Table of Contents
- A brief regional, social and historical background
- Theory, methods and caveats
- A potted history of BAC’s organisational evolution
- Governance challenges
- Adaptively managing governance tensions
- Recent external threats
- Governance for difference: analytic explication
- A final reflection
- Acknowledgements
- References
This chapter focuses on the organisational history and governance development of the Bawinanga Aboriginal Corporation (BAC) from its establishment in 1979 until late 2007. BAC is located in the Aboriginal township of Maningrida in north-central Arnhem Land in the Northern Territory (NT). It was incorporated under the Commonwealth Aboriginal Councils and Associations Act 1976 as an outstations resource organisation. Its original objects were to provide services to its members, most of whom resided at small dispersed outstation communities in the Maningrida hinterland of around 10,000km2. BAC, however, has always been more than just a resource agency for outstations. From its formation it has also administered a significant Aboriginal arts centre, Maningrida Arts and Culture (MAC), and so has provided services to artists both at outstations and at Maningrida. Even before its formal incorporation, key Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal personnel subsequently associated with BAC were engaged in advocating for land rights, outstation development and ultimately regional Aboriginal self-determination. BAC has always been a progressive organisation advocating for appropriate forms of development for its membership.
BAC’s organisational life path can be seen in three phases. The first, which dates from the early 1970s to 1989, is as an outstation resource agency (ORA) and Aboriginal arts centre. The second, from 1989, saw the transformation of BAC as it evolved into a major Community Development Employment Projects (CDEP) organisation. The start of the third phase, which saw BAC expand into a regional development agency, is more difficult to precisely demarcate. This phase probably dates from 1996, when BAC established its first Maningrida-based business and was subsequently recognised by the Australian Government as an organisation with sufficient capacity to administer major programs.
The Maningrida region is culturally heterogeneous and administratively complex. Maningrida was established as a government settlement some 50 years ago, during an era when the assimilation of Aboriginal people into mainstream Australian society was official colonial settler state policy. From 1957, there were political tensions between local Aboriginal land owners and other Aboriginal groups; and between Aboriginal people and white administrators operating with very different social norms and notions of accountability, and with highly differentiated political power. While BAC was established in the immediate post-colonial period, when self-determination became official government policy, it has had to operate in a complex intercultural environment. While ostensibly BAC has a key role brokering on behalf of its membership with the Australian state, it also faces the complex challenge of mediating the diverse interests of its membership. These diverse Aboriginal interests are dynamic, transforming, and difficult to unambiguously demarcate—they are influenced by a complex system of land ownership, language (or multi-language), personal and group identity, shifting locational and family affiliations, and associated local political alliances.
The principal aim of this chapter is to explain how BAC has managed to effectively and simultaneously manage governance tensions between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal social norms and within its Aboriginal membership. This explanation is provided by tracing BAC’s organisational history and its transformative, intercultural form of governance. The analytic explication seeks to identify some of the factors that have been critical to the governance and development success of BAC in effectively managing the tensions between western market-based and Indigenous kin-based social norms.
While history matters greatly in the BAC story, the focus here is primarily on the years since 1999. This is the time when formal governance emerged as a growing organisational issue. It is also a period in which the broader national Indigenous affairs environment has undergone some major transformations, with the abolition of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC) in 2004 and the sudden declaration of the NT National Emergency Response in June 2007. These recent events provide an interesting book-ending of the nearly 30 year organisational existence of BAC.
The corporation was established to meet the emerging needs of the Maningrida region’s growing outstations population. Today, those same needs exist, but the policy proposals announced in 2007 to abolish the two programs that have provided core funding to BAC by 30 June 2008 placed its future at considerable risk. This is a timely juncture to consider the vulnerability of a structurally dependent Aboriginal organisation (in what Rowse [2002] has termed ‘the Indigenous sector’) to the vagaries of policy change, irrespective of impressive performance, robust governance or the aspirations of membership. This in turn raises broader questions about the asymmetry of power relations in Australian society, the recent intolerance of the neoliberal state to cultural difference, and the extent that community governance and advocacy really matter for vulnerable Indigenous organisations.
The governance of Indigenous discrete communities is significantly influenced by their particular colonial histories and subsequent decolonisation experiences. The history of the Maningrida region needs some explication if we are to understand the background and operations of BAC. There is quite a significant literature about this region with key publications including Hiatt (1965), Meehan (1982), Altman (1987) and Gurmanamana, Hiatt and McKenzie (2002).
The Maningrida region is loosely demarcated by a region bounded by the Liverpool River to the west, the Glyde River to the east and the Arnhem Land escarpment to the south. It is estimated to cover 10,000km2 of tropical savanna. The regional population estimated in the 2006 Census is about 3,000, 162 being non-Aboriginal.[1] The region is extraordinarily linguistically diverse, with at least 10 distinct Aboriginal languages still in common usage in the region, besides Aboriginal English. And regional diversity is not just limited to languages. There are also variations evident in local and social organisation, religion and ritual, customary economies, art styles, and so on.
The region is extremely remote, even by Australian standards, located 500km east of Darwin and with only seasonal overland access. It is for this reason in part that it was colonised by the Australian state relatively late (Altman and Hinkson 2007). The region is in the middle of the vast Arnhem Land Aboriginal Reserve with entry limited by the Aboriginals Ordinance No. 9 (Cth) from 1918 onwards. A trading post was established in Maningrida in 1949–50 by the Native Affairs Branch of the NT Administration—to repatriate and keep Aboriginal people from the region out of Darwin—but then abandoned. In 1957, a government settlement was established at Maningrida, and only in 1963 was a bush track ‘blazed’ between Oenpelli (also known as Gunbalanya) and Maningrida by staff of the now renamed Welfare Branch of the NT Administration.[2] Some people from outlying inland areas only moved to Maningrida at that time.
Significant effort and public funding was expended on the development of Maningrida from 1957. Under the policy framework of assimilation, the aim was to centralise, sedentarise and ‘civilise’ or Europeanise Aboriginal people in the region, a state project that proved extremely costly and unsuccessful, and which was abandoned in 1972. This failure of assimilation is an aspect of policy history that current neo-conservative writing conveniently overlooks (see e.g., Hughes 2007). Even before 1972, there was a people’s movement in the region that saw families return to live in small decentralised groups on their traditional lands. In doing so, they were rejecting the particular form of ‘modernisation’ offered at externally-controlled settlements and missions, and moving to live remotely with minimal support from the state. A conservative reading of history erroneously sees this decentralisation as just a product of the permissive and progressive shift to self-determination and land rights from 1972, whereas this social movement preceded these policy developments (Coombs 1974). Decentralisation certainly accelerated as policy settings changed, but it may have happened anyhow owing to the failure of centralisation and the associated social tensions and extreme poverty experienced in Maningrida.
Elements of colonial discourse and associated ambiguities that remain today are notions of decentralisation and the term ‘outstation’, both of which are rarely used by Aboriginal people. Even the more modern terms, such as ‘homeland communities’ and ‘return to country’ (Blanchard 1987), suggest that people left, voluntarily or involuntarily. An outstation conjures up a notion of an outpost from a settlement, whereas in reality, for the residents it is just a locality on the land that they either own or to which they have rights of residence owing to kinship or other customary criteria. Local Aboriginal people just use the place name for an outstation locality as in Fig. 7.1, although when talking to outsiders generally prefer the term ‘outstation’ that I use here.
Maningrida was established because it was an administratively convenient locality near a fresh water spring at the mouth of the Liverpool River, on the land of the Dukurrdji clan. It is now, some 50 years on, a well-established township where the Dukurrdji land owners are greatly outnumbered. Outstations, by contrast, are small and generally located near perennial sources of fresh water and other natural resources. Outstations now have infrastructure and telecommunications that facilitate articulation with the wider administrative world, while maintaining a physical distance from Maningrida. Outstations have changed little in function from the 1970s (see Council for Aboriginal Affairs (CAA) 1976). Today, an outstation locality generally consists of a few houses, a source of year-round reticulated water, a Telstra pay phone, a bush airstrip or helipad, seasonal road access, and sometimes a small school building, usually with a residence for a visiting teacher (see Altman 2006).
[1] The 2006 census enumerated 1904 Aboriginal and 156 non-Aboriginal people at Maningrida; 355 Aboriginal and six non-Aboriginal people at outstations; and a total regional population of 2345, including those who did not state their identity. An estimated resident population for Maningrida and outstations is not provided by the Australian Bureau of Statistics, but it is estimated that Territory-wide there is an undercount of 19 per cent. Assuming that this undercount is consistent across the NT (which it is not), the regional Aboriginal population can be factored up by 1.19 to just fewer than 3000, of which about five per cent is non-Indigenous. It is possible that the undercount was actually greater in the Maningrida region than elsewhere in the NT because of the large hinterland and dispersal of the population to outstations and seasonal camps during the dry, when census enumeration is undertaken.
[2] Before then, Maningrida was supplied by sea.