Anthropology, Community Development, and Public Policy: The Case of the Kaiela Planning Council

The Aboriginal community of the Goulburn Valley in Victoria, Australia, has long been in the public policy spotlight. With strong connections to the Cummeragunja mission established in the late 1890s, the community boasts a proud tradition of Aboriginal leaders driving the Aboriginal rights movements in Sydney and Melbourne from the early 1900s till the present; the mission is some seventy kilometers north of Shepparton on the New South Wales side of the Murray River. In more recent times, the traditional Aboriginal owners, the Yorta Yorta, comprising the majority of the local Aboriginal population, were the first to put in a land claim under the Australian government’s Native Title Act 1993 in “settled” southeastern Australia. Although unsuccessful with the claim (High Court of Australia 2002), they became the first Traditional Owner group to sign a co- management agreement with the State of Victoria in 2004. In 2010 a further agreement was finalized (State of Victoria 2012) for jointly managing the Barmah National Park, an area within the Yorta Yorta lands.

The Goulburn Valley Aboriginal community has one of the largest Aboriginal medical services in the country— the Rumbalara Aboriginal Cooperative in Mooroopna, which recently opened a $40 million aged care development in the nearby town of Shepparton. And the Rumbalara Football Netball Club is unique nationally having maintained fifteen years’ participation in local country football and netball leagues. Notwithstanding ongoing racial tensions, often brought into acute focus with a “black” club participating in the important social field of country football, they have built significant wider community support and acceptance (Tynan 2007).¹

Adopting an anthropologically and sociologically informed approach, in this article I review a recent innovation attempted by the local Aboriginal leadership for a “whole of community” governance through the establishment of the Kaiela Planning Council. The article is in four sections: (i) background to the collaboration, including some context on the Goulburn Valley Aboriginal community and reflections on the complexities of non- Aboriginal people collaborating in the contested space of “Aboriginal policy,” accompanied by a brief location of the contested role of anthropology in contemporary Aboriginal policy development; (ii) a description of the collaboration’s structure using a mini- case study of the Aboriginal community’s engagement with the 2006 Australian National Census, where fundamental limitations become evident due to the unequal power relationships between partners, informed by legislative constraints; (iii) the Kaiela Planning Council, an in- depth case study; and (iv) a combined discussion and conclusion.

The Aboriginal Community

In 2001 the Aboriginal community in the City of Greater Shepparton, one of four local government areas (lgas) in the Goulburn Valley, was selected as one of eight national Council of Australian Governments (coag) trials to investigate new ways of working in Aboriginal affairs.² The City of Greater Shepparton has the fourth largest provincial center in Victoria, the township of Shepparton, located 180 kilometers north of Melbourne. By lga it has the largest Aboriginal community in Victoria, and as Taylor and Biddle (2008) explain, it is part of Australia’s southeastern geographical strip, which is a major Aboriginal population growth area. The 2006 Census had the City of Greater Shepparton’s Aboriginal population at 1,818 out of a total population of 57,089 persons (Australian Bureau of Statistics 2007). Local census work undertaken by my colleagues and I (see case study following for details) indicates that this was likely an undercount of about 28% and that the local Aboriginal population actually numbered around 2,360 at the time of the 2006 Census.³

Identity in Aboriginal Australia is often contested with differing views as to appropriate terminology. The High Court’s Mabo Decision of 1992 overturned the legal fiction of Terra Nullius. Prior to that 1992 decision it was assumed that Aboriginal people did not “own” land. The subsequent Native Title Act of 1993 has resulted in a strong revival in Aboriginal people identifying as Traditional Owners, a trend evident in the Goulburn Valley. A strong Traditional Owner identity has, in turn, strengthened the Goulburn Valley Aboriginal community. Such an outcome stands in contrast...