This paper situates contemporary dilemmas of Indigenous development in the underlying themes and principles of Indigenous policy over the medium-term-approximately, the last twenty-five years. It brings together the involvement of the Council of Australian Governments (COAG), the radical restructure of public administration with the introduction of New Public Management and the underlying trend towards 'normalisation' of Indigenous people and communities, which follows widespread mainstream disenchantment. Within this broad trajectory, some significant developments receive attentionthe rise and fall of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC), the recent decline of the Indigenous community-controlled service sector and the disenchantment that sanctioned the Northern Territory Emergency Response, following allegations of Indigenous child abuse. The paper signals its own disenchantment with the lack of progress under New Public Management and the policy framework of normalisation of Indigenous peoples. It concludes by advocating fiscal and structural reform that would reconfigure policy towards management for public value. This approach rejects formal concentration on Indigenous deficit and reaffirms the state's responsibility for fulfilling a range of diverse local and regional intangible, as well as material, values.

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to explore the potential usefulness of public documents as subjects of ethnography and propose that public documents offer a way to understand modern cultures. It examines the multiple personalities brought into being through the dissemination of policy documents. It shows how the ritual use of policy pronouncements manages the arena of social crisis and normalises the subjects of policy.Design/methodology/approachThe paper examines three statements of intent produced by the Council of Australian Governments about relations between the majority settlers and the Aboriginal peoples. These are the 1992 National Commitment to Improved Outcomes in the Delivery of Programs and Services for Aboriginal Peoples and Torres Strait Islanders; the 2004 National Framework of Principles for Delivering Services to Indigenous Australians; and the 2008 National Indigenous Reform Agreement. The paper borrows methodology developed for the ethnography of internet virtual communities to examine these public documents.FindingsIf the virtual communities of public documents are analysed as if they could be self‐generating and self‐referring, they can show us through their internal structure a different, possibly deeper, truth about their origins than if we view them as a mere artefact or by‐product of the cultures that produce them.Originality/valueThe paper encourages the development of a field of ethnography that analyses public documents as constructed virtual worlds.

This chapter is about accountability. The Indigenous sector described in the previous chapter is enmeshed in regimes of accountability, ostensibly to the Australian public at large. This may be appropriate in principle, but only because a reciprocal relationship with the Australian public, brokered by the state, is assumed. The state, in a sense, assures its Aboriginal peoples that their aspirations are valued and their needs met through a democratic political process and an impartial and accountable public service, but insists they also must then be accountable in the democratic merry-go-round.

PurposeThis paper attempts to replace the understanding of public sector accountability as a linear and hierarchical process with one in which accountability occurs within a network of social relationships. It associates the former approach with the introduction of New Public Management principles in Australian public administration. It investigates the effect of this on the ability of Australia's indigenous people both to access democratic accountability as citizens, and to develop their community organisations as service providers.Design/methodology/approachThe paper is based on field experience with aboriginal community organisations and critical assessment of the literature on this aspect of Australian public administration.FindingsThe paper finds that New Public Management approaches in Australian public administration have not led to greater political accountability but the reverse. As a disadvantaged, culturally distinct minority, aboriginal people are the subject of, rather than partners in, accountability regimes which mire their community service organisations in reporting requirements at the expense of practical activity. In some respects Aborigines are dealt with as individual citizen/clients, at other times as a disadvantaged minority group, and third, as culturally distinct polities. Each of these approaches implies different forms of accountability both by Aborigines to the state and by the state to them.Research limitations/implicationsThis analysis is inherently interpretative rather than exclusively empirical. However, greater efficiency as well as culturally appropriate outcomes can be found by instituting regional regimes of reciprocal accountability.Originality/valueThe analysis of developments in public administration is rarely brought to bear on Australian indigenous affairs.

Purpose – Development of Aboriginal communities, particularly in remote Australia is notoriously difficult. Despite formal equality Aborigines in Australia remain materially deprived and suffer ill health, premature mortality and high rates of imprisonment. This paper seeks to explain one aspect of development failure in examining the organisational dynamics of the bureaucracy charged with Aboriginal affairs administration.

Anthropology has often been handmaiden to administrative and political activity that requires bounded social groups mapped onto territories and possessing defining characteristics such as language, values and behaviours. This introductory essay sets the scene for the papers in this Issue which show that actual sets of social relations in their particular places cannot easily be made to conform with this hermetic construct. Acknowledging this, post‐colonial theory has been driven to theorise borderlands, hybridisation and metissage, liminal and interstitial social spaces. Yet these necessarily reinforce and privilege primary concepts of the pure and the central, the bounded and situated. This paper places the hermetic view of culture in its formative period, which also saw the emergence of nationalism and scientific atomism. The paper proposes that positing pure and bounded cultures, even as an idealised abstraction, is an error of theory which is influenced by an attachment to metaphors of the material world, usually ‘Euclidean’. Finally, the paper explores ways that analyses of cultural interrelation, such as those in this Special Issue, can proceed without imagining a resulting ‘culture’, and what this may do for the political landscape of localised cultural rights.

This paper questions a dominant view of culture as being relatively bounded and hermetic by questioning the concept of an intercultural domain that is brought into existence as a necessary consequence of this view. The paper suggests that recognition of cultural processes does not lead to the need to posit 'a culture' which is constituted by them. The view that 'a culture' is a relatively autonomous, relatively hermetic and relatively homeostatic entity arises, this paper argues, in the birth of nationalism and the founding years of anthropology, which are intimately linked. This approach, characterised here as modernist, is criticised for failing to deal well with complex cultural relationships. It results in the need to theorise an intercultural space, or a realm of cultural change, between cultures theorised as entities. Here the later work of Malinowski is used as an exemplar. The paper argues for alternative conceptualisations, such as Gluckman's suggestion that intercultural relations occur within social fields which are the proper subject of anthropology, and Strathern's contention that 'society' is a redundant concept, yet not denying 'sociality'. The case of the Aboriginal people of Broome in their struggle with the state over the terms in which their prior rights to land will be recognised is used to illustrate this.

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes Correspondence to: Sandy Toussaint, Discipline of Anthropology and Sociology, The University of Western Australia, 35 Stirling Highway, Nedlands, WA 6009, Australia; Patrick Sullivan, Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, GPO Box 553, Canberra, ACT 2601, Australia; Sarah Yu, PO Box 2913, Broome, WA 6725, Australia. Acknowledgements: Many people have contributed to our knowledge and understanding of water in the Kimberley. Thanks to the Bayulu, Djugerari, Jarlmadangah, Kupungarri, Looma, Mimbi and Yakanarra communities for participating in the original research and to the Kimberley Land Council for logistical support. Mervyn Mularty Jr., Patsy Bedford, Hanson (Pampila) Boxer, Nancy Broome, Warford Bujiman, Kitty Chungal, Peter Clancy, Edna Hopiga, Sally Kanyan, Billy King, Annette Kogolo, Kumunjayi Kogolo and Lucy Marshall were especially helpful. We would also like to thank others for their vital contributions, such as Annie Milgin, Doug (Kordidi) Moor, Darby Nangkiriny, Amy Nuggett, Mamanjiya Nuggett, Pansy Nulgit, Morgal Sharpe, Neville Sharpe, Anthony Watson, Harry Watson and John Watson. Bob Tonkinson's comments on an earlier version of this paper were invaluable, as was Gill Hutcherson's editorial guidance. Reports from two anonymous referees helped to crystallise the paper's central themes. A related point is that the increased production of artworks about water has probably come about among Fitzroy Valley communities because local organisations such as Karrayili Education and the Mangkaja Arts Resource Agency in Fitzroy Crossing have increasingly fostered the production of local paintings. There are other major art centres, such as at Papunya in Central Australia and Marribank in the south‐west of Western Australia (to name only two), where paintings about fresh and saltwater sources have provided varied subject foci. The ‘Dreaming’, known in the Kimberley as Ngarrangarri, refers to the profoundly rich body of religion and law that characterises many aspects of Aboriginal life. ‘Environs Kimberley’ provides an example of immediate interest. Established in Broome in the north‐west of Western Australia in the 1990s, ‘Environs Kimberley’ represents a group of people committed to environmental issues. In addition to participating in local action, they also regularly produce a newsletter. Items address a range of environmental issues, including water. For instance, Issue no. 28, 2003, included an item on re‐cycling grey water. Groups in the Fitzroy Valley often intertwine Aboriginal religion and law (generally known as the Dreaming) with aspects of Christianity. While this matter cannot be developed here (but see CitationKolig 1981 and Toussaint Citation1999a, Citation1999b for further discussion), it is the case in contemporary Aboriginal settings that religious associations do not always refer to one religion only. While significant to Aboriginal groups, the Fitzroy River has also been identified as ecologically rich and as one of the few remaining unregulated rivers in Western Australia. Its catchment area covers 85,000 square kilometres and extends from Halls Creek in the East Kimberley to Derby in the West Kimberley (CitationWater and Rivers Commission 1999). Custodian is used here although the expression ‘traditional owner’ would also be appropriate. Mowaljarlai (Citation1992, 179–81) describes a dambun as evolving from the Wanjina who divided the land into blocks, ‘an area which each family group is personally responsible for. Each Wanjina is a part of a tribe that belongs to a particular dambun … The people in each dambun must look after one special thing, a mountain, an animal, the grass or a tree.’ It is undoubtedly the case that, in an area such as the Fitzroy Valley, exceptions to these claims exist. For example, some Aboriginal women and men do not treat the river and other water sources in accordance with the requirements of Aboriginal laws, past experience or current practice. In circumstances such as these, those who do not ‘look after’ the river—by leaving rubbish behind, for instance, or by not following cultural etiquette—are criticised harshly by those who do. Matters such as these obviously require discussion and analysis but cannot be examined further here. Toussaint et al. (Citation2001) provide additional coverage on the problems that arise when water sources are not ‘looked after’. Strong Aboriginal and environmental concern to a proposed damming of the Fitzroy River at Dimond Gorge (Jijidu) resulted in the Western Australian Government withdrawing from its original plan. Butcher Cherel's paintings in the Martuwarra and jila exhibition also reveal his concerns about the Dimond Gorge proposal. Additional informationNotes on contributorsSarah Yu Correspondence to: Sandy Toussaint, Discipline of Anthropology and Sociology, The University of Western Australia, 35 Stirling Highway, Nedlands, WA 6009, Australia; Patrick Sullivan, Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, GPO Box 553, Canberra, ACT 2601, Australia; Sarah Yu, PO Box 2913, Broome, WA 6725, Australia.

This report estimates the impact that high levels of enrollment in the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) have had on economic trends in rural counties since the program’s inception in 1985 until today. The results of a growth model and quasi-experimental control group analysis indicate no discernible impact by the CRP on aggregate county population trends. Aggregate employment growth may have slowed in some high-CRP counties, but only temporarily. High levels of CRP enrollment appear to have affected farm-related businesses over the long run, but growth in the number of other nonfarm businesses moderated CRP’s impact on total employment. If CRP contracts had ended in 2001, simulation models suggest that roughly 51 percent of CRP land would have returned to crop production, and that spending on outdoor recreation would decrease by as much as $300 million per year in rural areas. The resulting impacts on employment and income vary widely among regions having similar CRP enrollments, depending upon local economic conditions.

The deaths of 2 Palestinian physicians at the hands of Israeli soldiers have drawn strong reprimands from the Medical Network, the 120-member section of Amnesty International Canada that promotes health care workers' concerns about human rights abuses. More than half its members are physicians