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Mardi Reardon-Smith Geoforum – Accepted – Pre-print
Mardi.reardonsmith@deakin.edu.au
1
A seat at the table? Planning, meetings and the ‘stable relation’ of a
joint managed National Park in northern Australia
Abstract
Over the last fifteen years, most national parks in Cape York Peninsula, far north-east
Australia, have been transferred to Aboriginal ownership and are now jointly managed by the
Queensland Parks and Wildlife Service and the relevant Aboriginal traditional owner groups.
The park in which this research was conducted has been jointly managed for just over a
decade, but the transition to joint management is entwined with challenges related to the
bringing together of different knowledge and management systems. The main forum for
discussing and implementing change is in the mutual space of formal joint management
meetings. However, this mutual space is not co-produced on equal terms. Joint management
meetings and the production of management plans function as a way for Queensland Parks to
fulfil their obligations to Aboriginal traditional owners while simultaneously reaffirming their
status as the more powerful co-managing institution. Rather than fostering a space of
indeterminacy, in which management partners could co-create new forms of managing and
caring for land, meetings and management plans function to construct a ‘stable relation’
between Aboriginal traditional owners and Queensland Parks.
Keywords
Joint management; national parks; natural resource management; meetings; planning;
Indigenous; Cape York Peninsula
Introduction
On a hot afternoon towards the end of northern Australia’s dry season, I witnessed an
altercation of the kind that was fairly typical of the joint managed park1 I was conducting
research in. Donna, an Aboriginal traditional owner2 and ranger employed by the Aboriginal
corporation who co-manage this park with the Queensland Parks and Wildlife Service
(hereafter Queensland Parks), was exchanging heated words with Shane, a non-Indigenous
Queensland Parks ranger. The disagreement was about the division of labour between the
rangers employed by the Aboriginal corporation and those employed by Queensland Parks.
Donna had observed Shane travelling to a site which she understood to be sensitive, and for
which she and her family had ownership rights over. Donna was asserting that Shane should
have thought to take her, or another Aboriginal traditional owner, with him when to visit this
1 In order to preserve the anonymity of my research participants, I have omitted the name of the national park
and Aboriginal traditional owner groups and use pseudonyms to refer to individuals.
2 Throughout this paper I use the term ‘traditional owner’, rather than ‘custodian’, as this is the term used in
Queensland government documents and publications discussing joint management in Cape York (see Fien,
2015; Queensland Government, 2022) , and because this is the term used by the Aboriginal people with whom I
worked – many of whom shortened ‘traditional owner’ to ‘TO’ in conversation.
Mardi Reardon-Smith Geoforum – Accepted – Pre-print
Mardi.reardonsmith@deakin.edu.au
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site, and that this should be standard policy for Queensland Parks rangers. Seeing me, Donna
walked away from Shane, and we sat in the nearby office. Clearly still agitated, Shane strode
over to the office. Leaning through the doorway, he told Donna that if she had an issue with
how he was operating, she was to bring it up at the next joint management meeting and not at
work. Donna began to interject, but Shane cut her short, saying, ‘I don’t want to get into it
now and I don’t agree with it, but you can have your say about it at the meeting.’
The notion that issues and concerns should be spoken about at the joint management
meetings and not during day-to-day operations was a common refrain throughout the 15
months in which I conducted ethnographic fieldwork, on and off, in the park. Often, the
phrase ‘bring it up at the meeting’ was used to foreclose discussion and dissension, deferring
consideration of grievances about the management of the park to a future time. However,
joint management meetings rarely engendered the kind of open discussion that would be
necessary for working through such issues. Instead, the joint management meetings I
observed and spoke about with my interlocutors tended to involve packed agendas
concerning budgets, infrastructure, work plans, and fire and pest management.
Joint management can be understood as an ‘emergent cultural form’ (Tsing, 2005: 3) that
brings different groups of land managers with different land management systems together in
a kind of mutual space of mediation. However, this mutual space is not co-produced on equal
terms. Joint management was established in the first place as an institutional mechanism for
government agencies to engage with Aboriginal traditional owners in the management of land
declared as national park. The structural, institutional authority underpinning joint
management arrangements is thus already skewed in favour of the Queensland Parks and
Wildlife Service, which fundamentally rely on a Western, scientific ontological framework
for land management. There is much to consider in terms of the differing priorities,
aspirations, and relations to land between Aboriginal traditional owners and park rangers, and
the challenges that this presents in co-managing a protected area which I do not address in
detail here. Rather, in this paper I seek to drill down into how joint management meetings and
the production of management plans function as a way for Queensland Parks to fulfil their
obligations to Aboriginal traditional owners while simultaneously reaffirming their status as
the more powerful co-management institution. I suggest that, rather than fostering a space of
indeterminacy, in which management partners could co-create new forms of managing and
caring for land, meetings and management plans function to construct a ‘stable relation’
(Hull, 2012: 256) between Aboriginal traditional owners and Queensland Parks. As Howitt
and Suchet-Pearson (2006) have suggested, without fundamentally altering the ontological
‘building blocks’ of management, the status-quo remains upheld and business-as-usual is able
to continue.
This paper proceeds with a short note on methods, before tracing the history of national parks
in Cape York and the development of the joint management program in the region. I then
interweave ethnographic findings and analysis across two sections in which I discuss, firstly,
how joint management meetings function and, secondly, detail the creation of a new type of
Management Agreement which attempts to more accurately capture Aboriginal traditional
Mardi Reardon-Smith Geoforum – Accepted – Pre-print
Mardi.reardonsmith@deakin.edu.au
3
owner aspirations. The article closes with a conceptually oriented discussion regarding the
possibilities of fostering true joint management in places like Cape York.
Methods
This paper is based on approximately 15 months of ethnographic fieldwork, conducted across
two national parks in south-east Cape York between 2017 and 2020. Initially, I undertook a
brief scoping trip to the region in which I established relationships and began the process of
seeking formal permission from Aboriginal ranger groups and Queensland Parks to undertake
my research. The substantive period of fieldwork occurred in 2018 and 2019, with a follow-
up visit in 2020 in which I communicated my research findings to my participants and
reaffirmed individuals’ consent to be involved. The research project was approved by
(institution name redacted for anonymity) Human Research Ethics Committee before I
commenced field research, and it adheres to the relevant protocols and guidelines for research
with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and other human participants.
This fieldwork involved long-term participant observation in the parks, in which I engaged in
a broad range of work and leisure activities with operational rangers. These activities
included tasks like fixing fences, planting trees, checking campground permits, spraying
weeds, laying baits for pest management, water quality monitoring, fire-management,
painting signs, going fishing, climate change monitoring, engaging with tourists and,
importantly, attending joint management meetings. I also undertook in-depth semi-structured
interviews with Aboriginal traditional owners and Queensland Parks operational rangers, and
with Queensland Parks senior management staff who were based in the nearby towns of
Cooktown and Cairns.
History of National Parks in Cape York
Since the 1970s, the Queensland government has declared a number of national parks and
protected areas in the Cape York region (Rigsby, 1981; Holmes, 2011a; Holmes, 2011b). The
creation of one of the earliest parks in the Cape – Oyala Thumotang National Park, formerly
Archer Bend National Park – was fraught. In the early 1970s, Wik Mungkan man John
Koowarta attempted to purchase the pastoral lease over a section of his traditional homelands
in western Cape York from the Archer River Pastoral Holding (Bennet and Sheehan, 2021;
Department of Environment and Science, 2021). The American businessman who held the
lease agreed to the sale, which would see the land returned to Mr Koowarta and several other
Aboriginal stockworkers who were traditional owners for the region, supported by the
Aboriginal Land Funds Commission. In a decision that was later found by the Supreme Court
and the Human Rights Commission to be unlawful and an example of racial discrimination,
the sale of the lease was blocked by the conservative Bjelke-Peterson Queensland
Government (Bennet and Sheehan, 2021). The reason provided was that,
‘The Queensland Government does not view favourably proposals to acquire large
areas of additional freehold or leasehold land for development by Aborigines or
Aboriginal groups in isolation’ (1982).
Mardi Reardon-Smith Geoforum – Accepted – Pre-print
Mardi.reardonsmith@deakin.edu.au
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While the case proved to be an important early test for the 1975 Racial Discrimination Act,
the ruling occurred too late for Mr Koowarta to gain title over his land. The Bjelke-Peterson
government gazetted the area of the pastoral lease as Archer Bend National Park in 1977,
effectively removing the possibility of the land being returned to the traditional owners
(Department of Environment and Science, 2021).
With its gazettal working to forcibly exclude Aboriginal people from gaining control over
their land, the contested creation of this early national park marked the beginning of tensions
between Aboriginal people and the environmental movement in far north Queensland,
tensions which came to national prominence during the Daintree road dispute (Anderson,
1989) and ‘wild rivers’ controversy (Neale, 2017; Slater, 2013). As Slater (2013) and Holmes
(2011a; 2011b) have pointed out, Cape York is often characterised a site of Green versus
Black politics. The history of Queensland Parks in the region have contributed to this sense of
animosity.
National parks in Australia follow the preservationist ‘Yellowstone model’ of conservation,
resulting in protected areas in which local people are excluded and their access to resources
severely constrained. the American naturalists who formed the Sierra Club and developed the
preservationist conservation national park model shared a sense that ‘Nature’ was external,
sublime, to be enjoyed at a distance, and – importantly – under threat (Tsing, 2005: 95-96).
Since their inception, national parks around the world have instigated encounters between
conservationists and indigenous peoples while simultaneously extending the reach and power
of the project of settler-colonialism (Carroll, 2014; Finegan, 2018; Jacoby, 2014; Spence,
1999). The first national park in the world to be declared was Yellowstone in the US, and its
gazettal necessitated the removal of the Indigenous Shoshone, Lakota, Crow, Blackfoot,
Flathead, Bannok, and Nez Perce Peoples from their land (Nabokov and Loendorf, 2004;
MacDonald, 2018). The forced removal and exclusion of Indigenous peoples from protected
areas served to create the fiction of an untouched, pristine, and wild Nature ready to be
enjoyed, at a distance, by cosmopolitan visitors. This practice of dispossessing Indigenous
peoples for the purposes of conserving landscapes is evident across the world in a variety of
contexts (Tsing, 2005; Doolittle, 2005; West et al., 2006; West, 2006). As Collins et al (2021)
point out, neoliberal conservation emerges from and is intimately entwined with the project
of colonization. The creation of these early national parks in Cape York relied upon this
narrative of parks needing to be protected from the polluting influence of humans, but was
also driven by an explicit resistance by the Queensland Government of the time towards
Aboriginal land ownership in general.
In 2010, around half of the area of Archer Bend National Park was revoked and in 2012 was
returned to the Oyala Thumotang Land Trust, and the same year the park itself was renamed
Oyala Thumotang National Park and ownership transferred to the Wik Mungkan, Ayapathu
and Southern Kaanju peoples (Department of Environment and Science, 2021). Having died
in 1991, Mr Koowarta did not live to see his land returned to Aboriginal ownership (Bennet
and Sheehan, 2021).
Mardi Reardon-Smith Geoforum – Accepted – Pre-print
Mardi.reardonsmith@deakin.edu.au
5
Joint management in Cape York
In recent years, national parks in Australia have emerged as an important site for Aboriginal
land claims under the national Native Title Act that was legislated in 1993. In 2004, the
Queensland government established the Cape York Land Tenure Resolution Implementation
Group (CYTRIG), which facilitated the resolution of multiple native title claims and
implemented the transfer of around 1.3 million hectares of conservation land in Cape York to
Aboriginal title (Holmes, 2011a: 64). Alongside the CYTRIG was the passing of the Cape
York Peninsula Heritage Act 2007, designed to address the concerns of all stakeholders.
Additionally, the Nature Conservation Act 1992 was amended in 2007 to create a new land
tenure type called National Park (Cape York Peninsula Aboriginal Land) (NP(CYPAL))
(Holmes, 2011a: 64). Parks have been transferred into CYPAL have Aboriginal freehold as
the underlying tenure, however these parcels of land must still be gazetted and managed as a
conservation park (Cope, 2020; Queensland Government, 2022). Aboriginal freehold is a
form of ‘inalienable freehold’ that is legislated through the Aboriginal Land Act 1991,
meaning that the land cannot be bought, sold, or subdivided, but it can be leased, and it exists
independently of Native Title (Queensland Government, 2023). As such, the ‘ownership’ that
such land transfers confer provides only limited scope for Aboriginal self-determination,
although it does provide the potential for economic development. While there are instances of
Aboriginal groups developing tourism ventures in joint managed national parks elsewhere in
Australia (see Atkinson, 2010; Shibish, 2015), this is yet to occur meaningfully in Cape York.
The parks in which this research was conducted have both had Native Title determined,
recognising the Aboriginal traditional owners who have rights and interests in these land
parcels and conferring ownership. These traditional owner groups began preparing their
Native Title claims and seeking to have their land rights recognised by the Queensland
Government in the early 1990s. After a long and sustained struggle, these traditional owner
groups achieved consent determinations in the late 2000s and early 2010s. When land has
been transferred into Aboriginal freehold, a land holding entity called an Aboriginal
corporation (previously a Land Trust) is established which is comprised of a board of
directors who are traditional owners for the land in question. Joint managed national parks
are governed through the creation of Indigenous Management Agreements (IMA) and
sometimes Indigenous Land Use Agreements (ILUA). These agreements are developed on a
park-by-park basis and outline the responsibilities of the co-managing parties of the
Queensland Government and the relevant Aboriginal corporation.
This arrangement of formal joint management is largely carried out through quarterly joint
management meetings, in which the Aboriginal board of directors meets with Queensland
Parks employees to discuss management and work plans for the park, as well as other
concerns and aspirations they may have. Cape York thus consists of a patchwork of different
kinds of tenures, and it remains a region in which control and ownership over land is highly
contested.
As well as emerging through the native title and land rights process in Australia, joint
management in Cape York is, simultaneously, part of a global trend towards community-
Mardi Reardon-Smith Geoforum – Accepted – Pre-print
Mardi.reardonsmith@deakin.edu.au
6
engagement in protected area management (Brosius, 2004; Nadasdy, 2005; Langton et al.,
2005; Youdelis et al., 2021). Increased global attention on Indigenous rights discourses
fostered a situation in which it is no longer tenable for nation states to exclude Indigenous
peoples from the management of their ancestral homelands. Community-based conservation
has emerged as a way to both improve conservation outcomes and provide community
development to Indigenous communities around the world (Langton et al., 2005: 34). While
joint management has existed in Australia’s Northern Territory since the 1970s with Kakadu
National Park (Haynes, 2009), the first joint managed park in Cape York was declared only in
2008. As such, joint management is still a new reality for the region, and many of the
difficulties that emerge when different knowledge systems and land management practices
come into conversation on unequal footing are present here. Emerging out of the land rights
movement and struggle for recognition (Coulthard, 2014), joint management remains a site of
contestation and negotiation, as Indigenous groups struggle to enact care for land within a
highly bureaucratized system of environmental governance (Carroll, 2015; Nadasdy, 2003).
Joint management involves conceptualizing a different way to care for land which emerges
from an acknowledgement that the presumed ‘wilderness’ of Australia is actually a landscape
that has been actively managed by Aboriginal people for tens of thousands of years, an
acknowledgement that sits alongside the overturning of the legal fiction of terra nullius
through the native title process (Langton, 2002; Head, 2000). In Aboriginal Australia, the
notion of ‘caring for country’ has emerged as a throughline in land rights and land
management endeavours (Altman, 2012; Pleshet, 2018). The phrase functions as a kind of
shorthand to describe the obligations and reciprocities that characterise Aboriginal
relationships to land. ‘Caring for country’ is simultaneously an ethic, an ontology, a
philosophy, and a complex of material practices (Graham, 1999; Graham & Maloney, 2019;
Watson, 2009; 2018).
Yet, as Adams and Mulligan note, even as many international conservation organizations
have moved towards seeing conservation and sustainable resource use by local communities
as compatible, ‘the dominant Western ideology regarding conservation has remained,
paradoxically, preservationist’ (2002: 9). This point aligns with work by Howitt and Suchet-
Pearson (2006) and Escobar (2019), who assert that in conservation management, Western
ontological approaches are positioned as neutral and value-free; a positioning which tends to
reaffirm the authority of Western environmental management approaches. In the context of
joint managing the park discussed in this article, Aboriginal traditional owners are
incorporated into an existing system of land management that is predicated on a
preservationist model of conservation. Thus, although Aboriginal traditional owners are now
involved in the day to day running of the park and in decision-making about land
management, Queensland Parks remains the authoritative voice and retains the balance of
structural power.
Many Queensland Park rangers employed in both operational and management roles are
enthusiastic about joint management, however there is an awareness among staff that the
transition is challenging, and that change is slow. The shift from sole management to joint
Mardi Reardon-Smith Geoforum – Accepted – Pre-print
Mardi.reardonsmith@deakin.edu.au
7
management across a broad swathe of parks over the last 15 or so years has meant that many
of the management systems in place have not yet been substantially altered from the pre-joint
management days. In this article I critique the structure of meetings and management
frameworks, yet my critique is not intended to be levelled at individuals. Queensland Parks
staff have an unenviably difficult role, in balancing their mandate as a (frequently
underfunded) government organisation alongside the aspirations of Aboriginal traditional
owners. Operational rangers face challenges around the physical nature of the work, and the
difficulties of remote living in parks that are geographically distant from towns and – during
the annual wet season – inaccessible by road. Management staff face challenges related to
administering a large number of parks dispersed across a vast region, and working with a
staff who are used to the freedom that remote area work sometimes affords. There are issues
with limited funding, meaning that parks cannot always deliver on traditional owner
aspirations. However, particularly among management staff, there is a sense of hope about
what joint management can, and potentially will, entail. One ranger who had worked for
Queensland Parks for multiple decades told me during an interview that his biggest aspiration
for his career was to contribute to better joint management; to ‘make it work’. As senior
ranger Josephine told me during our interview in mid-2019,
‘We always – even before joint management – we always, particularly with fire and
things like that, we did talk to local elders. But it’s a lot more formalised now. I think
it’s a great opportunity for the department to change its view in how they manage
national parks, so I think that’s been a really great shift which is ongoing obviously.
Because our department… a lot of ideas and stuff are based down in Brisbane, so it’s
been good to make sure that they listen to traditional owners. And obviously enabling
them to get back on country to do the work… Particularly with the cultural
management of things it’s been good, and obviously working with them… So it has
changed, but it’s also made it more complex with more meetings and more
involvement. Some things are easier, some things are harder, but I think overall it’s
certainly of benefit.’
To Josephine, even if imperfect, the formalisation of a joint management arrangement means
that the department has to take the aspirations and concerns of Aboriginal traditional owners
seriously. At the very least, joint management has made certain that Aboriginal people have a
seat at the table when it comes to managing their land. As Josephine said to me, ‘at the end of
the day, I’ve always said it’s like a marriage, except it’s worse than a marriage because we
can’t get a divorce. So that’s kind of how I always start. You’ve just got to be practical’.
Josephine’s comment points to the difficulty of competing aspirations and priorities for land
that is supposed to be simultaneously Aboriginal-controlled land and a conservation park.
Some of this comes down to the different forms that knowledge takes and the difficulty
inherent in trying to incorporate Aboriginal concerns and knowledges into the management of
a park that has been the sole jurisdiction of the State government for several decades.
However – and this is the point this article gets to – when joint management functions as a
slightly altered continuation of business-as-usual, the possibility of transforming how land is
cared for is circumscribed and limited. Constrained by layers of bureaucracy and what some
Mardi Reardon-Smith Geoforum – Accepted – Pre-print
Mardi.reardonsmith@deakin.edu.au
8
Queensland Parks staff refer to as a culture of ‘the way things are done’, any kind of change
will likely be incremental.
Unequal ground in the meeting space of co-management
On a warm afternoon in June 2018, I attended my first joint management meeting at the park.
Joint management meetings bring together the two entities who co-manage the park: the
board of directors of the Aboriginal corporation who hold native title over the park and the
Queensland Parks and Wildlife Service. I had been invited to speak to the board of directors,
traditional owners for the park, about my proposed doctoral research on intercultural land
management and was allowed to sit in on the afternoon portion of a long meeting. I arrived
around midday and walked up to the large, open shed where around ten people were gathered.
There were a handful of Queensland Parks employees, wearing uniforms, and a number of
Aboriginal people who were a mixture of older people acting as board members and younger
people who were employed as rangers by the Aboriginal corporation. Everyone sat in a semi-
circle, facing a whiteboard and the park ranger who led the joint management team, an
energetic and wiry woman who I’ll call Marianne. A plastic trestle table sat off to the side,
laden with food that the Queensland Parks staff had brought. Most of the Aboriginal people
present wore faded workwear and leant back in the aged plastic chairs, listening to Marianne.
One middle-aged woman held a small boy on her lap, an unwell grandson who she had
brought along with her to the meeting. Aside from the two Aboriginal rangers present who
lived part-time in the park at the northern ranger base, most of the non-Queensland Parks
employees had travelled by car for between two and six hours to be at the meeting.
The ranger in charge for this park, Ray, brought me a chair so I could join the group, and
Marianne briefly paused what she was doing to introduce me and check that everyone was
happy for me to sit in on the meeting. The part of the meeting I observed was a discussion
about the budget for the Aboriginal corporation, which is comprised of a combination of
money from Park revenue (visitor fees and camping permits, as well as gravel from existing
quarries sold for road building), money from Queensland Parks administered through
something called a Parks Activity Agreement, and some external government grants.
Marianne was breaking down costs, detailing how much things like training rangers and
maintaining vehicles would take from the budget. Everything discussed and resolved had to
be motioned by one board member and seconded by another. Mostly, Marianne spoke and,
upon observing no dissension and noting a handful of small nods, Marianne would propose to
the group that they were happy with it, and a board member would laconically flick their
hand, or nod, in order to forward or second a motion. Everyone held a copy of the meeting
agenda, handed out earlier in the day. The board of directors were quiet and reserved as
Marianne tried to move swiftly through an enormous list of to-dos. The meeting rarely
engendered much discussion and the board of directors tended to agree with what Marianne
suggested, with little comment.
Various anthropologists have painted similar pictures of meetings between Aboriginal
corporations and different bureaucratic entities, such as Land Councils or national parks.
Anthropologist and ex-Queensland Park ranger Haynes invokes Goffman’s concept of ‘polite
Mardi Reardon-Smith Geoforum – Accepted – Pre-print
Mardi.reardonsmith@deakin.edu.au
9
disattention’ to describe how Aboriginal board members engage with joint management
meetings at Kakadu in the tropical north of the Northern Territory (2009: 82). Haynes
describes how the agendas for these meetings are frequently set in advance. The sheer
number of items on the agendas means there is little time to devote to issues which traditional
owners may see as important, but which they have not succeeded in getting on the agenda. As
Haynes notes, ‘at the very point of setting agenda, well before the meetings are underway,
and through mundane and barely remarkable processes, we are starting to see matters of
importance to Aboriginal people pushed aside by those that whitefellas think are important’
(2009: 94). While Aboriginal board members at these meetings are generally quiet and
seemingly compliant, Haynes suggests that they engage in forms of resistance during these
meetings that are subtle yet effective. These forms of resistance include being late, taking
frequent breaks, absenting oneself for a time or not turning up at all (Haynes, 2009: 107-108).
Members of the Aboriginal board of directors often express frustration about the way
meetings are currently run. On a visit to a nearby Aboriginal ranger group, working across
multiple tenure types to the north of the park, I had a conversation with an Aboriginal board
director, Wesley, about how joint management meetings operate. While Wesley
acknowledged that as a well-educated and computer-literate man with involvement in
multiple Aboriginal corporations, he is well-placed to navigate joint management meetings,
the same is not true of all board members. Wesley’s elderly father sat with us, and he briefly
retreated to his bedroom to locate some documents to show me. He brought out some large,
laminated maps and hefty several-hundred-page long management agreements, encouraging
me to take a look. Wesley reflected that these documents are incredibly complicated,
especially for some of their old people who have low levels of literacy and little to no formal
education, the result of various restrictive government policies that controlled Aboriginal
peoples’ lives well into the 20th century in Queensland3 (Huggins, 1995; Huggonson, 1990;
Smith, 2008; Copland, 2005). Wesley pointed out that there is something not working in a
system where Aboriginal traditional owners are ‘expected to make informed decisions on the
spot about an issue that has a 400-page report written about it’. Frequently, Wesley explained,
traditional owners are told that in order to secure funds they ought to agree to whatever
Queensland Parks is putting forward, resulting in situations where traditional owners
sometimes say ‘yes’ without really understanding what it is that they are agreeing to. Wesley
reflected that in his experience, this tends to be how the Australian government deals with
Aboriginal people. This sentiment was reflected in my interview with another traditional
owner for the park who was employed by the Aboriginal corporation as a senior ranger. As he
said to me,
3 These included the Aboriginals Protection and Restriction of the Sale of Opium Act (1897), the Aboriginals
Preservation and Protection Act of 1939, the Torres Strait Islanders Act of 1939, the Aboriginals Regulations of
1945, the Aborigines' and Torres Strait Islanders' Act of 1965, and the Aborigines' and Torres Strait Islanders'
Act of 1965, among others with a move towards policies supporting self-management in the 1970s (Frankland,
1994). It is important to note that many Aboriginal people’s lives remain constricted and curtailed by
government policies in various ways to this day.
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‘I know they’re trying to steer the committee in the right way, in budgeting, you
know, all their expenditure, infrastructure… but they put too much pressure on the
educational side of it. Where our mob don’t understand. And all they want to do is
sign off, “yeah, I want this meeting over… Yeah, I’ll just sign off”.’
The labour that attending joint management meetings requires is an extension of the
bureaucratisation of Aboriginal lives, a phenomena that has been documented in Australia
(Macdonald, 2013; Macdonald, 2008) and other settler-colonial contexts (Nadasdy, 2003).
Aside from the skills needed to navigate complex documents and governance structures, there
is a huge amount of personal investment required. As an employee of the Cape York Natural
Resource Management organisation, an ex-Queensland Park ranger, said to me during an
interview in early 2019,
‘A lot of it is taking up a lot of people’s time, going to meetings and things… and
there’s travel, like to Cairns and all around the place, that’s where the meetings are.
And that all costs money and you’ve got to stay somewhere, so all those meetings and
gatherings cost a fair bit of – in today’s terms – they cost you money. Time and
money, to go to.’
In joint management meetings, directors receive sitting fees which cover some of these costs
and provide a modest income. Because of the history of colonisation and pastoralism in the
20th century in Cape York, which saw Aboriginal people removed from their homelands and
sent to various places in the Cape to live and work, many people nowadays claim multiple
affiliations to different language groups and regions (Smith, 2008). As such, many Aboriginal
people are board directors for multiple Aboriginal organisations. These people are,
essentially, professional bureaucrats. Having engaged in significant labour and effort
throughout the 1990s and 2000s to have their land returned through the native title process
and other State-based land claims processes, many Aboriginal people now work to administer
these lands. In a practical sense, this means juggling the obligations of multiple corporations,
attending multiple, frequent, and arduous meetings across widely dispersed settings in the
Cape and far north Queensland more broadly. Importantly, it means juggling the aspirations
and concerns of extended family groups with the desires of government departments and
organisations, like Queensland Parks.
Meetings for joint management and other reasons are a common vehicle for bureaucracy for
Aboriginal communities. Despite being understood as an unavoidable part of Aboriginal
community life, the literature suggests that meetings are greeted with the same lack of
enthusiasm across various contexts. As Redmond states, ‘it is certainly the case that meetings
were often rendered unendurably dull due to their having being primarily designed to rubber-
stamp outcomes to agendas that have been pre-prepared between developers and/or service
providers of various kinds’ (2015: 26). Meetings are central to how bureaucracy functions in
the joint management project. Schwartzman has argued that meetings ought to be understood
as ‘communication events’ which are constitutive of the context from which they arise
(Schwartzmann, 1993: 37). Schwartzman points to Myers’ beautiful description of meetings
among Pintupi people as ‘delicate achievements’ to discuss how meetings create both order
Mardi Reardon-Smith Geoforum – Accepted – Pre-print
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and disorder, sometimes reaffirming an existing status quo, sometimes providing potential for
change (1993: 37).
Joint management meetings are intended to open up a space for dialogue and change,
however aspects of how meetings are run ensure that meetings generally serve to reaffirm the
status quo. A sense of dissatisfaction around this emerged in a conversation I had with the
then-chairperson of the Aboriginal corporation co-managing the park. Over a meal in a noisy
food court in the city of Cairns where he had travelled to receive medical care, this man told
me that, to his eyes, Queensland Parks were always coming to joint management meetings
with a big list of plans, expecting the traditional owners to merely say ‘yes sir, no sir’, and
not enabling traditional owners to actually make decisions pertaining to the park. This
dynamic is recognised by operational park rangers too, many of whom expressed a desire to
see a change but – perhaps – were not equipped to effect such change. In an interview with
Queensland Parks ranger Ray, he expressed some discomfort with the way planning meetings
generally run:
‘I was thinking the other day, normally when we go to our fire and pest workshops,
we basically sit up the front in a way. Because we’re still a conservation park, we
need to run as a conservation park. Obviously, we’ve got to look after our pests and
fires and whatever. But one of the things I was thinking about the other day when we
had our last joint management meeting in Cairns… We get up the front there and say
we’re going to do early burns to protect our infrastructure and campgrounds and
protect the boundary for the neighbours and put a few mosaics in, and then later in the
year we’ll do a few burns and hot burns… So it’s all about us. So I thought, why don’t
we – next time that we go to a pest workshop – why don’t we say to the traditional
owners, how do you want to burn? It’s not all about me. It should be about us, as joint
management… That’s the way – to me – that’s the way it should be happening. Not
us, up the front there, cracking the whip. Even though they agree with it, and
obviously it’s all good, I think they should have also the opportunity to see. It’s their
land.’
Despite Ray’s desire to see change, the fact that this is the way that meetings have generally
operated is telling. Ray’s comments reflect what seems to be a common experience in joint
management contexts in which consultation with traditional owners remains light on the
ground even when it is legally mandated (Nadasdy, 1999; Youdelis, 2016). Here, meetings
function as an important vehicle for people to express their autonomy, which as Kapferer
(1995) has noted, is a process vital to maintaining the legitimacy of the State. Traditional
owners are ostensibly given the opportunity to voice their priorities and concerns, lending
legitimacy to joint management meetings and joint management itself, but the predetermined
agendas of meetings and the fact that Queensland Parks staff are, as Ray said, ‘sitting up the
front there’, mean that these opportunities only exist in constrained ways. When individuals
can express their autonomy in forms that are shaped and mediated by the State, such as
meetings, the ‘rational principles of bureaucratic order’ are reaffirmed (Kapferer, 1995: 83).
Value-based management planning: an open and indeterminate space?
Mardi Reardon-Smith Geoforum – Accepted – Pre-print
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12
Perhaps in order to counteract some of the ‘rubber-stamp[ing]’ (Redmond, 2015) that occurs
in joint management meetings, QPWS have begun to initiate value-based management
framework planning meetings with traditional owners. I attended a day-long meeting in 2019
in which the value-based management framework was discussed with an Aboriginal Land
Trust which administers an Aboriginal ranger group working in an area to the north of the
park. While everyone present expressed a general enthusiasm for the process, the meeting
was long and arduous. As is the case for many Aboriginal people in Cape York, several
members of this Land Trust sat on multiple boards and thus attended many similar formal
meetings. One woman expressed feeling the kind of meeting fatigue that Haynes (2009) has
spoken about in his work on joint-management in Kakadu. Sitting back in her plastic chair,
and rubbing her face with her hands, she pushed away the plate of cake in front of her
despondently. She told me she had been to several meetings in the preceding weeks, all
occurring in the same community space adjacent to the only café in the town, and she has
been served the same banana cake each time. She said that she was sick of the banana cake,
but her weariness at the idea of yet another meeting was evident.
The meeting on this day was about finalizing a Management Statement as part of a value-
based management framework, a new initiative that Queensland Parks were rolling out across
Cape York. The Management Statement is designed to set out clearly how Aboriginal
traditional owners want to see the national park they work on managed over the next decade.
Importantly, this Management Statement does not necessarily mandate how the park will be
managed. It is intended to merely ‘capture’ the aspirations of the traditional owners. For the
traditional owners, the Management Statement means translating complex social, cultural and
environmental concerns into a neat document which outlines the key values of this park, the
threats to these values and what strategies could be implemented to mitigate or manage these
threats. The key values had already been determined prior to this particular meeting and
ranged from the very tangible, such as freshwater ecosystems, priority bird species,
grasslands, to those less so - things like cultural sites and cultural knowledge; an attempt to
capture the maelstrom of what may be called ‘cultural values’ into something quantifiable.
On this day, the group was finalising the first draft of the Management Statement. This
entailed going through what they had previously deemed to be the key values for the park
they co-manage, and outlining the threats to these values and what strategies could be
implemented to mitigate or manage these threats. The key values were listed as cultural sites
and knowledge, freshwater ecosystems, brackish coastal country, grasslands,
rainforests/scrubs/vine thickets, savannah woodlands and priority bird species. Many of these
key values were simultaneously environmental and cultural; for instance, ‘priority bird
species’ included culturally significant bird species’, which were important for particular
stories or used as a food source, and those that are legislatively important from the
perspective of the government, like protected species. Sometimes these values can be
contradictory, such as in the case of magpie geese. One of the women present pointed out that
there is a tension between eating bush foods and protecting endangered species. She said that
in the old days, the old people would eat magpie geese, but now they only eat the eggs.
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13
Similar conflicts between cultural resource use and conservation priorities have been
documented elsewhere in Cape York (Nursey-Bray, 2009; Nursey-Bray et al., 2010).
In other instances, cultural and environmental values aligned. One of the main threats
discussed in relation to cultural sites was the proliferation of invasive plant species, the
control of which has emerged as a way for traditional owners to ‘clean up’ and care for
country (Bach et al., 2019; Bach and Larson, 2017; Reardon-Smith, 2023) while
simultaneously being a key priority for Queensland Parks and other conservation actors in the
region. Likewise, burning regimes function simultaneously to ‘clean up’ country and
demonstrate care for and connection to ancestral spirits who dwell in the land, and reduce
fuel loads and mitigate the risk of wildfires later in the year (Yibarbuk et al., 2001; Cook et
al., 2012; Petty et al., 2015; Reardon-Smith, 2023).
For Queensland Parks senior ranger Josephine, the value-based management planning
represented possibility for progressing the joint management project beyond a business-as-
usual approach. As she told me during an interview,
‘I’m quite excited about this because it’s an all-of-country management that takes in
the values of Traditional Owners and [Queensland] Parks together, obviously, for that
protected area. For the park… Because there’s different aspirations with traditional
owners, there’s more infrastructure and other, kind of, cultural law that they want to
do which we’ll support, but it’s not relevant for us to speak on their behalf. But it
means that each protected area will be prioritised about the values, and the importance
of the values, from a State’s point of view… Hopefully they [the State government]
look at it and say, wow, you need more money and people and, you know, we need to
support the joint management program’.
To Josephine and other Queensland Parks staff, value-based planning was an opportunity to
highlight those things that are matters of concern for Aboriginal traditional owners in the park
in a forum where a pre-existing agenda would derail the potential for discussion. As
Josephine rightly points out, crystallising these concerns into a document that can be
presented to the State government and – hopefully – ensure that funding is funnelled in the
right direction is an important, and admirable, potential outcome of this process. However, if
we consider joint management to be an ‘emergent cultural form’, to borrow Tsing’s (2005: 3)
phrasing, can value-based planning be considered an indeterminate space, with the potential
for collaboration free from power asymmetries?
This planning requires a conceptual separation of cultural and natural values, although, of
course, in reality these can never really be disentangled. As Gambon and Bottazi (2021)
found in their work, attempts to incorporate Indigenous knowledges and perspectives into
environmental management plans tend to focus on only those aspects of Indigenous ‘culture’
that have a utilitarian value in sustainable resource use that is easily recognised by proponents
of a Western scientific worldview. Such a planning processes that intends to translate the
wishes and aspirations of traditional owners into something digestible to the State echoes
Scott’s (1998) discussion of what is lost when the State attempts to make unwieldy local
Mardi Reardon-Smith Geoforum – Accepted – Pre-print
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realities legible. As Scott points out, state-led processes of simplification and making-legible
are never intended to accurately convey the reality of local lives and landscapes. Instead,
these processes invariably involve a ‘narrowing of vision’ in order to focus on those aspects
that are pertinent for state officials who seek to monitor and control their subjects (Scott,
1998: 11). These processes of simplification are a necessary component of bureaucracy;
bureaucracies cannot function without such abstractions.
Indeed, as Hull (2012) and Gupta (2012) have variously suggested, the production of
documents like the Management Statement is a central aspect of bureaucratic work. Drawing
on Weber and Foucault, Hull contends that it is through writing that bureaucratic
organizations are able to construct the ‘stable relation[s]’ necessary to implement regimes of
control (2012: 256, 259). Similarly, in his study of state officials in India, Gupta argues that
writing should be not be understood as a by-product of what bureaucrats do and instead
should be understood as a form of action that is constitutive of the state (2012: 36-37). The
creation of a document like the Management Statement is about ensuring that the views of
Aboriginal traditional owners are captured, but it does not necessarily follow that such
aspirations will be acted upon, nor that the accepted form of land management undertaken by
Queensland Parks will be substantially altered.
Discussion
Meetings are the main avenue for Aboriginal traditional owners to express their aspirations
and priorities for the park. Yet, the possibilities for incorporating Aboriginal aspirations and
forms of environmental knowledge are constrained from the outset by the very structure of
joint management. Howitt and Suchet-Pearson (2006) have argued that this is because the
very ‘building blocks’ of joint management emerge from a Western ontology and relationship
to land. They point out that things like management, capacity-building and planning are not
neutral and value-free, but instead emerge from a specifically Western ontological
framework. The very concepts of development and conservation are Eurocentric (Langton,
2002) and rely upon an idea of management that assumes a separation between humans and
the environment. Escobar (2019) argues that planning, like management, is presented as a
rational, universal and neutral process; a set of assumptions that obscure the ideology and
Western ontology that underpins planning and the violence that planning can do to non-
Western societies. As he writes, ‘planning relies upon, and proceeds through, various
practices regarded as rational or objective, but which are in fact highly ideological and
political’ (Escobar, 2019: 154). The ontological specificity of concepts like management and
planning are obscured by their common-sense usage. Howitt and Suchet-Pearson (2006)
argue that the naturalizing of these ideas works to subjugate alternative forms of knowledge,
resulting in a situation where a Western worldview is assumed to be universal. Similarly,
Gambon and Bottazi (2021) suggest that even when faced with vastly different
understandings of and relationships to the environment, conservation actors tend to see these
as cultural representations of a single world, making no space for ontological difference.
When these specific Western concepts are in-built in a situation that ostensibly exists to
Mardi Reardon-Smith Geoforum – Accepted – Pre-print
Mardi.reardonsmith@deakin.edu.au
15
facilitate collaboration between Western environmental management and Aboriginal caring
for country, there is limited potential for true joint management to occur.
As a result, co-management projects around the world often attempt to integrate what has
been called ‘traditional ecological knowledge’ (TEK), among other things, into natural
resource management. There is a rich literature on the difficulties, complexities, and
asymmetries inherent in such a project (see, for instance, Nadasdy, 1999; Nadasdy, 2005;
Youdelis, 2016; Ellis, 2005; Hunn et al., 2003; Cruikshank, 2005; Leduc, 2011; West et al.,
2006). Nadasdy (1999) has talked about how ‘integrating’ (itself a problematic idea)
Indigenous knowledges into land management frameworks is positioned by practitioners as a
technical problem; a mere problem of translation to be overcome through using the right tools
and systems. This interpretation, he suggests, ignores the power dynamics and political
dimensions which shape interactions between Indigenous groups and bureaucratised land
management organisations. As Nadasdy (1999: 10) points out, ‘the crucial question
concerning the distillations of TEK should be ‘who is doing the distilling?’’. In a somewhat
different vein, Finegan (2018) has asserted that the incorporation of Indigenous knowledges
into protected area management fails to achieve reconciliation objectives because co-
management alone cannot address the histories and ongoing unfolding of harms wrought by
settler-colonialism and preservationist conservation on Indigenous peoples. However, joint
management in Cape York is not just about how Indigenous knowledges are brought to bear
on management practices and achieving reconciliation, but it is also more broadly about
Aboriginal aspirations for management and sovereignty, economic and otherwise. As one
Aboriginal ranger told me, ‘it [joint management] is about getting the right people back on
the right country’.
However, what Nadasdy’s (1999) provocation does is make clear whose voice gets to count
when it comes to land management decisions. Another question vital to consider is: under
what circumstances is knowledge being distilled? Under what circumstances are management
decisions being made? In the joint managed park that I am discussing, Queensland Parks
have the upper hand for range of complex and entwined reasons. The park has been managed
exclusively by this government organisation for over three decades, and joint managed for
just over 10 years, meaning that many structures and systems remain in place from those
early years. Secondly, while Queensland Parks are concerned to ‘integrate’ or ‘incorporate’
Indigenous knowledges and aspirations into management plans, it remains true that the
structure into which these knowledges and aspirations are being added to has emerged from
Queensland Parks and reflects their mandate, concerns, and visions of what a park, and nature
itself, should be. Queensland Parks’ management staff have extensive experience with the
government department, with running meetings, and with scientific land management. Many
Aboriginal board members have limited literacy and – in the post-native title era – are
grappling with an enormous burden in terms of bureaucratic responsibilities. As Nadasdy
writes, ‘in the conference rooms… scientists and managers are in their element. They set the
agenda, frame the discussion, ask the questions’ (1999: 10). Writing over twenty years ago,
Nadasdy asserted that ‘what is needed is a radical rethinking of the basic assumptions, values,
Mardi Reardon-Smith Geoforum – Accepted – Pre-print
Mardi.reardonsmith@deakin.edu.au
16
and practices underlying contemporary processes of resource management’ (1999: 13), a
sentiment which remains relevant today.
The creation of Management Statements – like meetings – may serve mostly to construct a
‘stable relation’ (Hull, 2012) between Aboriginal traditional owners and Queensland Parks.
These bureaucratic processes, then, may fail to transform how land management is carried
out in joint managed parks and instead work to reaffirm the existing ‘bureaucratic order’
(Kapferer, 1995) and ensure that Queensland Parks retains the balance of power. Through
these interactions, the powerful position of Queensland Parks as an institution is reinscribed
and this power is reaffirmed. In their work, Youdelis et al (2021) suggest that the Canadian
government supports Indigenous-led conservation in theory while simultaneously allowing
extractive activities to continue on Indigenous-managed land, undermining Indigenous
conservation in practice. This paradoxical support and undermining can be seen as existing in
the project of joint management in Cape York, although here this is related more to a disjunct
between the ideological underpinnings of joint management and how the actual quotidian
processes of planning and management are carried out.
Conclusion
Joint management is a relatively new project in Cape York, having only existed for just over a
decade. Ostensibly intended to be a space in which knowledge and environmental
management and care can be co-produced across ontological differences, the current system
remains one in which as business-as-usual approach – with some notable changes – is
adopted. Having managed the park in a particular way for over 40 years, Queensland Parks
continue to implement a work plan based on a specific set of mandates and concerns that are,
generally, based on Western scientific approaches to conservation. Because of the way that
meetings function to produce a ‘stable relation’ (Hull, 2012), in which Aboriginal board
members concerns and aspirations are heard by Queensland Parks but the sheer quantity of
decisions to be made and format of the meetings result in Queensland Parks generally
presenting an already-formed management plan that simply requires approval, Queensland
Parks remain the authoritative voice in the management of the park.
The creation of a Management Statement through value-based planning represents a
significant shift from how Queensland Parks have approached co-management thus far,
enabling Aboriginal traditional owners to highlight their concerns and aspirations for their
land. Va l u e -based planning represents a shift away from Queensland Parks seeking approval
to carry out their normal style of scientific land management. In certain ways, it makes space
for specifically Aboriginal relationships to land, as important sites and story places can be
discussed alongside and as of equal importance to conservation priorities. Yet, it is arguable
that the ontological ‘building blocks’ (Howitt and Suchet-Pearson, 2006) of management
remain unchanged by this process. Instead, the notion of what is manage-able is extended to
encompass certain Aboriginal priorities and concerns. Furthermore, it remains unclear as to
whether the capturing of these perspectives will translate into actual changes in terms of how
management plans are formulated and carried out on the ground.
Mardi Reardon-Smith Geoforum – Accepted – Pre-print
Mardi.reardonsmith@deakin.edu.au
17
In some ways constituted by spaces of indeterminacy, in other ways reflective of a long
history of bureaucratised land management and the asymmetrical relations between
Aboriginal people and the State, joint management can be thought of as a marriage with no
option for divorce. This is not to negate the very real commitment that many people on both
sides of Queensland Parks/traditional owner divide have to the project of joint management,
nor to ignore the difficult work that rangers and traditional owners do in their labouring to
‘make it work’. People are aware that through the long process of having native title
recognised and having the park transition to joint management, many senior knowledge
holders have passed away. Many people characterise joint management as beset by ‘teething
issues’, as something not yet fully established and still requiring careful negotiation and the
balancing of multiple concerns. As senior range Josephine said to me, ‘it’s a bit too late, in
my opinion. Some of these negotiations have taken over 40 years. I guess it’s better late than
never, so we just kind of have to do the best we can, to make that happen, I guess.’
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