and are valued as integral to planning. A border zone can be viewed as a space of contestation, but also as a space for creativity in which complex contingencies are at play. And some of those contingencies, it seems, include abrupt and un-negotiated shifts in government policy.

In the world view of the governments and bureaucrats of western state systems, on the other hand, contingency is seen as something that can be contained through planning—one can ‘manage risk’ and even plan for contingencies, after all. The illusion of control is achieved by setting up bounded categories and controlling the enclosed space (either physical or conceptual). If that fails, if what is contained threatens to overflow the boundary, one simply shifts the boundary (‘reviews the plan’). Most of the time this is such a ‘normal’ process that it goes unremarked—indeed it is the very stuff of governance. But sometimes the shift is very noticeable, and momentarily the solidity of the boundary disappears. When that happens, one speaks of ‘moving the goalposts’ or, more cerebrally, of a ‘paradigm shift’.

Other evidence of this worldview is seen in the power of silos—government departments that, in effect, create arbitrary boundaries that cut across the continuities of everyday life. In this context it is interesting that the state seems to have difficulty in conceptualising where Indigenous people fit. For many years they were treated as a bounded category, and given their own department. Sometimes they were bundled with ‘culture’ (tourism and the arts), sometimes with the ‘other’ (immigration and ethnic affairs). Today it seems they are partible just like everyone else, although also categorised through the continuing existence of Indigenous-specific programs or sub-offices within the mainstream departments. Added to this is a fundamental lack of clarity over which ‘bits’ of Indigenous affairs are the Commonwealth’s responsibility, and which the NT’s. It is little wonder that many Indigenous people experience the workings of government as impenetrable and essentially contingent and arbitrary in nature.

Compartmentalism may be the only way in which such a large and complex system as a state can be managed. The problem comes with the attribution of value—this may be an effective worldview for its purposes, but is it good in some absolute moral sense and therefore always desirable? If so, it would be an effective view in all circumstances, and it would appear that this is not the case. For example, in such a view a border zone is an anomalous space. Where does it belong? Is it in this container or that one? Or does it somehow complexify the boundary, thus causing a ‘problem’ for governance? These questions and this problem are of the world view’s making, not properties of the boundary zone in itself, for it is possible to take a very different view—the Yolngu view. It is also arguably a very ineffective view at the local level, since it results in very small communities and very small organisations having to bear onerous burdens of accountability, and deal constantly with the consequences of uncoordinated directives and actions from the centre.

Systems of value are just that—systems—not simply collections of ideas thrown together in some random and arbitrary fashion. For the moment, agents of the state seem blind to the Yolngu system, seeing Aboriginal people as having ‘gaps’ in their ‘capabilities’, as half-full vessels that can be filled by somehow pouring western ideas about governance in on top of what is already there (or in the neo-assimilationist version, by tipping out the current contents and replacing them wholesale, holding the vessels under state control until the process is complete and they are fit to govern themselves). Government agencies and trainers in ‘capacity building’—consciously or unconsciously—constantly counterpose settler Australian notions of ‘good governance’ to a ‘deficit’ view of Aboriginal modes of governance.

While this remains the case, they will always meet with resistance or avoidance—whether conscious or unconscious—from Yolngu. For few Yolngu are likely to respond positively to a view which holds that the Yolngu way of doing things and the Yolngu system of value are deficient. The Yolngu system is not going to go away, and people are not vessels that can be emptied of one set of ideas and values and refilled with another, at least not without taking measures that are unacceptable in a liberal democracy.^[33] Moreover, as I have argued elsewhere (F. Morphy 2007c), to the extent that Yolngu have a theory of the value system of the encapsulating society, they do not particularly like what they see. In their view, that is the deficient system.

Having recognised that different systems can and do exist, the next step is to come to an agreement in principle to respect difference rather than viewing it as deficit—and this applies to both parties. Respect involves a suspension of the attribution of positive value to one system but not another. A respectful, informed and honest debate about pragmatics can then follow—what are the local goals in sight, whose goals are they, and what are the most effective (as opposed to ‘best’) strategies to achieve them in a negotiated space between the two ‘worlds’. Where the two systems seem incommensurable, what compromises are possible that will best help to achieve the intended goals? This is, in fact, a debate about cultural match, where both parties—not just the weaker party—are willing to consider making changes to their way of doing things. The willingness and capacity of government is as much at issue here as the ‘capacity’ of Indigenous people and their organisations, for it involves a radical change in perspective, in which Indigenous peoples’ local aspirations and goals take precedence over the state’s impulse to socially engineer Indigenous lives from the centre, ‘for their own good’.