As this monograph is completed, Australia is in the grips of the global financial crisis and an associated global economic recession. These events might encourage, one might imagine, a more critical thinking about the role that mining might play in ensuring sustainable Indigenous development. But there seems to be little evidence of a healthy scepticism about the risks that a development pathway closely linked to mining might entail. The Rudd Government has made Closing the Gap its key Indigenous affairs policy focus, with a halving of the employment gap in the next 10 years one of its key aims (Council of Australian Governments 2008). There is no doubt that a greater engagement of remote-living Indigenous people in mine economies is seen as a central plank of this goal that will require 100 000 new jobs in the next decade.

It is perhaps no coincidence that the Australian Employment Covenant is the brainchild of mining magnate Andrew Forrest. It is also of no surprise—but of some disappointment, as noted at the outset—that Minister Macklin (2008) focuses primarily on how Indigenous people should spend their agreement payments on community benefit without any engagement with the issue of whether such payments are adequate or equitable—arguably the crucial politico-economic question—or whether traditional owners of land should be required to quarantine their negotiated compensatory payments for damage to their land for wider community benefits. These are issues that have had a long history in Indigenous affairs policy debates (see for example Altman 1983; Cousins and Nieuwenhuysen 1984; O’Faircheallaigh 2004a, 2006; Trigger 2005).

Mining is fundamental to the wealth of Australia and as the Indigenous estate has expanded to cover over 20 per cent of the continent there is no doubt that more and more exploration and mining will occur on Aboriginal land. However development outcomes are defined—narrowly as conforming to a mainstream ideal or more broadly to focus on a livelihood—there is no doubt that for decades now these outcomes have been disappointing from Indigenous, corporate and state perspectives. It has been surprising just how little rigorous research is undertaken around Australia on the socioeconomic impacts of mining. While there are numerous ‘top–down’ statements about the benefits that mining should deliver, grounded Indigenous viewpoints are under-reported or unheard; pressure is mounting on Indigenous representative organisations to view mining as the panacea for regional and Indigenous development.

Yet even within the three cases on which chapters in this volume focus there are some clear variations in engagement with, and the impacts of, the mining sector that are heavily influenced by history, the nature of the local Indigenous polity and land ownership, and the diversity of Indigenous responses. This in turn has been greatly shaped by provisions in Australian land rights and native title laws that play a crucial role in (predictably) creating regional Indigenous diversity and political conflict by differentiating traditional owners or native title groups from others living in the region.

Chapters in this volume do not assume that mining is either positive or negative—there is no advocacy for any particular outcomes in situations where mining occurs on Aboriginal-owned land—but rather they set out to explore what has happened at three mine sites from a diversity of perspectives. It is recognised, though, that mining will be a site for contestation and that development, however defined, will only occur if Indigenous organisations are empowered and have capacity to negotiate and manage beneficial agreements in accord with local and regional Indigenous aspirations which may themselves, as we shall see, differ. These aspirations will, in all probability, be diverse so that not all Aboriginal people will seek employment opportunity at mine sites. Indeed, in some situations Indigenous people might actually seek mining employment so as to earn incomes to enhance opportunities for futures on country. In other situations even massive long-life mines with heavy Indigenous mine site engagements will generate insufficient opportunity to solve Aboriginal development problems, even if mining were a sustainable regional prospect.

An important question that is raised in this monograph from a social sciences perspective is whether there is too much collusion between the state and mining companies that offers a development pathway—concentrated mine dependence—that is too risky and too divorced from the preferences of many Indigenous subjects. At the current historical moment, perhaps the choice offered to remote living Indigenous people is too influenced by the dominant logic of neo-liberalism: engage with the mainstream as individual subjects or miss out. Such a stark choice seems to be at loggerheads with other more flexible options that are essential for sustainable livelihoods for people living on their lands and in accord with contemporary diverse, but intercultural, preferences. One such option is encapsulated in the notion of ‘economic hybridity’. The simplistic choice, modern or customary, that so dominates Australian public and intellectual debates and that ignores the intercultural needs to be challenged by a combination of grounded realism and engagement with a subordinate development discourse that is all too rarely articulated in Australia today. The essays in this volume ultimately aim to broaden this development debate, while also providing some insights into how, when mining does occur, one might look to better outcomes for all parties.