'Can't let that Country go dry': Challenges and alternatives of pursuing Indigenous inland water rights at Singleton Station, Northern Territory
Abstract
In September 2020, a water license was requested by Fortune Agribusiness over Singleton Pastoral Lease, located in a desertic area 400 kilometres north of Alice Springs. The water license authorised the company to extract 40,000 megalitres of groundwater annually for three decades. Although the proposed water extraction zone is within Singleton PL, the groundwater drawdown area extends across Neutral Junction PL, Warrabri and Illiyarne Aboriginal Land Trust (ALT) (ibid). So far, this is the most significant amount of water ever granted in the NT.
Traditional Owners are worried about imminent damage to Country and the subsequent retaliation from ancestral beings and neighbouring groups, as they have ancestral obligations to look after Country. However, they have to deal with the decision of either rejecting these kinds of projects and dealing with a local economy where job opportunities are as scarce as rain (Jonscher, 2021) or letting developers set up their businesses, hoping for minimised damage to Country and maximised financial reward
Therefore, this investigation highlights and analyses past, present, and future challenges regarding recognising inland water rights for First Nations and also analyses alternatives for ecologically, socially, and economically sustainable water management, particularly for those communities living near Singleton Station. To do so, the project is divided into three chapters. In the first one, I start from the understanding that Indigenous Australians are faced with 'aqua nullius', as they were faced with 'terra nullius'. Based on the idea of land appropriation through its transformation, the "terra nullius" doctrine ignored Aboriginal people's land and water management systems from policymaking until the late twentieth century.
To highlight the challenges aqua nullius has generated in Australian water management, I have analysed some elements of the Common Law, particularly the riparian rights system imposed by the settler government. Furthermore, I have chosen two cases (a conflict between cattle station managers in the upper Roper River in 1938 and the Queensland Wild Rivers Act 2005) to determine how those challenges operate in particular contexts involving inland water rights.
The second chapter analyses the Singleton Station water license case, particularly the views and interests envisioned by several stakeholders (developers, federal and state governments, local communities, NGOs, and organisations) regarding groundwater. In doing so, these cases are understood as 'contact zones'. According to Pratt, 'contact zones' refer to "social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical power relations (Pratt, 1991, p. 34). Moreover, these cases could be characterised as "ontological conflicts", where the modern idea of a single, all-encompassing, biologically defined reality is challenged by multiple realities constantly produced by social enactments between different actors. Ontological views of water as a resource and as a living entity produce challenges in policymaking that Aboriginal peoples' must overcome to pursue inland water rights.
In the last chapter, the latter 'Rights of Nature' trend that has conceived rivers as legal persons in countries like Colombia and New Zealand is evaluated as a potential strategy to be applied to the underground water below Singleton Station. In doing so, further questions emerge: what have been the various arrangements for granting `legal personhood' to rivers? What has been different and similar about the bases on which legal personhood has been granted? How would this approach address ongoing and future challenges regarding inland water management in the Northern Territory? and, most importantly, what institutional (including legal), community-level and other relationships may be, or would apparently need to be, invoked to assign legal personhood to rivers in Australia?