Clough, Alan --- "Politics and Struggle in Paradise" [1990] AboriginalLawB 2; (1990) 1(42) Aboriginal Law Bulletin 4

• Politics And Struggle In Paradise
• Wild Places Labelled Reassuringly
• Paradise Transformed
• Wind Against Tide

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Politics and Struggle in Paradise

by Alan Clough

Wild Places Labelled Reassuringly

Gurig, Tonda and Wasur are, respectively, a national park in the Northern Territory, a wildlife management area in Papua New Guinea and a nature reserve in Irian Jaya. Including the marine park around Gurig National Park, they cover some 15000 square kilometres of the planet. Located in the farthest, isolated comers of the states which created them all were designated nature management places at about the same time in the recent past. This warrants explanation. First some descriptive notes.

Tonda and Wasur, mostly less than 20 metres a.s.1., feature swampy lowland terrain. Gurig includes more rugged country with a covering of park-like savannah woodlands. Southern New Guinea and northern Australia experience a distinctive wet season with a seasonal shift marked by reversal of prevailing winds from a northwesterly monsoon to south-easterly trade winds and a concomitant rhythm in biological activity. Tropical Eucalyptus woodlands, isolated clumps of Pandanus on seasonally-inundated black soil country and fringing Melaleuca sands show striking similarities in form in both regions. With many species of plants and animals in common, the wildlife inventory is spectacular, one worthy of paradise.

On the wide, flat Bula plain in Tonda's Bensbach district grow waist-high strands of kunai grass, the tallest vegetation in the mostly close-cropped sward. Wild pigs hide inside the kunai during daylight hours but emerge at night to dredge with their snouts for swamp grass and lily tubers. Large herds of red deer keep watchfully away. Chortling brolgas emphasise the wide expanses that are filled with the rush of the trade winds. Magpie geese in very large flocks, reluctant to interrupt their grazing the lily roots that have emerged in the swamps with the advancing dry season, intensify their alarmed honking as one walks closer. Agile wallaby, apparently not so shy as the deer, swat in groups, lifting their heads only occasionally to check for danger; little yellow-brown triangles dotting the sward.

Mostly striking in and near Gurig is the deeply-embayed coastline with peninsulas and islands clothed in olive-green Eucalyptus woodlands. Red laterite-edged promontories and whitish sand on arcuate beaches trim the tourist-brochure-aquamarine Arafura Sea. Short creeks flow from the higher ground to meet the sea in shallow mangrove-lined bays and estuaries where nutrients from the runoff fertilise seagrass beds on which dugong and sea turtles thrive. Sea turtles of several species occur with the green sea turtle (Gurig's logo) numerous. The tropical seas have abundant fish of both reef and pelagic species. On land, there occur wild pigs, the agile wallaby, and scrub cattle as well as horses and Timor ponies. Frequently one surprises banteng cattle near the waterholes and soaks.

This wild diversity, tamed by decrees and acts of Parliament enacted in Darwin, Port Moresby and Djakarta, is now known by domesticating descriptors like "national park", "wildlife management area", "nature reserve", "marine park"; the familiar homogenising jargon of twentieth-century nature-management technocrats. In the wider community, these terms invoke comfortable images for us; pastoral visions of nature and culture surviving unchangingly right outside the resort compound, hotel door or air-conditioned vehicle .... do they not?

The names Gurig, Tonda and Wasur, on the other hand, would be names unfamiliar to many denizens of urban-industrial heartlands. But, to the peoples who live there, these names are very familiar. "Wasur" alludes to the swampy terrain in this southeastern comer of Indonesia. "Tonda" is a language grouping in south-west Papua New Guinea.

"Gurig" is one of the languages spoken by Mandilari, Namarrmu and Manugiri clan groups in northwestern Arnhem Land. Signifiers exotic to us, invoke understandings that are fully comprehensible within the local human geography. Acts of Parliament and Presidential decrees reify wildness for the dominant group. Wild places domesticated with reassuring labels are often not wild at all in the minds of people in the local group. They are usually home. Different systems of meaning, one local and indigenous and the other remote and foreign, invoke different understandings about the same places. The politics of paradise, I suggest, inhere in such overlapping systems of meaning. Together they create contested cultural landscapes where at stake is the power to reproduce the meanings in those landscapes. The land and it's resources are similarly up for grabs.

Paradise Transformed

Much in the politics of paradise is very clear. Wasur's proclamation coincided

with an increased emphasis on the widely-criticised policy of transmigration from the populous islands of western Indonesia to the sparsely populated eastern provinces of the country, e.g. Irian Jaya on New Guinea. The southern part of the Trans-Irian highway (World Bank-funded) is bitumen-sealed for more than 100 kilometers. It traverses Wasur securing part of the Indonesian border with Papua New Guinea enabling vehicle access in all seasons.

On the other side of the border in Tonda, movement by motor vehicle is severely restricted during the wet The few roads for the few vehicles are very poor. Provincial and Government officials go by vehicle. Villagers walk, or they go by canoe. Tonda was enacted just before Papua New Guinea became independent and a tourist lodge was established concurrently by a former kiap (patrol officer) and his family on the Bensbach River just 20 kilometers from the border with Indonesia.

On maps of the Northern Territory, Gurig national park is part of the discontinuous bulwark of green that lies between Darwin and the very large areas of the Aboriginal Land Trusts (often colour-coded brown), the largest of which is Arnhem Land. This green buffer includes Kakadu and the recently - declared Nitmiluk (Katherine Gorge) national parks, both negotiated solutions to protracted disputes ranging in scope from the detriment argument of residents of Katherine township to the geopolitical issue of uranium mining at Ranger. Implicated in this regional history, the Cobourg Peninsula area (later named Gurig) was declared a national park under a Northern Territory Act (Cobourg Peninsula Aboriginal Land and Sanctuary Act, 1981). This Act represented the negotiated settlement of traditional owners' claims to land under the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act, 1976.

Traditional owners saw the opportunity to return to their country from temporary exile on nearby Croker Island. This opportunity was sweetened with offers of financial assistance from the Northern Territory Government for outstation settlements. It was also a chance to earn income from the rapidly-expanding tourism industry in the Northern Territory. Consequently, Northern Territory title to the land, available immediately with no opposition, was accepted in preference to pursuing a land claim.

While this much is clear, a closer examination reveals some confused terrain to be negotiated. The increasing numbers of people struggling, laudably, to save the world's natural resources may hail the dedication of Gurig, Tonda and Wasur by the respective central state as a step in the right direction. My own enthusiasm for this international struggle is tempered by the knowledge that resources redeemed from destructive development are often already spoken for by local people who, from my experience, tend to see such declarations as a grab for their lands by that same remote and dominant state. These people understand quite clearly that ideas about nature conservation and management are used to legitimate state control of their lands. However, this process is not a straightforward one. Gurig national park was negotiated with (not grabbed from) traditional owners. Tonda was imposed with little negotiation. Nevertheless, in Tonda as well as in Gurig, the local people continue to have a large influence over the running of their country as nature management and tourism areas through a board of management and a management committee respectively. I am unsure as yet about how things work in the Wasur nature reserve. But in Tonda and Gurig, local or joint management is a feature. The board of management of Gurig national park is chaired by a local person with a majority of the board's membership recognised by the board as traditional owners. Representatives of the Northern Territory Government's nature management bureaucracy are in a minority. The Tonda wildlife management committee is comprised of members from each of the 18 constituent villages in Tonda with an advisory role played by representatives from the provincial and national primary industry and wildlife departments. Knowing the hidden agenda of the state and consenting to its domination are not mutually exclusive.

Ethnographic evidence indicates a further dimension. There is no happy coalition of natural resource managers. Turbulent and complex struggles rage over the land and its resources as well as over their meanings. The nature of these struggles has yet to be fully described. Waged by men and women in contemporary contexts, they continue to transform the cultural landscape.

Wind Against Tide

Struggle in paradise may be a strange image to reconcile. But, of principal concern to the people I have lived with over the last year and a half in and near Gurig and Tonda is the struggle to reconcile their determined optimism about economic opportunities in nature management and tourism development with their deep fear of losing ownership and control over land and its resources. This is a far more difficult vision to cope with, one with significant material consequences.

In Gurig and the nearby area, where quite large amounts of cash already pass through the local economy, people look to further development in a variety of tourism-related projects (resorts and safari hunting) and natural resource harvesting (pearling, fisheries, cattle). In Tonda, where the local economy is almost cashless, people seek to participate in commercial harvesting of some of the large number of red deer for meat and live animal export. This kind of optimism is nearly universal, often outstripping the enthusiasm of the development proponent. But there exists too an entirely appropriate pessimism and suspicion about the motives of both government and development proponents who want to engage traditional owners in agreements. People fear that they might not get the best deal for their resources. Immanent in the danger is the unease which appears increasingly to underscore interactions within the local communities. Hope for the future and a fear of being cheated co-exist uncomfortably. In addition to the familiar forces that undermine local ownership and control, people struggle with their own uncertainty within a differentiated community. As part of daily life people contemplate the flood of benefits from development of their natural resources along with the fearful prospect of the ebb of their ownership and control. This danger, ephemeral and difficult to grasp, is mirrored in seas around Gurig where, in sacred turbulence, the tide rushes against the wind. The terrific consequences of peoples' struggles may well be found to lie in a similar domain of significance. I will conclude with a brief sketch.

In Tonda, M is a man who, I was told, returned to his home village in the Bensback district after gaining a university education in Port Moresby. He worried a lot about the hunting royalties that should have been returned to traditional owners from the Bensback Wildlife Lodge. For fourteen years until August of 1988, the manager of the lodge held in trust half of the royalties payable to those who he understands are the rightful owners of the wildlife resources in question. He awaited a properly-constituted financial body that would represent the management committee. M. bent his mind on this situation. At the same time his family began to disintegrate. His youngest daughter died of snake bite. And he was wracked with jealously for his wife with another man. M.'s mind cracked under the strain and he now wanders the village aimlessly and speaks in unintelligible mumbles.

Pressure on the lodge manager to release the funds continued to mount over a number of years. Late one night in 1984, he received a near-fatal arrow wound. This event punctuated deteriorating relations between the lodge and the villagers at that time. A few months earlier, lodge guests in a private charter plane from Australia flew to the Bula Plain where they landed without permission of the owners and shot a number of deer and pigs in a trophy hunt. Outraged landowners and villagers felled trees across the lodge airstrip and slashed the offending plane's tyres. Shortly thereafter, the lodge manager decided to thin out the village dogs (a vital defense for villagers against sorcerers) in a late night cull. He reasoned that feral packs kill and maim young deer and consequently detract from the wildlife amenity of the countryside, his source of livelihood.

In recent less-tense times, a wildlife management technocrat, a close friend of M.'s from Port Moresby, acting as a consultant for an Australian company interested in harvesting the red deer resource in the Bensbach area facilitated the establishment of the 'Tonda Wildlife Management Corporation'. The outstanding royalties were at last paid to this properly-constituted financial arm of the management committee. When I left Tonda in 1988, the Corporation directors had decided to encourage the management committee to divide Tonda into two separate areas arguing that it was largely in the Bensback area around the lodge that the royalties were earned in the first place.

On the other side of the Arafura Sea, K. and M. are owners of land inside Gurig national park but they do not share in the economic returns from the land. Ownership of parts of the land is disputed. M. knows the land-ownership story but fears there would be too much trouble and fighting if he were to make the story public. K. knows the story too but will not speak publicly even though he grew up inside the park boundaries. K. insists that he was never consulted about having his own land included in the national park, and he is quite bitter about this. Documentary and oral evidence bear this out. He was consulted about a land claim, it seems, but he was not involved in the negotiated settlement for the land with the Northern Territory Government. Despite his bitterness, K. believes that the halcyon days of the missionary period, when you could trust people, will return and that economic opportunities in tourism, wildlife management and natural resource harvesting will provide the economic base for a better way of life. His optimism in this is captured in his notebook design sketches for bark paintings which he plans to produce to sell to tourists. His sketches of wildlife feature drawings of barramundi with the price tag attached to the tail of the fish, an integral part of the drawing. Conceptually, his optimism for the future is as hard to separate from his disquiet as the price tag from the fish. In the same way, the politics of paradise is an integral part of the daily life for the people who persist in living there.

If battle lines are difficult to draw in their struggles, the bottom line is not so. As a group, indigenous owners of these large tracts of land do not have the economic and political power to consume natural and cultural landscapes elsewhere inside the states which encompass their lands. As a group, they are not tourists. By their traditions, they have power over stories and knowledge that imbue with meaning their own country, not other peoples'. In Gurig, Tonda and Wasur, the collective vision of the encompassing state distilled into legislation, administrative procedures, by-laws, management plans and the like, is a strong countercurrent to tradition.