Sharp, Nonie --- "Book Review - Sustainable Use of Wildlife by Aboriginal Peoples and Torres Strait Islanders" [1997] IndigLawB 105; (1997) 4(7) Indigenous Law Bulletin 20

• Book Review-Sustainable Use Of Wildlife By Aboriginal Peoples And Torres Strait Islanders

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Book Review -

Sustainable Use of Wildlife by Aboriginal Peoples and Torres Strait Islanders

M Bomford and J Caughley (eds)

Bureau of Resource Sciences, Canberra, 1996

Reviewed by Nonie Sharp

Some ten years ago Peter Usher, Canada's leading practitioner and philosopher of indigenous resource management, raised the question of a fundamental difference in perspective between indigenous wildlife harvesters and non-indigenous wildlife professionals in the context of management strategies in northern Canada.[1] His study approached the subject of sustainable use and management of wildlife within the framework of two contrasting models of wildlife management, the 'state system' and the 'indigenous system': in the state system, wildlife scientists have a different role from harvesters; in indigenous systems, harvesting practice is inseparable from management.

Sustainable Use of Wildlife by Aboriginal Peoples and Torres Strait Islanders, a book devoting fourteen chapters to the use of wildlife in Australia by indigenous peoples, might be expected to examine this cogent question within a framework of cross-cultural difference. An opening statement on the issues and concepts which may frame and inform the study is promising: 'indigenous and non-indigenous Australians will need to develop a mutual understanding of each others' values' if management strategies appropriate to 'the collective goal of conserving Australia's natural resources' is to be achieved (p 7 and cf p 11).

Yet where are the different values delineated and defined? Certainly not in the first framing chapter and only piecemeal in the arguments of those which follow. There seems to be an unquestioned assumption that nature conservation is a cross-cultural collective goal and that it has the same meaning to indigenous and non-indigenous people alike. The first chapter states that 'there is broad community support for the conservation of wildlife simply for its intrinsic value' (p 7). It also describes 'conservation' as 'the sum total of actions taken to preserve and maintain items to which we attribute positive value' (p 7). The concept of sustainability is subjected to a degree of cross-cultural contrast, yet it does not lead towards a framework in which to explore values, meanings, customs and consequent priorities in management strategies.

The target audience of the book appears to be a non-indigenous audience involved in decision-making on wildlife use. The specific context for a study of indigenous people's use is the expansion of their access to land and resources (p 11). Seventeen of the nineteen authors are non-indigenous scientists, drawn predominantly from the environmental and biological sciences. They give expression to an underlying fear: that under conditions of new technology and the partial break-down of indigenous norms and safeguards, an expansion in the numbers of indigenous people living on their lands may result in non-sustainable use of wildlife (pp 7,11,197-98).

At a time when Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples have become increasingly vocal about the threat to themselves and to future generations of an unrestrained depletion of the mainstays of their subsistence on land and waters, the underlying concerns of this book may carry a certain irony; unintentionally, some of its preconceptions may also be insulting to indigenous people. It is necessary to hold in mind three emerging features of contemporary indigenous life and thinking. First, that many indigenous groupings and communities wish to take the responsibility for their lands and seas into their own hands, as Trevor Webb notes in chapter 7, citing Dermot Smyth (p 99). Second, that prior to, but especially since Mabo v Queensland [No. 2] ((1992) [1992] HCA 23; 175 CLR 1) a form of 'native title thinking' has emerged: the real possibility of owning and managing country according to local law and custom has gripped indigenous people. The authors of the second chapter state that the indigenous 'right to hunt is inextricably linked to land rights' (p 19). In chapter six, a constructive discussion of economic and policy perspectives, the positive outcomes for indigenous people of the recognition of indigenous property rights emerge as 'a potentially fundamental shift' in Australia. Here Altman, Bek and Roach explore the opportunities increased access to wildlife resources will afford in sustenance and incomes, and so 'provide an enhanced indigenous voice in environmental management' (p 77). A third change accompanies the second: a reclaiming by indigenous people of their own systems of 'use' of 'wildlife', 'conservation', 'sustainability', what they may call keeping the country healthy for future generations based on the handing down of responsibilities and rights.

Indigenous people will be the ones able to allay the fears of those non-indigenous Australians whom the book seeks to address. They will be able to speak with the authority of their own cultural inheritance, which includes land, and the cultural values that accompany their relationship to land. Indigenous people may be able to school writers away from cataloguing species and taking conceptual liberties with words like 'wildlife' (a term with culturally specific connotations among indigenous hunters and horticulturists). They may be able to give non-indigenous people an understanding that species 'used' are hunted and harvested within a cultural context in which responsibilities are undetachable from rights.

The absence of a framework for cross-cultural understanding in Sustainable Use of Wildlife prevents the reader from gaining a sense of Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander priorities on the taking of land or sea wildlife or how they gauge the state of the animal or fish; how they use landmarks to read the sea as well as the land; their detailed knowledge of various species and their consequent finely tuned powers of discrimination as to the variety, state of health, or sex, of an animal or fish; or how their 'environment' speaks to them. And here we return to an important divide, exciting for its power to demonstrate the vastness of human range and capacities. There are numerous signs in the book that the authors wish to address some of these questions; a framing of culturally different positions (themselves neither exclusive nor existing in a social vacuum) may provide the context for a dialogue between equal partners-the manifest aim of the editors and a range of the contributors.

* Nonie Sharp is an Australian Research Fellow at La Trobe University. Her most recent book is No Ordinary Judgment, Aboriginal Studies Press, Canberra 1996.

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[1] PJ Usher, The Devolution of Wildlife Management and the Prospects for Wildlife Conservation in the Northwest Territories, The Canadian Arctic Resources Committee, 1986.