Dreamings beyond ‘opportunity’: the collaborative economics of an aboriginal heritage trail

ABSTRACT

This article presents the Lurujarri Heritage Trail, an Indigenous tourism experience in Northwest Australia as exemplary for a world different from the teleological-minded futurism of neoliberal market economics. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork undertaken between 2011 and 2015, it first outlines how in 1987 the Trail was established at the very margins of the Australian economy. Through its emphasis on the here and now that is grounded in a collaboration of people and land and acknowledges diverse worldviews and ontological differences, the Trail today offers its participants a means to experience Indigenous culture as different from Western politics and development policies. As a result, its allegedly marginal Dreaming (Bugarrigarra) leads beyond the pursuit of economic opportunity and in doing so enabled the defeat of large-scale industrialisation in the region.

KEYWORDS:

• Aboriginal Australia
• anthropology
• collaborative economics
• Indigenous tourism
• ontology

Acknowledgements

I am most indebted to the many Indigenous and non-Indigenous community members in and around Broome who shared their time and knowledge with me. In regards to the material discussed in this paper, I would like to express my particular gratitude to the Goolarabooloo, their families, friends and elders past and present. I am furthermore grateful for the support from The Social Policy Research Centre at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) and the Institute for Social and Cultural Anthropology, Martin-Luther-University Halle-Wittenberg (MLU). I would like to express my particular gratitude to Stephen Muecke (UNSW) and Burkhard Schnepel (MLU) for their time and commitment, as well as to the two anonymous reviewers for their invaluable comments on previous versions of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Dr Carsten Wergin leads the Research Group ‘The Transcultural Heritage of Northwest Australia: Dynamics and Resistances’ at Heidelberg University. His academic background is in sociocultural anthropology, media and transcultural studies with a wider thematic interest in Digital and Environmental Humanities research, and a regional expertise in the Indian Ocean World, drawing on long-term fieldwork phases in the Mascarene Archipelago and Northwest Australia. His first monograph Kréol Blouz: Musikalische Inszenierungen von Identität und Kultur (Boehlau, 2010) is an ethnography of the transcultural music scene of La Réunion (DOM-TOM). Further publications include the edited volume Musical Performance and the Changing City (Routledge 2013), and the special journal issue Materialities of Tourism (Tourist Studies 2014/3).

Notes

1. Names in this article have been partly anonymised by the author.

2. In completion of this research, I owe much gratitude to diverse members of Aboriginal communities who live in and around Broome and on the Dampier Peninsula. Apart from the Goolarabooloo, those include Yawuru, Minyirr-Djugun, Bardi, Jabirr Jabirr, Nyul-Nyul, Ngambal and Nyikina people, among others.

3. Further information is available via the URL: http://www.goolarabooloo.org.au/lurujarri.html (Date accessed: 05 June 2015).

4. House Of Representatives Joint Committee On Northern Australia, The Development Of Northern Australia, Submission by the Broome Chamber Of Commerce & Industry, Submission Number 125, 28.03.2014.

5. Briefing paper: Economic futures for Northern Australia, Australian Conservation Federation [ACF] Carlton VIC, 2011.

6. Further significant results of his collaborative works in which he shared his knowledge with others are the books Gularabulu (Roe 1983) and Reading the Country (Benterrak et al. 1984).

7. More information and a map of the Trail are accessible via the URL: http://www.goolarabooloo.org.au/where-is-it.html (Date accessed: 30 October 2015).

8. Elsewhere, Stephen Muecke and I argue that this is also possible in the opposite sense, as tourists aim to become part of a destination not by taking souvenirs with them, but by leaving things behind, as what we have called ‘survenirs’ (Muecke and Wergin 2014).

9. For a detailed description of the events on ‘Black Tuesday’ see Muir (2012).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship allocated within the 7th Framework Programme of the European Commission (FP7-MC-IOF)[grant number 253633].