‘Cattle own this area’; The spatial politics of pastoral intensification, biosecurity and colonial control in northern Australia
基于与Gajerrong人的民族志研究，揭示澳大利亚北部畜牧业集约化和生物安全措施如何通过围栏、牧场改造等技术，侵蚀土著人的非排他性原住民所有权权利，并强化殖民控制。
Pastoral intensification and associated enhanced biosecurity measures in northern Australia are changing how Aboriginal people may enjoy their Native Title rights. Drawing on ethnographic research with Gajerrong people, we show how rights of access, use and enjoyment are refigured through new material gate and fencing technologies that enhance biosecurity capabilities, and via modifications to landscape management such as the introduction of ponded pastures and fire suppression. • Pastoral intensification and biosecurity in Northern Australia is changing Country. • Ethnographic research illustrates impacts to Indigenous access, use and enjoyment. • Non-exclusive Native Title rights are eroded where pastoral interests must prevail. • Increased attention is required to the biopolitics of industrial and intensive agriculture. Pastoral intensification is underway in northern Australia. This paper aims to reveal Indigenous experiences of contemporary intensification of pastoral activities, which ‘double up’ colonial control of Indigenous sovereign Country, aided by the implementation of biosecurity management. ‘Doubling up’ acknowledges that material conditions and governmentalities of colonialism don’t change or diminish over time, rather that strategies of occupation are amplified where increased extractive pressure is pursued. Drawing on ethnographic work with Gajerrong people and their Country in the Northern Territory of Australia, a place undergoing rapid socio-ecological transformation due to increased public and private development, we show how Indigenous access to land, utilisation of natural resources, and management practices – legal rights supposedly protected under native title legislation – are respatialised and undermined in the name of biosecurity. We present these emergent re-configurations through the spatial typology and relational politics of points, lines and polygons, drawing attention to how intensified production activities and the increased presence of cattle escalates the problematic colonial project of land control and expansion. We show that increasing control of animal movement are spatial strategies of biosecurity that impinge upon Indigenous access and enjoyment. Meanwhile weeds proliferate in ambiguous spaces of implied biosecurity action. We argue increased visibility and attention to the biopolitics of pastoralism is required to understand how differentiated biosecurity practices are enacted alongside the other logics being deployed to secure the lives of cattle, and how Indigenous and nonhuman others exert their agency through contemporary pastoralism. Reconditioning the colonial project means understanding Indigenous experiences and supporting resistance, as well as the activism that safeguards legal rights.