‘We are the ones who know the intimacies of the soil’: Grazier claims to belonging and changing land relations in Cape York Peninsula, Queensland

Abstract

Across Cape York Peninsula, the cattle grazing industry has declined in recent decades due to falling cattle prices, shorter wet seasons and land tenure changes. Remaining graziers perceive their status in the region as increasingly marginal and explain this precarity with the ‘locking up’ of Cape York land regimes and environments by National Parks and Aboriginal interests. Based on 14 months of ethnographic research in south‐east Cape York conducted in 2018–2019, in this article I describe and analyse how graziers construct their claims to belonging in the region in response to land tenure changes. Drawing on recent scholarship on non‐Indigenous forms of belonging in settler states and using the case study of one particular grazing family, I discuss how graziers position themselves as those who ‘know the intimacies of the soil’, as one grazier stated, due to multigenerational work on the land. Their claim to belonging tends to ignore prior Aboriginal occupation and instead emphasises their long‐term relationships with local Aboriginal families, while the third main stakeholder in the region, Queensland Parks and Wildlife Service, is perceived as a kind of dispossessor representing non‐local ‘Green’ ideologies and interests.

Full text

Mardi Reardon-Smith The Australian Journal of Anthropology
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“We are the ones who know the intimacies of the soil”: Grazier claims to belonging and
changing land-relations in Cape York Peninsula, Queensland
Abstract: Across Cape York Peninsula, the cattle grazing industry has declined in recent decades due to falling
cattle prices, shorter wet seasons and land tenure changes. Remaining graziers perceive their status in the region
as increasingly marginal and explain this precarity with the ‘locking up’ of Cape York land regimes and
environments by National Parks and Aboriginal interests. Based on 14 months of ethnographic research in
south-east Cape York conducted in 2018-2019, in this article I will describe and analyse how graziers construct
their claims to belonging in the region in response to land-tenure changes. Drawing on recent scholarship on
non-Indigenous forms of belonging in settler-states and using the case study of one particular grazing family, I
discuss how graziers position themselves as those who ‘know the intimacies of the soil’, as one grazier stated,
due to multi-generational work on the land. Their claim to belonging tends to ignore prior Aboriginal
occupation and instead emphasises their long-term relationships with local Aboriginal families, while the third
main stakeholder in the region, Queensland Parks and Wildlife Service is perceived as a kind of dispossessor
representing non-local ‘green’ ideologies and interests.
Key words: belonging, non-Indigenous autochthony, precarity, land-tenure changes, conservation regimes
It is a hot and blustery day in early November, and the country has well and truly
dried out. After a morning spent shifting cattle across a baked landscape, Cape York
grazier Alan1, his family and I are making the short trip across Lama Lama National
Park to the beach. We pile into Toyotas and bounce along an overgrown bush track
for forty minutes through eucalypt forest and across dusty saltpans dotted with
towering termite mounds. The windows are down, and our limbs stick, sweaty, to the
cracked vinyl seats. Alan tells me that he feels a real sense of loss about this particular
beach. With a bitter chuckle, he says that he used to want his ashes scattered at this
beach, but he is unsure now. ‘Parks2 have created a lot of negative feelings,’ he
explains. We draw closer and the smell of salt drifts through the air as the wind picks
up, offering a welcome reprieve from the heat of the day.
1 Throughout this article I do not use the real names of people or properties. The direct quotes from field
recordings and notes are only edited for greater readability.
2 Cape York graziers frequently referred to Queensland Parks and Wildlife Service simply as ‘Parks’. In this
article I use Queensland Parks and Wildlife Service, QPWS, Parks and National Parks interchangeably.

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In recent decades, the grazing industry in Cape York Peninsula, for north Queensland, has
become less economically viable due to shorter and drier wet seasons and falling cattle
prices. As a result of the Cape York Heritage Act 2007, cattle stations placed on the market
due to financial pressures have increasingly been purchased by the Queensland government
and transferred into joint-managed National Parks and blocks of Aboriginal freehold3
administered by Aboriginal Land Trusts (Queensland Government, 2019a). These land tenure
changes have led to substantial shifts in the way that land is managed. They have also
transformed the social make-up of the Cape York community. Based upon 14 months of
ethnographic fieldwork in 2018 and 2019 with four grazing families, two Aboriginal ranger
groups and Queensland Parks and Wildlife Service rangers in Cape York, this article
discusses graziers’ responses to perceptions that their claims to belonging are called into
question. It will reveal the forces put into play as their previously secure sense of
sociocultural and economic attachment to land in the region become increasingly precarious.
To describe and discuss the complex affective responses to changing land tenure and access
to land, this article focusses on the ways one particular grazing family forms their sense of
belonging to land. Although Queensland Parks and Wildlife Service (QPWS) is merely a
beneficiary of these land-tenure changes, not an instigator, graziers tend to perceive QPWS as
a kind of external dispossessor. Seeking to pull apart why graziers consider QPWS as
responsible for these changes, instead of attributing these shifts to changes in climate and the
international cattle market, I explore how different forms of environmental knowledge,
values and practices around land management come into conflict in interactions between non-
Indigenous graziers and QPWS rangers. The aim is to increase our understanding of how
settler descendants respond when their claims of belonging are called into question. Graziers’
long-term relationships with Indigenous people can complicate dominant narratives of White
autochthony which posit that Aboriginal people must be rendered invisible in order for
settler-descended people to feel a secure sense of belonging in a settler-colonial state. I
propose that as graziers in Cape York grapple with land-tenure changes that directly and
indirectly impact on the viability of their industry in the region, they enact a ‘politics of
3 Aboriginal freehold is a form of communal inalienable land tenure granted under the Aboriginal Land Act
1991 that is held by a trustee (a land trust or registered Native Title body corporate) for the benefit of the
Aboriginal community or a specific group of Aboriginal people (Aboriginal Land Act 1991 (Qld)).

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belonging’ (Yuval-Davis, 2006) to make certain claims about their ability to effectively
manage the land.
What is at stake for different people in Cape York when they make assertions of belonging is
significant and varies depending on the structural position of the group they belong to. Forms
of belonging for different land managers are sometimes shared and sometimes divergent,
shaped partially by complex genealogies of co-created environmental knowledge and
structured by land-tenure arrangements and management agreements. As I will show, for
settler-descended Cape York graziers, senses of belonging are intimately entwined with the
possession of detailed environmental knowledge and competence in land management.
In this article, I contend that settler-descended graziers enact a politics of belonging in
response to QPWS, rather than the presence of Aboriginal people or Aboriginal assertions of
sovereignty. This is because the historical grazing industry gave rise to intercultural
processes, resulting in some shared ways of relating to land between Aboriginal and non-
Aboriginal people in Cape York. While there is not scope in this article to discuss this
intercultural co-creation of knowledge in depth, the boundaries between grazier knowledge
and Aboriginal land-management knowledge – particularly around fire regimes and cattle
management - are murky. Aboriginal traditional owners and settler-descended graziers alike
place significant value on physical labouring on and interacting with landscapes. These local,
embedded and embodied environmental knowledges, and forms of physically relating to and
labouring on land, are positioned by graziers to exist in stark contrast to the bureaucratic and
scientific forms of land management that structure QPWS’ role in the region.
Intercultural Cape York
In Cape York, Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people continue to engage in multi-
generational relationships built largely upon shared work experiences in the grazing industry.
Historically always on unequal terms, these shared work histories shape contemporary
relationships, especially among older generations of graziers and Aboriginal people. As
Hinkson and Smith (2005) suggest, many ethnographic works on Indigenous and non-
Indigenous relationships in settler-colonial states present these two groups as existing in

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separate and distinct sociocultural domains. In the past, anthropologists have mainly been
interested in the perspectives and experiences in the Indigenous domain, leaving the
subjectivities of non-Indigenous persons in these contexts undertheorised. Instead, the non-
Indigenous domain has mainly been analysed through the broad strokes of government, ‘the
state’ or capitalist structures (Hinkson & Smith, 2005, 159).
In this article, I use Merlan’s (1998) ‘intercultural’ ethnographic and conceptual approach to
capture and theorise the situation of ‘difference-yet-relatedness’ of Indigenous-settler
relations in Australia, with a focus on everyday interpersonal interactions (Hinkson & Smith,
2005, 157). Rather than assuming that Aboriginal people and non-Aboriginal people come to
encounters as already pre-formed, culturally different and bounded entities, the intercultural
approach understands socio-cultural difference and forms of identifying as fundamentally
relational; as emerging in social relations, iterations and practice (Ottosson, 2010).
Developing ideas in the growing body of work in this space (see Martin & Trigger, 2016;
Ottosson, 2012; 2014; Trigger, 2008), I aim to take seriously the relatively understudied
experiences of non-Aboriginal people in Cape York, including graziers, Queensland Parks
and Wildlife Service employees and other land-managers, alongside the experiences of my
Aboriginal interlocutors.
The Cape York grazing industry
Established in the late 19th century after a short-lived gold rush triggered the rapid and violent
colonisation of Cape York, the pastoral industry was, until relatively recently, the dominant
industry in the region (Cole, 2004; Neale, 2017; Smith, 2003a). Relying upon a largely
unpaid Aboriginal workforce, the industry was able to remain profitable despite the relative
unsuitability of the land to grazing and lack of proximity to markets. Since the introduction of
equal wages in the 1970s, stations began employing fewer Aboriginal people, although
Aboriginal engagement in the pastoral industry remained significant (May, 1994; Smith,
2003a). This engagement has contributed to what Smith (2003b, 32) has described as a
‘syncretic interpenetration’ of grazing and traditional forms of Aboriginal land management,
leading to a situation in which grazing is deemed by a lot of Aboriginal people in Cape York
to be a legitimate use of land and, moreover, a ‘proper’ Aboriginal pursuit (Smith, 2003b,
33). Indeed, Smith has suggested that for many senior Aboriginal traditional owners in Cape

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York, establishing or taking over a cattle station has become ‘the holy grail of land rights and
self-determination’ (2003b, 32). Nowadays, in the wake of the ‘financial strictures of the
1990s’ (Strang, 2001, 53), many non-Aboriginal cattle stations on Cape York are
economically marginal, mainly operated by a husband and wife team with occasional help
from relatives, neighbours or the odd short-term contract musterer. In contrast, Aboriginal
cattle stations in Cape York – particularly those supported by the federal government’s
Indigenous Land and Sea Corporation – receive financial backing and provide traineeships
for young local Aboriginal people (Indigenous Land and Sea Corporation, 2019).
Since the 1970s, Australian cattle prices have fluctuated significantly, driven by unregulated
market prices, trade agreements, policy changes4, biosecurity concerns5 and, most
significantly, climatic conditions like multi-year droughts and flooding (Meat & Livestock
Australia, 2015). While there is growing concern both internationally and in Australia over
the environmental impacts and animal-welfare issues related to beef production, the financial
pressures which many graziers in Cape York face are directly related to these localised
drivers. Recent public concern about the condition of the Great Barrier Reef has contributed
substantially to government policy aimed at increasing oversight of grazing practices along
the eastern coast of Cape York (Queensland Government, 2019b). However, the acquisition
of cattle stations to be excised as National Parks is largely related to the Cape York Land
Tenure Resolution Program, administered under the Cape York Heritage Act 2007. Though
this does have the effect of increasing the amount of protected land in Cape York (see Figure
1), the Land Tenure Resolution Program is primarily concerned with returning control of land
to traditional owners (Queensland Government, 2019a).
The substance of graziers’ connection to land and sense of belonging
It is the end of the dry season and I am accompanying grazier Bill around his property
to distribute nutritional supplements to his cattle. In the tray of his vehicle are large
bags of these supplements, widely referred to as ‘lick’. We traverse Bill’s lease,
stopping at various makeshift sheds to heave the large bags of lick from the vehicle
4 In particular, the policy change which has a substantial impact on northern cattle producers in Australia was
the brief live export ban of 2011.
5 In the 1990s, the main biosecurity concern was in relation to fears around Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy,
colloquially known as mad cow disease, as well as an outbreak of E. coli in Japan.

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and pour their contents into empty drums. The cattle are familiar with the sound of
Bill’s truck and trot over eagerly. As we move around different sections of the
property, through lightly wooded forests and across dry creek beds, Bill points out
significant features in the landscape to me. He pauses by a hill to gesture at four or
five different native grasses, some of which have died back in the dry. He explains
how the species look at different points in the year and describes their utility for
cattle. As we trundle along a dirt track atop a rocky ridge, Bill tells me how years of
trial and error informed his decisions about where to place roads on the lease to avoid
erosion during the heavy rains and flooding of the monsoon. Bill openly admits to
having made mistakes in his early years – putting roads in the wrong places,
overstocking his station – and to having learnt from these mistakes.
Observing changes in the landscape, weather patterns and impacts of cattle is, for Bill and
other graziers, a key practice that both substantiates their sense of belonging in the region and
lends weight to their assertion that they are effective land managers. Anthropologists have
long been interested in how people acquire environmental knowledge and how such
knowledge shapes their experiences of the world (Orr, Lansing & Dove, 2015). Vanclay
(2008), for instance, contends that while it is difficult to quantify someone’s sense of place,
anthropologists are able to investigate people’s familiarity with the places in which they
dwell and thus arrive an approximate understanding of place-attachment (Vanclay, 2008, 8).
The kind of environmental knowledge articulated by graziers like Bill, then, emerges as
substantial in thinking about what comprises a sense of belonging for settler-descended Cape
York graziers.
Many graziers asserted to me that they know their leases better than anyone else. Often, this
assurance is grounded in deeper attachments than simply a familiarity based on long-term
experience. Such assertions instead emerge out of the multigenerational ties that graziers’
families have to specific places and the combination of inherited knowledge and knowledge
gained through experience of physically labouring on the land over a lifetime. This aligns
with Dominy’s (2001) research among pastoralists in the high country of New
Zealand/Aotearoa’s South Island, among whom she found a sense of belonging grounded in
intimate and experiential environmental knowledge garnered through both years of first-hand
experience and passed down through families.

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For the graziers in Cape York I worked with, similar comprehensive environmental
knowledge and physical intimacy with the landscape was frequently mobilised to bolster their
claims that they are the most appropriate people to be managing the land. Such knowledge
claims become important assertions of belonging when graziers’ management practices are
challenged, particularly by outsiders working within a Western science framework. This was
evident in an interaction I witnessed between a group of graziers and visiting scientists at the
Annual Grazing Forum in the Cape York town of Laura in 2019. The visiting scientists’
presentation about the environmental benefits of changing management practices and lower
stocking rates on stations had resulted in indignation from the assembled graziers. One
woman sought to contextualise the graziers’ attitudes, saying that, ‘this is the difference
between an owner and a manager [of a station]. We are the ones who know the intimacies of
the soil’.
Grazier resistance towards scientists and institutions like QPWS is a complex of several
factors. While graziers are certainly hostile to any suggestions that their management
practices should change, what is perhaps more significant is the disjunct between the kinds of
knowledge valued by graziers and that which they perceive scientists as possessing. Graziers
value environmental knowledge that is local, embedded and emerging out of long-term
experience. This knowledge, acquired through individual experience, the transmission of
multigenerational practical ‘wisdom’, and historically, through working alongside Aboriginal
traditional owner, is central to how graziers frame their sense of belonging in Cape York.
Tilley suggests that ‘knowledge of a thing is grounded in our bodily experience of it’ (cited in
Strang, 2014, 136). Ottosson draws on Appadurai to argue that ongoing interaction and
labour with a place works to build an embodied sense of that place (2016, 158). Much of the
literature around rural people’s relationships to land describes such a sense of place. As
Strang notes, continuous labouring on and interacting with the land has led to the
development of deep and complex place-attachments for settler-descended Australians who
have dwelt in one place for multiple generations (2004a; 2004b). Gray (1999) also highlights
how practical and physical engagement with the land works to socialise landscapes, creating
a sense of place among Scottish shepherds in the borderlands. He argues that places become
meaningful through the using – traversing them on foot or by vehicle, returning to certain

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points in the landscape that are useful for surveying sheep - and naming of places (1999,
443).
This aligns with how graziers like Bill traverse the land during cattle-management activities
like the ‘lick run’ described earlier. Such activities enable graziers to maintain familiarity and
intimacy with their stations, providing the context for ongoing environmental observations
and thus reaffirming their relationships to the land. Similarly, De Rijke (2012) asserts that
settler-descended rural people strive to ‘grow native roots’ by labouring on the land. Gill
(1997; 2005), too, suggests that Central Australian pastoralists understand themselves to be
imbuing the land in some sense with their memories of past work, achievements and failures.
The result of these ongoing interactions is what Williams has called a ‘slow thickening of
meaning’ (cited in Strang, 2004b, 38) and what Strang has discussed as cultural landscapes
(2004c), as graziers gradually socialise the landscape over time. What these accounts, and my
own field data, thus reveal is the significance that rural people place on labouring on the land,
experiential knowledge and obtaining what Ottosson (2016) has called an ‘embodied sense of
place’.
In contrast, visiting scientists and QPWS management staff who graziers would designate as
‘not local’, are understood to be attempting to apply abstract knowledge, formulated
elsewhere, to the context of Cape York. The perceived distance between local and external
knowledge contributes to graziers’ general defiance towards the expertise of scientists.
Similar rejections of expertise from outsiders has been discussed by Ottosson (2019a) in
relation to a water saving plan in Alice Springs, which she suggests reveals the division
between the place-specific knowledge held by locals and more abstract and global forms of
knowledge held by ‘experts’. Such expertise is perceived by long-time locals as hollow
because the knowledge is abstract and does not emerge from embodied experience (Ottosson,
2019a). Accordingly, any advice or planning from external ‘experts’, like the scientists at the
Annual Grazing Forum, tends to fall flat.
It is widely conceded in the literature that pastoralists and farmers tend to characterise
themselves as ‘stewards’ who care for and manage the land (Gill, 2014). This stewardship is
bound up with the notion of responsibility and a moral imperative to use and care for land
properly. As Strang suggests, pastoralists in Cape York shy away from describing the land in

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affective terms yet display an ‘underlying moral theme of care for the land’ (1997, 129).
Despite displaying pro-environmental values and engaging in a variety of conservation
projects supported by Cape York Natural Resource Management and Landcare groups,
graziers in Cape York tend to eschew the label ‘conservationist’ because of its association
with ‘greenies’. Cronon (1999) understands a conservation ethic to position humans as
external to nature, as something related to the preservation of an impossible, imagined
‘wilderness’. The stewardship displayed by graziers in Cape York and elsewhere in Australia
demonstrates a bodily engagement with the land they seek to care for. Graziers see their lives
and livelihoods as aligned with the wellbeing of the land. The land is considered by graziers
to be neither pure or separate, but something with which they are in constant relationship to.
Graziers perceive their actions on the land as impactful. Many graziers acknowledge the
damage that running cattle can wreak on ecosystems, although they tend to minimise their
own involvement in land-degradation, pointing to the proliferation of weeds on National
Parks and erosion caused by road building. Instead, graziers highlight the ways in which they
have mitigated any possible damage caused by cattle, including rotating stock through
paddocks, avoiding over-stocking, fencing waterways and engaging in erosion mitigating
projects like weed-control and fire-management.
Many graziers describe their land-management capabilities as superior to that of QPWS and
Aboriginal traditional owners. This is largely due to a perception among graziers that QPWS
are attempting to awkwardly apply land-management practices developed ‘down south’ in
Australia’s urban and populous areas to the highly specific region of Cape York. Graziers
tend to see land-management on blocks of Aboriginal freehold as characterised by absence,
believing Aboriginal people to be restricted by the complexity of Aboriginal freehold as a
land-tenure type which requires the consensus of multiple dispersed family groups.
Additionally, graziers tend to assume that young Aboriginal people prefer to remain in town
rather than in the bush. By comparison, graziers see themselves as employing embedded,
experiential knowledge year-round to manage the land, with many rarely venturing away
from their stations. Growing frustrated about discussions around changing land-tenure, one
grazier woman asked rhetorically at a public forum about weed control and soil erosion,
‘Well what do they think is going to happen to the land when it’s all National Parks and
Aboriginal land?’. Her implication was that, without graziers managing the land, weeds and
soil erosion would proliferate.

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I return now to grazier Alan and his family, who were introduced in the opening vignette of
this article, in order to investigate how the ‘embodied sense of place’ valued by graziers is
mobilised and transmuted into a ‘politics of belonging’ in response to perceived incursion by
QPWS in Cape York.
Alan and Bev: an experience of increasing precarity?
Alan, his family and I arrive at a section of beach in Lama Lama National Park called
Goose Creek Mouth. The sand is a rosy colour and on this day the sea is churned up
and milky. The sandy beach between Goose Creek Mouth and the beach break is
covered in crocodile tracks, and I stand back from the water’s edge as Bev catches
three barramundi. I spot a crocodile swimming in the river mouth and watch as an old
sea turtle missing a fin struggles in the waves out at sea. After a while, I sit down with
Alan, who prefers to fish with bait and a handline while all the others use a rod and
lure. He tells me that he has a lot of memories to do with his father at the beach. Alan
says that he used to come fishing or pig hunting here with his father as a child. The
beach, more than other places connected to Alan’s station, Tidewater, evokes strong
affective memories in Alan that he articulates freely. Alan says that he feels that
QPWS has a lack of regard for ‘people like me’ and refuses to acknowledge that he
has a history and depth of connection to this place.
Alan is a sixty-year-old fourth-generation grazier and runs Tidewater station in south-east
Cape York with his wife Bev. It is a block of sandy country comprised of salt pans, mangrove
forests, savanna woodlands and stands of Cooktown Ironwood trees. Tidewater station is
characteristic of the region, in that it has mostly poor, sandy soils and can only carry around
1400 head of cattle on 75,000 hectares. For comparison, in the Northern Territory the average
cattle station is 250,000 hectares in size, carrying around 8000 head of cattle (Northern
Territory Government, 2020). A maxim that I heard touted by several graziers is that, ‘Cape
York is good for breeding cattle and shit for growing them.’ That is, the country is rough, and
cattle do not easily put on the necessary value-adding weight. Poor pasture, coupled with the
lack of proximity to markets, distinguishes Cape York as being ‘perhaps Australia’s most
difficult pastoral country’ (Neale, 2017). Many Cape York graziers rely on the live-export

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market, and some have diversified their businesses, engaging in road work or driving trucks
to supplement their incomes and avoid bankruptcy.
Alan assumed the management of Tidewater Station at 19 years old, following the sudden
death of his father in a mustering accident. Like other young settler-descended graziers of his
generation, Alan worked closely with a team of older Aboriginal stockmen, many of whom
identified as Lama Lama and the traditional owners for Tidewater Station. Alan’s family and
particular Lama Lama families had lived and worked alongside each other for decades and
Alan still has close relationships with some older Lama Lama people. When I asked Alan if
he was concerned when he first heard about Native Title he replied, ‘no, not really. Because
we knew them fellas, you see’. Alan noted that he had felt secure in his assumption that Lama
Lama people saw Tidewater Station as belonging to his family and were far more concerned
with re-establishing a community at Yintjingga/Port Stewart, a small coastal outstation from
which a community of Lama Lama people were forcibly removed by the Queensland
government in the 1960s.
It came as something of a surprise to Alan, then, when he heard on the radio in the early
2000s that the whole eastern coast of Cape York was to be acquired as a Wilderness Zone, an
initiative of Premier Wayne Goss’s Queensland Labor Government. Alan and his wife Bev
were given two options: to remain at Tidewater for the remainder of their lease – at that
stage, only a handful of years – and only compensated for improvements, or to sell Tidewater
to the State government and receive a better deal, which is what they chose to do.
Tidewater Station was subsequently split into two tenures: Lama Lama National Park, which
was the first joint managed Park in Queensland, established in 2008, and Lama Lama Land
Trust, a section of Aboriginal freehold. Lama Lama people hold a variety of parcels of land
under different land tenures and administer them all through a body called Yintjingga
Aboriginal Corporation (YAC). YAC have currently leased the Aboriginal freehold section
of Tidewater Station back to Alan and Bev for ten years. There is a sense among YAC that,
depending on pressures on their other land tenures, this arrangement may be extended
allowing Alan and Bev to remain on Tidewater for some time. While they intend to remain at
Tidewater for as long as possible, Alan and Bev have lived in this state of uncertainty for

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over a decade and have been whittling down their herd and making plans to move further
south. However, they rarely voice frustrations about their situation, preferring instead to
discuss their frustrations around how QPWS impacts on their way of life.
Like other graziers with whom I worked, Alan and Bev frequently cited ‘freedom’ as the
thing they value most highly about living in Cape York. These graziers invariably spoke of
their enjoyment at being self-employed, enjoying the freedom to work when there are tasks to
be done and rest when things are quiet. In many ways, their attachment to the region seems to
be related to an association with the way of life that running cattle offers. This echoes
Strang’s (1997) suggestion that many pastoralists in Cape York experience the land as a
‘generalised theatre for activity’, with an attachment to a certain way of life rather than to
specific land areas (215). However, despite Alan’s self-ascribed attachment to ‘freedom’
rather than to the land itself, his specific emotional relationship to Goose Creek Mouth
destabilised this claim somewhat. Alan and Bev have ongoing communicated permission
from the traditional owners to visit Goose Creek, but because it is part of a National Park
there are restrictions imposed by QPWS on how they are able to access it. It is illegal to drive
a quad bike in a National Park without a specific permit to do so, which means that Alan and
Bev are only able to access Goose Creek Mouth when the track is dry enough for a car to
travel along it. Given the low-lying coastal nature of the area, Alan and Bev’s access to the
beach is thus limited to the latter part of the dry season. The presence of hidden cameras
along the track ensures that Alan and Bev follow the rules.
Despite Alan’s depth of connection to the beach, his frustration seems to emerge largely from
the ability that QPWS has to determine how and when he accesses this special place. I would
argue that Alan’s negative feelings are related to the curtailing of the absolute freedom which
he previously experienced in relation to this place. This decreasing freedom which Alan
articulates mostly in relation to the beach could be understood as related to his broader sense
of belonging and entitlement to the region being destabilised. Alan, who has never lived
anywhere else but Tidewater, is facing the reality that he will shortly be relocating elsewhere.
Alan’s experience is often used by other graziers, alongside land tenure changes in the
region, to bolster their claims that they are facing an increased situation of precarity. To
graziers, QPWS represents an incursion that simultaneously symbolises the increased reach
of the State and a vaguely defined ‘Green’ ideology. The possibility of being forced off cattle

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stations is both a felt experience and, in some cases, a structural reality, and it colours every
interaction that graziers have with QPWS.
Complexity and moral ambiguity of non-Indigenous belonging
Alan and Bev’s situation provokes a consideration of non-Indigenous connection to land in
settler-colonial states like Australia and discussion around what it means to belong. Mulcock
argues that while Anglo-Celtic Australians inhabit a well-defined dominant space in the
nation-state, they cannot claim the ‘moral right to belong’ that Aboriginal people retain
(2007, 68). This is because, as Gressier (2014, 1) notes, such assertions of belonging ‘are
often perceived as inauthentic at best and neo-colonial at worst’. I return to Yuval-Davis’
(2006) argument that a politics of belonging emerges when one’s taken-for-granted sense of
belonging is called into question; an experience which Hage also addresses in his work on the
drivers of White nationalism in Australia (2003). The unreflective sense of belonging which a
majority of both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people would purport to have is made
conscious by the presence of ‘others’ who may be perceived as threatening or challenging
their way of belonging (Hage, 2003). Recent scholarship, however, suggests that privileged
groups of people are increasingly interrogating their own positionality and sense of belonging
(Heffernan, 2020).
Central to this discussion is Yuval-Davis’ (2006) conceptual approach which, importantly,
distinguishes between everyday processes of belonging and the politics of belonging. She
suggests that everyday notions of belonging involve a wide range of daily practices in which
people form and maintain attachments, and craft narratives of self and others, based on their
multiple social locations including ethnicity, gender, age and class. Belonging, in this sense,
she suggests, is a fluid way of being-in-the-world, or perhaps becoming-in-the-world that is
not reflected upon much. For graziers like Alan and Bev, the experience of running cattle in
Cape York before the land rights era was entwined with an unchallenged sense of belonging.
They assumed that their title to land was secure and were bolstered in their senses of
belonging through interactions with a large community of other settler-descended graziers.
Before the Cape York Land Tenure Resolution Program, cattle stations tended to neighbour
other cattle stations, and QPWS employees were perceived as less bureaucratic and more
down to earth. As one grazier named Pam told me, ‘they were more our kind of people’.

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Yuval-Davis (2006) contends that aspects of more fluid processes of belonging only become
a site of contestation, reflection, discussion and politicisation when one’s ways of belonging
are called into question. It has only been through land tenure changes and the increased
dominance of QPWS that graziers have begun to feel that their claim to belonging is under
threat, and that they are at risk of being ‘locked out’ of Cape York by conservation and
Aboriginal interests. It is through this perception of threat and precarity that graziers come to
make assertions of belonging and claims to a unique relationship to land. Referencing John
Crowley, Yuval-Davis suggests that the politics of belonging can be understood as ‘the dirty
work of boundary maintenance’ (2006, p. 204), by which she means those boundaries that
function to separate ‘us’ and ‘them’. Such boundary maintenance is evident in the way that
graziers relate to QPWS rangers and the institution of QPWS as a whole, framing them as
antagonistic and hostile towards graziers.
The concept of autochthony, which comes from a Greek word meaning ‘to be born from the
soil’ (Geschiere, 2009, 2), is useful in understanding how many non-Indigenous people frame
their claims to belonging in settler-colonial states. Although evoking a similar primordialism
to the concept of indigeneity, autochthony is much more ambiguous which makes possible its
application to a wide variety of contexts (Geschiere, 2009; Jackson, 2006). Autochthony
refers to a ‘naturalised’ state of belonging emerging from a connection to the land which
relies upon distinguishing the autochthon from an ambiguous Other that can be continually
redefined (Geschiere, 2009, 28). Garbutt (2011) suggests that non-Aboriginal locals claim
autochthony and thus natural belonging. He notes that the notion that belonging can be
achieved through manual labour is a cornerstone of pioneer mythology. This point illustrates
Jackson’s observation that autochthons see themselves as the ‘sons of the soil’ (2006, 98). It
highlights how belonging emerges from associations with landscape over time (Read, 2000)
but is based on the masculinist pioneer notion of mixing of sweat with the land and being
reborn as a ‘son [or daughter] of the soil’ (Garbutt, 2011, 187-188).
Alan and Bev, like other Cape York graziers, often speak about how they have ‘made
something from nothing’ through their labour on the land. Direct interaction and physical
labouring on the land emerges in the ethnographic literature as an important aspect of non-
Indigenous connection to land. De Rijke (2012, 182) describes how Anglo-Australians strive

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to grow ‘native roots’ through physically altering or ‘improving’ the land in rural
Queensland. Similarly, Gill (2005) discusses how pastoralists in Central Australia position
their claim to the land as legitimate because of the effect of their labour in transforming what
they saw as a dormant, potential pastoral landscape into an active one. This notion of
‘improving’ the land in such remote and challenging locales has been suggested as related to
the pioneer mythology notion of eking out an existence in an inhospitable landscape (Furniss,
1997; Garbutt, 2011).
Garbutt (2011) has suggested that it is through coming face-to-face with Aboriginal people
that settler-descended Australians’ sense of belonging is revealed as profoundly shallow and
built on a history of violence. Indeed, Garbutt argues that claims of settler belonging rely
upon a ‘double effacement of memory’ which obscures both Aboriginal people and the
migratory and powerful colonial history of settlers. Settler claims to a form of indigeneity,
then, are fragile and vulnerable to being destabilised by settlers interacting with Aboriginal
people and being reminded of their own foreignness. However, in the context of
contemporary Cape York, the notion of ‘contact’ with otherwise-invisible Aboriginal people
is ill-fitting, as settlers and Aboriginal people have long been face-to-face in Cape York,
albeit in historically unequal relationships. Instead, the ‘other’ which is significant here to
graziers is the Queensland State government, as manifested by QPWS rangers. It is through
interactions with this ‘other’ that graziers articulate a politics of belonging (Yuval-Davis,
2006) and become defensive about their connection to land, as land tenure changes – which
QPWS have come to represent - reveal that their legal right to that land is tenuous, shaky and
fleeting.
Alan and Bev’s circumstances have propelled them into articulating their connection to
Tidewater station with a kind of defensiveness, demonstrating how definitions of self and
other, belonging and security are becoming key concerns for graziers in Cape York. Their
imminent departure from the region, though happening at an unspecified time in the future, is
certain, leading to high emotions and lofty claims. For graziers, in the past, the distinction
between leasehold and freehold title to land has been more or less non-existent. Indeed, the
same leases have been held by the same families over generations and graziers tend to talk
about ‘owning’ their stations rather than ‘leasing’ them. Part of Alan and Bev’s sense of
precarity is related to the question of ownership. Although Tidewater was only ever held

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under pastoral lease, until the Wik decision of 1996 pastoral lease was understood by graziers
such as Alan and Bev to be a stable form of title to land. The Wik decision found that
pastoral leases did not extinguish native title, spooking graziers in across Australia (Gill,
2005). Despite this, many Cape York graziers asserted that they felt confident that their
multi-generational relationships with key Aboriginal families in the region protected them
from potential native title claims.
The instability of pastoral leases as a form of land tenure have revealed to graziers that their
legal right to remain in Cape York is insecure. Faced with the realisation that what was once
considered a secure title to land is comparatively quite weak, graziers must reckon with their
now precarious right to belong in the region. Connection and attachment to land is, for
graziers, considered substantive and stable, achieved through generations of physically
labouring on the land. However, it is in the legal context of land tenures, not in the substance
of their attachment to land, that graziers’ rights over land are revealed as fragile and tenuous.
Cognisant, to some extent, of Aboriginal group boundaries and particular significant areas,
graziers’ sense of ownership over their leases is not necessarily borne of a lack of awareness
of Aboriginal connection to land in Cape York. Instead, graziers seem able to justify their
own connection to land in part by asserting that the areas that their Aboriginal friends and
acquaintances care about attaining ownership over are somehow elsewhere. Alan told me
frequently that the Lama Lama people had never intended to claim the inland section of
Tidewater station, despite the potential for doing so. He maintained that while it was their
country, they had no interest in Tidewater itself and were instead much more interested in
claiming the section of land along the beach and further north at Port Stewart/Yintjingga,
where the Lama Lama people have had a small outstation community since the early 1990s.
‘There’s only one significant site here,’ he told me confidently, adding that the Lama Lama
people were satisfied as long as they were able to visit and care for this site. Indeed, the
chairperson of Lama Lama land trust told me if it were not for a dispute regarding another
parcel of land, Alan and Bev could remain at Tidewater ‘as long as they want’. However,
Lama Lama Land Trust are eager to establish a new ranger base, and failing negotiations with
this other landholder, they are planning to build the ranger base at Tidewater. ‘But we’ve
always had a good relationship with Alan and Bev,’ the chairperson told me. ‘They’ve

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always been supportive of Lama Lama people. Even twenty or thirty years ago, Alan was
asking when Lama Lama were going to get our country back’.
For graziers like Alan and Bev, Aboriginal people are ‘elsewhere’, even if that ‘elsewhere’ is
only a forty-minute drive up the road. Alan often mentioned that he and his parents had made
it clear to the Lama Lama community that they were always welcome to visit, camp and fish
at the station. Only one family took up this offer, visiting occasionally. As the elders of this
family have become less mobile, these visits have gradually become less common, leaving
Alan and Bev to assume that the Lama Lama community has little interest in visiting
Tidewater Station except for paid work activities. As Aboriginal people have become less
involved in the Cape York grazing industry in recent decades (May, 1994), the significance
of close, everyday working relationships has also faded for grazing families. Nowadays, Alan
and Bev interact with Lama Lama families in only a few, prescribed ways. They occasionally
visit with or have phone conversations with a particular elderly Lama Lama couple who live
between Coen and Port Stewart/Yintjingga. Aside from this friendship, most of Alan and
Bev’s interactions with Lama Lama people are now mediated through QPWS and the formal
structure of joint-management. Lama Lama rangers visit, camp and engage in land-
management activities on Tidewater Station on several occasions throughout the year.
Despite these interactions, Alan and Bev still believe that without the Queensland
government’s intervention, the Lama Lama Land Trust would have had little reason to visit
the station.
As such, Alan and Bev, reflecting a sentiment held by other graziers in Cape York, do not
feel that their claim to belonging in the region is being threatened by Aboriginal people.
Graziers draw on their entwined working histories, previously close relationships and
knowledge of Aboriginal understandings of the landscape, which varies from cursory to
detailed among different graziers, to argue that most Aboriginal people have no desire to see
them leave the region. Instead, a nexus of administrative, legal and land-tenure changes,
along with bodies such as QPWS, Cape York Land Council, Balkanu Corporation, Centrelink
and Apunipinya Health Service, that graziers tend to group under the rubric of ‘the
government’, are blamed for driving a wedge between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people
in recent years. Accordingly, it is not because of the threat of a more morally sound claim to
belonging from Aboriginal people that graziers feel at-risk.

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Conclusion
Graziers in Cape York, like other land-managers, have intimate relationships with landscapes
comprised of long-term, detailed and embedded environmental knowledge. As such, graziers
tend to position themselves as stewards who are well-placed to care for the land. This ethic of
care has contributed to a connection to land among graziers that is entwined with the value
they place on their specific way of life. Interactions with Aboriginal people have not
problematised this connection to land for graziers, nor their sense of belonging in the region.
Cape York graziers are able to sidestep the kind of crisis of settler belonging described by
Garbutt (2011), in which a settler sense of belonging is problematised by coming into contact
with Aboriginal people as the true indigenes of the land. Graziers in Cape York have, instead,
always been in contact with Aboriginal people, albeit in the context of unequal relationships.
While different to Aboriginal connections to land in Australia, graziers and other land-
managers provide a route to non-Indigenous belonging that does not always rely on the
erasure of Aboriginal people. The graziers in this example instead position their own
belonging and connection to land as adjacent to that of Aboriginal people – although this is a
position that equally relies on assumptions and imaginaries of Aboriginal people.
Instead, their sense of being displaced or forced out emerges out of a new kind of contact
with the State government. National Parks are seen as a kind of third, unwelcome agent
representing government intervention. Graziers perceive National Parks as a dispossessor
because National Parks reveal as tenuous the nature of grazier claims to country in Cape
York. Graziers’ sense that they are experiencing increasing precarity at the hands of the State
government propel them into enacting a politics of belonging. Whereas before, graziers
experienced the kind of everyday forms of belonging described by Yuval-Davis (2006), they
now feel compelled to make claims about their specific aptitude for land-management and
about their unfair treatment at the hands of QPWS. While QPWS are not actually responsible
for the changes to the grazing industry in Cape York, graziers directing hostility towards
QPWS are tending to conflate the decline of the grazing industry with land-tenure changes
and new forms of control enacted by QPWS. This response reveals the insecurity felt by
graziers as their sense of belonging is destabilised.

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Funding: This research was supported by an Australian Government Research Training
Program (RTP) Scholarship 2017-2020 and the Carlyle Greenwell Research Fund from the
Department of Anthropology, University of Sydney 2017-2019.
Conflicts of Interest: The author declares no conflict of interest.
Acknowledgements: This paper has benefited from generous comments and suggestions
from the anonymous peer reviewers, Ase Ottosson, Linda Connor, Timothy Heffernan and
the editors.

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