Bushwalking in Kakadu: a study of cultural borderlands

Abstract

This paper examines the relationship between the contested domains of Aboriginal traditional owners and non‐Aboriginal Park users, specifically bushwalkers, in Kakadu National Park in the Northern Territory of Australia. It argues that Kakadu remains a cultural borderland where a negotiated relationship between local Aboriginal traditional owners and non‐Aboriginal Park users is struggling to emerge. It finds that the rhetoric of Aboriginal/non‐Aboriginal co‐existence, which pervades the Park, is infused by the legacy of a colonial settler state, which has presumed access to territory, marginalized Indigenous people and obviated their social and cultural landscape in favour of an expansionist aesthetic of wilderness preservation and appreciation. This paper finds that the activities of bushwalkers and the concerns that these activities generate in the local Aboriginal domain produce a novel space where place is contested and transformed, a space of negotiation and resistance where people's cherished values both compete with and influence one another.

Keywords:

• Aborigines
• bushwalking
• national parks
• tourism
• commodity fetishism
• wilderness

Notes

Lisa Palmer is an ARC Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Melbourne. She completed her PhD thesis on Aboriginal land management and tourism interests in Kakadu National Park at the Northern Territory University in 2001.

Bininj is a Gundjeihmi and Kunwinjku word which can mean man, male, person or Aboriginal people depending on context. Mungguy is a Jawoyn word of the same meaning.

This statement was first introduced in the Kakadu National Park Draft Plan of Management (Kakadu National Park Board of Management and Australian Nature Conservation Agency 1996).

The archaeological evidence suggests that Aboriginal people have lived in this region for at least 60,000 years.

I am grateful to Robert Levitus for suggesting the use of this term to refer to an Aboriginal association with place. Levitus refers to a ‘socialised landscape’, as a ‘processual, subjective, ego‐centred concept’, wherein the ‘Aboriginal gaze is enlivened by a social history: a country lived and worked in’. In contrast he argues the idea of a cultural landscape can be conceptualized ‘as existing in the objectified gaze of an outsider, reifying the sedimented values of things gone’ (R. Levitus, personal communication).

Settlers also invoke death as significant to their own ‘necral landscapes’ (Edensor 1998: 139) which instil attachment to place and relationships with the past. In the 1980s, the ashes of a bushwalker were scattered at a now off‐limits bushwalking site in the northern outliers of Kakadu. This event is seen by some bushwalkers as an important verification of their attachment to that area.

In reality, the surveillance walks conducted by Parks Australia are little more than uncoordinated excursions which do not include planned attempts to monitor bushwalkers' activities.

As a result of Aboriginal concerns about this issue it is now to become a permit condition that GPS not be carried by bushwalkers in the Park. However, this does not stop the information from simply being plotted by hand on to topographical maps at the time of ‘discovery’.

This code of conduct aims to minimize the impact which bushwalkers have on the environment and on other visitors (see, e.g., Australian Alps Liaison Committee n.d.).

An apocalypse‐causing figure called Bulardemo is linked by the Jawoyn with various sites in this area of the escarpment (see Merlan 1991).