Chapter 4: Wildlife, wilderness and the politics of alternative land use: an Australian ethnography

As long-established (settler) farming practices become increasingly unviable in Australia’s marginal areas, it is widely argued in governmental and other circles that the extension of wilderness areas that are then populated with native wildlife should be actively encouraged. From a developmentalist perspective, this policy is considered to offer up a number of seemingly incontestable benefits: alleviating the pressure on environmentally marginal areas, creating new employment opportunities, consolidating national biodiversity, and so on. From an anthropological vantage point, however, the prospects generated by this kind of development are by no means so clear cut. In the past five years or so, a state-supported initiative to reintroduce a particular species of wallaby to Innes National Park at the foot of Yorke Peninsula, South Australia, has generated a political conflict that raises a number of salient questions about this kind of alternative rural development and its relation to conventional agriculture. This chapter is based on ethnographic research conducted in 2005 and explores the significance of the conflict from academic and policy vantage points.