Hunting the Past, Harvesting the Present and Owning the Future. Aboriginal Life Projects on the Dampier Peninsula, Kimberley, Western Australia

Abstract

My thesis investigates decentralised living and state policy in relation to a particular subset of remote Aboriginal communities in the west Kimberley. These leases, locally called Blocks, were granted over the former Beagle Bay mission reserve in the late 1990s. A condition of the lease was to pursue engagement with the market economy with perceived benefits to the wider Aboriginal population. Block residents held work skills to engage with the mainstream market economy, but chose to decentralise where access to the market economy was necessarily limited due to the remote location. Previous studies of Aboriginal development have used the term 'life project' to reflect the agency of Aboriginal people and aspirations that differ from development projects determined by the state or market economy (Blaser 2004, Peterson and Myers 2018). The term is employed in this thesis to identify a particular form of decentralised living which shows some continuity with the earlier examples of such arrangement ('outstations' or 'homelands') but has innovations and novel attributes. The personality and skills set of the residents of each Block differed and their ambitions varied. However, ultimately all Blocks relied on tourism to engage with the market economy. This tourism development was both embryonic and economically marginal. Consequently, Block residents depended on external funding for their business to be sustainable. Data collected during fieldwork revealed how the various enterprises managed to sustain life on the Blocks, while some activities were doomed to both social and economic failure. An alternative economy in the form of a major industrial processing plant was proposed for the central Peninsula with a promise of substantial economic returns but was regarded by Block residents as unattractive because of the perceived impact on their small scale ventures. The central argument of the thesis is that a principal motivation for occupation of the Blocks was pursuit of 'the good life'. Business development was not the motivation for taking up the lease but was understood as obligatory to sustain occupation. Residents of each Block held ideals and values which are identified as the 'ideology of the Block' that legitimized occupation. Activities and relationships were brought into play to mediate two difficulties faced by Block residents. The first was the disjunction between the pursuit of the good life and the requirement for commercial engagement. The second was tenure of a lease over country which was not ancestral country while sustaining a cultural and spiritual connection to the land. The research demonstrates the transformational aspects of contemporary decentralised living, and the significance of understanding that the Blocks are distinct from the outstations established in the 1970s and 1980s. The ideology of the Blocks serves to articulate the cultural factors that sustain and to some extent frame decentralised living. This has implications for policy formulation and is fundamental to any attempt to engineer economies in remote Aboriginal-controlled lands.