Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the limits of anthropology in relation to the recalcitrant materiality of housing, mines and infrastructure on Groote Eylandt in northern Australia, home of the Anindiliyakwa, asking what forms of ethnography might hold the different beyond-human networks within the same frame.

Paper long abstract:

Imagine six houses built at a cost of $28 million AUD (€20.5 million Euros) that have to be bulldozed; replaced by thermally inert cement boxes at unidentifiably larger costs that have no room for washing machines let alone people. Imagine this is a federally-funded, high-stakes and well-scrutinised 'public good' project in a country so affluent recent global financial crises left mere surface wounds. In the Northern Territory of Australia, on Groote Eylandt, site of one of the world's largest magnesium mining operations, the Anindiliyakwa people have been told they pose such risks to themselves and their families they must be externally managed at scales unimaginable since early occupation. New housing is a reward for yielding title to customary lands, residency on which is newly re-seen as part of "the Indigenous problem". But the outcome of more poor housing for the already poorly housed is also the result of nature-culture destabilisations. Technical incompetence; welfare 'reforms'; recycled development arguments; and a rush to future-proof islanders against the immanent end of magnesium meets the corrosions of rust, cyclones, calcification, termites, swamps and rats. This paper considers both the recalcitrant materiality of housing and infrastructure on Groote Eylandt and the limits of anthropology, exploring what forms of ethnographic analysis might hold these different 'beyond-human' scales and connections within the same narrative, without losing sight of the material inequalities that are driven as much by capital as climate.