Showing and Telling: Australian Land Rights and Material Moralities

Abstract

This article draws upon landscape theory and studies of material culture to explore the process through which space is humanized, examining in particular how this process legitimizes moral rights to property. Drawing on ethnographic research in the Western Cape York Peninsula in Far North Queensland, it considers some of the performative, representational and material activities through which Aboriginal groups assert their claims to the land.

The analysis is placed within the wider historical and political context of the land rights and environmental movements in which ownership of the peninsula is entangled. The Aboriginal community in Kowanyama has primary claims to several thousand square miles of land within and surrounding their ‘Deed of Grant in Trust’ area, but these are opposed by many local pastoralists, the National Parks service and, to some degree, tourist and environmental groups in the region. The article examines how the construction of performative and artefactual representations of an indigenous cultural landscape enables Aboriginal groups to concretize and communicate their particular moral and political position and challenge European Australians’ colonial control over the land.