Postcolonial Studies, Vol 1, No 2, pp 237± 254, 1998

Re-imagining land ownership in

Australia

HELEN VERRAN

A front page report in The Australian newspaper of 10 August 1994 began

Cape York pastoralists and Aborigines have jointly called for state and federal

governments to legislate ¼ a form of statutory co-existence of title on pastoral

leases. ¼ [A] marathon seven-hour meeting in the Queensland town of Coen last

week ¼ sought to address the uncertainty and ® nancial dif® culties ¯ owing to Cape

assiduously, although unsuccessfully, to bring negotiations to a halt.

In 1994 t he Wik people’s claim to a large part of Cape York had every chance

of being recognised in law, and that likelihood led to the development of new

sorts of negotiating between Aborigines and pastoralists. The full bench of the

High Court of Australia delivered a si gni® cant ruling relating to land ownership

in Australia in June 1992: the land of Australia and the surrounding islands had

been owned by indigenous peoples before 1770 when British of® cials cl aimed

the land for the British Crown. With subsequent legislation, this meant that most

land not speci® cally claimed in the past under freehold title became eligible for

claims by indigenous comm unities under the Native Title Act 1993. A central

mainland of Australia in pastoral areas where man y Aboriginal people live,

maintaining their traditional association with their lands. The scene was set for

the new and unfamiliar politics that were being negotiated in Coen in 1994, to

spread quickly and widely, generating fear and confusion on all sides. This in

turn prompted the (now conservative) Federal Government to introduce what has

become known as its `Wik Bill’ to amend the N ative Title Act. The whole thrust,

and the explicit central provision of this amendment, which on the day I write

Helen Verran is a senior lecturer in the Department of History and Philosophyof Science, University of Melbourne.

1368-8790/98/020237-18 $7.00

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1998 The Institute of Postcolonial Studies 237

discussions reported so enthusiastically in The Australian, between a few

Aboriginal Australians and descendants of those who dispossessed them, got

under way in a small town in t he bush of far north Queensland in 19 94. But what

had become obvious by then, and is still obvious, although some would wish

things otherwise, was that it is no t only land title that the 1992 Native Title

ruling institutionally recognises. Aboriginal traditions of knowing were recog-

nised in a new way by that ruling, known n ow in Australia as the `Mabo Ruling’,

celebrating one of t he leading plaintiffs. Recognising Native Title amounts to

recognising the existence, and the rationality, of knowledge systems of indige-

nous Australians. And, as evidenced by the negotiations in Coen, some non-Ab-

title now required (but perhaps soon to be outlawed) i n many parts of Australia.

Among other things, I want to ask what sorts of things land titles are, and how

they are generated within a knowledge tradition, that is, to carry out a form of

ontological investigation. I suggest that looking at some of the puzzles that

participants in negotiations over native title and pastoral leases might face can

be helpful in understanding what I see as a new form of politics emerging in

contemporary Australia. I identify this as a politics being waged over ontic and

epistemic commitments; a politics over what there is and who/what can know it.

In particular I suggest that looking at some of their puzzles allows us to see

an element inherent i n knowing which, currently, is almost entirely ignored by

although the idea of working knowledge systems together as implied in the need

for Aboriginal Native Title, and pastoral lease holders to negotiate has not in the

past featured in that interest. Blinded by an ep istemology obsessed with scient i® c

knowledge, theory is taken to be the sole expression of true knowledge.

Philosophers (and anthropologists) puzzle over whether or not `traditional’

knowledge systems have theory, and if they do, whether or not it is rational. In

the early 1980s the topic was bogged down in a maze of debates over relativism

and realism.

However the topic has recently emerged rather differently both in

empirical and in speculative work in science studies, associated with a concern

entities which enable the workings of all k nowledge systems.

now is h ow to go beyond, the now quite common, descriptions of heterogeneity.

I suggest that part of this will be recognising that these `heterogeneous material-

symbolic assemblages’ clot in a politics waged over ontic/epistemic commit-

ments. This politics is perhaps most easily identi® ed in what are often called

`cross-cultural’ contexts, such as I am concerned with in this paper, but this

politics is certainly not con® ned to such situations. In this paper, which I

understand as a contribution in both postcolonial studies and science studies, I

show that we cannot begin to understand t his politics without paying attention

to ontic/epistemic imaginaries.

the word `modern’ designates two sets of entirely different pr actices ¼ The ® rst set

¼ by `translation’, creates ¼ hybrids of nature and culture. The second, by

`puri® cation’ creates two distinct ontological zones: that of human beings o n the

one hand; that of non-humans on the other. [Paradoxically] the more we forbid

ourselves to conceive of hybrids, the more possible their interbreeding becomes.

Latour reminds us that back in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe, as

modernity solidi® ed, particular accounts o f knowing and acting wer e developed

and promulgated as ® nal and ultimate. Usi ng the work of Shapin and Schaffer,

to see through this framework. The work of puri® cation, the story telling that

keeps sorting things into `nature’ and `culture’, work that must be invisibly

carried on to sustain the schema, `blows out’ and becomes visible at the end of

the twentieth century, especially to those involved in social studies of science

and technology.

At the end of the introductory chapter in We Have Never Been Modern, Latour

asks `what are we going to become? Can we aspire to Enlightenment without

modernity?’. He rejects the romantic notion that we can return to the ways of the

pre-moderns who `by dev oting themselves to conceiving o f hybrids ¼ have

pastoralists which are foreshadowed in the Native Title Act, and as exempli® ed

in the `marathon seven-hour meeting in the Queensland town of Coen’ in far

north Queensland in early August 1994, I want to show how questions over

knowing and acting come to life around the negotiating table. They constituted

the ® rst stumbling block in the negotiations at Coen.

In earlier times, for colonising Europeans, th e Aborigines of Cape York were

de® nitely not part of the knowing world. In the eyes of the grandfathers and

grandmothers of those pastoralists who in 1994 sat around the table negotiating

over ways of knowing the land they both claimed, the Wik people were, in

public contexts (as distinct from private involvements of many sorts), part of

prevent their being discriminated against and denied social justice.

We might like to t hink that near the end of the twentieth century this has

changed, and perhaps even point to the Native Title Bill as at testing institutional

recognition of Ab original Australians as knowers. But, in practice Ab original

knowledge systems are often understood as being at best a partial knowledge;

Aboriginal knowers are treated as ambiguously both knowers and known,

simultaneously of the social and the natural. And this will obviously form a

® rst barrier to mutual respect and understanding on which fruitful negotiations

will depend, although it is a barrier which might be d issolved b y good

intentions.

that this issue is likely to come to life when Aborigines sit down to negotiate

with pastoralists, I tell a little of the proceedings of a landrights case which was

an important precursor to the 1992 ruling on Native Title.

Some 25 years ago Milpirrum and others, Yolngu men who are all now dead,

made a High Court challenge to the Federal Government plan to develop a huge

bauxite mine and build a large mi ning town on land they understood themselves

and other members of their clans as owning. The j udgement, which went

against the Yolngu people with whom I am intimately involved,

was handed

down by Justice Blackburn in 1970.

The judge was correct in identifying that quite different notions of agency are

involved in A boriginal knowledge systems. But whether he was correct in thus

concluding that the clans had no proprietary interest is quite another matter.

What did the judge consider the evidence for the land not being property of

the clans? The crux of it was the limited rights of exclusion that clans had.

The clan’ s right to exclude others is not apparent ¼ the greatest extent to which

this right can be said to exist is in the realm of ritual. But it was never sug gested

that ritual rules ever excluded members of othe r clans completely from clan

territory; the exclusi on was only from sites.

solve this problem is embedded in Justice Blackburn’ s rei® cation of exclusion as

the de® ning characteristic of ownership of land. I will return to this later.

Is it beyond the pastoralists’ grasp on the issues to constr ue their corporations

as being responsible to the places where their cattle roam, pulverising the soil

with their hard-cutting hooves? How can they think of their companies as being

owned by the land? What might be the implications for their practices as

pastoralists of this understanding? This is part of what i s being negotiated over,

but like Justice Blackburn, the pastoralists must refuse the land as agent. How

and where to begin in institutionally recognising another system of knowing and

thus owning land is deeply perplexing for most p astoralists. Like the rest of us

see it, they `own’ the land in the strongest possible sense: the clans in question,

distributed across the area claimed, came int o being with the land i tself. The land

was made meaningful as it was peopled in a network of interconnected places.

Through these places the land owns them as they own the land. Owning the land

is owning and publicly articulating the stories t hrough which the land is

meaningful as a set of interconnected places. And in the stories are the multiple

and complex metaphors which comprise the stuff of negotiating in Aboriginal

Australia.

In contrast to the pastoralists, on the Aboriginal side generally there are far too

likely to be tied up with the ongoing struggle for cognitive authority, waged

through pitting metaphor against metaphor. There is often heated, and overt

struggle, over whose metaphor is going to prevail. Given time, one metaphor

will carry th e day, and it will have been greatly enriched by the controversy

surrounding its being settled upon.

Aboriginal Australian peoples generally understand themselves as having a

vast repertoire by which the world can be re-imagined, and in being re-imagined

be re-made. In English this usually goes u nder the title of `the dreaming’ . I think

a more helpful name for this conceptual resource is ` the ontic/epistemic imagi-

nary’ of Aboriginal k nowledge systems. It is this i maginary, celebrated, vener-

Pastoralists are likely to have trouble of a different kind. They know there are

no metaphors or images involved in public knowing of the land which un derlies

ownership. Behind ownership there are ju st the rigid facts of quantifying and

surveying the land. Various individuals might imagine and use all sorts of

metaphors in t he ways th ey represent the land, but that is the domain of art and

emotion which has no p lace in negotiations over ownership of land. Enmeshed

in their ri gid facts pastoralists have only very slender resources for imagining a

joint title.

Pastoralists, of course, see themselves, their lives and their families as

belonging to the landÐ they are country people. But this `belonging’ for them

How might the pastoralists solve their paralysis? I am immodest enough to

consider that I have some useful suggestions. My suggestions grow out of

contemporary u nderstandings in science studies, and are strongly mediated by

nearly 10 years of learning from and working with members of the Yolngu

Aboriginal community in the Northern Territory, and before that years of

working with Yoruba teachers in Nigeria as they struggled to reconcile the

traditions of Yoruba k nowing with contemporary school life.

If I was asked to translate between pastoralists and Aboriginal groups

negotiating over land t itle, I would begin by pointing out to the pastoralists that

and knowledge making in this em bedded or performative

pastoralists would need to understand that both an imaginary and a logic,

intimately meshed, ar e involved here.

But, taking these insights on board is likely to be dif® cult for the pastoralists.

For a start, they ® nd it dif® cult to see these negotiations as knowledge making

and not just dirty politics. Moreover, they have always lived in a world where

true knowledge has no imaginary. Modernity circumscribes its imaginary as of

aesthetic, but not ontic or epistemic in terest.

Seeing these negotiations as knowledge making is tied up with questions

about agency and knowing. There seems t o be too much agency involved here