Duplicity of meaning : wildness, indigeneity and recognition in the Wild Rivers Act debate

This article considers the ʻduplicitousʼ functions of the word ʻwildʼ in the arguments over the Queenslandʼs Wild Rivers Act 2005. Certain traditional owners, environmentalist and state groups have deployed the term pragmatically, simultaneously endorsing its usage (through repetition) and disavowing its colonial associations (through explanation) against protestations by Indigenous and non-Indigenous stakeholders. In a sense, this ambivalent ʻduplicityʼ is entirely consistent with relations between the settler-colonial nation state and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander polities – relations aptly characterised by Povinelli as shaped by ʻthe cunning of recognitionʼ – which stratify relations between groups through the endorsing of ʻtraditionʼ. Thus ʻthe Indigenousʼ can be posited both as one political minority amidst a multicultural polity and as a pre-modern and endemic precursor of the settler-colonial nation, constitutively conservationist ʻfirst Australiansʼ. Arguably, in the legislationʼs ʻrecognitionʼ of the ʻwildʼ past, Indigenous peoples – who were known in nineteenth century Queensland as ʻwild blacksʼ or ʻmyallsʼ (meaning those who resisted leaving their lands – and ʻcould be shot with impunityʼ) are recouped as the nationʼs first caretakers of ʻpristineʼ waterways. However, this article regards the current use of this ambivalent word as also potentially authorising those recognised through this mythic form, providing a limited and uncertain opportunity for traditional owners to ground a form of sovereign right in lands and waterways. Against totalising settler-colonial critiques of hegemony, this article argues that the Wild Rivers legislation does not forget indigeneity, but rather relies on indigeneity. While much research concerning ʻnaturalʼ ideologies such as ʻthe noble savageʼ has worked to show that faith in a belated era of historical fullness or presence can serve to evacuate the present of material details, it may also be that the ʻwildʼ can also offer Indigenous peoples a valuable political authority to, in the words of Courtney Jung, ʻcontest the exclusions through which it has been constitutedʼ.