How is a gravel pit like a uranium mine? Spacetimes of property, development and the state in northern Australia

Abstract

Agreements between Indigenous groups and third parties are a primary interface between development, the state, and Indigenous people and lands in Australia. In this thesis, I analyse their significance by interrogating the everyday textual, material and legal practices that produce agreements at the Northern Land Council (NLC), a powerful Indigenous organisation in the Northern Territory of Australia. I reveal the NLC’s agreement-making practices as a spatio- temporal assemblage of governance, or a chronotope. I argue that the chronotope’s trick is to metabolise and constitute a bewildering range of land- based resources in the same way, such that at the NLC a uranium mine is a gravel pit is a fracking well is a health clinic. The chronotope puts the NLC in a double-bind: while making its work indispensable to the state-backed machinery of development, it also myopically focuses resources within a narrow spatiotemporal window. Yet this myopic mimetic focus causes real-world, and frequently violent, effects. The practices that constitute the chronotope entail the gendered, racialised and classed disappearance of a range of institutional actors from NLC knowledge production, and also create the conditions for the entrenchment of capitalist extractive modes of being and doing, while facilitating the insidious slow violence of environmental harms out of sight and mind. Yet, in enacting these compromised practices, the NLC evinces a chimeric relationship with the state that is the key to its survival: sometimes inhabiting and acting with superior state power, other times in opposition to it, all the time occupying a hybrid mode. It is this constant negotiation with the state that has ensured the NLC’s resilience over time, but also holds it captive. Taken as a whole, this thesis confronts the binary requirement within critical scholarship for durable Indigenous organisations under continuing settler occupation to be either state or its opposite, and suggests a new take on what Indigenous institutional survivance requires.