This model suggests that there is a considerable gap in understanding between Indigenous and non-Indigenous sectors about leadership and governance, and that this gap generates political contestation over power and authority in post-colonial Australian society. Some argue that today, delineating culturally distinct governance structures and supporting distinctly Indigenous forms of leadership is no longer relevant or possible and that an intercultural approach is required (Holcombe 2004; Martin 2003; Merlan 1998). While Aboriginal groups at Port Keats have seen over their contact history that their attempts to engage in an ‘intercultural’ domain are extremely problematic, they have initiated several innovative attempts to transform and insert their culturally-based model of leadership into their interactions with the Australian state. However, with limited legal or policy recognition of their own governance systems and leadership networks, Indigenous leaders at Wadeye remain firmly embedded within an Indigenous ‘domain’.

Sinclair (2007: 128) argues that leadership identity is created within ‘a negotiated process that takes place within a politically charged organisational and social space’. Further, she argues that people face pressures in mainstream society to produce the ‘right’ leadership identity (ibid. 131). Feel for the Indigenous leader then, who has to operate and engage in both ‘traditional’ and mainstream domains. There are high expectations to deliver outcomes within the kind of group-orientated Indigenous framework as described in this chapter; and the state and its implicit policy goal to create the ‘right’ types of Indigenous leadership has created a negative environment over a long period. It is not surprising therefore that despite recent positive events^[24] the current restlessness of youth at Port Keats underlies another perspective from some locals. That is, that whilst their leaders lead at home, beyond the reserve boundary they are, as one old Murrinh-patha man said in the 1970s, ‘makardu’, a nobody, with limited power and authority (see Fr J. Leary cited in McCormack 2006).