Since the nineteenth-century expeditions, Northern Australia has
been both a fascination and concern to the administrators of
settler governance in Australia. Neighboring Southeast Asia and
Melanesia, its expansive and relatively undeveloped tropical
savanna lands are alternately framed as a market opportunity, an
ecological prize, a threat to national sovereignty, and a social
welfare problem. Over the last several decades, while developers
have eagerly promoted the mineral and agricultural potential of its
monsoonal catchments, conservationists speak of these same sites as
rare biodiverse habitats, and settler governments focus on the
"social dysfunction" of its Indigenous communities. Meanwhile,
across the north, Indigenous people themselves have sought to wrest
greater equity in the management of their lives and the use of
their country. In Wild Articulations, Neale examines
environmentalism, indigeneity, and development in Northern
Australia through the recent controversy surrounding the Wild
Rivers Act 2005 (Qld) in Cape York Peninsula, an event that drew
together a diverse cast of actors-including traditional owners,
prime ministers, politicians, environmentalists, mining companies,
the late Steve Irwin, crocodiles, and river systems-to contest the
future of the north. With a population of fewer than 18,000 people
spread over a landmass of over 50,000 square miles, Cape York
Peninsula remains a "frontier" in many senses. Long constructed as
a wild space-whether as terra nullius, a zone of legal exception,
or a biodiverse wilderness region in need of
conservation-Australia's north has seen two fundamental political
changes over the past two decades. The first is the legal
recognition of Indigenous land rights, reaching over a majority of
its area. The second is that the region has been the center of
national debates regarding the market integration and social
normalization of Indigenous people, attracting the attention of
federal and state governments and becoming a site for intensive
neoliberal reforms. Drawing connections with other settler colonial
nations such as Canada and Aotearoa New Zealand, Wild Articulations
examines how indigenous lands continue to be imagined and governed
as "wild."
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