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Accepted Paper:

"Nothing ever changes": historical ecology and environmental memory in Arnhem Land, Australia.  
Marcus Barber (CSIRO)

Paper short abstract:

I describe archival and ethnographic research about recent environmental change in Arnhem Land. Nicolas Peterson’s influential research and knowledge of Arnhem Land facilitated this study, which focuses on indigenous perceptions of change and their significance to present and future challenges.

Paper long abstract:

This paper describes the results of, and the relationship between, archival and ethnographic research about recent environmental change in Arnhem Land. Historical records of the region were examined for information about past environmental conditions, and these records included; accounts by explorers, travelers, and missionaries; the photographs of the anthropologist Donald Thomson; the records of the 1948 multidisciplinary scientific expedition; and recent aerial photographs and scientific data. This archival review, combined with previous long term ethnographic field experience, provided the foundations for conversations with contemporary eastern Arnhem Land residents about environmental stasis and environmental change in the region. A critical aspect of Yolngu cosmologies is the idea that, at the level of myth and ancestry which is described as the most fundamental form of reality, nothing ever changes. I explore how this belief articulates with memories and observations of stasis and change in important places in the region. The strong indigenous rights regimes in the Northern Territory (NT) situate indigenous people at the centre of local and regional management responses to negative environmental changes, including declines in important species, the impacts of mining, and the more diffuse challenges posed by phenomena such as climate change. This paper considers how such environmental changes are perceived, remembered, and explained. Nicolas Peterson's influential research, his personal archives, his knowledge of Arnhem Land history and of Arnhem Land environments significantly facilitated the research presented here.

Panel P04
Ethnography and the production of anthropological knowledge: essays in honour of Nicolas Peterson
  Session 1