The remoteFOCUS Pilbara Project

The Pilbara Project sits within this broader remoteFOCUS mandate. The Pilbara Project is to consider how governments need to change how they govern,

administer, and interact with the Pilbara region, and to develop recommended measures and reforms. In a briefing note prepared in November 2010 (Walker 2010: 4-5), the project phrased this purpose as positioning the Pilbara ‘as a leader in the reform of government governance, administration, and engagement, with the aim of significantly advancing regional development through a more strategic, systemic, and sustainable process’ and referred to ‘a scaled regional reform program’. Maintaining a balance amongst all three is a particular challenge in the

economically over-heated Pilbara. Here, in a classic demonstration of the effects of the ‘resource curse’, the scale and pace of recent cycles of resource boom have threatened to overwhelm the capacity, not just of local people and institutions, but also of governments, to manage either their social or economic environments. Only in the past few years has government attempted to take back some control over this key region in remote Australia in order to fulfil its ‘responsibility to provide an institutional framework that enables civil society and economic and social development’ (Desert Knowledge Australia 2008: 6).

In view of these deficits, remoteFOCUS commissioned this series of papers with three main objectives:

 to compile a socio-political overview of Aboriginal people in the Pilbara and report on the dynamics of engagement between Aboriginal people and the institutions of the Pilbara including State and Commonwealth, local government, industry and other Aboriginal organisations;

 to undertake specific targeted studies in the Pilbara that will inform the remoteFOCUS project on ways of Aboriginal people being able to draw the greatest benefit from developments in the Pilbara and the establishment of the Pilbara Cities agenda; and

 to distil from the overview and case studies evidence-based learnings and recommendations as a basis for strategic and positive ways for Aboriginal people to pursue their aspirations through engagement/involvement in governance reforms in the Pilbara and the associated investments occurring in that region.

There are five papers, in addition to this introduction, that address these objectives.

 Paper 1 – ‘Doing washing in a cyclone, or a storm in a teacup? Aboriginal people and organisations in the Pilbara’ – is an overview of Pilbara

Aboriginal demographics and dynamics, both historically and in the context of the present hyper-development.

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 Paper 2 – ‘A new story. Roebourne : a case study’ – looks at the history and current activities in a town that has a largely Aboriginal population and two recognised native title holding bodies.

 Paper 3 – ‘Harnessing the cyclone. Gumala Aboriginal Corporation: a case study’ – examines the workings of a particular Aboriginal organisation set up through the process of negotiations with a mining company.

 Paper 4 – ‘Connections, continuities, and change. Martu and their country’ – looks at the ways in which a Western Desert group in one of the most remote areas of remote Australia has acted and responded to the impact of change.

 Paper 5 – ‘Imagining a region: prototypes and possibilities for Pilbara Aboriginal people’ – takes the broader view of how Aboriginal people and organisations are operating and might operate at a regional level, including ways in which they might engage with wider Pilbara regional planning and governance institutions.

These papers, individually and collectively, illustrate the effects of the governance dysfunctions of current governance structures and practices affecting remote Australia and identified as part of the broader remoteFOCUS project. They also point to another critical and unresolved tension for governments: that is, how to achieve greater clarity of national purpose and realisation of appropriate living conditions and opportunities for Aboriginal citizens while at the same time accepting the right of Aboriginal people to cultural distinctiveness and identity. In his book, Belonging together, Sullivan (2011) sketches the history of more than fifty years of government policies that have tried and failed to reach these twin objectives. The latest in this long line is the policy of mainstreaming or

normalisation, now often glossed as ‘closing the gap’. The Pilbara studies make clear that this policy, too, is far from succeeding. Nevertheless, Sullivan offers a way out, that is (2011: vii):

a greater integration of white Australia with Aboriginal Australia, a reordering of our subjective understanding more than our structural relationship. I call this a consolidated approach to Aboriginal affairs. It recognises the

improvements achieved in Aboriginal circumstances during the period of rights-based land and development programs, recognises also the distance still to travel, and accepts the fact that the future of Aboriginal Australia is

inextricably bound up with the future of the descendants of our settlers and immigrants.

Recognition of this inter-relationship requires understanding about how consolidation differs from integration or assimilation...: it is a two-way process.

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This ‘two-way process’ emerges strongly from the Pilbara studies as ‘partnership’. Sullivan goes on to argue that such a two-way process is a logical extension of the kind of engagement often referred to as the intercultural domain, where ‘culture is found in relationships formed by experience rather than being a structured thing that people “have” or “belong to” ’ and ‘intercultural exchanges and negotiations are taking place all the time everywhere there are people, whether they are Aboriginal or non-Aboriginal’ (2011: 18). Looking at the example of one group, the

Ngaanyatjarra people – whose experiences since colonisation are not very different from those of the Martu (paper 4) – he discusses four important ways in which

Ngaanyatjarra are enmeshed in wider Australian processes: their corporate expression as a group, their land tenure arrangements, their interdependence with non-Aboriginal people on their lands, and through sharing the

environment within which they live...Ngaanyatjarra people, whether they care about it or not, are ineluctably bound into the Australian state (2011: 27, 28). His point is that ‘boundaries are not inherent to a culture but contextual, mutable and negotiable, and cultures are nested, imbricated, layered, with their own

subcultures as much as “other” cultures’ (2011: 26). His view is supported, as these studies make clear, by the experience of Pilbara Aboriginal people since the first pastoralists arrived in 1864.

This is not to suggest that the forms of interdependence, or of their effects, have been or are uncontested. On the contrary, as again made clear in these studies, there is a pernicious imbalance in the relationships between Aboriginal and non-

Aboriginal people in the Pilbara, resulting in the present marginalisation of Aboriginal people from the intensified decision-making processes in the region, whether being undertaken by government or by resource companies. The

remoteFOCUS Prospectus pays attention to the implications of this for Aboriginal organisations in its Attachment 1, on the accelerating crisis in remote Australia (2008:19):

The evidence...points to the vulnerability of Indigenous governance structures trying to deal with the growing demands of resources boom, land negotiations, and very significant streams of new revenue from agreements with resource companies.

Attachment 1 of the Prospectus also relates to the impact on Indigenous organisations of the governance dysfunctions of governance (2008: 18-19):

The Indigenous Community Governance Project has documented the effect of crippling stresses on the Indigenous organisations who are trying to cope with labyrinthine government funding arrangements, duplication and red tape, cross-jurisdictional inefficiencies, and the confusing array of overlapping short-term niche programs.

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Achieving a meaningful place for Pilbara Aboriginal people within the stated goal for the remoteFOCUS Pilbara Project of a scaled regional reform program is clearly highly complex and therefore daunting. Nevertheless, a number of themes emerge from the Pilbara studies that suggest that the challenges are not insuperable. Two of these themes in particular offer the basis of a way forward. One relates to Aboriginal principles of regionalism. The other is the critical place of Aboriginal organisations as providing ‘the institutional framework of Aboriginal civil society and, at the same time, the principal means of Aboriginal civic engagement with the wider world’ (Sullivan 2011: 50).