Disruptions, Transformations, and Divisions: Negotiating Joint Management in Northern Australia

This dissertation examines the joint management of an introduced species in Garig Gunak Barlu National Park, on the Cobourg Peninsula of northern Australia. The joint management arrangement in Cobourg, which brings Aboriginal people and the state together in a formal cooperative structure, is characterized by suspicion, conflict, and dissatisfaction. My research uses the management of banteng, a species of introduced cattle, as a framework for understanding the sources of this friction between the park's joint management partners, as well as between Aboriginal people and the state more broadly. In the complex field of interrelations that permeates the park, the banteng provide a distillation of the multiple views that actors have of the landscape, and a frame within which to understand the sometimes paradoxical status of the park and its management as a whole.;Settlers originally introduced banteng (Bos javanicus) to the Cobourg Peninsula as labor animals in the 1800s. From an initial introduction of less than 50 animals, they have spread and become a well-established population of some 10,000 non-native, large land mammals now living within the boundaries of a national park. At the same time, they have become endangered in their home range in southeast Asia, and are protected in only small numbers in a few national parks in Indonesia and Malaysia. This makes this park's feral herd the largest wild herd of banteng left anywhere in the world.;The management of these animals has proven to be a key challenge for the park's cooperative board of management that has exposed major fault lines between the actors involved in the joint management arrangement. The crux of disagreement between these actors is that Aboriginal people wish to have more control over what happens on their traditional land, and centralized park administrators wish to have a management plan for the entire park that operates independently of Aboriginal clan boundaries. Further, the structure and dynamics of the park's joint management approach serve to further demarcate and separate the two sides of the arrangement rather than working to draw people together.;I argue that rather than resulting in genuine power sharing and improved decision making, joint management of the park has developed into an extension of the state's previous policies towards both protected areas and Aboriginal people. In particular, this volume focuses on three key aspects of joint management: 1) the dividing practices that engender division and opposition across decision-making processes and the social production of identity; 2) the influence of the situated perspectives of individuals and the social realities they construct about the landscape; and 3) the bureaucratic processes through which the park makes Aboriginal people, places, and practices 'legible', which are inherently traumatizing and transforming, and are entangled with larger state processes of assimilation and national identity building.;This situation provides a focus for research on the changing forms of Aboriginal relations with both the landscape and the settler state. Previous research in Aboriginal Australia has pointed to the close links between material interactions with physical landscapes and the reproduction of social organization and ideology. Drawing on this research, and the developing 'landscape' concept within the field of anthropology, this dissertation argues that it is critical to grasp the fundamental division in understandings of the landscape that sits within the joint management situation in Cobourg, and demonstrates the importance of analyses that situate individuals and institutions historically, culturally and spatially.;Jointly managed parks are an attractive compromise solution for negotiating the post-land rights era, where indigenous people in many parts of the world find themselves involved in disputes over tradition, knowledge, and land. Yet the joint management model of cooperative board-based management that has been widely deployed in Australia remains largely unquestioned in its assumed outcomes of power sharing and improved local decision-making. This dissertation suggests that inherent contradictions in this joint management model may be significant enough to consistently limit the possibility of positive outcomes from such arrangements. Instead, I suggest that this process needs to include explicit efforts to bring parties together to articulate shared visions and aims, and to develop mechanisms and processes that anticipate and mediate conflict.