Aboriginal organisations were seen as an instrument through which a self-determined Aboriginal developmental trajectory could be formulated and pursued. They were an institutional home for what remained of policy’s aspirations for Aboriginal development after that concept was surrendered into the discourse of self-determination in the 1970s. Their capacity to satisfy such aspirations can, from the outside, be seen to have depended on a number of structural conditions, operating both above, with respect to the supervening non-Aboriginal domain, and beneath, with respect to their own capacity as carapace. Those structural conditions, bearing upon the status of the organisation as a transactional boundary, continue to be a focus of policy innovation and discord. Most recently, the trend of policy has been to sidestep or overrule that boundary and project its managerial agency directly into local Aboriginal domains.

I have suggested here that Aboriginal organisations funded principally from mining projects are now relatively well placed to preserve internal operational autonomy. It is clear, despite the changing relationship between the mining industry and Indigenous people in Australia, that establishing and resourcing such organisations is not a widely acknowledged channel for transferring benefits to Aboriginal peoples affected by mining. The Australian Government’s ‘Working in Partnership’ program for developing cooperative relationships between the mining industry and Indigenous communities heavily emphasises training, employment and business development. A ready possible explanation for this flows directly from my previous point. Government is more interested in promoting the mainstreaming linkages of employment and ancillary business between projects and local communities than in resourcing self-determination. Alternatively it may simply reflect a reasonable up-front emphasis on the immediate opportunities for project participation, relegating post-project sustainability to downstream planning.

There also seems to be limited industry recognition. Few of the companies subscribing to the Working in Partnership program provide revenue streams to local organisations under majority Indigenous direction. Indeed, of those mine sites surveyed by the Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics that were located in the vicinity of a discrete Indigenous community, half had no agreements of any kind with local Indigenous people at the mining stage of their operations (Tedesco, Fainstein and Hogan 2003: 24). In another survey published in 2001, a highly disproportionate number of agreements between mining companies and Indigenous communities were attributable to only two companies, Rio Tinto and Normandy (ISS/ACIL 2001: 15). However, ‘payments or other compensation mechanisms’ was the most common kind of provision included in the 140 agreements surveyed, covering ‘lump sum payments, soft loans, royalty equivalents, and equity in companies, rents and lease payments’ (ISS/ACIL 2001: 17). Not all of these will produce a revenue stream for a locally-controlled Aboriginal organisation, but this figure provides an indication of a potential to be explored. These survey data suggest that few players are including the resourcing of Aboriginal organisations and post-mining development within their range of expectations from the advent of mining, but those players are important ones.

In the long-run history of any remote Aboriginal town facing deteriorating demographic trends (Taylor Chapter 3), the duration of even a major mining project is only a window (Render 2005: 35). Moreover, there will always be many people of working age in such areas who will never achieve the required state of work-readiness, or who have no wish to work in a mine, or who are numerically beyond the capacity of the mining industry to absorb them. In the relationship between mining companies and local Aboriginal populations, the resources and capacities of Aboriginal organisations will be an important determinant of the long-term developmental legacy a mining project will leave behind. The initiatives of such organisations will be a critical mediator between the windfall revenues from mining, and what those revenues are able to create and sustain for the Aborigines in that area. While the remote-area mining industry in Australia is currently undergoing unprecedented expansion, and there will always be major new projects eventuating here and there, for any given Aboriginal community the particular project occurring in their vicinity may be the only opportunity in much more than a generation to acquire the capital base for at least a partially self-resourced future. As O’Faircheallaigh remarks, ‘a community will tend to have just one chance to extract revenue; if it fails in relation to this specific project, it fails in total’ (1996: 198).

We leave the discussion, then, at the point where it begins to broach another issue, that is, the kind of development that Indigenous peoples may wish to foster. In the international discourse around the relationship between miners and indigenes, some have begun distinguishing between economic development and what is variously called culturally appropriate, community-led, or human, development, thinking less about ‘how to fit Indigenous peoples into a commercial mining operation, and looking instead at how a commercial mining operation can fit into Indigenous life’ (Render 2005: 35–8). This not only raises new questions of definition and evaluation, but places responsibility on Aborigines themselves to determine what development should be, and how to bring it about. In this context, the matters discussed in this chapter are structural preconditions, important because they affect the ability of Indigenous interests to equip themselves with the institutional instruments necessary for development with or without mining. They are about using the resource transfer instigated by mining to create a space in which they may consider their own options for development. The work of development itself has still to follow.