Rather than understanding Indigenous community governance in the central Peninsula in terms of incorporated organisations and an informal ‘Aboriginal domain’, both located within a wider ‘governance environment’, it can be best understood in terms of a complex regional field. Within this field, what Hunt and D. Smith (2006a: 76) have identified as ‘four layers or dimensions of governance’— individual, entity, inter-relationships and ‘environment’—can all be recognised. But disentangling these ‘layers’ in this manner involves the reification of aspects of a complex field, which can lead to both analytic and practical complications.

One important problem inherent in the notion of a surrounding governance environment is that it masks the substantial interweaving of the ‘Aboriginal’ and the ‘mainstream’, and the intercultural character of Indigenous community governance. This is analytically inaccurate—as the concept of the field of governance makes clear, ‘outside’ agencies and their interventions are very much a constitutive aspect of such fields. But any masking of this social, cultural and political interweaving also limits possibilities of an effective rapprochement between the various interests—Aboriginal and otherwise—at play in such fields.