Joint managed national parks as a refraction of unsettled settler Australia: the question of trust

Introduction

This paper examines joint land and sea management models in Australian state declared ‘nature spaces’. Paying attention to Indigenous and non-Indigenous relations in the unsettled settler space that is constituted by the nation’s National Park network, we explore faultlines which threaten to undermine the quality of relations and management approaches. Central to our discussion is the matter of ‘trust – or lack thereof’, as it shapes the State’s relations with Indigenous people as the owners of lands and waters, and as it influences investment in Indigenous Law and culture as a central pillar for management. Indigenous ownership of lands and waters refers to an ancestrally determined and defined connection to Country. The expressions ‘Law’ and ‘Country’ are now both widely embraced by Indigenous Australians, adopted as vernacular in remote, rural and urban contexts to describe the two most powerful, and encompassing, aspects of Indigenous cultures. In the first instance, Law stands as a linguistic gateway to describe the structures, principles and actions that give meaning to Indigenous lifeworlds as they map out across linguistically bounded and ancestrally created territories. The expression Country is used to describe the bounded and known parameters of an Indigenous group’s geographical, ecological, ancestral and socially configured world. Country can be used to describe a great number of physical environments, and more often, when used in reference to a specific group’s lands and waters, its use reflects a relational imperative which distinguishes an inclination towards artful modes of connection, rather than separation, a defining quality of Indigenous knowledge systems more broadly. Kwaymullina distinguishes Country through relationality and a depth of care on the behalf of human kin,

For Aboriginal peoples, Country is much more than a place. Rock, tree, river, hill, animal, human – all were formed of the same substance by the Ancestors who continue to live in land, water, sky. Country is filled with relations speaking language and following Law, no matter whether the shape of that relation is human, rock, crow, wattle. Country is loved, needed, and cared for, and country loves, needs, and cares for her peoples in turn. Country is family, culture, identity. Country is self. ¹

Law and Country are official designations and when used often denote the ancestral lands, waters, culture and ancestral origins of a specific Indigenous language group. This also reflects an understanding that there is no single version of Law, in the same way that Indigenous languages have their nuance and territorial range.

Throughout this paper, we argue that it is a lack of trust that inhibits faith in Indigenous decision-making models and propagates unwillingness to accept Indigenous authority as the primer for care and conservation efforts. Nature spaces discussed here specifically include National Parks and examples are drawn from contexts in which we have conducted collaborative ethnographic research on Indigenous determined research and community-based projects over a combined timeline of six decades, including Limmen National Park and Barranyi National Park, in northern Australia. The research upon which we base this critical commentary on joint management has been conducted with Yanyuwa and Marra families, as co-producers of knowledge over several generations. Our collaborations have led to a series of co-authored and co-produced works, including land and sea claim evidence, plans of management, scholarly articles and digital animations. ² As non-Indigenous scholars ourselves, we write this paper and draw our insights from projects that have a sustained and long-running engagement with Yanyuwa and Marra experiences of legislative and kincentric land and sea rights, land and sea management and ranger programme development and cross-generational knowledge sharing through community led creative ventures.

It is in the context of joint management that Indigenous and settler colonial authority meet and circle around matters of natural and cultural resources management. These parks are spaces prized as national assets and sub texturally recognised (i.e. implied but not fully actioned) through forms of land tenure as ‘non-exclusive’ Indigenous lands and waters. Joint management is a peculiar arrangement that mimics and reveals the relational hierarchies normalised through processes of colonisation. Yet, jointly managed national parks, are intended to prioritise the shared importance of the land and sea, cast as a common ground of understanding and investment of care for Indigenous and non-Indigenous interests. Evidence emerging out of a 2021 Federal Government-initiated inquiry into the status of joint management, suggests a watershed moment for this model of environmental governance. At the heart of the inquiry’s findings, is a persistent discourse on trust and distrust. Distrust is offered as an explanation for relational breakdowns in the partnerships between the federal government and Indigenous groups across Australia’s three premier national parks.

Trust is treated here as a cornerstone in the relational accord that constitutes healthy relations. It is ‘a matter of relations between things: humans and other humans, non-humans, and institutions’. ³ It facilitates a field of subsequent emotional states and encourages actions that are vital to the reconfiguring of unhealthy and toxic relationships, for example, seeing value in something, realising the integrity of another, and the abandonment of authority and force. Yet trust can be an elusive condition when relations are prefaced by histories of colonial invasion and occupation. Conditions of distrust permeate Indigenous and settler State relations, because the premise of the encounter is one of doubt and suspicion, which comes to justify settler violence and dispossession, actions which lead to greater levels of distrust and a sustained motivation to oppress parties within the fractured relationship. By exploring the matter of trust this paper inserts a relational commentary into debates on the future of land and sea management approaches in unsettled settler spaces; that is, settler realities that remain unsettled and destabilised by prevailing Indigenous ownership and cultural commitments.

Australian national parks and joint management

There has been much research undertaken on the nature and effectiveness of joint management in Australian land and sea contexts. Smyth defines joint management as ‘the establishment of a legal partnership and management structure which reflects the rights, interests and obligations of the Aboriginal owners of the Park, as well as those of the relevant government, acting on behalf of the wider community’. ⁴ As Reardon-Smith explains, ‘Joint management can be understood as an ‘emergent cultural form’ that brings different groups of land managers with different land management systems together in a kind of mutual space of mediation. ⁵ However, this mutual space is not co-produced on equal terms’. Reardon-Smith elaborates on the complexity of this cultural form, stating that ‘[t]here is much to consider in terms of the differing priorities, aspirations, and relations to land between Aboriginal traditional owners and park rangers, and the challenges that this presents in co-managing a protected area’. ⁶

The desire to understand the complexity of joint management is expressed in the vast body of scholarship that has been produced, both internationally (with a focus on Canada and the US) and with specific reference to Australia. ⁷ Themes include bridging National Parks and Indigenous interests; Indigenous economic benefits; local and federal governance tensions; land tenure and Indigenous rights; conservation and sustainability goals and Indigenous rights to hunt and gather on national reserve lands. ⁸ Tourism and climate change have emerged as pressing concerns as they are widely anticipated to increasingly pose challenges to park management. ⁹

Joint management is both a legal and procedural arrangement. In step with the birth of legislative land rights, the inception of joint management for Australian national parks was a co-ordinated ‘response to increasing legal recognition of Aboriginal rights to traditional lands, beginning with the passage of the Aboriginal Land Rights Act (Northern Territory) (Cth) in 1976’. ¹⁰ The ALRA remains the country’s most substantive legislative arrangement for the award of Indigenous freehold title, to the exclusion of all others. ¹¹ However, in many instances of recognised Indigenous freehold title, Indigenous owners have then been required to lease back their lands and waters to the State for inclusion on the National Reserve System.

Australian states and territories have their own specific legislative land rights instruments and operating federally is the Native Title Act 1993. Moving beyond the land, at present there are virtually no provisions for the recognition of Indigenous exclusive freehold title to bodies of waters and the sea. There are alternative models of recognition outside of legislative land rights, but these too do not confer exclusive rights to Indigenous groups. Existing options for rights to manage and care for land and sea territories include the declaration of Indigenous Protected Areas (IPAs), which may be managed in accordance with Indigenous owners’ objectives. IPAs deliver biodiversity conservation outcomes for the benefit of all Australians and may be established on Aboriginal lands, but do not formally recognise Indigenous sole possession. Instead, IPAs commit land title in perpetuity to the National Reserve System.

Australia’s National Reserve System (NRS) is a network of protected areas that safeguards the country’s natural landscapes and animals for future generations (Figures 1 and 2). As of June 30, 2022, the NRS covered 22.1% of Australia’s land mass. ¹² This vast network of parks and reserves overlay a prior and persistent Indigenous estate. The Indigenous estate is defined as, ‘the tangible and intangible aspects of Indigenous Australia collectively held by Indigenous Australians’ irrespective of settler recognition and legislatively recognised land rights. ¹³ A more expansive terminology, the ‘Indigenous estate’ includes the tangible and intangible qualities of Indigenous connections to lands and waters across the entire landmass, and is not restricted to a designation of lands and waters, rights and authority that is contingent on western legal recognition. The Indigenous Land and Sea Corporation explains, ‘Physically, this [estate] refers to land under the care and control of Indigenous Australians, alongside the fresh and salt-water [C]ountry over which there are recognised Indigenous interests’. ¹⁴

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

The Australian National Reserve System & Marine Protected Areas. ¹⁵

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 2.

Australia’s National Reserve with governance categories, including IPAs and Jointly Managed Protected Areas. ¹⁶

The Indigenous estate is gathered up by the settler State organising principle of ‘Australia’s Commonwealth register of natural and economic value’, inclusive of its national parks and marine parks. ¹⁷ The high stakes value of national parks and marine parks to the Commonwealth register of value, is complicated by Australia’s colonial origins, and unsettled by prevailing Indigenous ownership and cultural commitments to manage, and care for Country that is contained within state and federally drawn boundaries. ¹⁸ Dual and competing interests have ultimately compelled the progression of negotiated terms of access to and control of lands and waters within national parks, as a land rights agenda has progressed, and as Indigenous land rights have been partly recognised.

To further complicate the terrain into which settler and Indigenous values are projected and often made to compete, the Parks Australia portfolio includes more than 600 national parks. ¹⁹ These combine with the nation’s 6 premier national parks, 60 marine parks and a network of botanic gardens, to account for over 680 designations. ²⁰ Australia has a long and sustained impulse towards state/territory control of lands and waters of value, in accordance with Western conservation, tourism and economic values. The tendency and patterns through which Australia has mapped its land and seascapes with national park designations reveals deeper socio-political realities, that reveal national agendas, colonial logics and the sustained habit of attempting to erase or assimilate Indigenous presence. ²¹

Representing the three jewels in the National Parks crown are Uluṟu-Kata Tjuṯa, Kakadu and Booderee National Parks. Each of these is owned by Aboriginal people and held as exclusive freehold title. They are however leased to the Director of National Parks (DNP), as part of a conditional agreement that comes with recognition of Indigenous title. Ownership of Uluṟu-Kata Tjuṯa has been determined through the successful award of Aboriginal freehold title, under the Aboriginal Land Rights Act (Northern Territory) (Cth) 1976. Indigenous ownership of the lands and waters contained by Kakadu National Park has been recognised in two parts, first in 1978 with a claim under the Aboriginal Land Rights Act (Northern Territory) (Cth) 1976 and a second series of claims resolved under the Native Title Act 1993, with the most recent resolution in in 2022. ²² Since 1992 Booderee has been held as inalienable freehold title by the Wreck Bay Aboriginal Community, under the Aboriginal Land and Waters (Jervis Bay Territory) Act 1986. ²³

In these three cases (Uluṟu-Kata Tjuṯa, Kakadu and Booderee) a complex history backgrounds each arrangement and infuses views on how lease backs to the DNP were negotiated and formalised. Several scholars have documented these histories and reflected on the long-term effects of national park status on ontologies of care, Indigenous rights of access, tourism and pervasive colonial imaginings on ‘wilderness’ and conservation. ²⁴ In summary, Lawrence, writes that ‘The long delay in official recognition of the rights of indigenous people to land and resource use reflects fundamental differences in indigenous and non-indigenous land management strategies’. ²⁵ With specific reference to Kakadu National Park, Palmer notes that the ‘rhetoric of Aboriginal/non-Aboriginal co-existence, which pervades the Park, is infused by the legacy of a colonial settler State’, so too it has ‘marginalised Indigenous people and obviated their social and cultural landscape in favour of an expansionist aesthetic of wilderness preservation and appreciation’. ²⁶

Ross et al., explore in further detail problematic relations at the core of joint management, explaining that this model does not disrupt settler colonial identity, on the basis that both nationhood and park management are built upon the ‘erasure of Indigenous governance’. ²⁷ Citing Uluru as one example, they describe the park as ‘a site of messy, complex and competing ideologies, practices and performances of Australian nationhood, all premised on the knowledge created from and underpinned by colonial expansion’. ²⁸ Any remedy to this situation, they argue, would require co-management that empowers Aboriginal people and has them involved in all levels of decision-making.

At no point in the long-running history of establishing National Parks on Aboriginal lands and waters in Australia has there been consensus on the equity of terms, or agreement on a plural vision of management. Nor has there been a robust commitment to restitutional redress in the form of return of Indigenous lands and waters as uncompromised freehold title as a continent-wide agenda. This holds in place an awkward accord of ‘unfinished business’ as a dominant discourse in scholarly research on joint management models across the three premier parks. Conservation orchestrated through joint management models struggles to achieve many of its goals in these high value, biodiverse landscapes, which are the historical product of Indigenous people’s engagements and action, and thus require, Indigenous intervention to maintain the very values for which they are lauded. ²⁹

Failed joint management

In this section we outline some of the factors fuelling a lack of trust in joint management. This is trust as a belief or investment by Parks Australia in Indigenous people’s authority to manage lands and waters on Law-based and culturally prescribed terms. It is also, although to a lesser extent, about Indigenous people’s distrust of centralised and State-based management practices. We focus our attention on two sources. The first is a 2021 report tabled by the Senior Advisory Group on Joint Management Arrangements for Commonwealth National Parks, which represents the most comprehensive formal accounting to date, of the success or failure of joint management. The second is ethnography collected with Indigenous groups (Marra and Yanyuwa families) engaged in Indigenous and non-Indigenous collaborative conservation management efforts in Limmen National Park and Barranyi National Park. We identify faultlines in the joint management model that gather around the following unresolved issues, (A) lack of Indigenous Law at the centre of land and sea management; (B) lack of Indigenous access and engagement without constraint; (C) Lack of faith in Indigenous decision-making and (D) problematic centralisation of authority and tangled land tenure arrangements.

Barranyi and Limmen National Parks, Northern Australia

Faultline: lack of Indigenous law at the centre

A common refrain among Indigenous rangers and community members engaged in joint management across Limmen and Barranyi National Parks in northern Australia is a lack of formal adoption of Indigenous Law and culture as governing principles and practices for management (Figures 3 and 4). In this oversight, the legacy of colonisation is carried forward through bad habits that have led to a perception of Indigenous Law and culture as of indeterminate value. Such viewpoints reflect a lack of trust in the veracity of Indigenous Law and culture and restrict their influence in joint management, by casting this knowledge base as a form of ‘soft power’ or origin story which holds no bearing on the practical health of lands and waters in the present. ³⁸

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 3.

Limmen National Park, Northern Territory, Australia. ³⁹

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 4.

Barranyi National Park, Gulf of Carpentaria, Northern Australia. ⁴⁰

Yanyuwa/Marra Indigenous Ranger, Shaun Evans, observes that Indigenous Law is most often treated as a ‘feel good thing, but in reality, its hard work and whitefellas don’t get it’. For Shaun, looking after his lands and waters involves equal parts natural resource management and recognition of the kincentric basis to Country. It builds into the management process awareness of the sentient and agentic quality of lands and waters which call for on-going communication and receptiveness to need and character. ⁴¹ Relational closeness is a key to this type of management. ⁴² As Yanyuwa elder, Old Steve Johnson explained, ‘You want to know how does this Country know me? I will tell you how, my foot track is on every beach and hill, that’s how Country knows me’. Senior woman Dinah Norman a-Marrngawi echoed similarly, ‘You can go, you can talk to that place, your track is all over that Country, Country knows you, your smell, your language, your ngalki [essense]’. JR, a member of the Indigenous board seeking to guide joint management of Limmen National Park remarked also that ‘when you are moving around this place [the park] old people [ancestors] are watching the whole time, they know who is right for here, you belong here, and also who they don’t know but it’s a problem if they don’t know you’. He affirms his rights concluding that, ‘I could bring my kids here no problem, we can sit down on this Country, cause these old people know they are from here’.

Indigenous Law is the most immersive of concepts in an Indigenous cultural context. ⁴³ It is a nuanced schema for human existence and goes beyond a system of justice or governance as might be the western understanding of Law; to shape and give meaning to all aspects of life. Indigenous Laws are inclusive of ancestral and creator beings, humans and non-humans, ecology, geography and all elements occurring within the realm of Indigenous people’s sovereign lands and waters. Law provides the logic and rationale for life and puts into relation all forms of being. ⁴⁴ As such, Law is much more than soft power and its framing as a subordinate to contemporary white governance substantiates a deep inequity between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples. A radical break from the tendency to corral Indigenous Law and culture to the margins, calls for re-education in intercultural operations such as joint management and bi-cultural governance. Indigenous management goes beyond offering ‘cultural solutions’ to ‘natural problems’ and Indigenous solutions are also practical, outcome driven and diachronic in their approach to the problems, for example, as made explicit in practices of Indigenous fire management, companion planting, threat abatement and waterway management. ⁴⁵

Faultline: lack of Indigenous access and engagement without constraint

Law is emplaced and must be enacted. Therefore, joint management that is presumed workable in situations where Indigenous people are not living directly ‘on Park’ or are restricted from moving freely across their lands and waters, represents a falsehood. In cases where an Indigenous owner body does not live near the lands and waters incorporated into the national park boundary, people are often entirely dependent on government agencies to access their Country. This has proven to be a huge issue in Limmen and Barranyi National Parks. In the first case the national park was announced in 2012, after a period of ownership by non-Indigenous interests (Northern Territory Land Corporation – NTLC) from the late 1900s. The NTLC is a corporate entity that manages land in the Northern Territory to advance its economic and social development. Prior to this arrangement the area of land was held under two pastoral leases and was owned by white landholders from the 1880s. The Indigenous owners, Marra people, have been alienated from this stretch of their territory since the 1880s. ⁴⁶

Today, Marra are resident between three townships in the Gulf of Carpentaria, Ngukurr, Borroloola and Numbulwar. These are located 220, 185 and 378 km respectively from the centrally located National Park Ranger Station. These residency patterns have been in place for several generations and are the direct result of colonial dispersals. For many present day Marra the park therefore is an unknown place, and the activities occurring across this space are beyond their purview. Lines of descent tell them they have a kinship-based connection, but the practicality of access, the extent of applied knowledge and a praxis-based connection with the location is tangential, if not, very consciously ‘under construction’ in the present moment. The reality of younger generations finding their connections to Limmen National Park is the focus of a collaborative project we are currently involved in with Marra, on the future management of this park. Younger Marra relationships and efforts to connect with lands and waters throughout the park highlight the educative and aspirational scope for parks to become contexts for intellectual growth and practical engagements by Indigenous owners who seek opportunities to gain skills through experimentation and learning on Country for management purposes. ⁴⁷

Barranyi National Park (located on North Island) in the southwest Gulf of Carpentaria is just as complex. Yanyuwa, the Indigenous owners for this place were aggressively removed from their island territories from as early as 1901, with people now resident in three townships, Doomadgee, Mount Isa and Borroloola, located 1,130, 930 and 80 km respectively from Barranyi. The absence of Yanyuwa in this place, over time and the obstacles that come with attempting to visit and spend time on the remote island territory, has meant that the Parks and Wildlife department has gained almost total control over management and decision making. This remains so much so that Yanyuwa rangers and family members speak of avoiding this place because it is controlled by ‘whitefellas’, does not look healthy (on the basis that Indigenous management protocols such as regular burning have been neglected) and they fear they might attract trouble should they interact with this place in culturally prescribed ways.

Yanyuwa worry about undertaking their own management approaches for fear of prompting official backlash. People express reticence time and again, and in a recent trip to the island, Warren Timothy asked, ‘why don’t white managers follow the Law, why can’t they ngayangayamantharra [obey our Law]’. Large numbers of Yanyuwa owners have never been consulted on matters critical to the management of Barranyi, despite their commissioning and co-authoring several cultural and natural resource reports of their own. In both Limmen and Barranyi National Parks, the joint management model has been persistently problematic on the basis that it assumes equal partnership as the start point, without recognising historical circumstances which present obstacles of access, and the failure to deliver infrastructure and opportunity that guarantees Indigenous access, and influence. Instead, the notion of partnership conjures up relationships of connections to Country that are at times unrealistic and have little support, given the realities experienced by Indigenous peoples in these very remote regional contexts.

We raise these issues primarily in the interest of highlighting the need to have and trust people moving through park spaces with authority, supporting a connectedness that is critical to maintaining Law and knowledge transferal across generations. This reformulates joint management as an effort that starts with a national investment in recognising Indigenous sovereignty to the Indigenous estate and consciously supporting people’s re-connections to lands and waters as the primer for all management efforts.

Faultline: lack of faith in Indigenous decision-making

As an extension of Indigenous Law, collective decision making is a cornerstone of Yanyuwa and Marra governance. ⁴⁸ Consensus reached through discussion, and slow agreement is regarded in many communities to be critical to communal health and societal steadiness. To elaborate, consensus is not the same as unanimity. A group reaches ‘consensus by listening to the opinions and concerns of others - they work towards a suitable decision. Not everyone is necessarily pleased with the outcome, but they realise it is the best decision for the community. Unanimity requires that everyone involved agrees’. ⁴⁹

Consensus is also dynamic, and an important part of understanding Indigenous collective decision-making is recognising that things change, and preferences too can change. The perception of Indigenous Law and decision making as steeped in tradition only, denies the reality that they are also emerging terms of engagement, and can have a cumulative quality, which evolves ‘by adaptive processes’. ⁵⁰ In Yanyuwa language decision-making is summed up as kalinyamba-wukalwukanyi mindibirrinja awara, which translates as ‘they would talk and talk to each other, until everything was settled and agreed upon’. This phrase reflects a process of coming together to work through conflicts and decisions with the aim of reaching agreement among senior kin. Often considerable time is dedicated to the process and any desire to rush process or break solidarity in the pursuit of a singular self-interest is strongly resisted. As Indigenous Ranger co-ordinator Fiona Keighran explains, ‘It only works when its families all working together’.

The underlying principle which always informs such models of decision-making is that of family (in Yanyuwa = li-malarnngu); it is people’s concern for family that increases a sense of group care for one another and associated lands and waters. The pace and manner of decision making on such terms is conducive to beneficial outcomes that link people, lands and waters, a triadic that is critical to effective long-term management goals that are diachronic (consider and incorporate change over time – seasonal/patterned), qualitative, generationally experienced (from an ancestral presence through to younger generations) and holistic (aimed at managing the interconnections that make a nested ecology healthy). Management outcomes that achieve these goals need not be exclusively positioned as beneficial from an Indigenous perspective, rather they have clear benefits for all parties invested in management of the national estate. Furthermore, decisions made on such terms, are less vulnerable to contest, failure and non-observance.

The SAG Report indicates that it is State defined national/environmental/economic benefits that compete hardest for legitimacy and achieve dominance in management modelling by and large. Yet joint management is branded as an opportunity for equal rights and interests. Joint management purports to offer equal opportunity, such that the participants in joint-management themselves are substitutable. It is as Rose describes, the process demands creation of a ‘zero point’, from which the artifice of equality can emerge. ⁵¹ It is of little value for Indigenous people to be rendered as ‘stakeholders’, when those imposing a Western democratic aesthetic in decision-making fail to comprehend what is ultimately and uniquely at stake for Indigenous people. A simple proposition therefore is that Indigenous decision-making processes are introduced as the central framework for management on the basis that they have proven their effectiveness and reliability over time. ⁵²

Faultline: centralised authority and tangled land tenure

Based on our experience of working collaboratively with Indigenous communities and their associated ranger groups in northern Australia, all living things and phenomena are impregnated with consciously held meanings, events, stories and songs which are held by men and women. ⁵³ Indigenous Law and culture are distinguished by a biological and geographical literacy that can take years to acquire and comprehend. Multiplying realities or potentials in how Law is understood is crucial to an embrace of plurality as it maps across the 680 parks currently listed on the national estate. At present overarching agendas and directives for management are centralised through Parks Australia, located in the Nation’s capital of Canberra. This is geographically and intellectually remote from the localised worlds that constitute the Indigenous estate, or in this case, the Marra and Yanyuwa estates which predate and survive the National estate.

The recommendation to decentralise parks management away from Canberra is also raised in the SAG Report. The Report outlines that ‘Shifting Canberra based jobs to the parks would assist the bureaucracy to understand the day-to-day practicalities of life on the parks’. Broadening comprehension of the practicalities of life in and around parks is one part of the benefit that would flow on from this, but we also scope relational proximity as critical to imagining and better understanding Indigenous owner’s desires to manage their lands and waters. ⁵⁴ With this will come exposure to the Law based terms of which communities seek to manage, and observation of Indigenous decision-making processes in operation across wider communal and everyday contexts.

Emphasising the need for local attentiveness, Yanyuwa outline the following as critically important to managing their lands and waters, and call on all who work in their region to realise that,

➢ Law is emplaced.

➢ Law follows logics and structures often tracked through kinship and descent.

➢ Law, whilst ancestrally derived, is responsive and can change over time.

➢ Outsider engagements with Law must recognise that Law operates through relationships between human, non-human and non-living entities.

➢ Encounters with Indigenous Laws and knowledges require time. The formation of strong relationships is essential to ethical management.

➢ Indigenous people own their lands and waters, Law and knowledge. They are more than stakeholders.

When asked how Yanyuwa talk about joint management in their own language, the concept of kunkunmantharra – of ‘caring for’, ‘looking after’, ‘making sure things are kept straight’, are given as the closest correlates. Kunkunmantharra is management committed to respect, complexity, creation and connection. ⁵⁵ Yanyuwa Elder Mavis Timothy explains that when using the word kunkunmantharra, one is also talking about Law and making sure things are done in accordance with the Law. If this is neglected, then joint management becomes ‘a whitefella show for everyone in Canberra’. ⁵⁶

Elaborating on the need to respectfully engage on these terms, Yanyuwa elder and long term Indigenous sea ranger Graham Friday, spoke the following after a meeting dedicated to discussing Barranyi National Park,

And you know what, whitefellas and some blackfellas still have no fucking idea about our Law, how we hold Country. You can talk, you can keep telling them, but you know what they’ve got no ears to hear. You know I can talk to them pastoralist mob, and the miners and they tell me all the time how important the land is to them, same with the fishermen mob, they can tell me why the sea is important to them, same with the conservation mob, but me when I try to tell them why the Country and sea is important to me, it like they just block their ears, or they tell me that’s how it was in the old days but it is new time now. Do you know how frustrating it is? All the time have to talk, talk, talk try and explain our way of owning Country, owning the sea, and still it’s like we are talking to no one. I am telling you they have no ears, they can’t listen, maybe they are just plain dumb, you can take them out onto Country, show them Country, show them the Dreaming places, places where I grew up, but it’s just like they have no eyes either, they have no idea. ⁵⁷

Drawing from the SAG Report commentary on the need to develop locally tailored protocols with Indigenous owners to guide the behaviour of staff and businesses working on park, the need to recognise and work with the nuance of Law as both emplaced and owned, is another important step in accepting authority,

Alison (not real name) has been asked to deliver cultural awareness training. Alison knows the cultural awareness training has not been appropriately tailored to the area of the park she has been asked to deliver it at . . . Alison is a Traditional Owner from another part of the park – the area of the park where the training is to be delivered is not her Country. Alison knows she cannot speak for another’s Country . . . ⁵⁸

These comments combine to reinforce a prevailing need to localise management at all stages. So too they call for a commentary on the obvious oversight, and that is Indigenous ownership, and a more stringently configured model of management based on fulsome, rightful Indigenous ownership. A corrupting element of the joint management model that must be addressed is the requirement for Indigenous owners to lease their lands and waters back to the State. This does not equate with freehold title or exclusive Indigenous ownership and stands in as a coercive method for retaining control over lands and waters.

It’s too hard you know, when it all just goes white fella way (Mavis Timothy)

Mavis, a senior Yanyuwa woman, who has seen parks personnel come and go from the context of her lands and waters, who has participated in countless joint-management board meetings for Barranyi National Park, and watched the Indigenous ranger programme within her community grow from strength to strength, knows the challenges that come with joint management. Running parallel with these experiences are her community’s now 48-year journey with legislative land rights and restitution. There is no disputing the fact that the two matters, namely park management and Aboriginal land and sea rights go hand in hand. This prompts the question, how can trust be built when Indigenous ownership is diffused through problematic lease back requirements?

We propose that the key to repairing relations and finding pathways towards trust-based models of joint management calls for continued pushing and testing of the legal parameters to establish Aboriginal land rights and progressing an at present unrealised agenda for Indigenous marine tenure as freehold title. The problematics of Native Title are now widely documented with little alternative models for restitutional land rights being modelled for Australia’s future. The conversation calls for attention to speculative efforts at reconfiguring land and sea/water rights, and pathways towards securing rights such as those progressed by ‘Land Back’. ⁵⁹ The current options for land/water rights (not yet sea rights) are Native Title in the legal sphere, the purchasing of land by Indigenous communities or return of land both directly and through NGOs and charities. ⁶⁰ As it stands, a Federal land and sea rights agenda that factors in the National Reserve System is desperately needed.

Why trust matters

The recurring theme of trust in the SAG Report is striking not only in its invocation of an emotionally oriented breakdown in relations, but for the extent to which it resonates with commentary we have documented over several decades of ethnography with Indigenous groups in northern Australia. Over time we have collaborated with Yanyuwa and Marra families on projects concerning land and sea rights, generational knowledge exchange and cultural/natural resource management. When the topic of Indigenous and non-Indigenous relationality inflects our discussions of such efforts, trust is often cited as the lacking ingredient, the element of relational courtesy denied to Indigenous peoples or when put in reverse, it reveals a lack of trust in Canberra, the white seat of settler governance. These mentions of trust often open reflection on hurts and become a shorthand way of revealing encounters marked by suspicion, culpability, ambiguity and betrayal.

We have argued that the conditions of distrust permeate Indigenous and settler State relations, because the premise of the colonial encounter is one of doubt and suspicion. Coloniality as an enduring state stands to justify the origins of settler violence and dispossession, actions which have led to greater levels of distrust and a sustained motivation to oppress parties within the fractured relationship. In such contexts, a discussion of trust can be scaled up or down, from the interpersonal to the communal. There is utility in localising and personalising an analysis of the relational accord through interpersonal frameworks, for these make intimate and familiar, the study of relationships at a grander scale (such as between settler and Indigenous presence). ‘The dynamics surrounding decisions to trust are complex and involve social and emotional considerations beyond economic ones’, thus they are likely to be distinct across cultures, for the social dynamics which distinguish unique cultural histories and present realities weigh heavily in the scenario of shaping and distinguishing emotional meaning, range and habit. ⁶¹

Elaborating on the nexus between cultural histories and trust, Carlson and Frazer determine that it is the long-term effects of intergenerational trauma related to past and present policies of removal and assimilation, institutionalised racial discrimination and a monocultural approach to health and wellbeing, as a suite of multiple harms created by the ‘good intentions’ of the State that fracture relations of trust between Indigenous people and the State. ⁶² From an Indigenous perspective the spread of perceptions of trustworthiness or lack of, can often be traced to localised relational encounters. Writing of Indigenous trust in health care services, Carlson and Frazer explain that ‘Word spreads through family and community networks about whether particular health professionals are trustworthy, or not’. ⁶³ Talk of mistrust has a profound influence on the nature of relations and where practice-based relations are called for with the grassroots delivery of services such as in a health care clinic or within the context of a jointly managed national park head office and on park operations, relations can turn tense very easily and slip into unhealthy patterns of blame, suspicion, mistrust and poor communication.

Appreciating the value of trust and the nature of any on-flowing social goods, calls for a reflexive consideration of context, a pondering on what might represent social good and benefit for all parties, including the lands and waters and non-human presences with which humans coexist. A question also remains as to the nature of value, the value that is placed on forms of knowledge and practice, expressed as strategies of care and management. The decision-making process used to determine which value system wins is never innocent in a settler colonial context. The determination of management strategies, and how these will be implemented, is dependent upon conditions of respect and trust, as an investment in the reliance and merit of diverse cultural positions and orientations. The presence or absence of trust in this relational encounter has a significant impact on the nature and praxis of actioned management as delivered through action-tendencies.

Conclusion

As the SAG Report reveals, joint management has failed. It has not cultivated and sustained relationships that recognise and resist replicating the inequities that lead to the marginalisation of Indigenous authority. The revelation of this failure however offers an opportunity to rethink not only management futures for Australia’s national estate, but to reconfigure this estate as an Indigenous estate, thus discarding the habit of positioning Indigenous owners as mere stakeholders in the future of their ancestral lands and waters. Surely the impetus to care for the environment must be configured as a question of kinship, moral obligation and a steadied commitment by all to responsibly care in a time of escalating earth hazards. A higher-level relational bond will likely encourage another level of commitment to management, one that implicates the human in models of ecological health.

Other critically important steps include leaning further into management from diachronic, qualitative, generational and holistic perspectives, to inform new iterations of risk assessment and harm prevention as the basis on which management efforts occur. The adoption of temporal models which invest equally in people as they do environments in the configuration of valuable nature spaces reconfigures the national park as a lifeworld of interconnection not a nature space. To think in such ways is to draw respectfully from Indigenous Law based principles of hyper-relationality.

Joint management needs to cultivate a new set of action tendencies which begin and culminate with the centralisation of Indigenous Law and culture, orientation that is in good faith towards Indigenous decision-making, and recognition of fulsome terms of Indigenous authority over lands and waters. Whilst this may seem utopian, if left unwritten, then we fail in our objective to advocate for its exploration. All trust conceptualisations necessitate risk, conscious consideration of risk, volition and/or active choice by the trustor and trustee. Joint management is no exception. In a settler colonial nation joint management is all about trust, vulnerability and the warranted nature of good relations. Managing the lands and waters of Australia is a field populated by people who have some shared goals yet perhaps divergent views on how these might be reached. ⁶⁴ This is a positive and intriguing space from which might come leading reform towards building a practice of trust making and sustaining relations for greater beneficial return that supports the health of the Indigenous estate as a national interest. While trust is arguably not the sort of attitude that one can just will oneself to have, trust can be cultivated.