In the late 1980s and early 1990s, two distinct groups of Kaanju people sought to establish ‘outstations’ on their homelands, and to regain control of their country through land claims. The first of these groups was centred on an extended family^[8] whose forebears’ clan country lay just to the north of Coen, around Birthday Mountain (Watharra).^[9] The second group, which included a number of closely related members of several extended families, sought to re-occupy country on the upper Wenlock River.

For this latter group, the desire to return to country was complicated by the character of mainstream land tenure on their homelands. The principal ‘boss’ of this group in the 1980s, M_, a Kaanju woman then in her forties, had a particular connection to a stretch of the Wenlock River focused on the Lightning Story-Place, Malantachi. However, this Story-Place, along with much of M_’s father’s country (with which she primarily identified), was occupied by an ‘experimental farm’ run by Queensland’s Department of Primary Industries.^[10] The only available land for the establishment of an outstation lay further upstream, close to the Frill-Neck Lizard Story-Place called Chuulangun (Dusty Lagoon), on the upper Wenlock River just inside the Deed of Grant in Trust (DOGIT) lands of the Lockhart River Aboriginal community.

In order to establish the Wenlock River outstation, M_ needed the support of other Kaanju people with closer ties to the country around Chuulangun. In part, this support was needed to gain the formal permission of Lockhart River Council to establish the outstation within the DOGIT. But M_’s primary consideration appears to have been the ‘informal’ permission she required, in accordance with local Aboriginal Law, to undertake the establishment of an outstation on an area somewhat removed from her father’s principal country. To this end, she sought the support of two senior Kaanju men, T_ (her cousin) and S_ (her classificatory uncle). Both of these men had close connections in the vicinity of Chuulangun. T_’s principal ties were to the nearby Eagle-Hawk Story-Place called Nantanchi, and S_’s connections centred on the ‘Tommy-Round Head Lizard’ Story-Place at Mula at the headwaters of the Pascoe River. In partnership with these two senior Kaanju men, M_ was able to develop the Wenlock River outstation with funds administered by an Aboriginal corporation in Coen, whilst simultaneously seeking support for regaining control of her own country around Malantachi, where she also hoped to establish a camp.

At this early stage in the development of the outstation, the complex interplay between ‘informal’ aspects of governance within the Aboriginal domain and ‘formal’ Aboriginal organisations and councils was already apparent. On the one hand, M_’s establishment of the outstation at Chuulangun depended upon a negotiation of particular interests in Kaanju country distributed among a set of senior men and women (including T_ and S_, as well as M_ herself). These more localised interests together coalesced into a wider ‘countryman’ (Chase 1980) grouping of Kaanju people from the upper Wenlock and Pascoe river systems, who jointly re-established and utilised the Wenlock outstation camp.

But these localised and countryman identities—key aspects of governance within the Aboriginal domain—articulated with more formal aspects of the region’s field of governance. These more formal aspects of governance included the Lockhart River Aboriginal Shire Council, whose permission was needed to allow the establishment of the outstation on the DOGIT. They also included several Aboriginal corporations based in Coen,^[11] where M_ and T_ both lived.

Importantly, the manner in which Kaanju governance was articulated in the formal governance arrangements at Coen and Lockhart River varied both in scale and style from the manner in which Kaanju governance was enacted within the Aboriginal domain. In Coen, for example, Kaanju people were formally represented as members of two discrete groups—the ‘Northern Kaanju’ (who included M_ and the other Kaanju people from the Wenlock and Pascoe rivers) and the ‘Southern Kaanju’, a term taken to identify Kaanju people from the more southerly Archer River system, but which in practice was near-synonymous with the Coen-based Kaanju family from Watharra (Birthday Mountain).

The principal cause of the emergence of this formal ‘Northern’ and ‘Southern Kaanju’ distinction seems to have been the development of a land claim (under Queensland’s Aboriginal Land Act 1991) over the Birthday Mountain area. In developing this claim, C_, the senior member of the Wathara-associated family group, sought to limit the claimant group to his own ‘clan’ or ‘family’. As the claim process developed, however, the claimant group was broadened to include all ‘Southern Kaanju’ families. But the claim continued to exclude the ‘Northern Kaanju’ group, an exclusion based on linguistic and social distinctions between Kaanju people from the Archer River and the Wenlock and Pascoe river areas.

Sutton (1996) has outlined the expansion of the Birthday Mountain claimant group, an event whose concern with social scale in relation to traditional ownership is of relevance to understanding the field of governance in the central Peninsula:

Comparable forms of contestation by ‘groups’ of various scales has occurred in relation to ‘Northern Kaanju’ country, although—as I argue below—the language of ‘groups’ may not be the best way to apprehend the articulation of differing interests in such cases.

At the same time that the ‘Southern Kaanju’ group was engaged in the Birthday Mountain land claim, the newly formed Coen Regional Aboriginal Corporation (CRAC) reserved places for ‘Northern Kaanju’ and ‘Southern Kaanju’ representatives on its Board of Directors, alongside representatives of several other Coen-based ‘tribes’ and a set of people whose primary identity was as a ‘town mob’ (Smith 2000b). But despite the obvious attempt by CRAC to produce a ‘culturally appropriate’ form of representation—by way of reserved places for the region’s various ‘tribal’ factions—there was a clear difference apparent between the notion of representation that underlay the development of the CRAC board (that a senior man or woman could speak for an amalgamated ‘tribal’ group) and the carefully negotiated politics of ‘speaking for country’ apparent between M_ and other senior Kaanju people. Further, the reified ‘Northern’ and ‘Southern Kaanju’ ‘tribal’ groups—presumed by CRAC to exist as principal sociopolitical conglomerations within regional Aboriginal governance—were also at odds with a more localised emphasis on country within the region’s Aboriginal domain. Nonetheless, rather than a distinction between ‘Aboriginal’ and ‘formal’ governance arrangements, the late 1980s and early 1990s instead saw ongoing attempts at an accommodation between informal Aboriginal values and processes, and formal representation within CRAC.^[12] In this way, reified constructs like the ‘Northern Kaanju’ identity acted as place-holders for M_ and her relations’ engagements with outsiders, whilst the flow of resources that enabled the development of the Wenlock River outstation reinforced the reproduction of a conjoint ‘countryman’ group of Kaanju people with shared interests in the Wenlock River outstation and surrounding areas of Kaanju country.