Metamorphosis of relatedness : the place of Aboriginal agency, autonomy and authority in the Roper River region of Northern Australia

Abstract

This research project concerns approaching an understanding of the impact of settlement life and sedentary institutions of living upon Aboriginal people's lives in the Roper River region of northern Australia. The purpose of this research lies in contributing to understanding the contemporary nature of Aboriginal people's agency over the order of their lives in the Roper region. Such an understanding may offer an opportunity to reconsider the ways in which outsiders (including government agencies and independent consultants alike) approach the offering of assistance with respect to structuring the living environments of Aboriginal residents in remote settlements. The research has been conducted through a variety of means including archival and secondary source reviews in addition to living in Ngukurr (the largest contemporary settlement of the Roper region) for eleven months of 2004, during which time I was contracted by the NT government to facilitate a participatory planning exercise with the residents concerning the future of the built environment. The methodology employed in undertaking the research therefore consists of participant observation, experience of operating in Ngukurr as a consultant architect, recording of oral histories and testaments and archival and secondary source verification of historical details of Mission and Government policy. My disciplinary training is in architecture and my current research focuses beyond the tangible buildings of the settlement to a consideration of the expectations of behaviour and consequent constraints the buildings and boundaries of the settlement impose, and the metamorphosis to ways of living that they have caused . Though the houses and spatial divisions of living environments are the immediately visible, tangible manifestations of the imposed structural order of settlement and thus operate as the focus of imposed constraint, for residents the constraints imposed by the houses are the physical indicators of the myriad of behavioural expectations inherent in the project of 'settlement'. Thus the manner in which residents respond and express their agency in creating the structure of order of their lives is the focus which lies at the heart of my investigation in attempting to understand the impact that the institutions of sedentary living have had upon Aboriginal people's lives in the region. The thesis focuses on two case studies of decision-making fora ; one a community meeting regarding shop business initiated by the residents, and the other, a community planning project of several months duration regarding planning for future housing. Attempts by outsiders to impose a colonial order upon the country in the Roper River region surrounding Ngukurr began in the late 191 h century and persist today, yet for residents of Ngukurr whose spiritual country is within and around the settlement, the order of settlement life continues to be primarily structured by the Land and people's relationships to country and each other. In the thesis consideration of contemporary issues are situated by a discussion of Ngukurr's origins as a Mission settlement and the resultant imposition of a Christian order, followed by its handover into government administration in the late 1960s. In contemporary Ngukurr this involves consideration of the moments of intersection between the assumptions inherent in the State's method of delivering services and housing, and the webs of relatedness and kinship into which those dwelling practices are received. The participatory planning project I undertook whilst living in Ngukurr allowed an approach of reflective practice, whereby my participation in Ngukurr life as a professional consultant developed alongside my reflections as a researcher in a mutually informative process of approaching an understanding of what capacity residents had to determine the order of their lives and the ways in which they exercised their agency. In considering how to engage the residents in a process whereby they can participate in planning and developing their living environment one of the largest questions is how much structure and infill should be determined, and how much left to develop in process. The answer to this is dependent upon the prevailing power relations and therefore on understanding the prevailing political and social context; because ultimately this is what determines what people are able and willing to do for themselves. In Ngukurr one of the most prevalent conflicts informing what people are willing and able to do for themselves is a negotiation between an institutional dependency upon paternal State care, which has developed over seven generations, imposing a modern way of life that assumes particular structures of behaviour and loyalty/participation between the individual and the State on the one hand, and an older enduring order embodied in the Land, which determines the continuity of values and a structure of relatedness requiring obligations of care and sharing amongst kin and country. The physical spatial structure of the contemporary settlement in Ngukurr assumes the behaviour of residents will conform to the modern structural relationships between the individual and the State, modelled on employed individuals and their families participating in suburban home ownership. However, these houses are not privately owned, nor occupied by nuclear families headed by employed adults, but rather they are occupied according to a constantly negotiated daily flux responding simultaneously to the demands of the State system and the older order of kinship, obligation and relatedness, with resultant complexities. The largest structural problem in contemporary Ngukurr is this mediation between the individual residents and the megastructures of government and government agencies that currently determine so much of the order of their lives. Despite assuming responsibility for the operation of the settlement of Ngukurr, and responsibility for the welfare of its residents in the 1960s, Government policy has been focused upon discouraging resident's dependency upon the State ever since. This is narrowry conceived by encouraging 'economic independence'. Residents are keen for independence also, but it appears to be conceived of in different terms. Residents want to have a say in what kind of independence rather than accept the limited interpretation (afforded them by assimilationist efforts) encouraging primarily 'economic' independence. They want to define the order of their lives for themselves, in order to maintain their own values, responsibilities and obligations. The location of Ngukurr within southeast Arnhem Land adds weight to this desire, since as a settlement situated on Land held in Trust for Aboriginal people consequent upon the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act in 1976, residents wish to determine their own way of life on their own Land. Ngukurr residents' original structures of authority, embodied as they are in the enduring order of the Land, are overwhelmed by the myriad of decision-making pressures foisted upon them by the running of a permanent settlement funded largely by government as a 'system' for living. As illustrated throughout the thesis, the imposition of sedentary life has not been simply a process of assimilation to living in houses, but an attempt at social engineering to coerce Aboriginal people in adopting the same orientation to time, place and the order of life to that of the colonisers. Rather than continue a dwelling practise of thousands of years in response to the particularities afforded by a chosen place to camp, residents at Ngukurr have been incorporated into a dwelling practise that assumes conceptual homogeneity of 'space', and institutes a 'system of living' applicable apparently anywhere regardless of sustainability or care for maintaining the conditions of country in the dwelling place. In this project there is no 'post colonial'- the agenda is still imposed one way and residents make daily negotiations for themselves in retaining particular orientations and values and (temporarily) relinquishing others in order to get by. Where once 'traditional' authority determined the order of life, from ceremonial time through to obligations to country, kin and rights in marriage and use and disclosure of knowledge about country, in contemporary times two additional trajectories of authority, Church and State, compete with Aboriginal order for relevance in negotiating the order of the everyday. My research approaches an understanding of the dynamics of social and political factors surrounding the manner in which residents enact their agency in decision-making regarding their living environments and the order of life they wish to pursue. Show more