It was to be expected, then, that a forced engagement with the rituals of community consultation eventually reinforced local people’s view of the DEH and the politicians behind it as distanced, arrogant and uncompromising. At best, the consultation process was considered a waste of time and effort; at worst, it was a sham and a deceit.

The most significant outcome of this intense and protracted politicking was that when the first batch of tammar wallabies was finally released inside the park, the farm families who had a boundary with it were as hostile as ever to the project. Further afield, it was regarded with circumspection and concern for the long-term consequences. Subsequently, when the rangers put on a small celebration to signal the achievement of the tammar relocation inside the national park, the still stridently opposed farmers and their families were conspicuous by their absence. This stand-off meant that precisely the local folk who could have been of most use to the project were the ones most alienated from it. In no sense was this a fatal setback to the overall project. It will be recalled, however, that the close cooperation of neighbouring farmers, wherever the tammar wallabies were to be introduced, was written into the proposal from the outset as a highly desirable, if not imperative, requirement if the exercise was to be given the best chance of success.

The point that has to be reinforced at this juncture is that the tammar wallaby relocation scheme was, from the outset, an important and innovative prospect. For the dedicated team of conservation scientists, it was a major challenge to their scientific professionalism and one from which they could gain extensive and unique experience. For the upper echelons of the DEH, the project held out a good deal of prestige and publicity in that the return of extinct wildlife to its original wilderness would create an extremely favourable public image. For the state’s politicians, especially the Minister for the Environment and the Premier, the return of the tammars could be presented as a highly symbolic contribution to the preservation of Australia’s biodiversity, and therefore well indicative of the state government’s increasingly important environmental credentials.

Inasmuch as it seems likely that the preservation and enhancement of biodiversity on the Australian continent are going to be central to the way in which rural futures are thought about, there are some salutary lessons to be gleaned from this case study. The first is that a range of social and cultural considerations can influence, if not determine, how grassroots populations respond to initiatives from above—and by no means are these entirely dependent on the intrinsic significance of the policy or proposal. The people of lower Yorke Peninsula had no problems with the overall goal of preserving and enhancing their region’s biodiversity, and thus contributing to the national scene. As with so many other rural occupations, the region’s agriculturalists considered themselves true environmentalists whose credentials easily outstripped the membership of any city-based green group. These same local folk were, however, frequently cautious, circumspect and pessimistic when external institutions bore down on them with preconceived policies and programs that would impact on their rural way of life. And the more external agencies supplemented their arguments in the same discursive terms with which they began, the more intransigent local people were likely to become.

Circumspection and suspicion about the motives of government institutions and their associated agencies are in no sense restricted to the people of lower Yorke Peninsula. They are considered judgments that are commonplace in the cultures of rural Australia, which is why any official policy or program for the rural future ignores them at their peril. It is not appropriate, therefore, for a major institution such as the DEH to approach ‘social and economic considerations’ as if they are of secondary or minor consequence, for the straightforward reason that to do so stores up further problems for the future rather than according them proper consideration from the outset. To many people, and certainly to an anthropological audience, this point might be self-evident. As I hope is evident from the above account, however, that was by no means the case with the tammar relocation project, and although the consequences were not disastrous, they would assuredly have been best avoided, if at all possible.

The second cautionary point is that institutions such as departments of the environment cannot be left to determine on their own account the extent and the degree of community involvement in such major areas as the protection and advancement of biodiversity, for their institutionalised scientism means that they respond with outright indifference or heavily qualified attention to non-scientific knowledge claims. Broadly speaking, departments of the environment approach community consultation as a problem to be dealt with and, if necessary, to be circumvented altogether, rather than the source of an alternative, valid and relevant body of knowledge. They function as if their stock definition and body of knowledge are the only ones to be consistently prioritised, yet this occurs at precisely the time at which more and more people in societies such as Australia become increasingly aware of the limitations of natural science and the wide-ranging problems that a previously uncritical dependence on it has generated and compounded. Circumspection towards science, and cynicism towards institutions that privilege it as a source of knowledge above all others, are by no means restricted to the local population of lower Yorke Peninsula. They are significant political developments in Australian society at large, and therefore ones that departments of the environment ignore at their peril.

The third point is that, notwithstanding points one and two, as an anthropologist, I am less convinced than most that continuing dialogue and exchange of views between conservation scientists and local populations are the ways in which differences can be resolved and productive ways forward generated. In the comparative literature, mainly drawn from experience in the United States, where the aims of conservation science and the concerns of local landowners have come into open conflict, sociological analysis generally concludes that the different parties have to continue their dialogue, they have to persist with their continuing exchange of views, and so eventually arrive at a working compromise (for example, James 2002; Norton 2000; Peterson and Horton 1995; Wondolleck and Yaffee 2000).

The main problem with this kind of conclusion is that it fails to address the uneven distribution of power, which not only characterises such relations, it generates the conflict between them in the first place. An emphasis on continuing dialogue and exchange of ideas infers a degree of equivalence and equality between partners to the conversation that is, in reality, quite mythical. In the South Australian case, as in comparable others, the discourse of conservation science was informed and backed by an institutional and political structure of enormous influence and power. Whatever the credibility and legitimacy of those who opposed the tammar relocation project from below, the conservation scientists from the DEH had only to persevere with their major ambitions in order to finally realise them. This is, more or less, the current situation. The project was somewhat delayed by local community opposition, a number of costs were incurred that would otherwise not have materialised and the local support from farm families that would have been far preferable was not forthcoming. None of these costs, however, was overwhelming for the elementary reason that institutional resources provisioned by the State far outweighed anything that the local opposition could possibly muster. As Australia’s rural future becomes increasingly linked to major environmental goals such as the preservation of biodiversity and therefore the politics of conservation science, a major requirement will be how to accord proper recognition and authority to those who privilege and build on non-institutionalised, even commonsensical, bodies of knowledge and the folk discourse that gives public voice to them.