SEMINAR: Anthropology / Sociology Seminar Series

The Western Australian government’s recent proposal to close up to 150 of the state’s remote Aboriginal communities sparked condemnation from community members including Aboriginal organisations, the state and federal opposition Labor governments, a range of activist groups and the United Nations. Remote community residents have expressed anxiety, fear and confusion. In this project I will seek out responses from such groups, and others, to establish how the proposal has directed and changed social action. I will explore various theoretical frameworks, such as Cohen’s (1972) ‘moral panics’, to interpret this social action. I conceptualise the government’s proposal as one event in a much larger project of contemporary and historical Indigenous affairs policy in Australia. As the proposed community closures have not (as yet) eventuated, this project will also examine a specific event in Western Australian history from which parallels may be drawn: the equal wages decision of the late 1960s. This led to many Aboriginal families being drawn off the pastoral stations on which they had been employed, and towards the fringes of towns such as Fitzroy Crossing and Derby. If a large number of the state’s remote communities are closed, there is a strong possibility that displaced residents will likewise aggregate to the fringes of larger towns. The consequences for them are likely to have similarities to those that occurred some fifty years ago. The significance of this project is to outline the possible implications of the Western Australian government’s proposal using an example from the state’s own historical record, and, on a broader level, to contribute to contemporary understandings of the policy interaction between settler states and their indigenous populations.