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In Australia, mining and tourism promise
economic and social benefits for the
nation-state. At the same time, these industries
seem to short-change the desires, beliefs,
politics and aspirations operating at a local
community level. The vast economic value
that mining and tourism generates competes in a
complex way with the expression of social,
cultural and political values. In
terms of economic value, mining generates
enormous wealth for shareholders, corporations
and governments. Tourism too can generate much
wealth for governments, corporate operators and
smaller businesses. However, in doing so, both
mining and tourism run the risk of undermining
the actual and potential diversity of local
economies.
A central problem is that mining companies seem
to proceed on the assumption that tacit social
contracts are less important than a company’s
legal entitlement to set up industry. And, more
often than not, the social value of mining bears
little resemblance to the effects of resource
extraction and profiteering. In comparison to
mining, tourism may promise more environmentally
and socially sustainable outcomes. However, even
community-based tourism can produce
contradictory effects, if only through tourism’s
tendency to perpetuate pre-packaged or
romanticised images of peoples and places.
This special section ‘Songlines vs. Pipelines?
Mining and Tourism in Remote Australia’ is
concerned with the conflicts between mining and
tourism and is especially focused on how these
industries’ diverging values and development
strategies have turned into a ‘wicked problem’
for many communities. The mining boom in remote
Australia sees leisure tourism competing against
a fly-in, fly-out (FIFO) workforce for limited
accommodation and flights, and in a way that
dramatically affects demographics and everyday
life in these places. This special section
explores in new ways the transformative effects
of these industrial changes.1 The
papers collected here question the relationship
between resource extraction and tourism
economies in order to open up wider discussions
about the socio-political, cultural and societal
role the mining boom plays in remote communities
in Australia.
The ‘triple crisis’ in global finance, climate
change and oil consumption has affected most
economies worldwide (Papatheodorou et al.).
Nevertheless, since the Global Finance Crisis
(GFC), Australia has managed economic stability
and even growth. This is due to large-scale
exploitation of resources such as bauxite, coal,
iron ore, oil, uranium and natural gas that has
met a strong demand from countries with
fast-growing economies, particularly China. As a
result, the value of the Australian dollar has
risen over the past three years from about 0.5
to 0.8 Euro. Consequently, export-dependent
sectors other than mining, notably the
Australian tourism industry, suffer from what in
economics was identified as ‘Dutch disease’ in
the late 1970s. For tourism this problem is
twofold: 1) Tourists don’t travel to Australia
because it has become increasingly expensive to
do so, which results in a decline in
international tourism; and 2) people living in
Australia prefer to travel abroad, to
destinations such as Bali or the Philippines
that are comparatively cheaper than tourist
sites within the country, which results in
further decline in domestic tourism.
All sectors of the tourism and service
industries are affected by resource extraction
economies. Aviation, food services and
accommodation providers have benefited from the
significant increase in business tourism, but
struggle to keep up quality and staff numbers as
it becomes difficult to compete against wages
offered by the mining sector. Other parts of the
tourism sector that might value other than
purely monetary or profit-driven gains, such as
Indigenous, environmental and heritage
enterprises, experience considerable pressures.
Such enterprises are linked to values ‘embedded’
in particular locales and their residents.
Resource extraction also has implications for
thinking about ‘country’, a word that now
signifies a diverse cross-section of Indigenous
cultures and peoples that are vulnerable to
major transformations that accompany large-scale
mining and changes to the tourist industry. The
papers collected in this special section attend
to this topic and take account of Indigenous
culture’s radically different values and
approach to ‘country’.
‘Songlines vs. Pipelines?’ thus explores
contestations over value as a ‘wicked problem’
for social science research and policy makers.
The values involved are attached to the weight
and force of masses of fungible commodities,
technical and financial infrastructures and the
human resources of whole sectors of the
population. The problem is wicked because of the
momentum of all this; it cannot be solved by one
or two policy decisions alone. For example, the
iconic image of a beach, of clean yellow sands
and a spectacular (and free of charge) sunset,
is of undeniable value to locals and tourists,
but might find itself in competition with a
heavy industry whose pollution can make the
beach plummet in value.
On the other hand, the mining industry is
claiming to ‘generate’ further wealth and new
jobs. In such situations a lot of time and
effort is ‘spent’ determining stakeholders, some
of whom are non-human, like rivers or whales,
and have advocates speaking on their behalf and
carrying out negotiations (see Muir, this section).
These terms are ostensibly negotiable; for
instance stakeholders might question the
validity of ‘triple bottom line accounting’ or
‘public sector full cost accounting’ over
industry-provided figures. Yet different
stakeholders often represent particular concerns
or partisan politics or social values (whether
scientific, political, economic, legal or
cultural), as Traditional Owners may document a
sacred site, scientists may explain the role of
whales in an ecosystem, and economists may
calculate the value of tax revenue for all.
There is a strong need, therefore, for rigorous
scholarly engagement with a problem that is of
major national significance. It has therefore
been our aim here to bring together the work of
academic experts whose papers might stimulate
further critical and informed debates about the
impact of mining in remote Australia on tourism,
culture and community.
Tourism and Australia: A Brief Outline
and Value Assessment
People have always travelled to see different
landscapes and experience other cultures,
languages and cuisines. The word ‘tourist’ was
first used only in 1772, and the word ‘tourism’
in 1811, to describe such activity. Commercial
travel for leisure purposes was first associated
with the advent of the Industrial Revolution in
the United Kingdom—the first European country to
promote leisure time to its growing population
of industrial workers, as travel became a more
affordable option for the average person.
Tourism’s origins can thus be located in the
origins of industrial development, and tourism
has itself become one of the world’s most
important industries.
According to Scott Lash and John Urry,
innovators for the expansion of the tourism
industry such as Thomas Cook are as important to
modern cultural production as well recognised
figures such as Henry Ford. This new mobile
world created markets where there were none, and
created a world that could be known in advance
before one travelled. Tourism is therefore
central to today’s global articulation of
different flows of people, work, capital and
ideas (Bauman, Cresswell and Merriman). It is
one of the major forces transforming space
(Coleman and Crang), and stands as one of the
preferred economic development policies around
the globe (UNWTO).
About 40 years ago, there was a scholarly turn,
especially in social sciences, to the importance
of tourism. This can be seen in such cornerstone
works as Dean MacCannell’s The Tourist: A
New Theory of the Leisure Class (1976)
that theorised tourism as a postindustrial
search for truth and a ‘staged authenticity’
(MacCannell, ‘Staged Authenticity’). Such a
classic theory of tourism takes on a different
resonance in a contemporary context in which
powerful mining companies influence mainstream
and other representations of their industry. We
are also seeing mining companies intervene in
local politics in exploitative ways, even to the
extent of effecting restrictions on land rights
claims.2
The Commonwealth of Australia came into being
after the emergence of tourism and tourism
remains an important part of its national
economy. The spectacles of Australian landscapes
and of iconic aspects of everyday life in
blockbuster films, from Crocodile Dundee
(1986) to Baz Luhrmann’s Australia (2008),
suggest the importance of Australia as a tourist
destination and of tourism as an industry for
Australia. In 2008-2009, Australia had 5.6
million international arrivals, 34.3% more than
10 years before (Euromonitor). The trend rate of
growth, however, fell away in the last few
years, due to the spread of risky diseases such
as SARS and bird flu, oil price rises, the
collapse of some major domestic airline
carriers, the Bali bombings, and increased
geopolitical tension. Furthermore, the
aforementioned high exchange value of the
Australian dollar has had a negative impact on
its international tourism market (Assaf et
al. 166-67).
However, even today, tourism remains of great
significance within the Australian economy.
Tourism’s total contribution to Australia’s GDP
in 2010-11 was $73 billion, constituting 5.2% of
its economy (mining was 7.3% of GDP in the same
year). In addition, tourism employed 907,100
persons, both directly and indirectly,
representing 7.9% of Australia’s total
employment. Domestic visitors took over 71
million overnight trips and 161 million day
trips in 2011 (Australian Government). Also in
2011, 5.9 million international visitors arrived
in Australia. While most international markets
remained stable or declined, the number of
visitors from China grew by 19.5% and from India
by 6.9%. Tourism also continues to play a key
role in the development of regional and rural
areas where 46% of the tourist dollar in
Australia is spent. As such, it is of
considerable importance to many of Australia’s
regional communities (TRA 1).
Of interest on an international level is the
diversity of niche markets in which Australia is
enmeshed (Davidson and Spearritt). Niche markets
that are of particular relevance to remote
regions in Australia include sustainable,
heritage and cultural tourism. Many of
Australia’s heritage assets are located in
regional areas and cultural tourism contributes
significantly to economic growth but also to
social policy in these places (CRC, Economic
Value). Since 2006 the number of
domestic overnight cultural and heritage
visitors has grown by 11%, while total domestic
overnight visits remained flat over the same
period. In 2007, 10.9 million domestic overnight
visitors participated in cultural or heritage
activities and 10.4 million in domestic day
visits. Tourism WA states that:
Heritage tourism has the potential to
considerably improve the economic vitality of
numerous Western Australian communities,
broaden the state's tourism base and improve
awareness, appreciation and conservation of
our physical and intangible heritage.3
The focus here on ‘awareness, appreciation and
conservation’ suggests that tourism has become a
sign of embodied connections with people,
locales and landscapes that are otherwise
unquantifiable. If tourism started as leisure
and escape from work, everyday burdens, problems
and responsibilities, it has diversified in more
recent years to include philanthropic work—the
visiting of socially troubled places in order to
‘do good’, now known as volunteer tourism.
Tourists might invest in artworks that ensure a
continued existence to markers of Aboriginal
presence. Or, tourists might attend Aboriginal
cultural tours that introduce people to food,
stories, or particular sites of historical and
cultural significance.
Environmentalists have long seen the
opportunities that such forms of exchange might
encourage for developing longer lasting communal
relationships and for encouraging cheaper forms
of tourism (see Vincent
in this issue).
While new tourism initiatives, especially
environmental and cultural tourism enterprises,
can help Indigenous communities and people, they
can also be criticised for perpetuating romantic
or pre-packaged stereotypes. Similarly, heritage
tours to ‘birthplaces of the oil industry’ see
tourists visiting ghost towns that have been
turned into heritage sites and museums. Such
tourist ventures run the risk of recycling
colonialist myths, including misrepresentations
of violence wrecked on Indigenous people (see Che in this issue).
It is therefore important to note that tourism
is far more than a local economic activity. It
is also a system that exists in relation to
other systems (political, economic, and social)
and has the ability to organise the world
through interactions with these systems
(Franklin). It is also not just related to
people who travel for leisure, since mobility
has become a normal part of everyday life
(Hepburn). Tourism can thus help to ‘shape and
mediate our knowledge of and desires about the
rest of the planet’ (Franklin and Crang 10).
Tourism has also proven to be a highly
resilient and adaptable activity. This can be
seen in areas, once known as war or disaster
zones, that have since been transformed into
tourist sites (Beirman). Some examples of
‘post-disaster’ tourism include the Ho Chi Minh
path of genocide, and concentration camps in
Germany and Poland. Others include plantations
in Mauritius and pearling industry sites in
Broome where slavery or forced labour took
place. Less controversially, a former mine in
Katoomba (in the Blue Mountains region of NSW)
has been transformed into a ‘Scenic World’ park.
This is another example of an ex-industrial site
now valorised as a lucrative tourist attraction.
The connection between Indigenous people and
country, and how this relates to tourism
imaginaries in Australia, is another point of
discussion. The desire to travel to distant
parts of the world, such as remote Australian
regions like the Kimberley, is often stimulated
by a wish to experience extraordinary places,
both natural and cultural, UNESCO-approved or
not. In any settler and/or postcolonial society,
such heritage is a complex and contested topic.
Heritage sites as tourism sites have various
dimensions in Australia, from wilderness areas
to different uses of historical prison
complexes. UNESCO Heritage Listings include the
Sydney Opera House, Convict Sites, and Nature
Reserves. Such destinations are places where
global and local processes and trends come
together (Gordon and Goodall 292; also Neveling
and Wergin). Within this ‘production of space’,
institutional practices and processes shape
destinations in different ways through a
discourse of ‘active’ developmental purposes
(Lefebvre; Merrifield). In Australia, such
institutional practices also involve a specific
geo-political construction of ‘White Australia’
that was shaped in the bureaucratic minds of
strategists located very much in the southeast
of the country (Jones and Shaw).
Successful tourist destinations are generally
those places that evoke a sense of make-believe
or promise experiences ‘far from the ordinary’
(Gibson and Connell 260). While often
romanticised, Indigenous cultural heritage has
played, in Australia, a significant role in
tourism and this industry may be under
considerable threat from the mining resource
boom.
Tourism and the Resource Boom:
Australia’s ‘Dutch Disease’
As noted above, despite the global triple
crisis, the Australian economy has managed
stability and even growth. Mining has been of
central importance in this regard as resource
extraction booms have repeatedly dominated the
country’s economy. In September 2012, Australian
owner of Hancock Prospecting Pty Ltd, Gina
Rinehart became the richest woman in the world.
Her company’s fortune was built on mining claims
discovered in the Pilbara, including the world’s
largest iron ore deposit.4
According to the BBC, Rinehart’s wealth
increases by approximately AUD$600 every second.
While the wealth of mining magnates continues to
increase substantially, the wellbeing of local
communities and locales often seems to diminish.
While mining developments of the nineteenth and
early twentieth century meant the construction
of new towns and homes for miners and their
families, the fact that the current boom is
dominated by a FIFO workforce has had often
destructive effects.
As a result, regions affected by mining develop
two-speed economies, with mining on the fast end
and all other local economies on the slow end.
The Gold Rushes of the nineteenth century were
able to lure thousands of individuals to the
Australian goldfields with the hope of ‘striking
it rich’, something no longer possible now,
except in odd cases on the opal fields where
tourism also dominates. ‘Marvellous Melbourne’
was the city built on such individual gold
strikes, as wealth stayed in the community and
helped to create the basis of a developing city.
It is not so clear that mining companies such
as Woodside, Buru or Rio Tinto will bring wealth
and/or job creation, or that it will be
beneficial for local communities through, for
example, funding initiatives and educational
programs. This may prove particularly
problematic for Indigenous people who often
figure highly in unemployment, alcohol and other
drug abuse, domestic violence and crime
statistics, all of which have been a feature of
life in remote parts of Australia (although Carrington et
al. in this issue problematise the
relative visibility of crime in Indigenous
communities). Despite the expressed need, on
behalf of government and other community
representatives, to improve social wellbeing in
those regions, only an estimated 0.5% of mining
profits are in fact allocated to Indigenous
people. At the same time, the mining industry is
estimated to employ about 150,000-200,000 FIFO
workers every week (see Carrington et
al. in this issue). FIFO workforces
tend to be more cost-effective for local
governments, as there is less need to invest
money in community development: the families of
FIFO workers are elsewhere, and so are the
schools, libraries and most leisure industries.
Instead, FIFO workers’ pay tends to support pubs
and prostitutes.

Figure 1: Advertisement that
appeared in the literary journal Meanjin
in 1972.
That Conzinc Riotinto of Australia here promise
‘opening up the Australian emptiness’ (Figure 1)
raises the question of colonialist depictions of
Australia as terra nullius at a time
when questions about Indigenous
self-determination and revaluing of country were
beginning to be raised. It is also interesting
to note that CRA was keen to advertise their
noble intentions in relation to the national
good, as the company promised ‘building towns,
ports and harbours’. This philanthropic
rhetoric—the idea that the mining company is
‘putting something back’ rather than simply
taking ‘something from the soil’—resonates today
in the context of the national ‘mining tax’
debate which sought formally to incorporate, via
taxation, the value of commodities extracted
from the national ‘commons’. That most large
mining companies strenuously contested this tax
indicates a fraught relationship between the
State (in this case, Julia Gillard’s Labor
government) and corporate mining interests. The
mining tax debate became heavily politicised and
sensationalised in the Murdoch press through
vociferous opposition from federal Liberal Party
leader Tony Abbott. At the same time as mining
companies resisted the government’s proposed
tax, aimed at redistributing mining profits,
companies struck royalty deals with local
governments and, in some cases, Aboriginal
communities, as if to demonstrate a concern for
local and environmental issues.
Each of the papers in this special section
contributes to this larger question of how
mining and tourist industries contribute to
discourses and practices of cultural value the
impacts of which reach beyond the purely
economic. In their paper, ‘Crime Talk, FIFO
workers and Cultural Conflict on the Mining Boom
Frontier’, Kerry
Carrington, Russell Hogg, Alison McIntosh and
John Scott set the scene for this
discussion. They present findings from a
community case study in the West Australian
minefields where the tourism sector has recently
begun selling souvenir T-shirts reading:
‘FIFO—Fit In or Fuck Off’. In their
contribution, Carrington et al. draw
attention to the impact of a non-resident
workforce on everyday life in a small town. They
argue that not only do mining and work camps
undermine the values of long-term sustainable
community development in rural Australia,
including existing tourism ventures, but that
FIFO camps have brought cultural problems that
make future development problematic.
Deborah Che’s paper,
‘Pennsylvania Wilds or Timber Production and Oil
and Gas Fields? Resource Extraction and Tourism
Development in the Allegheny National Forest
Region’, offers a comparative United
States/Australian perspective, providing a brief
industrial history of the Allegheny Plateau in
Pennsylvania (USA), a place where the world’s
commercial oil industry was born, but also an
appealing tourist escape for residents of nearby
industrial cities. Using a human-geographic
approach informed by historical analysis, Che
examines the shifting land uses in the Allegheny
National Forest (ANF) region from the mid-1800s
to the present. Che highlights recent conflicts
between tourism and oil and gas production
companies played out in this newest frontier of
US natural gas production that is also known as
“Pennsylvania Wilds”, a 12-county region
containing hundreds of miles of land and water
trails.
Tess Lea adds another
angle on the ‘wicked problem’ of ‘songlines vs.
pipelines’ in her account of ‘Ecologies of
Development on Groote Eylandt’. This paper takes
an ecological perspective in its exploration of
the interimplicated ways that mining, social
policy development and Indigenous livelihoods
function. In doing so, it advocates a break away
from common arguments that mining simply poses a
threat to Indigenous sovereignty, reading the
manganese-rich blue mud of the Groote Eylandt
archipelago in terms of policy quagmires,
discourses of Indigeneity and the push and pull
of infrastructure developments. As a result, the
very notions of ‘theories of development’ and
policy ‘intent’ are destabilised, while
underlying forces that constitute the conditions
of policy intervention on both a consumerist and
ecological level are brought to the fore.
In the context of the dramatic impact of mining
industries on local communities, it seems that
the capacity for local interventions in
decision-making processes is ever more
diminished. In particular, the place and value
of Indigenous culture, traditions and relation
to place, in short country, are either
barely considered or, even more problematically,
become a kind of scapegoat in larger
negotiations as economic opportunity becomes the
prime value.
In her paper, ‘Hosts and Guests: Interpreting
Rockhole Recovery Trips’, Eve Vincent uses an
ethnographic approach to explore the impact of
resource extraction on a small-scale Indigenous
tourism venture. The paper focuses on a small
group of Aboriginal people from Ceduna in South
Australia who, in 2006, began organising
biannual 4WD tours of their traditional country.
The tours offer visits to a series of
‘rockholes’, permanent water sources that occur
in granite outcrops scattered amongst the mallee
scrub. Members of the local, highly-politicised
Kokatha grouping and interested non-Aboriginal
visitors jointly undertake these tours, now
known as ‘Rockhole Recovery Trips’. These trips
take place in three contiguous conservation
reserves, which are also subject to a myriad of
mineral exploration leases. Vincent’s paper
provides an interpretation of their significance
as she sets out the range of meanings and values
that energise the planning and enacting of these
trips, as well as the new meanings and values
they generate.
Kathie Muir’s paper
‘Politics, Protest and Performativity: The
Broome Community’s “No Gas on the Kimberley
Coast” Campaign’, presents the results of
fieldwork from her study of conflict between
Indigenous and environmentalist groups and
proposed mining industries, this time in the
Kimberley. The community campaign against the
proposed Liquid Natural Gas processing hub at
James Price Point/Walmadan north of Broome is
grounded in an alliance between local community
members and Traditional owners. Muir discusses
the unique cultural, racial and environmental
characteristics of Broome and how they have
shaped this campaign in significant ways. She
outlines how the campaign has transformed the
identities and day-to-day lives of people,
helping some to re-connect with their community.
Muir shows how this presents a means to actively
build relationships with Traditional owners and
honour their ongoing connection to country.
Finally, she explores some of the ways in which
these identities and relationships are expressed
artistically and how they feature in social
media.
In the last contribution to this special
section, ‘A Substantial Piece in Life:
Viabilities, Realities and Given Futures at the
Wild Rivers Inquiries’, Timothy Neale analyses
the findings of a series of government inquiries
(2010-2011) into the impact in Queensland of the
Wild Rivers Act, legislation introduced
to protect and preserve natural rivers. Neale’s
paper raises questions about the discursive
implications of the word ‘wild’ as played out in
the inquiries and in media debates about the
Wild Rivers Act. The paper looks at tensions
between Indigenous and non-Indigenous
representations of everyday life in the Cape
York region and it does so in the context of an
optimistic discourse about employment
opportunities, or what Neale (drawing on Philip
Martin) refers to as ‘bright futures‘. This
discourse, Neale argues, becomes entangled in
political-economic questions of what
constitutes, as Senator Heffernan put it, ‘a
substantial piece in life’.
Understanding Value Discourses: Towards
a Policy Dialogue
Australia’s remote regions offer nature-based
tourist experiences that advertise magnificent
scenery, extensive coastlines, rivers and
waterholes, fishing opportunities and wetlands
and billabongs with extensive wildlife. Its
natural and cultural heritage is intrinsically
linked to Indigenous cultural history and its
valorisation of country. The ‘uniqueness’ of
Australian Indigenous cultures can, however, be
exploited in tourism advertisements, as becomes
visible in tourist promotions on Qantas flights.
It is there from the moment one boards, on the
garments of the flight attendants. The equation
of how the tourism industry can benefit
Indigenous people and communities could be easy:
Sustainable Resource Management would
support development of and be supported by a Sustainable
Tourism Industry. A Sustainable
Tourism Industry could deliver a
Strong Economic Base that would cater
for Strong Culture and the
Preservation of Country.
This would support Traditional owners who argue
‘we cannot afford to mine the coal’.5
They cannot ‘afford’ to because they value
country differently and it would cost them too
much to give up what they value. This value
overwrites economic interests in resource
exploitation, which sees ‘nothing’ there except
minerals. But the world once again seems upside
down in Australia. While many countries have
turned their industrial sites into heritage
sites, museums, parks and other tourist
attractions, Australia is turning its natural
and cultural heritage, Indigenous country,
existing and possible future tourist
attractions, into industrialised space. The
related fetishisation of technology, the attempt
to ‘tap into’ Nature, has implications for
broader social, political and economic concerns.
It attempts to overwrite the existing complex
networks of value in cultural and natural
heritage.
Whatever the imperatives, people always
identify with values that for them are worth
protecting. The challenge is to present one’s
story so that is has significance within the
broader discourses about preservation and
development (Wergin). There is a need for
further independent research, also with regards
to tourism, that works through the
teleologically-minded futurism advocated by
resource extraction economies. One field of
interest that is very much related to this is
how the present is constantly constructed as a
problem, in order to argue for a need for
industrial development in the future.
However, as Larry Dwyer pointed out in a
personal conversation during our seminar, ‘in
economics there is no such thing as a free
lunch’, and the contributions collected here all
question whether further industrial development
and investment in resource extraction is the
solution or whether it creates a much larger
problem. What becomes evident is that we need to
interrogate the ‘value discourses’ themselves
that underlie the related decision-making
processes, as they play out in specific, local
circumstances. Bruno Latour argues, in relation
to similar environment cases where different
worlds collide, for the importance of diplomacy
and negotiation, where skilled diplomats treat
each side with respect and can pinpoint exactly
“what each side really believes in” (Latour 29,
trans. Muecke). In Australia, this might mean
seriously interrogating concepts like progress
(‘What, Blackfellas have none, no future?’) and
the sacred (‘What, Whitefellas have
none, they’ve left that behind?’). These are
core concepts that crop up all the time without
serious discussion. In asking such questions,
scholars can help local communities to see
through the affirmative actions taken by
capitalist interventions and the false promises
of equal ‘opportunity’ that merely privatise
state welfare.
To be clear, such academic interventions should
not be seen as a distracting sideshow, but as
capable of delivering expansive overviews and
alternative strategies. Culture and community in
remote regions will inevitably change. They
always have. However, what future role the
resource extraction economy will play in this
change remains to be seen. First and foremost, a
local community should have the opportunity to
impact on the direction this change will take,
based on informed decisions that are supported
by formal political processes and not
jeopardised by skirmishes.
In the scenarios described in this collection,
the capitalist dream that imagines a pipeline
hooked into a natural resource and magically
turning on the tap of wealth, without careful
consideration of its complex effect on cultures
and peoples, may turn out to be as much a
caricature as that of commercial representations
of the dreamtime ‘native’ in harmony with this
same nature. If complexity is the
norm, as our contributors think, then every
‘world’ (the miners’ world, the tourists' world,
as well as the Indigenous peoples’ world) is a
heterogeneous mix of living things, materials,
concepts, techniques, feelings and values trying
to sustain itself—and sustainability always
comes at a price.
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Notes
1
This Special Section is a result of intensive
debates during the two-day seminar ‘Songlines
vs. Pipelines?’ that was organised at the Social
Policy Research Centre (SPRC), The University of
New South Wales, Sydney, in February 2012. Its
editors Carsten Wergin and Stephen Muecke would
like to express their sincere gratitude to all
seminar participants for their valuable input,
as well as to members and staff of the SPRC and
the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at UNSW
for the financial and administrative support
that made this event possible. One of the aims
has been to publish seminar outcomes quickly and
it is thanks to the editors of AHR,
Monique Rooney and Russell Smith, and their
immediate interest in the topic, that this could
be achieved. Thank you also to Virginia Watson
and Nina Mistilis for their helpful comments on
earlier versions of this paper. Carsten Wergin’s
two-year research stay at the SPRC is funded by
a Marie Curie Fellowship allocated within the
7th Framework Programme of the European
Commission.
2
Based on a personal conversation with a
researcher who has been affected by a ‘no
publication’ policy inflicted by its financial
donors.
3
See http://stateheritage.wa.gov.au/about-us/acts-policies/heritage-tourism-strategy
Accessed 30 Nov. 2012.
4
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-05-23/billionaire-rinehart-is-world-s-richest-woman-brw-says.html
Accessed 22 Jul. 2012.
5
Traditional owner from the Lower Fitzroy River
in personal communication with the authors,
February 2012.
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