Journal articles on the topic 'Aboriginal pastoralists'

I examine aspects of land-use in the north-west Northern Territory by Aboriginal hunter-gatherers and white pastoralists since the early twentieth century. A case study of Legune Station and Marralam Outstation highlights issues of general relevance to those areas of rangelands where pastoralism and huntinglgathering coexist and compete. The historical record indicates that, contrary to widely held views, many aspects of Aboriginal relations to land were maintained throughout the pastoral period. In effect, multiple use has been a reality since contact, and in the wake of the Mabo debate will continue to be an issue for the next century. I argue that policy and bureaucratic frameworks, both past and present, fail to deal with this cross-cultural reality. There are both ethical imperatives and land management advantages in recognising Aborigines as stakeholders in decisions about the future of the rangelands.

Australia's rangelands are experiencing a rapid shift from dominantly commodity values towards a mix of commodity and (broadly defined) amenity values. The former hegemony of pastoralism is now being displaced by a diverse array of resource uses, strongly influenced by national aspirations concerning Aboriginal land rights, preservation of biodiversity and of valued semi-natural landscapes, sustainable management, tourism and recreation. This diversification in resource value is fostered by the highly differentiated value-orientations of influential interest-groups, including Aboriginals, welfarists, conservationists, pastoralists and a disparate array of tourists and recreationists. Simplistic modes of resource allocation are being replaced by complex, often contradictory modes of politicised decision-making, shaped by the demands of interest-groups, with decisions being focussed more on values than on facts. Accordingly, more effort needs to be spent in developing an understanding of value-orientations and their influence on the perceptions, needs and expectations of these various groups. A postal survey of 67 South Australian pastoralists reveals that they comprise a cohesive reference group with a strong sense of identity and self-worth. They closely identify with their distinctive way-of-life and its equally distinctive (and challenging) environment. They are very conscious of their role, not only as producers, but also as custodians of the rangelands, capable of making the pivotal decisions towards sustainable management. Their strong orientation towards intrinsic, expressive and social values provides partial compensation for continuing economic and social hardships. Above all they place high value on their independence, and they regard intervention by conservationists, urban interests, Aboriginal interests and governments as presenting a greater threat to their future than does prospective further economic decline. This distinctive value orientation has for long proved highly adaptive in ensuring survival in periods of economic and environmental stress, but may be less effective in meeting emerging challenges in which pastoralism has to adjust to a more complex decision context, in which other interest groups have values and goals markedly at variance with those held by pastoralists.

In the 1870s, an intense quest revealed to scientists that pituri, an important Aboriginal commodity, was sourced from the plant Duboisia hopwoodii?a shrub named after a well-known colonist. But it was Aboriginal people and white explorer-pastoralists from the Mulligan River region in far western Queensland who provided the samples and alerted scientists to the important chemical properties of pituri. Subsequently, there was a proposal to change the name of the plant to Duboisia pituri. Whom should the plant have been named after, the colonist or the Aborigine?

This paper explores relations between Blandowski, Krefft and the Aborigines during the 1856-57 Murray River expedition. As with many scientific enterprises in Australia, Aboriginal knowledge made a substantial contribution to the success of the expedition. While Blandowski generously acknowledged this, Krefft, who was responsible for the day to day running of the camp, maintained his distance from the Aborigines. The expedition context provides an insight into tensions between Blandowski and Krefft, and also into the complexities of the colonial project on the Murray River, which involved Aborigines, pastoralists, missionaries and scientists.

AbstractBased on long-term fieldwork with Aboriginal groups, Euro-Australian pastoralists and other land users in Far North Queensland, this paper considers the ways in which indigenous relations to land conflate concepts of Nature and the Self, enabling subjective identification with elements of the environment and supporting long-term affective relationships with place. It observes that indigenous cultural landscapes are deeply encoded with projections of social identity: this location in the immediate environment facilitates the intergenerational transmission of knowledge and identity and supports beliefs in human spiritual transcendence of mortality. The paper suggests that Aboriginal relations to land are therefore implicitly founded on interdependent precepts of social and environmental sustainability. In contrast, Euro-Australian pastoralists' cultural landscapes, and constructs of Nature, though situated within more complex relations with place, remain dominated by patriarchal and historically adversarial visions of Nature as a feminine "wild-ness" or "otherness" requiring the civilising control of (male) Culture and rationality. Human spiritual being and continuity is conceptualised as above or outside Nature, impeding the location of selfhood and collective continuity within the immediate environment. In tandem with mobile and highly individuated forms of social identity, this positions Nature as "other". There is thus a subjective separation between the individualised life of the self, and the life of Nature/other that, despite an explicit discourse in which ecological well-being is valorised, inhibits affective connection with place and confounds sustainability.

Kangaroo management is important to the sustainability of Australia’s rangeland landscapes. The commercial harvest of kangaroos assists in reduction of total grazing pressure in the rangelands and provides the potential for supplementary income to pastoralists. Indeed, the commercial kangaroo industry is considered by natural resource scientists as one of the few rural industry development options with potential to provide economic return with minimal environmental impact. While the biology and population ecology of harvested kangaroo species in Australia is the subject of past and present research, the social, institutional and economic issues pertinent to the commercial kangaroo industry are not well understood. Our research is addressing the lack of understanding of social issues around kangaroo management, which are emerging as constraints on industry development. The non-indigenous stakeholders in kangaroo harvest are landholders, regional management authorities, government conservation and primary production agencies, meat processors, marketers and field processors (shooters) and these industry players generally have little understanding of what issues the commercial harvest of kangaroos presents to Aboriginal people. Consequently, the perspectives and aspirations of Aboriginal people regarding the commercial harvest of kangaroos are not well considered in management, industry development and planning. For Aboriginal people, kangaroos have subsistence, economic and cultural values and while these values and perspectives vary between language groups and individuals, there is potential to address indigenous issues by including Aboriginal people in various aspects of kangaroo management. This research also examines the Aboriginal interface with commercial kangaroo harvest, and by working with Aboriginal people and groups is exploring several options for greater industry involvement. The promotion of better understandings between indigenous and non-indigenous people with interests in kangaroo management could promote industry development through the marketing of kangaroo as not only clean and green, but also as a socially just product.

AbstractEcologies of production and state classifications shaped Chinese imperial frontier policies. In Chinese classical debates about the effect of environment on human character, the dominant view held that all peoples could become civilised, but a dissenting view held that barbarians could never change their ways. Nomadic pastoralists likewise debated whether to adopt certain Han cultural practices or reject them. Chinese dynasties often accepted diversity, but at certain times tried to eliminate difference by persuasion or by force. Three cases illustrate these processes during the Qing period: the relationship between Manchus and Mongols, Qing policies towards aboriginal peoples and the settlement of Taiwan, and Qing policies towards southwestern mountain peoples. In each case, policies came out of the interaction of ethnic categorization, views on cultural transformation and frontier environments. When Qing rulers lost the ability to recognise such cultural distinctions, they lost a key to the endurance of the empire.

The subject of this paper being contemporary Australian rangelands literature, I have restricted the study to literature of the decade to 1994, with focus on 1992-1994. I acknowledge recent informative studies, but have developed an individual perspective. In addition to considering recent novels and factual books I have given attention to newspaper and magazine accounts, as these give the most immediate observations of the rangelands, and attitudes towards them and their inhabitants. Key trends that emerge are perceptions of the rangelands as pristine - probably the one continuum since the commencement of written records about Australia; the entirely contrasting view of pastoralists as destroyers of rangelands; and recognition of Aboriginal spirituality as significant in caring for the land. The trends are not, however, entirely in the one direction, as I indicate by presenting both the positive and negative views presented by a select number of writers.

This paper reports on an Aboriginal site complex, incorporating hut structures, ceremonial stone arrangements, an extensive surface artefact assemblage of lithics and mussel shell, and a silcrete quarry, located along Hilary Creek, a tributary of the Georgina River in western Queensland, Australia. At least two phases of occupation are indicated. The most recent huts have their collapsed organic superstructure still present, while those of a presumably earlier phase are distinguished as bare, circular patches of earth which are conspicuous amongst the ubiquitous gibber, with or without stone bases, and lacking any collapsed superstructure. Immediately adjacent to the huts and also a few hundred metres away are clusters of small stone arrangements, and about 2 km to the southwest, along the same creekline, is another series of larger, more substantial stone arrangements; these features speak to the importance of the general Hilary Creek area for ceremonial purposes. Radiocarbon dating reveals use of the Hilary Creek complex dates to at least 300 years ago; the absence of any European materials suggests it was likely not used, or only used very sporadically, after the 1870s when pastoralists arrived in the area, and when traditional lifeways were devastated by colonial violence.

AbstractVance Palmer's The Passage (1930) and Eleanor Dark's Lantana Lane (1959) bracket the period during which the narrow coastal strip north of Brisbane from the Pumicestone Passage to the Noosa River was being transformed economically and culturally into what we know today as the Sunshine Coast. In the 1920s and 1950s respectively, Palmer and Dark participated in changing the region, and as established writers they reflected upon that metamorphosis in literary works that reached a national audience at a time when Brisbane's near north coast was off the beaten track for professional writers. But for millennia prior to colonisation, this area had sustained a vibrant economy and culture centred on bunyas from the mountains and seafood from the coast. By the late nineteenth century, this vast economic and cultural network had been radically disrupted by the incursions of timber-getters and pastoralists, and many of the traditional owners who had survived the frontier wars had been removed. While the inscription of a new identity on the region in the twentieth century was driven by the real estate speculators who coined the name ‘Sunshine Coast’, Palmer in The Passage and Dark in Lantana Lane share a more cooperative, sustainable, egalitarian and anti-imperialist vision for the region, with some indirect and ambiguous debts to its Aboriginal past.

Environmental history, as it has emerged in recent years, is most distinctive in the way it illustrates a serious engagement between the disciplines of ecology and history. This article begins with an exploration of the lineage and promise of environmental history, particularly in the Australian setting. It then analyses a number of the cultural debates about vegetation change in Australia—about clearing, open landscapes, scrub encroachment and burning practices—and draws attention to the way that morals, politics and aesthetics shaped environmental perception and still do. Clearing was the dominant discourse in the history of landscape change and a legislative requirement for secure settlement. At the same time, criticism of clearing and its effects represented an early conservationist sensibility, but the heroic pioneering labour of clearing, the political imperatives associated with it and the escalating ecological legacy it generated, have sometimes made us forget how open was much of the Australian landscape when Europeans first arrived. The morality of clearing—the arguments for and against—focused the minds of settlers on the trees and the loss of them, while the aesthetics of pastoralism attracted their eyes to the grasslands and made them rejoice in the curious legacy of 'open' landscapes. In the early nineteenth century, the most common usage of the word 'forest' was to describe land fit to graze: 'according to the local distinction, the grass is the discriminating character [of forest land] and not the Trees'. At the same time, pastoralists were unwilling to recognise the role of Aboriginal people in creating such open landscapes and this reticence to acknowledge the Aboriginality of the pastoral economy persists today. This in turn affected the way settlers perceived the new forests that appeared after European invasion. The fate of the vegetation Europeans found has understandably been so much the focus of science and history—its removal, replacement, utilisation, modification and conservation—that 'new forests' easily escape scholarly attention; and being new, they seem far less valuable and threatened. They have generally been perceived as a nuisance, as enclosing and encroaching, as 'scrub', as 'woody weeds'. The politics of understanding regrowth are related not only to the issues of clearing and density, but especially to the culture of burning in Aboriginal and settler society and its implications for management and biodiversity. If the coming together of ecology and history best defines the new 'environmental history', then the most illuminating confluences are those where each discipline helps the other to identify what constitutes a unique 'event', both ecologically and historically. The article therefore finishes with examples of events in two landscapes—the long drought of the 1890s in western New South Wales and the Black Friday bushfires of 1939 in the mountain ash forests of Victoria—to illustrate how each emerges as an intriguing artefact of nature and history, a cultural exaggeration of a natural rhythm. Even as we discover the ecological depth of each apparently 'natural' event, we are reminded of its historical specificity.

After long campaigns demanding recognition of traditional land rights, Aboriginal people have regained control over some properties, but in circumstances that are greatly changed from pre-invasion conditions. Much of this newly acquired land is in rangeland areas, where the environmental degradation arising from pastoralism has lowered land values, thereby making land available for Aboriginal acquisition but at the same time making it less commercially viable without major capital investment, with the attendant possibility of further damage. In this context there can be no simple return to 'tradition', nor are there easy blueprints to follow to redevelop a viable approach to land management. Aborigines are faced with the question of choosing practical management decisions that will meet their cultural and ecological, as well as economic, needs. They are seeking also to take an active role in the broader management of the rangelands for which they feel responsibilities, beyond the fencelines of any one property. They are finding, however, that environmental decision-making is still embedded in the long colonial history of rural conflict over land and resources. While there are some approaches in common with non-Aboriginal neighbours and despite severe pressures and constraints, Aboriginal land managers are developing a distinctive pattern of decision-making which privileges social and cultural uses, together with an interest in implementing practical conservation measures for a wide variety of native biota. But the expression of Aboriginal interests in environmental decision-making continues to be obstructed. The long history of rural racial conflict over land and resources has left a legacy of severe structural disadvantage and of persistent, hostile alliances which act to marginalise Aboriginal voices despite the appearance of increasing inclusivity. The paper argues that these obstructions to an active Aboriginal role in environmental decision-making need to be recognised and addressed if Aboriginal interests and knowledge are to contribute justly and effectively to rangeland sustainability.

Aboriginal ownership of Australia's rangelands is already significant and is likely to increase with recognition of Native Title. Aboriginal management of the rangelands, including their use for cultural and subsistence purposes as well as for pastoralism and conservation (parks) presents alternatives to conventional practices. Traditional ecological knowledge is applied in all forms of Aboriginal land use. Multiple use of the land, combining two or more forms of use within a single area, is predominant. Such strategies are particularly important in more marginal parts of the rangelands where, because of environmental unpredictability, single purpose use may threaten the successful survival of landholders. A case-study of contemporary land use practised by the Ngarrinyin people in one such marginal area, the interior section of the Kimberley's remote Gibb River road, illustrates these points. As it shows, Aboriginal groups have varied their land management responses according to the extent of their ownership and control over their traditional country. The multiple uses which they practise enhance both their chances of providing a livelihood and the sustainability of the land as a whole. Non-Aboriginal neighbours have also increasingly moved towards multiple use strategies. These realities challenge the common perception from the 'outsider' government authorities that such regions should focus on single purpose use, with pastoralism the prime emphasis. The paper argues that this challenge must be met, by revision of land tenure to accommodate multiple use, by improving Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal communication and information exchange on rangeland management, by providing appropriate land management programs and by engaging in longterm, holistic planning for all residents of such regions. Such approaches would enhance opportunities for closing the gap between the realities of rangeland use and beliefs in appropriate forms of use.

Comparison of Aboriginal interests in rangelands in western New South Wales with those in north- western Northern Temtory and the Kimberley of Western Australia reveals little difference in their history, aspirations for land acquisition, or plans for multiple use management. Throughout Australia, Aboriginal people who are traditional owners of rangelands continue to live on or near the land they regard as traditionally theirs. This is true of the more closely settled rangelands as well as remote regions. In all the rangeland areas Aboriginal people now wish (and following the Mabo decision may more realistically expect to gain) some form of freehold title to at least some of their land. Aboriginal people whose traditional lands are located in western New South Wales have access to very little of their land but have maintained their connection to it. They have aspirations of obtaining access to and control over portions of it, with plans to manage it under a multiple use regime that would include small-scale sustainable pastoralism and agriculture, while living in dispersed family groups on the land. Aboriginal people's desire to retain access to their traditional land for non-economic reasons (spiritual, social, historical) is paramount. Should the Commonwealth Land Fund legislation be enacted, cultural imperatives as well as economic viability will need to be taken into account in the purchase of land. Planning for future management should incorporate traditional ecological knowledge and should involve Aboriginal traditional owners and their organisations, such as land councils and resource agencies, in local and regional planning.

Australia's rangelands are experiencing a radical re-evaluation of broadacre natural resources, with declining commodity values and enhanced amenity values. This is indicative of a transition from a productionist to a post-productionist era in rural resource use and related policy directions. While this transition offers new opportunities, it also presents formidable structural problems for our rangelands, most notably in the shift from market towards non-market values and in the geographical transfer of value. These challenges require new responses in strategic regional planning. Effective planning must recognise not only the structural problems endemic to the rangelands but also the highly differentiated regional potentials which are increasingly evident. A provisional regionalisation for strategic resource use planning is proposed, based upon resource orientation and obtained using a simple scaling of potentials for pastoralism, mining, tourism and Aboriginal resource use. Seven distinctive regional types are proposed, with the most powerful dimensions of differentiation being between commodity - versus amenity - orientation and also between accessibility/urbanisation (linked to closer settlement, mining and tourism) versus remoteness (associated with 'frontier' regions and Aboriginal homelands). A structured approach towards translating resource potential into regional benefits is outlined.

There is a prevailing paradigm that woody vegetation is expanding at the expense of grassland with reduced burning under pastoralism in the Mulga Lands biogeographic region in eastern Australia. This raises the possibility that the region is acting as a carbon sink. Vegetation boundaries were precisely positioned from rail survey plans dating from 1895 to 1900. This baseline was compared with the position of boundaries on 1952 aerial photography and 2010 Google Earth imagery. The conversion of forest to non-forest by mechanical clearing was also mapped from satellite imagery. There was no consistent trend in the direction of boundary movement for mulga (Acacia aneura F.Muell. ex Benth.), gidgee (Acacia cambagei R.T. Baker) forest or miscellaneous other forest types. The stability of the boundaries, despite the transition from aboriginal management to rangeland pastoralism, contrasts with dramatic declines in tree cover resulting from mechanical clearing. Mapping of forest cover from satellite imagery reveals that conversion of forest to non-forest has reduced mulga forest to 74%, gidgee forest to 30% and miscellaneous forest types to 82% of their original area. Annual clearing rates for the period between 1997 and 2005 were 0.83, 0.95 and 0.43% for those forest types, respectively. Clearing has declined substantially in the period 2005–09 since the advent of recent regulations in Queensland. The area remains a source of carbon emissions but this situation may reverse if restoration of mulga dry forest becomes an attractive land use with an emerging carbon market.

Arid systems are markedly different from non-arid systems. This distinctiveness extends to arid-social networks, by which we mean social networks which are influenced by the suite of factors driving arid and semi-arid regions. Neither the process of how aridity interacts with social structure, nor what happens as a result of this interaction, is adequately understood. This paper postulates three relative characteristics which make arid-social networks distinct: that they are tightly bound, are hierarchical in structure and, hence, prone to power abuses, and contain a relatively higher proportion of weak links, making them reactive to crisis. These ideas were modified from workshop discussions during 2006. Although they are neither tested nor presented as strong beliefs, they are based on the anecdotal observations of arid-system scientists with many years of experience. This paper does not test the ideas, but rather examines them in the context of five arid-social network case studies with the aim of hypotheses building. Our cases are networks related to pastoralism, Aboriginal outstations, the ‘Far West Coast Aboriginal Enterprise Network’ and natural resources in both the Lake-Eyre basin and the Murray–Darling catchment. Our cases highlight that (1) social networks do not have clear boundaries, and that how participants perceive their network boundaries may differ from what network data imply, (2) although network structures are important determinants of system behaviour, the role of participants as individuals is still pivotal, (3) and while in certain arid cases weak links are engaged in crisis, the exact structure of all weak links in terms of how they place participants in relation to other communities is what matters.

Only ~15% of Australians now live outside the cities and the essentially suburban coastal corridor. Those coastal suburbs are home not to the descendants of drovers and Anzacs, but to ambitious migrants from Asia and the Middle–East, with no taste for rural life. Under pressure of globalisation and market economics the narrative of the rangelands has changed and with that the national interest in the rangelands has declined. Increasingly self-interest has over-powered national interest in the rangelands. The traditional narrative relied on mining, pastoralism and tourism and the contest for land and resources between these sectors and Aboriginal interests. The early champions in each of these sectors were revered. Today these sectors are driven more by self-interest and international investors than national interest. Today, there is not the same recognition of the names like Kidman or Flynn or Perkins as in the past. The rangelands are no longer in the hearts and minds of the nation. Rangelands impinge to a degree on national security through the buffer of confidence their vast expanse provides to coastal communities. Rangelands also figure in the national conscience through the complexity of issues around ‘the problem’ of Aboriginal lifestyles as perceived by coastal communities. Yet topics that spark national interest in rangelands are hard to identify unless they relate to share dividends. In this indifferent environment, will the rangelands benefit from grand national-policy initiatives or from increasingly focussed progressive policy? This paper argues for a narrative with a more disruptive and innovative radicalisation of the rangelands to re-ignite national interest and national investment.

The importance of the rangelands, economically, environmentally, and culturally to Australia, is highlighted. Australians need to be more aware of and appreciate new ways of working in pastoralism, environmental management, with Indigenous communities and mining that point the way to better social, economic, cultural and environmental outcomes. Optimism about the future role of the rangelands stems from the changes in Australia that have occurred over the past 50 years, from a country that was legally and socially segregated. Changes started with advocacy of voting rights for Indigenous people in 1961 and continued with the establishment of Aboriginal legal services, the setting up of the National Native Title Tribunal and native title representative bodies, and the founding of Reconciliation Australia. Changes have occurred because people have tried to make things better, not just for themselves but for Australia. Leadership and tireless action from Indigenous people and non-Indigenous collaborators have been powerful forces for change. However, governments continue to often fail those who live and work in areas that are distant from cities. Change needs to continue and everyone who cares about rangelands has a role, in different ways, to nudge the world of the rangelands to a better place.

The Western Australian system of protected areas (PAs) covers more than 15 million ha and is the second largest conservation estate of the Australian continent. An analysis of the history of the creation of PAs in Western Australia shows that the concept of nature conservation through reserves was slow to emerge. During the early decades of the century, reserves were mainly created for their recreation values. The lack of governmental interest in nature conservation led to a belated development of reserve coverage up to the 1950s, while vast areas of land were opened to farming and pastoralism. Following two scientifically-based reviews of the PA system, the number and coverage of PAs increased dramatically up to the late 1970s. The rationalization of the vesting and managerial responsibilities for PAs was only finalized in the 1980s. Since then, there has not been any large increase in PA area but a consolidation of the PA coverage. The development of the system of PAs has been impeded by the belated response of Western Australian governments to conservation concerns and a 'worthless' land approach to conservation as a land use. While large-scale land alienation for agriculture has now stopped, other types of land uses such as mining and other aspirations over land management and vesting, such as Aboriginal land claims and forestry are now constraining any large expansion of the PA system. Only an approach embracing the whole landscape can overcome the political and social limitations of the concept of PAs and the further degradation of developed land in Western Australia.

The majority of arid and semiarid land in the Western Australian pastoral zone has a long history of livestock grazing within an extensive network of predominantly family-held pastoral leases. A variety of different groups have purchased pastoral leases in the last five decades and, for many, making a profit from pastoralism is no longer a priority. For the central rangelands of Western Australia, these groups have included: government agencies, who have purchased some 9% of pastoral leases by area; private conservation organisations (<1% purchased); aboriginal communities and groups (~7%); and mining companies (~13%). The purchases of pastoral leases by government agencies was designed to improve the conservation status of arid-zone ecosystems, and is the first step in a process of changing land tenure to a conservation reserve. This paper summarises the extent and other characteristics of these changes in land tenure and ownership of pastoral leases, and explores the implications for land management and conservation, stemming from these changes. It demonstrates that large areas of contiguous land with no or reduced domestic stocking can now be found in many parts of these rangelands, particularly in the Coolgardie, Yalgoo and Pilbara bio-regions, with some leaseholders actively managing land for the conservation of biodiversity and restoring sites degraded through past over-grazing. In some bio-regions, such land covers considerable proportions of sub-catchments, suggesting that broad-scale conservation management and restoration objectives may be realised. It is argued that to fully realise these objectives requires effective communication and co-ordination between land managers, including sharing of ideas, view-points and resources. In particular, mining companies, now major holders of pastoral leases in Western Australia, can play an important role in contributing to and even facilitating such objectives.

The mound springs of inland Australia are of outstanding scientific and cultural importance. Natural outlets for the waters of the Great Artesian Basin, they are found mostly on or near its margins. The most numerous and active are in the far north of South Australia. Parts of westem Queensland still have active springs, but almost all in north-westem New South Wales are now extinct, presumably because of aquifer draw-down in the wake of bore sinking. As permanent sources of potable water in a desert environment they have been a focus for human activity over many years. Aboriginal occupation has been documented to at least 5000 years BP and almost all the springs are rich in archaeological material and mythological associations. Since European settlement they have been of strategic importance in exploration and in the location of pastoral stations, the Overland Telegraph and the old Ghan narrow gauge railway from Marree to Oodnadatta. Biologically, they represent unusually specialised aquatic habitats, the discontinuity being analogous to islands and the isolation just as great for species with limited dispersal abilities. The result is an assemblage of plants and animals of evolutionary, biogeographic and ecological interest, with many endemic and relict species. Heavily degraded by aquifer draw-down and over a century of pastoralism, the springs were given little attention until relatively recently. In the past decade two key areas have been acquired for the national parks system and ten important springs on pastoral country outside of the parks have been fenced. Important research has also been carried out, with a particular focus on the endemic elements of the invertebrate fauna. These are positive achievements, but the remoteness of the localities where the springs occur presents a continuing difficulty for on-going conservation and management programs.

This paper examines a range of environmental, research and practical issues affecting fire management of pastoral lands in the southern part of the Kimberley region in Western Australia. Although spinifex grasslands dominate most leases, smaller areas of more productive pastures are crucially important to many enterprises. There is a lack of local documentation of burning practices during traditional Aboriginal occupation; general features of the fire regime at that time can be suggested on the basis of information from other inland areas. Definition of current tire regimes is improving through interpretation of NOAA-AVHRR satellite imagery. Irregular extensive wildfires appear to dominate, although this should be confirmed by further accumulation, validation and analysis of fire history data. While these fires cause ma,jor difficulties. controlled burn~ng is a necessary part of station management. Although general management guidelines have been published. local research into tire-grazing effects has been very limited. For spinifex pastures, reconimendations are generally consistent with those applying elsewhere in northern Australia. They favour periodic burning of mature spinifex late in the year, before or shortly after the arrival of the first rains, with deferment of grazing. At that time. days of high fire danger may still be expected and prediction of fire behaviour is critical to burning decisions. Early dry-season burning is also required for creating protective tire breaks and to prepare for burning later in the year. Further development of tools for predicting fire behaviour, suited to the discontinuous fuels characteristic of the area, would be warranted. A range of questions concerning the timing and spatial pattern of burning, control of post-fire grazing, and the economics of fire management, should be addressed as resources permit. This can be done through a combination of opportunistic studies, modelling and documentation of local experience. The development of an expert system should be considered to assist in planning and conducting burning activities. Key words: Kimberley, fire regimes, fire management, pastoralism, spinifex

Aborigines and other Australians have not met with amity. Memorials to the Aboriginal people of Australia are not common and some of the more prominent are regularly damaged. Eddies of past tempests slap disturbingly at modern day memorials thousands of kilometres and several generations removed from the eye of furious storms. This article traces a difficult story of what seems at first sight to be blind racism, at a second sight, a rampant colonialism, and at a more reflective third, perhaps, the economy of the pastoralist and the farmer in deadly disharmony to that of the hunter gatherer. Whatever the origins, the consequences of conflict endure for centuries.

The following article is in response to a research project that took the form of a road trip from Perth to Lombadina re-enacting the journey undertaken by the characters in the play Bran Nue Dae by playwright Jimmy Chi and Broome band Kuckles. This project was facilitated by the assistance of a Creative and Research Publication Grant from the Faculty of Communications and Creative Industries, Edith Cowan University, Western Australia. The project was carried out by researchers Kara Jacob and Margaret Hair. One thing is plainly clear. Aboriginal art expresses the possibility of human intimacy with landscapes. This is the key to its power: it makes available a rich tradition of human ethics and relationships with place and other species to a worldwide audience. For the settler Australian audience, caught ambiguously between old and new lands, their appreciation of this art embodies at least a striving for the kind of citizenship that republicans wanted: to belong to this place rather than to another (Marcia Langton in Watson 191). Marcia Langton is talking here about painting. My question is whether this “kind of citizenship” can also be accessed through appreciation of indigenous theatre, and specifically through the play Bran Nue Dae, by playwright Jimmy Chi and Broome band Kuckles, a play closely linked to the Western Australian landscape through its appropriation of the road trip genre. The physical journey taken by the characters metaphorically takes them also through the contact history of black and white Australians in Western Australia. Significantly, the non-indigenous characters experience the redemptive power of “human intimacy with landscapes” through travelling to the traditional country of their road trip companions. The road trip genre typically places its characters on a quest for knowledge. American poet Gary Snyder says that the two sources of human knowledge are symbols and sense-impressions (vii). Bran Nue Dae abounds with symbols, from the priest’s cassock and mitre to Roebourne prison; however, the sense impressions, which are so strong in the performance of the play, are missing from the written text, apart from ironic comments on the weather. In my efforts to understand Bran Nue Dae, I undertook the road trip from Perth to the Kimberley myself in order to discover those missing sense-impressions, as they form part of the “back story” of the play. In the play there is a void between the time the characters leave Perth and reach first Roebourne, where they are locked up, and then Roebuck Plains, not far from Broome, yet in the “real world” they would have travelled more than two thousand kilometres. What would they have seen and experienced on this journey? I took note of Krim Benterrak, Paddy Roe and Stephen Muecke’s Reading the Country, a cross-cultural and cross-textual study on Roebuck Plains, near Broome. Muecke talks about “stories being contingent upon place … Aboriginal storytellers have a similar policy. If one is not prepared to take the trouble to go to the place, then its story can only be given as a short version” (72). In preparing for the trip, I collected tourist brochures and maps. The use of maps, seemingly essential on any road trip as guides to “having a look at” country (Muecke ibid.), was instantly problematic in itself, in that maps represent country as colonised space. In Saltwater People, Nonie Sharp discusses the “distinction between mapping and personal journeying”: Maps and mapping describe space in a way that depersonalises it. Mapping removes the footprints of named creatures – animal, human, ancestral – who belong to this place or that place. A map can be anywhere. ‘Itineraries’, however, are actions and movements within a named and footprinted land (Sharp 199-200). The country journeyed through in Bran Nue Dae, which privileges indigenous experience, could be designated as the potentially dangerous liminal space between the “map” and the “itinerary”. This “space between” resonates with untold stories, with invisibilities. One of the most telling discoveries on the research trip was the thoroughness with which indigenous people have been made to disappear from the “mapped” zones through various colonial policies. It was very evident that indigenous people are still relegated to the fringes of town, as in Onslow and Port Hedland, in housing situations closely resembling the old missions and reserves. Although my travelling companion and I made an effort in every place we visited to pay our respects by at least finding out the language group of the traditional owners, it became clear that a major challenge in travelling through post-colonial space is in avoiding becoming complicit in the disappearance of indigenous people. We wanted our focus to be “on the people whose bodies, territories, beliefs and values have been travelled though” (Tuhiwai Smith 78) but our experience was that finding even written guides into the “footprinted land” is not easy when few tourist pamphlets acknowledge the traditional owners of the country. Even when “local Aboriginal” words are quoted, as in the CALM brochure for Nambung National Park (i.e., the Pinnacles), the actual language or language group is not mentioned. In many interpretive brochures and facilities, traditional owners are represented as absent, as victims or as prisoners. The fate of the “original inhabitants of the Greenough Flats”, the Yabbaroo people, is alluded to in the Greenough River Nature Walk Trail Guide, under the title, “A short history of Greenough River from the Rivermouth to Westbank Road”: The Gregory brothers, exploring for pastoral land in 1848, peacefully met with a large group of Aborigines camped beside a freshwater spring in a dense Melaleuca thicket. They named the spring Bootenal, from the Nyungar word Boolungal, meaning pelican. Gregory’s glowing reports of good grazing prompted pastoralists to move their flocks to Greenough, and by 1852 William Criddle was watering cattle for the Cattle Company at the Bootenal Spring. The Aborigines soon resented this intrusion and in 1854, large numbers with many from surrounding tribes, gathered in the relative safety of the Bootenal thicket. Making forays at night, they killed cattle and sheep and attacked homesteads. The pastoralists retaliated by forming a posse at Glengarry under the command of the Resident Magistrate. On the night of the 4th/5th July they rode to Bootenal and drove the Aborigines from the thicket. No arrests were made and no official report given of casualties. Aboriginal resistance in the area was finished. The fact that the extract actually describes a massacre while purporting to be a “history of Greenough River” subverts the notion that the land can ever really be “depersonalised”. At the very heart of the difference lie different ways of being human: in Aboriginal classical tradition the person dwells within a personified landscape which is alive, named, inscribed by spiritual and human agents. It is a ‘Thou’ not an ‘It’, and I and Thou belong together (Sharp 199-200). Peter Read’s book Belonging: Australians, Place and Aboriginal Ownership contains a section titled “The Past Embedded in the Landscape” in which Read discusses whether the land holds the memory of events enacted upon it, so forming a tangible link between the dispossessed and the possessors. While discussing Judith Wright’s poem Bora Ring, Read states: “The unlaid violence of dispossession lingers at the sites of evil or old magic”, bringing to mind Wright’s notion of Australia as “a haunted country” (14). It is not surprising that the “unlaid violence of dispossession lingers” at the sites of old prisons and lock-ups, since it is built into the very architecture. The visitor pamphlet states that the 1890s design by George Temple Poole of the third Roebourne gaol, further up the great Northern Highway from Greenough and beautifully constructed from stone, “represents a way in which the state ideology of control of a remote and potentially dangerous population could be expressed in buildings”. The current Roebourne prison, still holding a majority of Aboriginal inmates, does away with any pretence of architectural elegance but expresses the same state ideology with its fence topped with razor wire. Without a guide like Bran Nue Dae’s Uncle Tadpole to keep us “off the track”, non-indigenous visitors to these old gaols, now largely museums, may be quickly led by the interpretation into the “mapped zone” – the narrative of imperialist expansion. However, we can follow Paul Carter’s injunction to “deepen grooves” and start with John Pat’s story at the Roebourne police lock-up, or the story of any indigenous inmate of the present Roebuck prison, spiralling back a century to the first Roebuck prison in settler John Withnell’s woolshed (Weightman 4). Then we gain a sense of the contact experience of the local indigenous peoples. John Withnell and his wife Emma are represented as particularly resourceful by the interpretation at the old Roebourne gaol (now Roebourne Visitors Centre and Museum). The museum has a replica of a whalebone armchair that John Withnell built for his wife with vertebrae as the seat and other bones as the back and armrests. The family also invented the canvas waterbag. The interpretation fails to mention that the same John Withnell beat an Aboriginal woman named Talarong so severely for refusing to care for sheep at Withnell’s Hillside Station that “she retreated into the bush and died of her injuries two days later”. No charges were brought against Withnell because, according to the Acting Government Resident, of the “great provocation” by Talarong in the incident (Hunt 99-100). Such omissions and silences in the official record force indigenous people into a parallel “invisible country” and leave us stranded on the highways of the “mapped zone”, bereft of our rights and responsibilities to connect either to the country or to its traditional owners. Roebourne, and its coastal port Cossack, stand on the hauntingly beautiful country of the Ngarluma and seaside Yapurarra peoples. Settlers first arrived in the 1860s and Aboriginal people began to be officially imprisoned soon after, primarily as a result of their resistance to being “blackbirded” and exploited as labour for the pearling and pastoral industries. Prisoners were chained by the neck, day and night, and forced to build roads and tramlines, ostensibly a “civilising” practice. As the history pamphlet for The Old Roebourne Gaol reads: “It was widely believed that the Roebourne Gaol was where the ‘benefit’ of white civilisation could be shown to the ‘savage’ Aboriginal” (Weightman 2). The “back story” I discovered on this research trip was one of disappearance – indigenous people being made to disappear from their countries, from non-indigenous view and from the written record. The symbols I surprisingly most engaged with and which most affected me were the gaols and prisons which the imperialists used as tools of their trade in disappearance. The sense impressions I experienced – extreme beauty, isolation, heat and sandflies – reinforced the complexity of Western Australian contact history. I began to see the central achievement of Bran Nue Dae as being the return of indigenous people to country and to story. This return, so beautifully realised in when the characters finally reach Lombadina and a state of acceptance, is critical to healing the country and to the attainment of an equitable “kind of citizenship” that denotes belonging for all. References Aboriginal Tourism Australia. Welcome to Country: Respecting Indigenous Culture for Travellers in Australia. 2004. Benterrak, Krim, Stephen Muecke, and Paddy Roe. Reading the Country. Perth: Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1984. Carter, Paul. The Lie of the Land. London: Faber & Faber, 1996. Dalton, Peter. “Broome: A Multiracial Community. A Study of Social and Cultural Relationships in a Town in the West Kimberleys, Western Australia”. Thesis for Master of Arts in Anthropology. Perth: University of Western Australia, 1964. Hunt, Susan Jane. Spinifex and Hessian: Women’s Lives in North-Western Australia 1860–1900. Nedlands, WA: U of Western Australia P, 1986. Read, Peter. Belonging: Australians, Place and Aboriginal Ownership. UK: Cambridge UP, 2000. Reynolds, Henry. North of Capricorn: The Untold History of Australia’s North. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2003. Reynolds, Henry. Why Weren’t We Told? Ringwood, Victoria: Penguin Books Australia, 1999. Sharp, Nonie. Saltwater People: The Waves of Memory. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2002. Shire of Greenough. Greenough River Nature Walk Trail Guide. 2005. Tuhiwai Smith, Linda. Decolonizing Methodologies. Dunedin, New Zealand: U of Otago P, 1999. Watson, Christine. Piercing the Ground. Perth: Fremantle Arts Centre P, 2003. Weightman, Llyrus. The Old Roebourne Gaol: A History. Pilbara Classies & Printing Service. Wright, Judith. The Cry for the Dead. 1981. 277-80. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Hair, Margaret. "Invisible Country." M/C Journal 8.6 (2005). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0512/09-hair.php>. APA Style Hair, M. (Dec. 2005) "Invisible Country," M/C Journal, 8(6). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0512/09-hair.php>.

IntroductionI work at a regional campus of La Trobe University, Australia. More precisely, I work at the Bendigo campus of La Trobe University. At Bendigo, we are often annoyed when referred to and addressed as ‘regional’ students and staff. Really, we should not be. After all, Bendigo campus is an outpost of La Trobe’s metropolitan base. It is funded, run, and directed from Bundoora (Melbourne). The word ‘regional’ simply describes the situation. A region is an “administrative division of a city or a district [… or …] a country” (Brown 2528). And the Latin etymology of region (regio, regere) includes “direction, line”, and “rule” (Kidd 208, 589). Just as the Bendigo campus of La Trobe is a satellite of the metropolitan campus, the town of Bendigo is an outpost of Melbourne. So, when we are addressed and interpellated (Althusser 48) as regional, it is a reminder of the ongoing fact that Australia is (still) a colony, an outpost of empire, a country organised on the colonial model. From central administrative hubs, spokes of communication, and transportation spread to the outposts. When Bendigo students and staff are addressed as regional, in a way we are also being addressed as colonial.In this article, the terms ‘region’ and ‘regional’ are deployed as inextricably associated with the Australian version of colonialism. In Australia, in the central metropolitan hubs, where the colonial project is at its most comprehensive, it is hard to see what remains, to see what has escaped that project. The aim of this article is to explore how different aspects of the country escape the totalising project of Australian colonialism. This exploration is undertaken primarily through a discussion of the ways in which some places on this continent remain not regional (and thus, not colonial) how they keep the metropolis at bay, and how they, thus, keep Europe at bay. This discussion includes a general overview of the Australian colonial project, particularly as it pertains to First Nations Peoples, their knowledge and philosophies, and the continent’s unique ecologies. Then the article becomes more speculative, imagining different ways of seeing and experiencing time and place in this country, ways of seeing the remains and refuges of pre-1788, not-regional, and not-colonial Australia. In these remains and refuges, there persist the flourishing and radical difference of this continent’s ecologies and, not surprisingly, the radical suitedness of tens of thousands of years of First Nations Peoples’ culture and thinking to that ecology, as Country. In what remains not regional, I argue, are answers to the question: How will we live here in the Anthropocene?A Totalising ProjectSince 1788, in the face of the ongoing presence and resistance of First Nations cultures, and the continent’s radically unique ecologies, the Australian colonial project has been to convert the continent into a region of Europe. As such, the imposed political, administrative, scientific, and economic institutions are largely European. This is also so, to a lesser extent, of social and cultural institutions. While the continent is not Europe geologically, the notion of the Anthropocene suggests that this is changing (Crutzen and Stoermer). This article does not resummarise the vast body of scholarship on the effects of colonisation, from genocide to missionary charity, to the creation of bureaucratic and comprador classes, and so on. Suffice to say that the different valences of colonisation—from outright malevolence to misguided benevolence–produce similar and common effects. As such, what we experience in metropolitan and regional Australia, is chillingly similar to what people experience in London. Chilling, because this experience demonstrates how the effects of the project tend towards the total.To clarify, when I use the name ‘Australia’ I understand it as the continent’s European name. When I use the term ‘Europe’ or ‘European’, I refer to both the European continent and to the reach and scope of the various colonial and imperial projects of European nations. I take this approach because I think it is necessary to recognise their global effects and loads. In Australia, this load has been evident and present for more than two centuries. On one hand, it is evident in the social, cultural, and political institutions that come with colonisation. On another, it is evident in the environmental impacts of colonisation: impacts that are severely compounded in Australia. In relation to this, there is vital, ongoing scholarship that explores the fact that, ecologically, Australia is a radically different place, and which discusses the ways in which European scientific, aesthetic, and agricultural assumptions, and the associated naturalised and generic understandings of ‘nature’, have grounded activities that have radically transformed the continent’s biosphere. To name but a few, Tim Flannery (Eaters, “Ecosystems”) and Stephen Pyne, respectively, examine the radical difference of this continent’s ecology, geology, climate, and fire regimes. Sylvia Hallam, Bill Gammage, and Bruce Pascoe (“Bolt”, Emu) explore the relationships of First Nations Peoples with that ecology, climate, and fire before 1788, and the European blindness to the complexity of these relationships. For instance, William Lines quotes the strikingly contradictory observations of the colonial surveyor, Thomas Mitchell, where the land is simultaneously “populous” and “without inhabitants” and “ready for the immediate reception of civilised man” and European pastoralism (Mitchell qtd. in Lines 71). Flannery (Eaters) and Tim Low (Feral, New) discuss the impacts of introduced agricultural practices, exotic animals, and plants. Tom Griffiths tells the story of ‘Improving’ and ‘Acclimatisation Societies’, whose explicit aims were to convert Australian lands into European lands (32–48). The notion of ‘keeping Europe at bay’ is a response to the colonial assumptions, practices, and impositions highlighted by these writers.The project of converting this continent and hundreds of First Nations Countries into a region of Europe, ‘Australia’, is, in ambition, a totalising one. From the strange flag-plantings, invocations and incantations claiming ownership and dominion, to legalistic conceptions such as terra nullius, the aim has been to speak, to declare, to interpellate the country as European. What is not European, must be made European. What cannot be made European is either (un)seen in a way which diminishes or denies its existence, or must be made not to exist. These are difficult things to do: to not see, to unsee, or to eradicate.One of the first acts of administrative division (direction and rule) in the Port Phillip colony (now known as Victoria) was that of designating four regional Aboriginal Protectorates. Edward Stone Parker was appointed Assistant Protector of Aborigines for the Loddon District, a district which persists today for many state and local government instrumentalities as the Loddon-Mallee region. In the 1840s, Parker experienced the difficulty described above, in attempting to ‘make European’ the Dja Dja Wurrung people. As part of Parker’s goal of Christianising Dja Dja Wurrung people, he sought to learn their language. Bain Attwood records his frustration:[Parker] remarked in July 1842. ‘For physical objects and their attributes, the language readily supplies equivalent terms, but for the metaphysical, so far I have been able to discover scarcely any’. A few years later Parker simply despaired that this work of translation could be undertaken. ‘What can be done’, he complained, ‘with a people whose language knows no such terms as holiness, justice, righteousness, sin, guilt, repentance, redemption, pardon, peace, and c., and to whose minds the ideas conveyed by those words are utterly foreign and inexplicable?’ (Attwood 125)The assumption here is that values and concepts that are ‘untranslatable’ into European understandings mark an absence of such value and concept. Such assumptions are evident in attempts to convince, cajole, or coerce First Nations Peoples into abandoning traditional cultural and custodial relationships with Country in favour of individual private property ownership. The desire to maintain relationships with Country are described by conservative political figures such as Tony Abbott as “lifestyle choices” (Medhora), effectively declaring them non-existent. In addition, processes designed to recognise First Nations relationships to Country are procedurally frustrated. Examples of this are the bizarre decisions made in 2018 and 2019 by Nigel Scullion, the then Indigenous Affairs Minister, to fund objections to land claims from funds designated to alleviate Indigenous disadvantage and to refuse to grant land rights claims even when procedural obstacles have been cleared (Allam). In Australia, given that First Nations social, cultural, and political life is seamlessly interwoven with the environment, ecology, the land–Country, and that the colonial project has always been, and still is, a totalising one, it is a project which aims to sever the connections to place of First Nations Peoples. Concomitantly, when the connections cannot be severed, the people must be either converted, dismissed, or erased.This project, no matter how brutal and relentless, however, has not achieved totality.What Remains Not Regional? If colonisation is a totalising project, and regional Australia stands as evidence of this project’s ongoing push, then what remains not regional, or untouched by the colonial? What escapes the administrative, the institutional, the ecological, the incantatory, and the interpellative reach of the regional? I think that despite this reach, there are such remains. The frustration, the anger, and antipathy of Parker, Abbott, and Scullion bear this out. Their project is unfinished and the resistance to it infuriates. I think that, in Australia, the different ways in which pre-1788 modes of life persist are modes of life which can be said to be ‘keeping Europe at bay’.In Reports from a Wild Country: Ethics for Decolonisation, Deborah Bird Rose compares Western/European conceptualisations of time, with those of the people living in the communities around the Victoria River in the Northern Territory. Rose describes Western constructions of time as characterised by disjunction (for example, the ‘birth’ of philosophy, the beginnings of Christianity) and by irreversible sequence (for example, concepts of telos, apocalypse, and progress). These constructions have become so naturalised as to carry a “seemingly commonsensical orientation toward the future” (15). Orientation, in an Australian society “built on destruction, enables regimes of violence to continue their work while claiming the moral ground of making a better future” (15). Such an orientation “enables us to turn our backs on the current social facts of pain, damage, destruction and despair which exist in the present, but which we will only acknowledge as our past” (17).In contrast to this ‘future vision’, Rose describes what she calls the ‘canonical’ time-space conceptualisation of the Victoria River people (55). Here, rather than a temporal extension into an empty future, orientation is towards living, peopled, and grounded origins, with the emphasis on the plural, rather than a single point of origin or disjunction:We here now, meaning we here in a shared present, are distinct from the people of the early days by the fact that they preceded us and made our lives possible. We are the ‘behind mob’—those who come after. The future is the domain of those who come after us. They are referred to as […] those ‘behind us’. (55)By way of illustration, when we walk into a sheep paddock, even if we are going somewhere (even the future), we are also irrevocably walking behind ancestors, predecessor ecologies, previous effects. The paddock, is how it is, after about 65,000 years of occupation, custodianship, and management, after European surveyors, squatters, frontier conflict and violence, the radical transformation of the country, the destruction of the systems that came before. Everything there, as Freya Mathews would put it, is of “the given” (“Becoming” 254, “Old” 127). We are coming up behind. That paddock is the past and present, and what happens next is irrevocably shaped by it. We cannot walk away from it.What remains not regional is there in front of us. Country, language, and knowledge remain in the sheep paddock, coexisting with everyone and everything else that everyone in this country follows (including the colonial and the regional). It is not gone. We have to learn how to see it.By the Fox or the Little EagleFigure 1: A Scatter of Sulphur-Crested Cockatoo Feathers at Wehla. Image Credit: Terry Eyssens.As a way of elaborating on this, I will tell you about a small, eight hectare, patch of land in Dja Dja Wurrung Country. Depending on the day, or the season, or your reason, it could take fifteen minutes to walk from one end to the other or it might take four hours, from the time you start walking, to the time when you get back to where you started. At this place, I found a scatter of White Cockatoo feathers (Sulphur-Crested Cockatoo—Cacatua galerita). There was no body, just the feathers, but it was clear that the Cockatoo had died, had been caught by something, for food. The scatter was beautiful. The feathers, their sulphur highlights, were lying on yellow-brown, creamy, dry grass. I dwelled on the scatter. I looked. I looked around. I walked around. I scanned the horizon and squinted at the sky. And I wondered, what happened.This small patch of land in Dja Dja Wurrung Country is in an area now known as Wehla. In the Dja Dja Wurrung and many other Victorian languages, ‘Wehla’ (and variants of this word) is a name for the Brushtail Possum (Trichosurus vulpecula). In the time I spend there/here, I see all kinds of animals. Of these, two are particularly involved in this story. One is the Fox (Vulpes vulpes), which I usually see just the back of, going away. They are never surprised. They know, or seem to know, where everyone is. They have a trot, a purposeful, cocky trot, whether they are going away because of me or whether they are going somewhere for their own good reasons. Another animal I see often is the Little Eagle (Hieraaetus morphnoides). It is a half to two-thirds the size of a Wedge-tailed Eagle (Aquila audax). It soars impressively. Sometimes I mistake a Little Eagle for a Wedge-tail, until I get a better look and realise that it is not quite that big. I am not sure where the Little Eagle’s nest is but it must be close by.I wondered about this scatter of White Cockatoo feathers. I wondered, was the scatter of White Cockatoo feathers by the Fox or by the Little Eagle? This could be just a cute thought experiment. But I think the question matters because it provokes thinking about what is regional and what remains not regional. The Fox is absolutely imperial. It is introduced and widespread. Low describes it as among Australia’s “greatest agent[s] of extinction” (124). It is part of the colonisation of this place, down to this small patch of land in Dja Dja Wurrung Country. Where the Fox is, colonisation, and everything that goes with it, remains, and maintains. So, that scatter of feathers could be a colonial, regional happening. Or maybe it is something that remains not regional, not colonial. Maybe the scatter is something that escapes the regional. The Little Eagles and the Cockatoos, who were here before colonisation, and their dance (a dance of death for the Cockatoo, a dance of life for the Little Eagle), is maybe something that remains not regional.But, so what if the scatter of White Cockatoo feathers, this few square metres of wind-blown matter, is not regional? Well, if it is ‘not regional’, then, if Australia is to become something other than a colony, we have to look for these things that are not regional, that are not colonial, that are not imperial. Maybe if we start with a scatter of White Cockatoo feathers that was by the Little Eagle, and then build outwards again, we might start to notice more things that are not regional, that still somehow escape. For example, the persistence of First Nations modes of land custodianship and First Nations understandings of time. Then, taking care not to fetishise First Nations philosophies and cultures, take the time and care to recognise the associations of all of those things with simply, the places themselves, like a patch of land in Dja Dja Wurrung Country, which is now known as Wehla. Instead of understanding that place as something that is just part of the former Aboriginal Protectorate of Loddon or of the Loddon Mallee region of Victoria, it is Wehla.The beginning of decolonisation is deregionalisation. Every time we recognise the not regional (which is hopefully, eventually, articulated in a more positive sense than ‘not regional’), and just say something like ‘Wehla’, we can start to keep Europe at bay. Europe’s done enough.seeing and SeeingChina Miéville’s The City and The City (2009) is set in a place, in which the citizens of two cities live. The cities, Besźel and Ul Qoma, occupy the same space, are culturally and politically different. Their relationship to each other is similar to that of border-sharing Cold War states. Citizens of the two cities are forbidden to interact with each other. This prohibition is radically policed. Even though the citizens of Besźel and Ul Qoma live in adjoining buildings, share roads, and walk the same streets, they are forbidden to see each other. The populations of each city grow up learning how to see what is permitted and to not see, or unsee, the forbidden other (14).I think that seeing a scatter of White Cockatoo feathers and wondering if it was by the Fox or by the Little Eagle is akin to the different practices of seeing and not seeing in Besźel and Ul Qoma. The scatter of feathers is regional and colonial and, equally, it is not. Two countries occupy the same space. Australia and a continent with its hundreds of Countries. What remains not regional is what is given and Seen as such. Understanding ourselves as walking behind everything that has gone before us enables this. As such, it is possible to see the scatter of White Cockatoo feathers as by the Fox, as happening in ‘regional Australia’, as thus characterised by around 200 years of carnage, where the success of one species comes at the expense of countless others. On the other hand, it is possible to See the feathers as by the Little Eagles, and as happening on a small patch of land in Dja Dja Wurrung Country, as a dance that has been happening for hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of years. It is a way of keeping Europe at bay.I think these Cockatoo feathers are a form of address. They are capable of interpellating something other than the regional, the colonial, and the imperial. A story of feathers, Foxes, and Little Eagles can remind us of our ‘behindness’, and evoke, and invoke, and exemplify ways of seeing and engaging with where we live that are tens of thousands of years old. This is both an act of the imagination and a practice of Seeing what is really there. When we learn to see the remains and refuges, the persistence of the not regional, we might also begin to learn how to live here in the Anthropocene. But, Anthropocene or no Anthropocene, we have to learn how to live here anyway.References Allam, Lorena. “Aboriginal Land Rights Claims Unresolved Despite All-Clear from Independent Review.” The Guardian 29 Mar. 2019. <https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/mar/29/aboriginal-land-rights-claims-unresolved-despite-all-clear-from-independent-review>.Althusser, Louis. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation).” On Ideology. Trans. Ben Brewster. London: Verso, [1971] 2008.Attwood, Bain. The Good Country: The Djadja Wurrung, the Settlers and the Protectors. Clayton: Monash UP, 2017.Brown, Lesley. The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary: On Historical Principles: Volume 2. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993.Crutzen, Paul, J., and Eugene F. Stoermer. “The ‘Anthropocene’.” Global Change Newsletter 41 (May 2000): 17–18.Flannery, Timothy F. “The Fate of Empire in Low- and High-Energy Ecosystems.” Ecology and Empire: Environmental History of Settler Societies. Eds. Tom Griffiths and Libby Robin. Edinburgh: Keele UP, 1997. 46–59.———. The Future Eaters. Sydney: Reed New Holland, 1994.Gammage, Bill. The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia. Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 2012.Griffiths, Tom. Forests of Ash. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001.Hallam, Sylvia. Fire and Hearth: A Study of Aboriginal Usage and European Usurpation in South-Western Australia. Rev. ed. Crawley: U of Western Australia P, 2014.Kidd, D.A. Collins Gem Latin-English, English-Latin Dictionary. London: Collins, 1980.Lines, William. Taming the Great South Land: A History of the Conquest of Nature in Australia. Berkeley and Los Angeles: U of California P, 1991.Low, Tim. The New Nature: Winners and Losers in Wild Australia. Camberwell: Penguin Books, 2003.———. Feral Future: The Untold Story of Australia’s Exotic Invaders. Ringwood: Penguin Books, 1999.Mathews, Freya. “Becoming Native: An Ethos of Countermodernity II.” Worldviews: Environment, Culture, Religion 3 (1999): 243–71.———. “Letting the World Grow Old: An Ethos of Countermodernity.” Worldviews: Environment, Culture, Religion 3 (1999): 119–37.Medhora, Shalailah. “Remote Communities Are Lifestyle Choices, Says Tony Abbott.” The Guardian 10 Mar. 2015. <https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2015/mar/10/remote-communities-are-lifestyle-choices-says-tony-abbott>.Miéville, China. The City and the City. London: Pan MacMillan, 2009.Pascoe, Bruce. Dark Emu, Black Seeds: Agriculture or Accident? Broome: Magabala Books, 2014.———. “Andrew Bolt’s Disappointment.” Griffith Review 36 (Winter 2012): 226–33.Pyne, Stephen. Burning Bush: A Fire History of Australia. North Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1992.Rose, Deborah Bird. Reports from a Wild Country: Ethics for Decolonisation. Sydney: U of New South Wales P, 2004.

Kangatarianism is the rather inelegant word coined in the first decade of the twenty-first century to describe an omnivorous diet in which the only meat consumed is that of the kangaroo. First published in the media in 2010 (Barone; Zukerman), the term circulated in Australian environmental and academic circles including the Global Animal conference at the University of Wollongong in July 2011 where I first heard it from members of the Think Tank for Kangaroos (THINKK) group. By June 2017, it had gained enough attention to be named the Oxford English Dictionary’s Australian word of the month (following on from May’s “smashed avo,” another Australian food innovation), but it took the Nine Network reality television series Love Island Australia to raise kangatarian to trending status on social media (Oxford UP). During the first episode, aired in late May 2018, Justin, a concreter and fashion model from Melbourne, declared himself to have previously been a kangatarian as he chatted with fellow contestant, Millie. Vet nurse and animal lover Millie appeared to be shocked by his revelation but was tentatively accepting when Justin explained what kangatarian meant, and justified his choice on the grounds that kangaroo are not farmed. In the social media response, it was clear that eating only the meat of kangaroos as an ethical choice was an entirely new concept to many viewers, with one tweet stating “Kangatarian isn’t a thing”, while others variously labelled the diet brutal, intriguing, or quintessentially Australian (see #kangatarian on Twitter).There is a well developed literature around the arguments for and against eating kangaroo, and why settler Australians tend to be so reluctant to do so (see for example, Probyn; Cawthorn and Hoffman). Here, I will concentrate on the role that ethics play in this food choice by examining how the adoption of kangatarianism can be understood as a bargain struck to help to manage grief in the Anthropocene, and the limitations of that bargain. As Lesley Head has argued, we are living in a time of loss and of grieving, when much that has been taken for granted is becoming unstable, and “we must imagine that drastic changes to everyday life are in the offing” (313). Applying the classic (and contested) model of five stages of grief, first proposed by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross in her book On Death and Dying in 1969, much of the population of the western world seems to be now experiencing denial, her first stage of loss, while those in the most vulnerable environments have moved on to anger with developed countries for destructive actions in the past and inaction in the present. The next stages (or states) of grieving—bargaining, depression, and acceptance—are likely to be manifested, although not in any predictable sequence, as the grief over current and future losses continues (Haslam).The great expansion of food restrictive diets in the Anthropocene can be interpreted as part of this bargaining state of grieving as individuals attempt to respond to the imperative to reduce their environmental impact but also to limit the degree of change to their own diet required to do so. Meat has long been identified as a key component of an individual’s environmental footprint. From Frances Moore Lappé’s 1971 Diet for a Small Planet through the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organisation’s 2006 report Livestock’s Long Shadow to the 2019 report of the EAT–Lancet Commission on Healthy Diets from Sustainable Food Systems, the advice has been consistent: meat consumption should be minimised in, if not eradicated from, the human diet. The EAT–Lancet Commission Report quantified this to less than 28 grams (just under one ounce) of beef, lamb or pork per day (12, 25). For many this would be keenly felt, in terms of how meals are constructed, the sensory experiences associated with eating meat and perceptions of well-being but meat is offered up as a sacrifice to bring about the return of the beloved healthy planet.Rather than accept the advice to cut out meat entirely, those seeking to bargain with the Anthropocene also find other options. This has given rise to a suite of foodways based around restricting meat intake in volume or type. Reducing the amount of commercially produced beef, lamb and pork eaten is one approach, while substituting a meat the production of which has a smaller environmental footprint, most commonly chicken or fish, is another. For those willing to make deeper changes, the meat of free living animals, especially those which are killed accidentally on the roads or for deliberately for environmental management purposes, is another option. Further along this spectrum are the novel protein sources suggested in the Lancet report, including insects, blue-green algae and laboratory-cultured meats.Kangatarianism is another form of this bargain, and is backed by at least half a century of advocacy. The Australian Conservation Foundation made calls to reduce the numbers of other livestock and begin a sustainable harvest of kangaroo for food in 1970 when the sale of kangaroo meat for human consumption was still illegal across the country (Conservation of Kangaroos). The idea was repeated by biologist Gordon Grigg in the late 1980s (Jackson and Vernes 173), and again in the Garnaut Climate Change Review in 2008 (547–48). Kangaroo meat is high in protein and iron, low in fat, and high in healthy polyunsaturated fatty acids and conjugated linoleic acid, and, as these authors showed, has a smaller environmental footprint than beef, lamb, or pork. Kangaroo require less water than cattle, sheep or pigs, and no land is cleared to grow feed for them or give them space to graze. Their paws cause less erosion and compaction of soil than do the hooves of common livestock. They eat less fodder than ruminants and their digestive processes result in lower emissions of the powerful greenhouse gas methane and less solid waste.As Justin of Love Island was aware, kangaroo are not farmed in the sense of being deliberately bred, fed, confined, or treated with hormones, drugs or chemicals, which also adds to their lighter impact on the environment. However, some pastoralists argue that because they cannot prevent kangaroos from accessing the food, water, shelter, and protection from predators they provide for their livestock, they do effectively farm them, although they receive no income from sales of kangaroo meat. This type of light touch farming of kangaroos has a very long history in Australia going back to the continent’s first peopling some 60,000 years ago. Kangaroos were so important to Aboriginal people that a wide range of environments were manipulated to produce their favoured habitats of open grasslands edged by sheltering trees. As Bill Gammage demonstrated, fire was used as a tool to preserve and extend grassy areas, to encourage regrowth which would attract kangaroos and to drive the animals from one patch to another or towards hunters waiting with spears (passim, for example, 58, 72, 76, 93). Gammage and Bruce Pascoe agree that this was a form of animal husbandry in which the kangaroos were drawn to the areas prepared for them for the young grass or, more forcefully, physically directed using nets, brush fences or stone walls. Burnt ground served to contain the animals in place of fencing, and regular harvesting kept numbers from rising to levels which would place pressure on other species (Gammage 79, 281–86; Pascoe 42–43). Contemporary advocates of eating kangaroo have promoted the idea that they should be deliberately co-produced with other livestock instead of being killed to preserve feed and water for sheep and cattle (Ellicott; Wilson 39). Substituting kangaroo for the meat of more environmentally damaging animals would facilitate a reduction in the numbers of cattle and sheep, lessening the harm they do.Most proponents have assumed that their audience is current meat eaters who would substitute kangaroo for the meat of other more environmentally costly animals, but kangatarianism can also emerge from vegetarianism. Wendy Zukerman, who wrote about kangaroo hunting for New Scientist in 2010, was motivated to conduct the research because she was considering becoming an early adopter of kangatarianism as the least environmentally taxing way to counter the longterm anaemia she had developed as a vegetarian. In 2018, George Wilson, honorary professor in the Australian National University’s Fenner School of Environment and Society called for vegetarians to become kangatarians as a means of boosting overall consumption of kangaroo for environmental and economic benefits to rural Australia (39).Given these persuasive environmental arguments, it might be expected that many people would have perceived eating kangaroo instead of other meat as a favourable bargain and taken up the call to become kangatarian. Certainly, there has been widespread interest in trying kangaroo meat. In 1997, only five years after the sale of kangaroo meat for human consumption had been legalised in most states (South Australia did so in 1980), 51% of 500 people surveyed in five capital cities said they had tried kangaroo. However, it had not become a meat of choice with very few found to eat it more than three times a year (Des Purtell and Associates iv). Just over a decade later, a study by Ampt and Owen found an increase to 58% of 1599 Australians surveyed across the country who had tried kangaroo but just 4.7% eating it at least monthly (14). Bryce Appleby, in his study of kangaroo consumption in the home based on interviews with 28 residents of Wollongong in 2010, specifically noted the absence of kangatarians—then a very new concept. A study of 261 Sydney university students in 2014 found that half had tried kangaroo meat and 10% continued to eat it with any regularity. Only two respondents identified themselves as kangatarian (Grant 14–15). Kangaroo meat advocate Michael Archer declared in 2017 that “there’s an awful lot of very, very smart vegetarians [who] have opted for semi vegetarianism and they’re calling themselves ‘kangatarians’, as they’re quite happy to eat kangaroo meat”, but unless there had been a significant change in a few years, the surveys did not bear out his assertion (154).The ethical calculations around eating kangaroo are complicated by factors beyond the strictly environmental. One Tweeter advised Justin: “‘I’m a kangatarian’ isn’t a pickup line, mate”, and certainly the reception of his declaration could have been very cool, especially as it was delivered to a self declared animal warrior (N’Tash Aha). All of the studies of beliefs and practices around the eating of kangaroo have noted a significant minority of Australians who would not consider eating kangaroo based on issues of animal welfare and animal rights. The 1997 study found that 11% were opposed to the idea of eating kangaroo, while in Grant’s 2014 study, 15% were ethically opposed to eating kangaroo meat (Des Purtell and Associates iv; Grant 14–15). Animal ethics complicate the bargains calculated principally on environmental grounds.These ethical concerns work across several registers. One is around the flesh and blood kangaroo as a charismatic native animal unique to Australia and which Australians have an obligation to respect and nurture. Sheep, cattle and pigs have been subject to longterm propaganda campaigns which entrench the idea that they are unattractive and unintelligent, and veil their transition to meat behind euphemistic language and abattoir walls, making it easier to eat them. Kangaroos are still seen as resourceful and graceful animals, and no linguistic tricks shield consumers from the knowledge that it is a roo on their plate. A proposal in 2009 to market a “coat of arms” emu and kangaroo-flavoured potato chip brought complaints to the Advertising Standards Bureau that this was disrespectful to these native animals, although the flavours were to be simulated and the product vegetarian (Black). Coexisting with this high regard to kangaroos is its antithesis. That is, a valuation of them informed by their designation as a pest in the pastoral industry, and the use of the carcasses of those killed to feed dogs and other companion animals. Appleby identified a visceral, disgust response to the idea of eating kangaroo in many of his informants, including both vegetarians who would not consider eating kangaroo because of their commitment to a plant-based diet, and at least one omnivore who would prefer to give up all meat rather than eat kangaroo. While diametrically opposed, the end point of both positions is that kangaroo meat should not be eaten.A second animal ethics stance relates to the imagined kangaroo, a cultural construct which for most urban Australians is much more present in their lives and likely to shape their actions than the living animals. It is behind the rejection of eating an animal which holds such an iconic place in Australian culture: to the dexter on the 1912 national coat of arms; hopping through the Hundred Acre Wood as Kanga and Roo in A.A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh children’s books from the 1920s and the Disney movies later made from them; as a boy’s best friend as Skippy the Bush Kangaroo in a fondly remembered 1970s television series; and high in the sky on QANTAS planes. The anthropomorphising of kangaroos permitted the spectacle of the boxing kangaroo from the late nineteenth century. By framing natural kangaroo behaviours as boxing, these exhibitions encouraged an ambiguous understanding of kangaroos as human-like, moving them further from the category of food (Golder and Kirkby). Australian government bodies used this idea of the kangaroo to support food exports to Britain, with kangaroos as cooks or diners rather than ingredients. The Kangaroo Kookery Book of 1932 (see fig. 1 below) portrayed kangaroos as a nuclear family in a suburban kitchen and another official campaign supporting sales of Australian produce in Britain in the 1950s featured a Disney-inspired kangaroo eating apples and chops washed down with wine (“Kangaroo to Be ‘Food Salesman’”). This imagining of kangaroos as human-like has persisted, leading to the opinion expressed in a 2008 focus group, that consuming kangaroo amounted to “‘eating an icon’ … Although they are pests they are still human nature … these are native animals, people and I believe that is a form of cannibalism!” (Ampt and Owen 26). Figure 1: Rather than promoting the eating of kangaroos, the portrayal of kangaroos as a modern suburban family in the Kangaroo Kookery Book (1932) made it unthinkable. (Source: Kangaroo Kookery Book, Director of Australian Trade Publicity, Australia House, London, 1932.)The third layer of ethical objection on the ground of animal welfare is more specific, being directed to the method of killing the kangaroos which become food. Kangaroos are perhaps the only native animals for which state governments set quotas for commercial harvest, on the grounds that they compete with livestock for pasturage and water. In most jurisdictions, commercially harvested kangaroo carcasses can be processed for human consumption, and they are the ones which ultimately appear in supermarket display cases.Kangaroos are killed by professional shooters at night using swivelling spotlights mounted on their vehicles to locate and daze the animals. While clean head shots are the ideal and regulations state that animals should be killed when at rest and without causing “undue agonal struggle”, this is not always achieved and some animals do suffer prolonged deaths (NSW Code of Practice for Kangaroo Meat for Human Consumption). By regulation, the young of any female kangaroo must be killed along with her. While averting a slow death by neglect, this is considered cruel and wasteful. The hunt has drawn international criticism, including from Greenpeace which organised campaigns against the sale of kangaroo meat in Europe in the 1980s, and Viva! which was successful in securing the withdrawal of kangaroo from sale in British supermarkets (“Kangaroo Meat Sales Criticised”). These arguments circulate and influence opinion within Australia.A final animal ethics issue is that what is actually behind the push for greater use of kangaroo meat is not concern for the environment or animal welfare but the quest to turn a profit from these animals. The Kangaroo Industries Association of Australia, formed in 1970 to represent those who dealt in the marsupials’ meat, fur and skins, has been a vocal advocate of eating kangaroo and a sponsor of market research into how it can be made more appealing to the market. The Association argued in 1971 that commercial harvest was part of the intelligent conservation of the kangaroo. They sought minimum size regulations to prevent overharvesting and protect their livelihoods (“Assn. Backs Kangaroo Conservation”). The Association’s current website makes the claim that wild harvested “Australian kangaroo meat is among the healthiest, tastiest and most sustainable red meats in the world” (Kangaroo Industries Association of Australia). That this is intended to initiate a new and less controlled branch of the meat industry for the benefit of hunters and processors, rather than foster a shift from sheep or cattle to kangaroos which might serve farmers and the environment, is the opinion of Dr. Louise Boronyak, of the Centre for Compassionate Conservation at the University of Technology Sydney (Boyle 19).Concerns such as these have meant that kangaroo is most consumed where it is least familiar, with most of the meat for human consumption recovered from culled animals being exported to Europe and Asia. Russia has been the largest export market. There, kangaroo meat is made less strange by blending it with other meats and traditional spices to make processed meats, avoiding objections to its appearance and uncertainty around preparation. With only a low profile as a novelty animal in Russia, there are fewer sentimental concerns about consuming kangaroo, although the additional food miles undermine its environmental credentials. The variable acceptability of kangaroo in more distant markets speaks to the role of culture in determining how patterns of eating are formed and can be shifted, or, as Elspeth Probyn phrased it “how natural entities are transformed into commodities within a context of globalisation and local communities”, underlining the impossibility of any straightforward ethics of eating kangaroo (33, 35).Kangatarianism is a neologism which makes the eating of kangaroo meat something it has not been in the past, a voluntary restriction based on environmental ethics. These environmental benefits are well founded and eating kangaroo can be understood as an Anthropocenic bargain struck to allow the continuation of the consumption of red meat while reducing one’s environmental footprint. Although superficially attractive, the numbers entering into this bargain remain small because environmental ethics cannot be disentangled from animal ethics. The anthropomorphising of the kangaroo and its use as a national symbol coexist with its categorisation as a pest and use of its meat as food for companion animals. Both understandings of kangaroos made their meat uneatable for many Australians. Paired with concerns over how kangaroos are killed and the commercialisation of a native species, kangaroo meat has a very mixed reception despite decades of advocacy for eating its meat in favour of that of more harmed and more harmful introduced species. Given these constraints, kangatarianism is unlikely to become widespread and indeed it should be viewed as at best a temporary exigency. As the climate warms and rainfall becomes more erratic, even animals which have evolved to suit Australian conditions will come under increasing pressure, and humans will need to reach Kübler-Ross’ final state of grief: acceptance. In this case, this would mean acceptance that our needs cannot be placed ahead of those of other animals.ReferencesAmpt, Peter, and Kate Owen. Consumer Attitudes to Kangaroo Meat Products. Canberra: Rural Industries Research and Development Corporation, 2008.Appleby, Bryce. “Skippy the ‘Green’ Kangaroo: Identifying Resistances to Eating Kangaroo in the Home in a Context of Climate Change.” BSc Hons, U of Wollongong, 2010 <http://ro.uow.edu.au/thsci/103>.Archer, Michael. “Zoology on the Table: Plenary Session 4.” Australian Zoologist 39, 1 (2017): 154–60.“Assn. 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